How is it a false equivalency? The Workers produce, among many other things, cotton, which is not a luxury good. There is no claim that they made labubus, but that some of the cotton involved came from some of the work camps in Xinjiang.

China’s “forced labor camps” are part of the prison reform initiative. Nearly every East Asian country has a version of this, wherein workers learn a trade and produce goods; the sale of which to the general market subsidizes their wages which they build up during their sentence which allows them to have savings when they exit back to society, with state-guaranteed experience in a specific job. Farming is popular because, you know, it’s China. Making those that go against society do the most basic and necessary work in society to understand what they are harming has been their modus operandi since the revolution.

Your problem with ‘trivial luxury goods’ being made by prisoners though just means you have more of a problem with the US than with China; as in the US ‘prisoners’ are leased to private corporations like Walmart, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Starbucks, Sprint, Verizon, Avis, AT&T, and Aramark.

China uses ‘forced labor’ to ‘produce cheap materials’ that need to be used in some way since they’re the by product of teaching prisoners a trade. The US has never even thought about abolishing slavery and every fortune 100 corporation in the US uses slavery to produce final products that you directly buy and consume.

Only superficially. It’s really hard to tell what percentage of our DNA is actually useful, or could be useful under conditions we haven’t seen, or is actually a part of any given variation. What we do know, of the number of DNA combinations we have seen if we play out each possible version of those variations there’s around 4^2000 variations. Or in other words If a billion people were born every day since the start of the universe, there would not be a single duplicate person. And this is the extreme low end estimate based on limited data sets that generally don’t even include people of every major region, much less interesting micro-populations that have been breeding in isolation for a thousand years or more.

Now lets assume we remove all causes of congenital blindness. Generally speaking the number of genes making up most identified causes are less than 20 total. That would (simplified, yell at me later math nerds) knock that number down to around 4^1995.

That would still be more viable combinations than we could possibly run through from now until the heat death of the universe, assuming current population growth rates which we’ll have until we invent birthing pods.

In other words we’ll probably be fine, but if we need to, and it’s allowed to be researched more, we could just simply artifically introduce safe variation. i.e. people giving birth to people they aren’t genetically related to anymore.

The swiss cheese model assumes equal risk, or in other words fails to differentiate actual risk from multiple sources. You aren’t being targeted by a state actor. DDoSing via zombies is more expensive (including risk capital) than using VPSs these days. The actual people targeting you are going to be bottom of the barrel commercial scammers and skiddies wanting the least possible effort targets, and again unless all the holes magically line up in your model, they won’t ever get that. Your adblock is a layer, your browser is a layer, these days your DNS is a layer, your router is a layer, your search engine is a layer, if you live in a particularly hell hole your ISP is a layer. Given the inherent insecurity of WIndows it was never a layer.

If you care about security and/or are paranoid enough about security that you care about whether or not your OS is updated, you aren’t on windows. No security professional will ever recommend windows, and all real world infrastructure using windows as a backbone never has windows as a security layer. Lets be honest if someone has access to any windows PC on your network, it does not matter if windows is up to date, they have total control over that computer, and its not windows nor windows server preventing access to other devices on the network.

We’re talking about the Earth, not some fictional hellscape of drop bears, made up plants like Eucalyptus, and giant flamethrower wielding spiders.

Substantial is severely overstated as any crop you would replace rice with where rice is grown in water would objectively destroy all local water cycles if not the entire local ecosystem. That would have a much greater impact on climate change than if rice accounted for 100% of all calories eaten globally.

A) Rice paddies are generally in wetlands and swamps, protecting these areas, any other grain you would grow here would destroy that wetland biome. Corn especially would essentially render the entire area sterile because

B) Domesticated rice grown in water does not use any pesticides or herbicides whatsoever. There’s no need for it. Occasionally, in specific areas, you’ll need scare crows, frequent human activity, or crabs/ducks depending on the exact pest you’re getting rid of, but you don’t need glyphosate. This has massive knock on effects for climate, fewer herbicides and pesticides means more carbon being sequestered. Fewer herbicides and pesticides in water means more microorganisms turning CO2 back into oxygen and sequestering the carbon in tasty tasty microscopic corpses. Which brings us to

C) Methane and the GHG cycle: While methane is a much more effective greenhouse gas than CO2, it also has practically no shelf life in the atmosphere. It is a natural part of the GHG cycle and even if all grains everywhere were converted to rice, we could not generate enough methane to effect the climate. It would decay to hydrogen within ten years in the upper atmosphere (versus 50 or more for CO2) but more importantly every single type of forest sequesters it more efficiently than CO2. Saying a natural source of CH4 that is easily accounted for by growing it upwind of a forest, like it almost always is, is a serious driver of climate change or even a risk for it is silly doomerism.

