I’m just kind of assuming he’s in mid- to late-stage Alzheimer’s and hopefully won’t last the year, probably getting “Amendment 25, sectional 5’d” by Vance at the earliest opportunity, and I don’t think Vance has enough political will behind him to be a dictator. At least that’s my hope, flimsy as it might be.

What do you mean? The sun gets chased away every night, though I think that gets outsourced to Sköll, a wolf.

Maintaining continuity of consciousness is the only thing that would make me feel comfortable with converting myself to a machine intelligence.

Actually, yes we can, and alarmingly easily at this point, even using his general speech patterns (disjointed as they might be). Though I can’t currently do it at my workstation.

Never dehumanize fascists or fascist-sympathizers (redundant but ok), it’s always important to remember that bad faith actors or their stooges are human and cannot be entirely eliminated from society, which is why people that fight for positive change have to set the rules such that bad faith actors’ actions are either quickly recognized and mitigated, or have society structured such that even those motivated solely by unempathetic selfishness can only achieve status by masking and contributing positively anyway.

As long as we’re coming up with overly convoluted reasons that a minor plot device from a fantasy space opera makes sense in a rigorous scientific way, why not assume that they were genetically engineered specifically as a torturous punishment for the Hutt syndicate? Bioengineering is apparently canon, so there’s in-universe justification.

Nah, you can enroll your own keys and set it up so you can be reasonably certain that your boot image hasn’t been altered, validating its integrity against the potential threat of bootkits. I do this with my Gentoo install.

Isn’t post-quantum cryptography already a thing? Probably not implemented in anything meaningful yet, but still.

I mean, you can still do that with https, your dns requests will likely still be in the clear unless you’re using dns over tls or dns over https.

I would agree with you that something similar to metric would eventually arise, but I would consider duodecimal to make more sense than decimal, as 12 is a superior highly composite number and the terminating representation is much shorter for more commonly used fractions (e.g. 1⁄4 would be represented as 0.3, 1⁄3 as 0.4, 1⁄2 as 0.6, etc). I would also argue that groupings in powers of 12² make more sense than 10³.

I would also argue that it would make more sense for measurements to be based on natural units (such as Planck length) for all the basic measurements (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela), such that the anthropic unit (the one you’d most commonly refer to without prefixes) would be some multiple of 12 away from the natural unit.

Joe Biden is too old to be a Boomer, technically. He’s part of the Silent Generation. So really he’s just doing the traditional Silent Generation part of bowing out so a Boomer can take over.

Dried frog pills, probably. I’ve been told if you take one you can hallucinate that you’re sane, which is probably close enough for the average physicist.

Sounds painful with a high possibility of breaking bones then drowning while conscious. I’d recommend an inert gas that’s not CO2 and readily available, like nitrogen or something (CO2 buildup in the blood is what gives the sensation of suffocation). If you’re worried about people finding you and a mess, get an enema and stay a bit dehydrated first, and also ensure your body’s found within the first 2-3 days if possible (the first thing your corpse does is shit itself, and rot sets in pretty quickly).

This of course presumes you’re making the decision to end yourself while of sound mind, not in some panic, feeling trapped or completely hopeless. There’s usually a way out that’s not as permanent and can lead to future positive interactions that make continued living worth the pain. That said, I’ll never judge someone whose pain outweighs their will to live.

What a coincidence, I’m drinking mead and installing Gentoo. Currently compiling gcc, always takes forever, maybe I should’ve gone with the recompiled binary for that one lol.

No ragrets.

I think it’s the majority, still. Not sure if that’s technically changed to KDE with Steam Decks though.

You know the corollary to Arthur C Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” which is “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology”? That’s what I think the explanation and manipulation of the electromagnetic force and strong and weak nuclear forces basically are. We just figured out the rules for how magic works, and now we manipulate them to make rocks think and show us pretty colors over vast distances, and can also explode cities with glowing rocks and weird gasses. Also we can make potent potions from strange biological and chemical essences that make the body do what we tell it, mostly. And we’re getting better at it (and would be getting better at it faster if it weren’t for metaphorical dragons getting in the way).

Just because we can explain it doesn’t make it any less magic.

Yes.

“Forever” unless the knowledge is out of date, or you don’t use it and forget, or until Alzheimer’s or some other dementia happens and everything disappears (or until your death, I suppose, but gold also tends to change hands around that time).

I mean it was 0.01, at that point he was screwed anyway, and he fixed his program.

Yes. Yes we are.