If you want you get a good idea about the complexity, there is a sci-fi novel called “Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. It lays out a situation with 3 suns and it’s very messy (not a spoiler).

The details are important. How big are the suns, how do they revolve around each other? I’m not going to pretend to be able to do the math if I had the details. But it throws into question if life on earth would have developed at all. And it it did it would be very different. Our planet has won the lottery. It got an atmosphere, is far enough from the sun but not too far away to benefit from its energy. A stable orbit gives us four seasons. A lot of life on this planet has developed around that and around one moon giving us predictable tides. All of that would be messed up, a livable earth would probably need to be further out from the bi-suns. The slow process of evolution likes relative stability. Two suns pulling on everything would provide the opposite. That’s why I would lean towards no life actually. Greater mass at the center of the bisolar system would also raise the odds of getting hit by a rock. The moons might be slamming into each other and then the planet.

What I’m saying is it’s not a good idea…

I see from my own behavior that more and more stuff is done on my cell phone and less stuff on a PC. I think eventually everything will be merged into a single device. But I wouldn’t bet on the form factor yet. Whether it will be AR/VR headsets or a form of tablet or a tech yet to amaze us - IDK.

I don’t think you did anything wrong. I hate people striking up a conversation like that as well.

You can train yourself not to panic, deep breaths, focusing on something in the middle distance, closing your eyes, counting to ten - whatever works for you. And then you can ride a situation like this out. Either by masking your discomfort or giving very curt replies. You can also just say “I’m very sorry, I’m not in the mood for a chat.” But you mustn’t worry that you made an extrovert sad. She’ll get over it and maybe learn from this experience as well.

I take your point. It’s just that any scenario you’re describing with so-called AI could have been done by a search engine already. The slop of yesteryear was SEO ranking articles and fake links to make the algorithm prioritize your site over others. Well poisoning is how PR agencies get troublesome celebs out of the headlines again. The list goes on.

I share your concerns about the black boxed nature of so-called AI and by extension their search engines. I’m not saying it isn’t a problem; it’s just not a new one. Up until now we have had companies in charge with a vested interest not to bend the flow of information too far from, let’s call it, the median truth. Now companies are letting models make these decisions and some humans afford these models more credibility than their common sense and that is all worrying to say the least. So I’m a worried as you are, it just started earlier for me.

All of these things would have been possible to restrict on good old Google searches. And they are enforced to varying degrees around the world to differing legal situations. You shouldn’t be able to search for child porn anywhere, swastika merch in Austria, insults of the king in Thailand, etc.

Search on Google mainly got worse because of Google. They made their results more shit to get you to click on follow ups, the dreaded page 2 of results for instance, where they could sell more ads.

I do agree that so-called AI search is more of a black box. Although the Googles and the Bings want you logged in to personalize the results, you can find a way to test their otherwise mostly obscured algorithms in a neutral setting. The models may not allow that and/or testing their metal may have yet to be invented. But they will replace search as we knew it.

The growing faith people have in whatever LLMs spit out (over old school searches) is very concerning. It’s like LLMs are the new Facebook conspiracies. Schools need to teach media literacy as its own subject. All people under 70 today should have to get a media drivers license.

Edit: And I didn’t even mention the “right to be forgotten.” That also exists in the EU.

I fear this has the potential of becoming the copied standard unfortunately. Fear of terrorism is like think of the children. All it will do is force people who need visas into having squeaky clean innocuous public profiles and operating anonymous accounts with actual opinions. Terrorists will do the same. So this privacy infringement will only catch really dumb people.

No, it isn’t. They may already like you but how will they know you care if you don’t offer an array of easy to misunderstand signals?

Sounds Swedish.

This feels like an ad.

It’s gossamer thin, admittedly. But there is a shred of a justification for striking Iran that is covered by international law. I’m not saying it is a proven case yet that a preemptive strike against their nuclear program was called for, against a state whose raison d’être is to destroy Israel. But if the circumstances were just right, the Israeli-US allies could get away with it. (And if no good proof materializes, I suspect they will get away with it anyway. Remember Colin Powell’s PowerPoint? Did that have consequences other than killing people next door? I suspect that’s why they’ve crossed this bridge.)

There is not even a hint of a justification for what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Not in international law. And any possible moral high horse has already been shot long ago. It’s just imperial ambitions.

So we should not equate these two special military operations just yet. We may in the future and then we can throw all our rotten tomatoes at DC. But right now one probably should reserve judgment and refer to them as “alleged orcs” if one is given to name calling.

One ping only.