The truth is climate change is 100% a matter of fossil fuels. If we stop using fossil fuels, we will immediately stall climate change. Nothing else we can realistically do except burning fossil fuels will cause climate change, and even if we go full net zero on every other thing we do, without stopping fossil fuels, we will not make any progress whatsoever. Even if we used 100% ethanol fuel in ICE vehicles, we would stop climate change. Because we would not be introducing ancient sequestered energy back into the system, we would be taking energy from the system one year, and putting it back in the next.

Rice is the same. All methane renewed by growing rice will be sequestered or decayed in less time than it will take for properly dried and stored rice to decay, and none of whats generated would effect the total amount of methane circulating in the system.

We’d have to define the end goal clearly enough for it to be feasible. Is it possible for a machine to do every -action- a human is likely to do, as an imitation? Sure. We’re pretty close to that now.

Can we define consciousness or intelligence in a way that does not eliminate free will, so that we can build a machine that has either? That’s a much harder ask. Free will is the opposite of a deterministic universe, and if we’re in a deterministic universe then absolutely a machine can be made as good or better than a human, but we won’t have free will so whether or not we ever make that then depends on the starting conditions of the universe.

If we do have free will the question then becomes what gives us free will and can we recreate what gives us free will so we may impart it on others.

It’s just as likely any GAN, of which LLMs are largely a subset, which does cover nearly the entirety of what current ‘AI’ is, to develop into True AI as any given duck suddenly generating a metal xenon egg.

While certainly far be it from me to be the arbiter of what consciousness or even a replacement-level intelligence is, simple ‘neural’ networks and generative adversarial networks aren’t ever going to be more than simple machines. They’re great at generating chaos and deciding what is or isn’t close to what is not chaos, by the very narrow definitions that they are given, and with enough of them stacked I’m sure you can trick someone into believing they’re alive; but that’s still a far cry from being equivocal intelligence, or any kind of intelligence.

Turkey has been an explicit dictatorship since 2016, when Erdogan faked a coup against himself and has largely used that as an excuse to militarize against the government and populace.

This raid, like the raid the year before, and at least 100 other raids against opposing political parties since 2016, is just another blatant action by one of the most violent dictatorships in recent history.

Turkey is what people pretend Iran is.

LLMs have as much chance of magically transforming into True AI as frogs have of transforming into the Bagger 288.

Well see here little buddy, back in the 1980s you’d get this little cardboard circle with a variety of characters on it, and there was this whole game around building a tower and knocking these circles off the tower, but no one played the game. Hell most people refuse to believe a game with them existed. They were going to be the next big collectible before Pokemon brought back trading cards and beanie babies took over for anyone that didn’t like cards.

Some pogs were also metal. For some reason.

Years later a weird asian man made a face and coincidentally got pog brought in the the common vernacular, but that’s a different pog entirely, a pretender to the throne. Every day I lament that that asian man made that silly face, if only because it has obscured to the true nature of the pog.

Pre-birth DNA editing to ensure a healthy and ideal child.

Eugenics is awful. It’s horrible. There is no question and there’s a million historical and fictional deep dives one can do to objectively prove that it is against any form of morality you could possibly come up with.

But, improving the human experience, ensuring no one is born with a disability, ensuring that everyone has the best possible chance to enjoy and experience life would be amazing. If society could get its collective shit together we could in fact make sure that every person gets the best possible experience of our species. We could pretty much entirely eliminate childhood cancers. We could make super heroes (relative to unmodified humans). We could eliminate genetic defects that have plagued families and entire populations since pre-history.

My Billionaire Capitalist Is Also a Marine Biologist isn’t the weirdest anime title I’ve seen in the last five minutes, but is still not something I expected today.

A) Labubu’s are awful, and already so far out of fashion this is kinda a weird article to put out.

B) The ‘forced labor’ in the Xinjiang region of China is about equal to how every single license plate in the US is made, except prisoners are compensated better in China.

C) Just a reminder no international organization has said anything about Xinjiang other than ‘China’s response to US and Turkish terror groups were a bit harsh, and the racial profiling done in the 1990s that was stopped in 2006 was a bad thing. Also that one turkish family that was deported to indonesia should have been deported to turkey.’

D) Every single Uyghur organization in the US and Turkey has been linked to multiple attacks on civilians, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (or was until Trump unwittingly cut their funding, marking a hilarious turning point in US propaganda production), and has been funneled weapons the same way Kurds have publicly been funneled weapons.

