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This is such a wonderful guarantee to offer to users. In most cases, I trust the Debian maintainers more than a trust the upstream devs (especially once you take into account supply chain attacks).

It's sad how much Linux stuff is moving away from apt to systems like snap and flatpak that ship directly from upstream.


I'd be mad if washing machines were marketed as a "robot maid"

"Washer" and "dryer" are accepted colloquial terms for these appliances.

I could even see the humour in "washer-bot" and "dryer-bot" if they did anything notably more complex. But we don't need/want appliances to become more complex than is necessary. We usually just call such things programmable.

I can accept calling our new, over-hyped, hallucinating overlords chatbots. But to be fair to the technology, it is we chatty humans doing all the hyping and hallucinating.

The market capitalisation for this sector is sickly feverish — all we have done is to have built a significantly better ELIZA [1]. Not a HIGGINS and certainly not AGI. If this results in the construction of new nuclear power facilities, maybe we can do the latter with significant improvement too. (I hope.)

My toaster and oven will never be bots to me. Although my current vehicle is better than earlier generations, it contains plenty of bad code and it spews telemetry. It should not be trusted with any important task.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA


A woman from 1825 would probably happily accept that description though (notwithstanding that the word “robot” wasn’t invented yet).

A machine that magically replaces several hours of her manual work? As far as she’s concerned, it’s a specialized maid that doesn’t eat at her table and never gets sick.


19 century washing machines were called washing/mangling machines.

They were not called maids nor personified.


Machines do get "sick" though, and they eat electricity.

Negligible cost compared to a real maid in 1825. The washing machine also doesn’t get pregnant by your teenage son and doesn’t run away one night with your silver spoons — the upkeep risks and replacement costs are much lower.

They do and will randomly kill people

Mostly from dryers. I assumed mostly from failure to clean the lint but the following link suggested that that was the cause only 27% of the time.

https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-re...

In the table from the Pdf link failure to clean was the only category that resulted in deaths.


Dawg what kind of washing machines are you using?

In 1825? Certainly not one that ran on electricity, much less something that had meaningful safety features.

I used to play with a Maytag machine machine motor. It had a single cylinder, ran on gasoline, and had a kick-start. It was from, IIRC, 1926.

The exhaust would have been plumbed to the outdoors, but other than that the expectation was that there would be a gas-fired engine running in the house while the washing was done.


Samsung?

In 1825 both electricity prices and replacement costs would have been unaffordable for anyone, though. Because there was literally no prize you could pay to get these things.

Shame we are in 2025 huh? Ask someone today if they accept washing machine as robot maid.

The point is that, as far as development of AI is concerned, 2025 consumers are in the same position as the 1825 housewife.

In both cases, automation of what was previously human labor is very early and they’ve seen almost nothing yet.

I agree that in the year 2225 people are not going to consider basic LLMs artificial intelligences, just like we don’t consider a washing machine a maid replacement anymore.


I get mad at semantic arguments that distract from creative output.

Aside from the obviously humorous content the rest is useless allegory (I want a recipe not a story and need some code, not personal affection for software engineering) and no true scotsman (no true adherent of my native language would call it a robotic maid!)

As social creatures humans are pretty repetitive.



That's not the "Gotcha' you think it is.

Net immigration is down. That counts illegal immigration and deportations, presumably which are way down and way up, respectively. Both stats have nothing to do with how many people _want_ to be in the US, just how many people are able to get here.

How long is the of _applicants_ for residency in the US? That's the metric you're looking for. I suspect, with the increased difficulty in illegal immigration, that there is an increase in applications for legal immigration. That's speculation though, I have no idea where to get those numbers.


Good for the regime and americans in general. I still want to get in. I haven't fought anyone yet though.

This is really sad. You're just pirating books. At least go use a pirate website and don't ruin libraries for the rest of us.

We will no longer have public goods if the public abuses them.


I honestly don’t see the harm about removing the lending period for my personal reading. It will only make me check out and read more books. Can you detail the harm I am causing? It’s like making photocopies of books for my own use, which is still legal.

The chain of causality is about one link long: If libraries become common vectors for privacy, the powers that be will end libraries. https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...

Photocopying an entire book is, in fact, against the law in most cases: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/academic-and-education...

Selfish people like yourself are why we can't have nice things. Either pay for your books or pirate them outright from bittorrent.


1. I am not in the USA.

2. You’re pointing at the legal code that is about exceptions for library liability. 17 U.S.C. § 108 doesn’t say anything about me making a personal copy.

I don’t yet understand your one-link argument about privacy and how it relates to this discussion. I read that you would prefer if I were to directly download a copy from a shadow library instead of lending it from my local library.


yes, yes I would prefer that you buy drugs from a drug dealer instead of stealing them from a hospital.

*piracy

(but they also don't like privacy laws around libraries)


Are there any copper-rich asteroids out there?

Googling: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003206332...

> Asteroids have since long been considered to host significant resources of siderophilic elements such as Fe, Ni, Co, Cu, that could be exploited in situ. However bulk rock mining would be largely impractical. In this paper, we report on abundance and mineral occurrences of copper in H chondrites, identify Cu carrier minerals and interpret their distribution in the context of processes that must have affected parent bodies. This leads us to suggestion that some parts of S-type asteroids contain Cu in a form and amount that would satisfy requirements of potentially economically and environmentally more efficient exploitation.


Is AI going to take all the jobs, or isn't it?


If only there were some kind of collective larger than a family or a school that could decide to take away social media from impressionable children...


Yes, and how would the government ban social media apps from preschoolers without forcing everyone to doxx themselves to prove age?

Your sarcastic jab doesn't add any new questions or answers to this very important issue, since everyone can agree social media is bad for kids, but also we don't want to lose internet anonymity just because schools and parents can't raise kids without giving them a smartphone in hand since birth.


They've already done it, mate. You can go read about the Australian law. They are putting the burden of proof on the tech companies: "You have heaps of data on your users, you know who are young teens because you target them for marketing. Ban underage kids or we fine you."


Kobo offers two separate models with buttons https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ereaders/kobo-ereaders-with-butto...


We already ban children under 13. I think that's a good thing and the age limit should be 16 or 17.

The rest of your comment is a non sequitur.


It's a good thing that children under the age of 12 don't know how to use checkboxes!


Luckily the Australian law is written such that tech companies can't get away with a checkbox.


You won't have immortality, but Jeff Bezos & friends might.

How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?


Agreed. If immortality was discovered tomorrow (or at least some sort of anti-aging treatment), there’s no way it would become available to a regular person. All of us would still age and die, but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.


> but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.

We all know what the ruled do when they get really pissed. The prospective ghouls know it very well too.


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