This is absolutely horrifying. Humans are already bad enough at identifying targets and minimizing collateral damage and civilian casualties.

How does one program a drone that can identify targets independently, while also not easy being fooled by someone disguised as a noncombatant and child? I guess in theory the drones could be more expendable than manned targets and therefore have an even more strict policy on firing on potential noncombatants(even if that is easily exploited) but I get the feeling they wont do that.

China has been militarizing and between the gender gap, the soon decline in population, and recent global attitudes towards them shifting , theyre going to be in for a world of economic hurt. A large population of unattached young men with poor economic outcomes doesnt bode well for peace in that region.

Likewise the US policy of “surely embracing capitalism will lead to a liberal democracy” gave way to mild hostility towards china when it didnt happen. Especially with a president for 4 years who kept saying those quiet things other presidents didnt outright say because they knew it would be poking the bear for no reason.

God help us all if this actually happens because it would lead to a world war centered on Asia and china, and I hope that what will happen with the age gap and decline in china will mirror more japan, but we do live in uncertain times.

Well according to the third movie judgment day is inevitable, talk to the hand. So maybe they just figured they might as well be the ones to do it.

Eh I understand the long term apathy and eventual giving up.

They cant keep winning votes by just not being republicans. They will always not be republicans and eventually people are going to want more out of them.

It’s actually caused by scattering of the light in the atmosphere not refraction. Refraction is what makes rainbows tho.

Hmmm. I dont exactly want to cheer on the music publishing copyright industry, but AI infringing on creative spaces is certainly an issue especially when its trained using someones data without their consent.

Im surprised they arent chomping at the bit to train these AIs so that they can use the end result to give us AI driven artists, but I guess their knee jerk reaction to do a dcma takedown is too strong.

Youtube is still the biggest video website on the world and there just isnt a viable competitor to it and nor is there financial incentive for anyone to jump into something like it given the overhead and cost. Hell even early on when youtube was lower resolution and ran worse on hardware it still beat out competitors like vimeo, dailymotion, and the various early internet content creator sites that spun off of youtubes early copyright purge.

At the end of the day they serve a tiny amount of ads which honestly is more of a minor inconvenience(especially when you remember what TV was like) and the algorithm is pretty hit and miss(personally on my feed it’s not bad). Even worst case scenario if the adblockers stop working youtube will probably still not die.

It would take an antitrust hearing or something to really push youtube off of it’s top spot and it would be interesting to see what that would look like for the site(though I suspect a google dismembering would leave youtube intact and just remove it form other alphabet brands which wouldnt entirely fix the issue).

Hell look at what happened on reddit. That was a very visible very big protest and there was a huge amount of outrage and reddit skews nerdy enough that the userbase actually pays attention and cares about whats going on. Weeks later and not a lot has changed. Lemmy and some other alternatives became viable but even then it And thats essentially just a big message board which links to content on other sites, in terms of design it should be easier to replicate compared to an open video site that anyone can upload to.

a standalone induction cooktop like the Breville Control Freak will do a way better job,

at $1,499.95 for a single burner it better damn well.

I have an LG c1 and the apps and start page dont bother me too much. The remote gives you easy quick launch options and I just immediately boot into my PC anyway and then use the remotes quick launch features to hop into the streaming apps I used to use(because DRM makes browser streaming a hassle especially on linux).

My beef with my smart tv is that basic settings are not hidden behind sub menus under submenus under submenus. Want to blank my screen? Adjust some picture settings a smidge? Audio stuff? Best to google it cause stuff that used to be front and center on my old tvs is either missing or buried deep down.

I dont think they charge extra for the smartness either. A 55 inch 4k tcl tv can be had for under $500, and those have roku cooked in. MY c1 was all about the hardware as well.

Hard disagree. There is a huge difference between the convenience of having a camera on you at all times and giving control of all of your services to a single provider or company that then locks you in.

It’s not like the different apps make my phone take up more space in my pocket.

I dont understand the obsession with grouping everything in one place. Like I know why companies do it because the current philosophy is to have you eternally in their ecosystem and to never leave their site/app or do anything else and continue to monitor.

