I wonder if humans are less sensitive to lung cancer than other animals: we've been sitting around campfires or in smokey huts for hundred of thousands of years, long before we started smoking tobacco/cannabis. There must have been selective pressure to survive it better, no ?

What? You're not going to advocate for it??? I thought you were invoking some kind of principle or something.

You're down with Russia killing far more Ukrainians, whom they claim are their own people?

You're down with what China's doing to the Uyghurs, whom they claim are their own people?

And while we're on the topic, how many Iranians should we be willing to kill to save them from their leaders? Nuclear extermination would surely do it... do you advocate that?

But maybe it won't take that much. Regime change in Afghanistan only cost 2000 American lives, 175,000 Afghan lives, and 2,000,000,000,000 dollars, but we sure got rid of those sorry... What? They're back in power?

Only the simplest minds think intervention automagically yields the intended result. In fact the current sorry situation in Iran is a direct result of us trying to "fix" things more to our liking in the middle of last century.

So... Should we attack every country that slaughters its own people?

If it does happen, it will do nothing but turn the 3D printer hobby market into a market similar to the "get free movies/TV/sports on this magic streaming stick" market. I built a CNC stepper controller from discrete components connected to a DOS computer in the 90's. I wrote my own limited CAM software, too. Things have only gotten easier since then.

Yes, that's the one. I remembered it was a famous author. It's not as good as the Forever War (what is ?) (where is the movie BTW, it's been in the pipe for years ?) but it was an interesting read.

I remember this Sci-Fi book a couple years ago about a guy who invents a time machine that travels only in the future and when he gets to the circa +100 year mark the US is a hellhole ruled by the Returned Jesus who is clearly just an AI with violent autocratic tendencies; and the country is basically back to 30AD Palestine. And some people still want to build the Torture Nexus.

No, they want to "correct" it to harbor only mainstream hallucinations.

On the early 2000 I was managing several family computers, regularly full of Windows viruses and got fed up. I installed Kubuntu on them and told the users "it's just a new windows update, things might be a bit different" ! There were absolutely no issues except for a few "I can't find this program" "let me ssh in and install this out that". Still ongoing.

It's not a free speech issue, it's a Section 230 issue. If Meta wants to enjoy the liability protections of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, they have to be more hands-off on content. Blocking ads because Meta doesn't like the content seems to be a clear overstep of the rules to be protected by Section 230. Their filtering of malware, child porn, and hate speech is simply compliance with either other laws or for the benefit of their users. Blocking anti-Meta content is clearly reading the content and making judgements.

Gene Kranz's book "Failure is not an option" is one of the best reads a geek can have; it's about all the technical problems they had during the Apollo project and how they solved them.

Erlang is... weird. 15 years ago I wanted to learn a new and different language and I tried it but i could not wrap my brain around some of its constructs. Then I read a paper by a guy claiming that some things were impossible to do with Erlang (with examples in other languages) and since I didn't have any projects to do with it, i basically forgot all about it.

Why did they change name ? Usually companies do that after some big scandals...

Same job here. You put into words what I've been thinking. I find getting started on embedded projects with new boards increasingly difficult. I thought I was just getting old, but the documentation is hidden on download sites (and gigantic), applies to heaps of incompatible boards (spot the difference !), mixes payware (very $$$) solutions and open source (which the vendors won't support or even explain), the forums take a week to have a single barely related answer...

Or well warmed at least. We have a server room at work (about 10 racks) and we use ambient air cooling for it (aircon only on the hottest days of summer). In winter we can heat the entire building (250 people) with the air that comes out of the machines.