E) The US hates muslims. Literally hates the entire religion and all adherents. Believes they are monkeys that aren’t capable of thought like Zionists are. The US has hated China since the 1800s. The exclusive reason the US has immigration laws is because Chinese workers out worked American workers but sent all their earnings to their families back home. Until the Chinese exclusion act any person could come to the US and do whatever, as long as they could sustain themselves.

The US does not care about Chinese Muslims. At all. They are tools.

Anyone with any knowledge of the middle east should be aware of it. The genocide has been going on for your entire lifetime. In fact there is no human alive today that was not alive during a period where zionists were not killing Palestinian children.

Sec+ holder, I’ll be fine. So will anyone with any amount of common sense.

Don’t download strange executables. Use trusted sites. keep your browser up to date and run an effective adblock.

Congrats you’ve eliminated 99.9% of all attack vectors in use today. I guarantee you aren’t going to be targeted by the last .1%.

And I replied telling you you were wrong.

Rice is one of the most environmentally friendly carb sources, and in its native environments is an essential plant. Corn takes up more space and the production and refining creates more CO2 than rice. Potatoes are much more vulnerable to rot and much more likely to fail, not to mention the much higher fertilizer requirements.

Climate change is not one thing. Methane isn’t the enemy. Hell CO2 isn’t the enemy. It is taking out things out of balance. If we were to eliminate rice and just grow corn, yes, we’d drop 10% of methane production… except we wouldn’t because corn requires 5x the fertilizer and fertilizer production is a larger contributor to GHG emissions than aviation and shipping.

Corn is also horribly space inefficient outside the US. Not just outside the Americas, but outside specifically the midwest in the US. Despite it now being attempted to be grown on every continent there is no place on Earth besides the US and Canada that corn becomes more productive per hectacre than rice. It simply cannot replace rice, which is more productive on every single other continent.

So that’s 5x the fertilizer, at least 1.5x the space (up to 3x the space) which then logarithmically increase the amount of CO2 produced for transportation and production, all while destroying native ecosystems (or at least ecosystems that have adapted to rice farming over the last few thousand years), oh and we can’t forget water management systems would need to change drastically so add 50 years of construction to any CO2 calcs.

‘Methane bad’ is true, sure, but we can’t look at one single source, which provides HALF OF ALL CALORIES CONSUMED BY HUMANS, and say that’s a thing that needs to switch. If we replaced corn with rice tomorrow the world would have a net negative GHG production from where we started. The same is not true in reverse, despite rice causing a minor amount of separate methane production.

You could download a Trojan that takes advantage of a known vulnerability.

Just… don’t do that?

This is part of Common Sense™. It’s a package that every single human being in a developed country is taught in regards to technology, and has been taught since the 1990s. (2000s for developing countries like the US).

Every single person that interacts with a computer in a professional setting has been taught explicitly how to never have a single virus on their computer. And they have been repeatedly taught this every 6 to 12 months for the last 3 decades. It is only people that purposefully infect themselves or purposefully choose to remain stupid — not ignorant, just stupid — that get infected with Trojans.

Your browser could have a vulnerable plugin, or maybe the user delays updates.

See above, and the previous comment.

I bought a USB drive off a sketchy guy in college which had auto-run Malware on it – but it didn’t work on Ubuntu.

See above. You did not use common sense™. You chose to be stupid, despite your college freshman orientation clearly covering basic safety.

Given the number of calories per tonne of methane produced, no, no it’s not hurting the climate.

This kinda complain is the same as ‘well if we just eliminate humans we’ll solve climate change,’ like yeah, no shit. But the point is keeping humans alive and rice is uniquely good at just that.

This doesn’t effectively increase your risk as a consumer. It only increases risk at the enterprise and infrastructure level.

All threat models include who you are and the environment the OS is run in for a reason. Just browsing the web is fine as a consumer, until browsers stop targeting your OS for updates.

The main vector for infection for any OS isn’t the OS itself. Malware doesn’t just spawn on your computer the second you plug it in to a router (no matter what Trump’s FCC thinks with their chinese router ban). It needs to get on your computer.

An up to date browser will prevent the majority of infections, with common sense preventing the rest. I kept Windows XP well into windows 7 years, and windows 7 well into windows 10 years before switching to linux. Just don’t download malware, you’ll be fine. Worst case scenario you keep a backup clone of your hard drive on a usb stick (which you should have anyway) and just reflash your drive every few months (or just switch to linux, it can do anything windows can do at this point with enough faffing about.)

To anyone wondering, no, rice is not hurting the climate. Unlike many water-intense crops, people are not trying to grow rice in the middle of the American desert.