I always describe pansexuality as “bisexuality with more politics and an ugly flag”. The basic idea is the same (not being attracted only to one gender) but pansexuality is more explicit about there being more than two genders and liking most or all of them.

You pay five million bucks to the government, presumably to be pocketed by the president. Under the legal concept of l’etat, c’est moi you have therefore substantially benefitted the United States.

I did that and what I find interesting is that exactly one MEP replied. Well, his assistant did but that still counts. The way the reply was worded even made clear that someone did read my mail specifically.

I’m not a friend of the BSW but I will acknowledge that their MEP Jan-Peter Warnke is in opposition and responsive (via assistant).

But even if the rest of the bunch was silent, do send those mails. Or send paper mail. Or a fax; we’re taking about German MEPs after all. Either way, make your voice heard.

At least the fusion guys are making actual progress and can point to being wildly underfunded – and they predicted this pace of development with respect to funding back in the late 70s.

Meanwhile, the AI guys have all the funding in the world, keep telling about how everything will change in the next few months, actually trigger layoffs with that rhetoric, and deliver very little.

Don’t worry; we’ll find an artist so bland that we’ll get zero points even if we’re the only participant. The audience will fall asleep and wake up a week later with no recollection of the event. The victory will be awarded to Sweden on principle.

I work for a publicly traded company.

We couldn’t switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.

I don’t think the shareholders give a rat’s ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It’d take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.

And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we’re going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment’s notice.

Is actually have a good answer but in my case it’d be “I wanted to know what that one plant I saw was”. AI-based pattern matching to identify plant or animal species is pretty handy.

It’s also way more sensible than trying to use text generation for anything useful.

AI isn’t taking off because it took off in the 60s. Heck, they were even working on neural nets back then. Same as in the 90s when they actually got them to be useful in a production environment.

We got a deep learning craze in the 2010s and then bolted that onto neural nets to get the current wave of “transformers/diffusion models will solve all problems”. They’re really just today’s LISP machines; expected to take over everything but unlikely to actually succeed.

Notably, deep learning assumes that better results come from a bigger dataset but we already trained our existing models on the sum total of all of humanity’s writings. In fact, current training is hampered by the fact that a substantial amount of all new content is already AI-generated.

Despite how much the current approach is hyped by the tech companies, I can’t see it delivering further substantial improvements by just throwing more data (which doesn’t exist) or processing power at the problem.

We need a systemically different approach and while it seems like there’s all the money in the world to fund the necessary research, the same seemed true in the 50s, the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, the 10s… In the end, a new AI winter will come as people realize that the current approach won’t live up to their unrealistic expectations. Ten to fifteen years later some new approach will come out of underfunded basic research.

And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.

I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.

There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.

Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.

Conception begins at meiosis. If you don’t want to procreate, don’t produce ova/sperm. Produce a million sperm cells and only make one child? Off to death row with you, mass murderer!

It depends. “Donald Trump wants to annex Wisconsin as the 51st state” wouldn’t be funny. Pocketpair launching a Steam store page for the Palworld dating sim (which was last year’s April Fools joke) was.

But yeah, this isn’t the time for political humor.

Vereinheitlichtes Betriebssystem für den Öffentlichen Dienst, also known as VereinhBetrSfdÖD. Rolls right off the tongue.

So far Article 7 hasn’t been used because Poland had Hungary’s back. Given that Poland is no longer ruled by the right-populist PiS, that might no longer hold, though.

Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.