What makes it boring is that the engineers optimize for the arena, and the arena is boring.

They made it an almost perfectly flat metal surface with no features of any kind. Robot Wars was more interesting. Not only did they have house robots which looked like The Shrieking Maimer, the arena was also more interesting with pits, house robots, flame areas, etc.

IMO a more interesting arena would lead to more interesting battles, especially if the arena weren’t perfectly flat so it wasn’t optimal to have one that had a 2mm clearance. Even better would be if you had a variety of arenas, and the contestants didn’t know until the day of the battle which one they’d be in. Some might be flat, some might have a water hazard, some might have sand, some might have a dirt floor. Then you’d have more walking robots, more tank-tread robots, etc. so they could tackle a variety of terrain.

Yes

IMO it’s much more subtle. There are still really cold days in winter. There are still mild days in summer. You can even have a whole summer that’s cool or a whole winter that’s incredibly cold. I’ve heard that one of the effects of climate change is that the weather is more unpredictable.

Having said that, there’s a winter festival here that relies on naturally frozen outdoor water. A couple of years ago they had to cancel it because for the first time since it started it never got cold and stayed cold enough. If you look at the data, the length of that festival has been getting shorter and shorter every year. As for summer, having an air conditioner used to be uncommon, now it’s a necessity.

It’s tricky because some of that is lifestyle creep. An air conditioner used to be a much more expensive luxury, but now they’re cheaper. Technology changes, expectations change, so behaviour changes. We’re also notoriously bad at remembering what was normal in the past. We remember events and extremes, not averages. But, the number of days a festival can stay open in the winter is a much more concrete thing. It was just a given that it would be about 2 weeks when I was a kid, and they had a lot of freedom when it could be. Now it’s a matter of waiting for the weather to cooperate, and often it can’t run the full 2 weeks.

if they really really want them, at least make them electric

And very expensive.

In the modern day, They could EASILY educate themselves with the actual current and up to date scientific research, the internet exists.

The people putting out actual scientific information are not rewarded for making their information easy to digest for the uneducated. They’re rewarded for publishing scientific papers in journals that are read by other scientists.

I don’t know about you, but I very rarely read scientific papers, especially in a field that isn’t one I know well. Even if you know the field well there are all kinds of terms and math that mean reading a paper is hard. If you don’t know the field, even understanding the terminology they use is a huge challenge. It’s not realistic to expect someone with only a high school education to read papers.

Making media that appeals to, and is easily digested by regular people is a completely different skill set. Some people doing that actually care about real science. There are heroes who spend their time reading and digesting scientific papers so that they can explain them to regular people. But, there seem to be far more people who just make shit up that they know will go viral. If you’re a product of the Mississippi educational system, you probably can’t tell the difference between a legitimate science communicator and an asshole who’s making shit up to go viral. For every David Attenborough, there are probably a dozen Dr. Mercolas. And, let’s not forget that one of the most well known scientists writing about honesty and ethical behaviour was found to have plagiarized her research. So, even if you were reading scientific papers she’d written you might have been misled.

My mom is on that path, but still alive. She won’t drink regular tap water because she’s scared of fluoride. She no longer believes germs exist. She won’t get vaccinated or get flu shots (and won’t vaccinate her dog either). Her “doctor” is an hour’s drive away because she had to search far and wide for one who wasn’t part of the “big medicine” conspiracy.

It’s all so exhausting.

My hope has always been that if self driving cars are successful, almost nobody will own a personal car.

Cars are massively wasteful. Put aside the idea you’re hauling around multiple tonnes of steel and glass frequently to just move one person. Ignore the pollution aspect too. They’re also wasteful because they’re used for maybe 2 hours per day, and the other 22 they just sit somewhere taking up space and getting rusty.

Just think about how many stationary cars you pass when you’re out in the world. Nobody’s getting any use out of them, they’re just sitting there in case they’re needed, meanwhile they’re taking up useful space. There are other potentially expensive things you only use for a short amount of time each day: say, a good kitchen knife. But, most of them are indoors where they’re not exposed to the elements and deteriorating without being used.

In a future with self-driving cars, owning a car could be a luxury that enthusiasts could pay for, if it was worth it to them, but everybody else who needed a car could just rent a car for an hour or two.

