I hear they’ve got quite a big ball of twine

Fire is a natural and necessary part of many ecosystemsm. It keeps parasitic insect populations down, stuff like ticks and chiggers, and some plant species rely on fire to prepare the soil for seeds and even is required for some plants to release their seeds. In dry ecosystems like the western USA it also consumes old dead plant material, reducing the fuel available for future fires and reducing fire severity overall. Many foresters and fire fighters advocate for increasing prescribed burns, essentially forest fires that we light on purpose in cooler and wetter times of the year to consume the fuel without risking a catastrophic fire that is difficult to control. I just think that’s neat.

I was going to make a speed running joke here but it made me sad so you get this instead.

I mean it’s not a secret. It’s lead. There’s lead in the water down there.

If the irrational hatred of gay people is similar at all, these people are closeted trans people inflicting their hatred of themselves and their own feelings on the world. Probably.

Reading between the lines here, someone is fucking with the market on purpose. Drop the prices so low the competition goes out of business trying to keep up, then jack up the prices to make it all back multiple times over. Businesses don’t drop the price of products for no reason.

Long ago the four nations lived in harmony. But everything changed when the business nation attacked. Only the regulations could stop them, but when the world needed them most, they vanished.

The many flaws of d&d is why I strongly prefer gurps.

They didn’t have zero experience. There were two full rocket designs that were built and flown before rocket 3, hence why it was called rocket 3. It also achieved orbit successfully two times, which only a limited number of companies have ever achieved.

The first offer wasn’t rejected, they didn’t have the money on hand at the time. Between the first offer and the second they got investor funding together and the cash on hand dwindled, so the second offer was with cash to cover the offer and some to cover running the business between acceptance and closing. After the second offer the board released a statement saying it’s this or liquidate the company, so they went with this because it’s the best outcome for everyone with the current state of things.

Memory unsafe languages will always have value in applications where speed and performance mean anything. Embedded programming and video games are the obvious examples, but pretty much any application taken far enough will eventually demand the performance benefits of memory unsafe languages. Some even require writing assembly directly. Contrary to common dogma, the compiler isn’t always best.

Not sure why you’re implying induction is a rich people method. You can get a plug in induction cooktop for less than $100.

Considering that computers are Turing complete, yes they can, by definition. They can be used to compute anything that can be computed. The question you’re probably really asking is can we make a functional agi with current technology. In a practical sense, no, in a theoretical sense, yes. In practice we can’t because we don’t know how. That knowledge is a form of technology that we haven’t developed yet, though we may have all or most of the pieces available right now. We know that our computers should be able to do it, given enough memory and processing power, but hardware alone doesn’t make an intelligence. You need the software too, and we just don’t know how to make the leap from single purpose tools to general intelligence. Think of it like an airplane. We had all the pieces necessary to make one long before we ever did. We saw birds do it and tried to copy them. We had metal, wood, rope, rubber, cloth, everything you need physically to build a self propelled flying machine, for hundreds or thousands of years, but we didn’t have the underlying principles, a working theory for how to put them together just so. That’s where we are with agi. We have all the raw materials, and some of the complex pieces, but we’re missing things that prevent us from taking that final step into a true agi, however limited.

Business majors are ruining the world one quarter at a time.

Doubt. These large language models can’t produce anything outside their dataset. Everything they do is derivative, pretty much by definition. Maybe they can mix and match things they were trained on but at the end of the day they are stupid text predictors, like an advanced version of the autocomplete on your phone. If the information they need to solve your problem isn’t in their dataset they can’t help, just like all those cheap Indian call centers operating off a script. It’s just a bigger script. They’ll still need people to help with outlier problems. All this does is add another layer of annoying unhelpful bullshit between a person with a problem and the person who can actually help them. Which just makes people more pissed and abusive. At best it’s an upgrade for their shit automated call systems.

You sound like one of those idiots preaching the apocalypse from a street corner. Humans obsolete in 10 years? Yeah sure buddy, right after all those profits trickle down. This is just another tool, an interesting one to be sure, but still just a tool. If you’re staying up nights worrying about this, you don’t really understand the technology, or maybe you’re just worried someone is going to realize you don’t do shit.

Yeah. It’s at the root of a lot of the problems with conservatives in the US. Religion trains people in believing because they were told to believe, and holding to these beliefs in the face of all suffering and hardship. It’s a gateway drug to conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions.

What’s really going to fuck with you is that the fire is mostly confined to the boundaries, so a fire would be better measured by units of length. It’s not like you have 75 square kilometers simultaneously on fire, you’ve got 75 square kilometers burned, as in past tense, and some amount of the outline of that is currently on fire.

You’re saying this like the rat race isn’t a feature for employers. They give you that advice because they want you to settle for whatever shit job they can get you to do for as little pay as possible. Employers don’t want happy, productive employees. They want desperate, starving employees just happy for the “opportunity” to make just enough to technically be able to survive.

At that point why bother? Just make it a random N byte integer.