Having your weapon a highly visible color has several advantages. In court it's proven if someone saw the gun: just ask "what color was it?" It's easier to find in the dark. It's easier for an adversary to see that you're armed. It has a slight tendency to combat a certain kind of person's irrational general fear of guns, in the courtroom and if you, God forbid, have to pull it out. You have a gun that's less escalatory and harder to lie about. In combat (and yes, guns are for stopping tyranny) it's a problem, but it's not all that hard to blacken a pink gun.

I'm all for bold ideas, but I agree with other posts: this steps well over the line. Growing human brain cells to run machines is grotesque. Once you start treating pieces of a human brain as hardware, you've already accepted that consciousness is just a resource to exploit. That's pure evil. Bioethicists have been warning about this for years. As brain organoids become more complex, we cannot rule out that they may develop rudimentary consciousness or experience. Ethical reviews of organoid research repeatedly flag questions around moral status, sentience, and whether we are torturing a "blob" that might feel. We do not yet have frameworks to protect dignity. Not of donors, not of hypothetical bio-entities. The burden of proof should lie with those claiming it is safe, not us. Until we resolve these foundational issues, this experiment belongs in thought, not practice. And why in all unholy dystopia did they pick human brain cells over monkeys?Shut it down.

It's like there are at least two layers of funny money accounting going on here.

First, you have the strange way that people equate market cap with value. There's no guarantee that holding shares with a current market value of $X will eventually return $X or more in dividend payments plus maybe some eventual disposal of assets, and these are usually the only tangible values involved. A market cap based on ludicrously high P/E ratio will be high, but trading those shares is like trading Bitcoin: it starts to look more like a Ponzi scheme than a genuine value-based investment.

Second, even the market cap is mostly theoretical here, because any shares held can't be freely traded on an open market. The asset is almost completely illiquid other than occasional anomalies like the secondary sale we're talking about. The first IPO of an AI unicorn could be the pin that bursts the bubble.

It's the difference between being one of the AI unicorns that doesn't actually make any real profit yet and is largely funded based on hype and hope, and being a supplier like Nvidia that is actually being paid real money (funded by all the AI investment) and has a P/E ratio that is high but not off-the-charts stupid.

The layoffs were baked into the plan all along. There is indeed structural weakness in the system, but it is not about robots or AI erasing jobs. It's about power and money. Corporations and governments have long used crises, real or manufactured, as cover for downsizing, deregulation, and wealth transfer from the many to the few. When a small class accumulates most capital, they seek ever more return. Growth slows, wages stagnate, and they pressure institutions to cut labor costs. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty shows how when return on capital outpaces growth, wealth naturally concentrates.The system is built to squeeze labor, not to maintain balance.

As already pointed out, Studies have shown AI is not killing jobs.By framing layoffs as "inevitable technological progress," the discourse absolves decision-makers -- those who choose to cut safety nets while encouraging monopolization -- of responsibility. The complaint becomes: "AI made us do it." but that's a dirty lie. Here's what's in the history books: The Panic of 1907 and similar crises demonstrated how monopolies and trusts not only oppressed competitors but endangered the broader economy. Antitrust enforcement became a means of self-preservation for a capitalist society: restraining concentrated power to maintain legitimacy. Each wave of regulation, from the Clayton Antitrust Act to the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, followed periods when inequality and hardship made reform politically unavoidable. The pattern recurs: concentrated wealth breeds instability, instability produces suffering, and suffering eventually breaks the dam of laissez-faire ideology just long enough for modest correction.

Let's learn from history just this once and frame this problem in the proper terms. Because even the rich didn't do well in those times.

yes, there's a mod that removes it and it speeds up load time. But that's beside the point. The many other virtue signalling trigger warnings also waste time. Necessitated by people who show outrage at every opportunity because they feel or actually obtain some social cache.

The percentage of people with epilepsy who don't know video games can trigger it it about zero. Now take those few seconds from every player, each time they start the game and you're putting a real cost. Enough of those and it's worth talking about reversing it. And being outraged on others behalf gives you no moral authority among the sane.

Kept in their lane, trigger warnings have some use, especially for material with real trauma triggers like violence or assault. A few studies show they can help a small number of people with PTSD prepare themselves. Outside that, they have become mostly a display of moral virtue or fear of criticism. Take Subnautica. It flashes a time-wasting seizure warning every single time it starts. Once on install would be enough. The same problem appears in universities, where syllabi now come with page-long disclaimers about "disturbing" material in classics like The Odyssey. A Harvard study found such warnings do nothing to reduce anxiety. They just mark content as dangerous and make readers more nervous.