I’m really hopeful that Steam Boxes and Steam Decks etc. mean that peripheral manufacturers start making sure their stuff works well on Linux.

Honestly, a lot of the time all they’d need to do is document the protocol and publish it and probably someone else would build and maintain a driver for them. I think it could undo a whole chicken and egg situation. Right now, manufacturers don’t build their stuff with Linux support because not enough gamers run Linux. As a result, not many gamers run Linux, which means it’s reasonable for manufacturers not to build in Linux support.

As for the unknowns, there are unknowns in Windows too. I’ve had to go into the registry many times to tweak something so it worked the way I wanted. The only difference is that my Windows install was the result of months or years worth of tweaking and customizing. Well, not the only difference. Linux is much more tweakable, and it’s something where you go in expecting to have to spend more time adjusting things. But, Windows didn’t have its unknowns too. It’s just that most of them were already behind me. With Linux, I knew I’d have to start from nearly square one. I’m glad I did in the end, but it was still frustrating at times.

its

It’s like the “physical version of a save icon”.

I daily-drive Bazzite on multiple machines. It’s excellent, even on machines I rarely use for games.

If you use the console version of Bazzite (which I use on a HTPC), it runs Steam in console mode on boot. I assume that’s what SteamOS does, it seems like they designed that mode to feel identical to using SteamOS on a SteamDeck. That makes it easy to launch games etc. without needing a keyboard and mouse. Then you can go to desktop mode when you need it.

The desktop version of Bazzite is just a Linux desktop that starts Steam on boot so that it’s running in the background. It has some gaming-related things installed but if you want to use it as a machine to write software it’s basically ready to go.

The part that takes energy and effort is making the switch.

I’m really familiar with Linux. I’ve been using it on and off since the days of Slackware. My work computer was Linux-only for several years.

But, even with that, it took weird driver issues with my GPU, combined with the impending death of Windows 10, combined with the ridiculous heavy handed Copilot BS on Windows to finally convince me to switch my main desktop PC to Linux.

It was just the momentum that was so hard to overcome. I knew what worked in Windows, and I knew what didn’t. I had already found and installed all the programs I needed. My settings were all how I liked them. I knew the keyboard shortcuts. With Linux I didn’t know what would work or what wouldn’t. With Linux, there were a lot of things I’d need to install and set up, and I knew that was going to take some effort. But, worst were the unknown unknowns. I didn’t know what was going to cause me problems, and didn’t know if they were things I could resolve in a couple of hours or if they’d take weeks.

I’m glad I made the switch, and the overall maintenance load is much lower than it was in Windows. The frustration factor is 10x better. But, I did have to make a real effort to make the switch. There were a few weeks where it was pretty frustrating.

He seems to set a timer and make sure he reminds people about that at least once a month.

Sure professor. Keep digging that grave.

aims to

Aims to. As in, has never once reached. So, you’re suggesting that in a state that has never happened, but theoretically could happen, then it’s OK to have a for-profit business.

What about in the real world?

That’s an “if” big enough to drive a train through.

There has never been a classless society where everyone’s basic needs are met. So, pretending that that’s the starting point for this hypothetical is a sign you’re pretty desperate.

Training an LLM on your code makes it definitionally a derivative work

If so, then every painter who studied Picasso is making Picasso-derived works. That’s not how copyright works.

And which of them thought that communism without capitalism allowed someone to run a for-profit business?

You mean, whatever Marx says.

Copyright infringement is never theft.

And, arguably, what they’re doing with LLMs isn’t even infringing copyright. If I look at a copyrighted picture, learn from it, then paint my own impression of it, my painting shouldn’t be infringing the copyright. Do that with an LLM instead of a brain and it’s a similar argument.

The dual standard is really the issue. Meta downloaded terabytes of books from LibGen and loaded them into its model. If that’s not infringing copyright, then anybody should be able to download a book from LibGen and read it without worrying about copyright infringement because they’re just loading them into their brains. But, I have a feeling that Meta will get away with it as fair use, but individual people will still be nailed for “copyright infringement” for loading media into their brains in exactly the same way.