If these two companies are in bed with each other, they are hate-fucking each other though. Carnal pleasure but no love lost.

I don’t find this that infuriating. And you have choices to run a different browser. Granted, most of them are chromium based. Edge’s only use case is to download a Firefox fork and/or a better chromium that is neither Edge nor Chrome.

In no situation where weed is legal minors are allowed to buy it. I would be onboard on this propaganda train if all I saw on Netflix is 15yo’s getting high. Which I don’t see that much really.

Minors should not consume it. Minors have parents. Minors’ parents’ job it is to keep them away from that along with sniffing glue, tobacco, vaping, alcohol and eating laundry capsules, just to name a few dangers more.

The negative effects on brain development I read about were all linked to regular, if not heavy use. There is enough wiggle room for school/education and, once again, the parents to step in.

Idiocracy is happening anyway.

You are judging work by somebody who doesn’t feel compelled to follow guidelines made by other people with those very same guidelines. Those other people looked much more closely at flags for geographical entities, not movements, to come up with their guidelines. No one is required to follow them or retroactively abide by them. They are a great style guide but not the law.

Every flag serves a purpose. This flag’s purpose is to show representation by color and design for everyone in the community. It’s was the point to be busy.

Why don’t they just stick with the rainbow flag? Because the idea of the rainbow encompassing everyone was made at a time when gay and lesbians came out with pride but many of the letters that abbreviate that community today were still marginalized more harshly, maybe even within homosexual circles. They weren’t all suddenly anthropists and free from discriminatory points of view. Development of ideas and communities takes time. And that’s why an artist took ideas from many different flags that were created over time and combined them into one. It is eye catchy and instantly recognizable, even at a medium distance still.

I don’t find the result aesthetically pleasing either. But I recognize a) that wasn’t the point of it and b) I’m not a member of the LGBTQ+ community. If from within that community a movement rises to change the flag into something else, by all means. Other than that my design opinions - and I suspect many other ones in this thread - are largely academic and frankly irrelevant.

Good flag bad flag is not the gospel. Take it as a starting point for new designs but don’t scrutinize all existing flags by it.

Discrimination in hiring happens every day. Be it conscious or subconscious. If there isn’t a hard, unavoidable quota no one can force anyone to hire people they don’t like. The laws may just forbid them from being this forthright.

Never attribute to malice what you can more appropriately attribute to stupidity. The people who coded this may be young and not even on their first divorce yet. To me, that’s what this family plan business falls under. To leap from that to organized discrimination of folks being born out of wedlock seems a tad too conspiratorial from my POV.

This may be a fryable fish. Yet I see much bigger fish elsewhere.

What may also hold back development of functional patchwork family plans is legal hot water. Not every split is amicable. The Googles and Microsofts may simply have decided they don’t want to be put in a situation where they need to adjudicate between two warring ex partners whose bitterness is overriding their child rearing responsibilities with petty disputes. And building a system where maybe new partners can gain access - even just by mistake - to their spouse’s kids accounts also has very bad PR potential when it turns out the step parent is abusive.

Nevertheless you should let them know about your feedback. Patchwork families are quite common and they can probably do more in that area.

That’s unfair to microwave ovens because they have established uses, even in some fine dining establishments. So-called AI has none of that just yet.

It does not address the question at the core: who counted what and how? Even if we accepted it as given that men were more effective in the suicide department, which may very well be backed by all individual studies, that would not make international comparisons, the like we see in the title, any more reliable. I did not see a source for this TIL and that’s why I’m throwing heaps of salt on it.

Unlike other governments who are (more) honest.

This has to fall under the category of “never trust a statistic you didn’t forge yourself.” I’m confident without looking that the amorphous Western countries don’t all count suicides and attempts the same way. And for China you would have to trust official numbers or generate your own because the one thing the leadership does not like is looking bad in the international community.

The other question I would have is this ratio based on absolute numbers or per capita. The reason why I ask is that China has a massive gender imbalance, a blast from the past when the one - child policy was in play and millions of female embryos were somehow aborted. And here I would also assume that official population numbers may not be entirely correct to make the generally known problem within the country look less severe.

If there are more men in absolute numbers, there will be more male suicides, some of which one might attribute to the ripples downstream of that very same imbalance.

Whoever concluded this may have accounted for all the pitfalls in their study. And the result may be fantastically accurate. But we oughta be careful and keep more than just a few grains of salt handy when we hear about something like this.

And if we have found a way to reinforce a straw, then we will have found a way to reinforce the planet as well. Danger averted.