A sane middle ground would be like movie ratings: a simple content list available on request, not blocking the start screen or page. Adults can judge what they want to read. If someone cannot handle deciding for themselves, the warning will not help anyway. It just signals how badly the author wants to be seen as caring. Warnings should serve clarity, not self-congratulation.

This illustrates the contempt large tech companies have for the people who keep them alive. They don't care what you actually want, but how far they can push before you quit. Every forced update, every dark pattern, every ad disguised as a feature is a test of your tolerance, not a service to you.

The bigger the company, the less reason they have to care. Once they dominate a market, they know you have nowhere else to go. That is when the garbage ratio spikes: Microsoft slipping ads into the operating system, Google rearranging Gmail whether you like it or not, Youtube's absolutely awful new ui, Meta filling your feed with sponsored junk. The calculation is simple: monopoly power means they can shovel worse product at you and trust you will still come back.It's not accidental or subtle. It is the business model.

Evan walked the aisles with his basket hanging loose, like he had every right to be there. He kept his head level, though his heart was galloping. A block of cheddar and two tubs of yogurt disappeared under his jacket, followed by a loaf of bread and two cans of soup. Enough for a meal, maybe two, if he stretched it.

At the doors, he pushed through the crowd, forcing his stride into something casual. Then the whir began. A drone lifted from its ceiling nest, rotors slicing the air. Its light fell on him like a spotlight. "Unpaid items have been detected. Stop."

Evan ran. Across the floor, out the doors, sneakers hammering the pavement. Another drone dropped in from above, swooping low, its camera blinking. He ducked, zigzagging through parked cars, until the bread slipped from his coat and the cans clanged onto the asphalt. The drones immediately rose higher, losing interest once the bulk of the haul was gone. Panting, shaking, Evan kept running until the Walmart glow was behind him.

That night, in their dim apartment, Mara sat cross-legged on the carpet. The little block of cheese and the two yogurts were spread before them like contraband treasure. "So this is it?" Evan nodded, avoiding her eyes. "The bread and soup didn't make it. Drones stayed on me until I dropped 'em."

She peeled open a yogurt, dipped her finger in, and licked it slowly, like it was some rare dessert. "It's enough," she murmured. "For tonight." He broke the cheese into uneven chunks, handed her the larger one. "It's not enough. I promised I'd take care of you." "You did. We're eating, aren't we?"

His voice cracked. "I looked like an idiot out there. Running from a machine. Dropping dinner on the pavement." Mara reached for his hand, sticky with yogurt. "You ran for me. That's not nothing." He finally looked at her, saw the faint smile tugging her lips.

They ate slowly, drawing out each bite. The yogurt cups scraped clean, the cheese gone in four small mouthfuls. The sharp edge of hunger had dulled for the night. Mara leaned her head against his shoulder. "Tomorrow we'll figure something else out," she said.

Evan stared out the cracked window at the glow of the Walmart sign in the distance, and thought about the drones, patient as vultures. "Yeah," he whispered. "Tomorrow."

They cannot imagine keeping things in a car for convenience, because a chauffeur or maid always clears it out and puts everything away. They've never worried about whether they'll have everything at the other end of the destination: someone does the packing for them. They have never had to wait for a taxi. They do not see cars as storage or backup. To them, a car is a fashion piece, part of a collection, a toy for pleasure, or a way to get from one place to another.

The idea of keeping supplies in the trunk "just in case" is foreign to someone who has always had food wherever they went, who has never wondered where to sleep in a pinch, never planned a long road trip -- only a drive to the nearest airport or a fun day along the highway or autobahn. All the little practical uses most of us attach to car ownership simply do not exist in their world. So for them a service that takes a person from here to there is all that's needed. They recognize that a poor person needs transportation too, but they see this as a cheaper option that does everything a car should do for a poor person: take him from one place to another.

I've been trying to use ChatGPT like that. It takes an hour of demanding rewrites and pointing out mistakes for it to properly fill out a 16k txt file with what I've got going on at the moment for the purpose of making the days' schedule. It keeps dropping things off, putting in [this thing goes here] and ignoring whatever we weren't talking about most recently.

You know what they were banning? They were banning factual information that contradicted the official narrative. They were banning links to small, but scientific, studies that suggested alternative treatments, people talking about loved ones who got the vaccine and died of COVID anyway, hospitals putting covid as cause of death when it really was something else so they could get that government funding. Go educate yourself you ideologically blinded twit.

Everything is relative. That doesn't mean we should stop pushing society in the direction it aught to go.

Women weight less, drink less, and eat less than men. That alone is a reason to pick more women for an initial mission. The same reason no 270 pound body builder is getting a slot.

Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.