I just dont understand why people would buy into such nonsense. Like why would I want to have my wallet and money tied into a damn chat app. Why would I want to use a chat app to hail a cab and go shopping? It’d be better to have multiple services that do the one thing well rather than 100.

Or alternatively they can add similar to the mediacodecs and such check a “install the office and other helpful stuff”

Yeah. Ubuntu has kind of taken a turn over the years but its still a super user friendly distro and they have done a lot to make linux more accessible for the masses. They also serve as a base for a number of other distros to build off of an as a result theyre an easy choice for a newbie to gravitate towards.

Cant less democratic regimes do that anyway?

10s of Millions of people in the united states live in multifamily housing. You’re responding to concepts like multifamily housing and public transit as if these are abstracts that huge numbers of americans dont already rely on. There are plenty of areas with bad infrastructure today for this, but thats all the more reason to improve. More missing middle density housing is important to make housing more affordable and improve density and supply.

We can certainly use better and actual proper public housing options like in places like the netherlands, and better renter protections to keep a landlord from upping your rent too much, but thats all the more reason to push forwards.

It’s funny people always act like it’s impossible for this to work when millions of people do it to NYC from as far north as Dutches county, way down long island, and into Connecticut. Millions more also drive sure enough, but suburban trains are viable the problem is they just dont exist or when they do have poor schedules.

If you live in the suburbs and commute into a major city then traffic going into said city is also unbearably slow. But to quickly counter this point, millions of people commute using the NYC suburban spurs for metro north, and south and I can assure you the desnity falls of a cliff as soon as you pass the NYC border.

Likewise there are plenty of alternatives even for suburbs involving things like park and rides and train stations with garages that can help funnel people into roads and on public networks. Ideally a good station should be centralized in the town and but walkable(Ive seen some NYC train stations literally be a random parkinglot in the woods and then there’s GoTransit in toronto) but as it will take a long time to right the ship I think making sure theres spots to park your car is important too.

Moving forwards though there should be improvements in zoning law to help right the ship when it comes to car-centric american infrastructure and urban planning.

The frustrating thing is decent density doesnt mean high rises and big city concrete jungle. There are tons of east coast and midwestern neighborhoods that are mostly single family homes on lots, with some multifamily and low rise apartments mixed in on tree lined streets near parks and shopping areas that have densities of more than 11,000 people per sqmi.

I will say insurance companies can be very quick to fight you when it comes to giving out money. Keep at it and you’ll get something, but considering how long you can pay them month to month without using it, it’s obnoxious.

Except health insurance. Health insurance is a fucking racket, the medical industrial complex it ties into is a racket, and the United States would be a better place if it gutted this system

A lot of the caucasian centric discussion about race comes from the fact that a lot of english speaking websites are centered and focuses around the anglosphere.

What is and isnt white varies from location to location in parts of the world where that matters. So you have people who would be decidedly light skinned but black in the Caribbean argue their whiteness, but as soon as they immigrate to the US that’s out the window. Likewise latin americans can create a racial hierarchy and given the literal european descent of many of them there is a case to have here, but put them in the united states and then they suddenly turn not white. In fact a puerto rican independence revolutionary leader got his first taste of 2nd hand citizenship when having to travel through the Jim Crow south and found that despite being an ivy league educated white boy back home, he was colored in the states.

But context matters more than anything else. Its why for example an american immigrant family may feel as if their culture is being appropriated when white people start stealing it, but members of that ethnicity living in their home country might find it endearing and cute to see.

A mobile phone that increasingly has more of your life on it at that. So whereas 12 years ago you might have just lost your contact list and some fart sound boards, today you have bank apps, payment apps, tickets, cards, identification, auto logged in shopping access, and more!

I know more recent versions of android made me curse at google for adding all these guard rails and walls making doing some stuff more difficult.

On the other hand I recently had a phone fall out of my pocket and in the time it took me to get from the corner back to the place I dropped it someone had nabbed it. I was suddenly a lot more appreciative of the restrictions in place that turned my stolen device into a chargeable paper weight.