nfh

The Papal states, which was the middle ages version of Vatican City, didn’t exist for a period of almost 60 years, when modern Vatican City was first recognized as a nation, in the Lateran treaty.

At some level, it’s a question of whether you view Vatican City as a new successor state, or a continuation of the former Papal states. The treaty framed it as a new state, which is at least an interesting historical fact.

There have been a small number of cases where it actually worked, but to my knowledge nothing universally applicable. AIDS treatments, however, have become so good that the disease is no longer seen as a major problem of our times.

We have a type of stem cell treatment used in extreme blood cancer situations that had cured a number of people of AIDS. To my understanding, it should work for most patients, but it’s a risky and extreme enough procedure that it’s not worthwhile compared to the standard treatment regimen. But if you also get leukemia, the treatment might cure both diseases.

Cancer is not one disease, at best you can cure a small specific subset of cancers.

With one given treatment, maybe. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t any cancers that are in principle untreatable, though a handful are very difficult to cure people from. We have a wide variety of treatments for a wide variety of cancers, some of which are now really close to 100%.

Getting to direct where every dollar goes above a billion is a huge amount of power. A single person deciding how to spend millions or billions of dollars to do what they deem to be improving society? They may do some good things, but a democratic process would probably do better overall.

Have you tried a user agent switcher?

Asking whether the project uses AI responsibly means you either need to define responsibly in a way that people can apply objectively, noting that everyone will have opinions about whether it’s a good definition. Or you leave it undefined and the answer basically means nothing.

It turns out, when you kick people out of a community for being toxic, racist, or otherwise counterproductive to maintaining a community… they go form a right wing spinoff of that community. I feel like it says a lot that when you kick people out for traits that aren’t “being right wing”, they form communities around that shared identity.

Thanks to government subsidies it’s much easier to boot into the corn kernel within the United States. But if you enable your VPN within your BIOdieSel, you can still take advantage of them abroad

As an experienced Linux user, I just migrated my last windows machine to Debian sid, my gaming PC. And it’s great. But I started on stable, and moved to sid after a few weeks, and it really wasn’t an issue for gaming or general use. My partner’s gaming computer is still on stable.

But yeah for someone less familiar, Bazzite and Mint are great choices. Pop! OS if you like the look of it, or Zorin OS if you like its look. You can always try something new if you’re interested in its features.

Dick/Nixon

I mean, it’s in western Asia, next to Azerbaijan and Georgia. “Complicated definitions of Europe” are part of the point here, but it’s pretty clearly not Europe in my mind, but given the Turkish border, it’s not far from Europe like Australia is

Australia, Armenia, and Morocco are all outside of Europe, and have completed too. Basically all European countries are eligible, plus those whose public broadcasters are part of the European Broadcasting Union.

Why not both?

This is one of many examples of a class of problem where the technology is the easy part. There’s room to improve the tech certainly, but the technology sufficient to solve the problem is already well understood.

The hard part is how to get people to actually do the necessary changes. To consume less, get fewer gas cars on the road, increase the amount of nuclear, hydro, solar, geothermal, and wind in the grid, and minimize coal and gas use. To reduce land use by cows, and increase land use by trees and native plants.

But maybe AI is the secret here. We have tools that are in the hype moment whose training data already contains several reasonable solutions to climate change. Maybe if AI “finds” the solution to climate change, people will finally listen

What’s really wild is that not only are games good enough on Windows, but tests lately are showing a consistent trend where the two are often indistinguishable in performance, and where they’re not, Windows isn’t consistently winning.

If you’re not into the genre of competitive multiplayer games that have kernel anticheat, Windows isn’t really better for gaming anymore, outside of being more familiar for many people. Today we’ve reached the point where it’s a few fps either way, and people should use whatever they want, but if Microsoft keeps bloating Windows, it might soon be that the “Windows tax” also refers to the performance penalty you pay for using the familiar OS instead of learning something new.

The thing is business is more booming than it’s ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool’s errand, at some point you’ll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.

If you make a hammer that’ll last 100 years, you’ll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you’ll be punished when sales fall because you’ve solved a problem for most people.

Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that’s actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it’s great, and you’ve spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it’s good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it’s profitable. And that’s all they care about. It’s basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they’re told they’re allowed to care about.

Suddenly cutting off a lot of trade suddenly is a stupid and reckless move that would hurt people in their countries as much as it would hurt the US. It’s basically the same behavior as Trump with his absurd tariffs, banning trade with a country, and taxing people obscenely to buy things from that country mostly work out to the same effects in practice.

Incentivizing other trade partners, and maybe slowly disincentivizing the US makes a lot of sense though. Maybe it made more sense years ago, but as they say, if the best time was yesterday, the next-best time is today.

The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they’re trying to do.

Agreeing with this, expanding a RAID array is not necessarily impossible, with something like RAID 5, and the right RAID setup, you could theoretically add an identical disk without wiping it all in the rebuild. RAID 1, you’ll 100% need to copy the data somewhere that isn’t the 2/4 disks in the meantime. In an environment where storage is expensive, RAID 1 is not suitable imo.

ZFS makes it so easy though. Throw a mismatched disk in? No big deal, it’s in your pool now. Want double parity for extra peace of mind? You can do that. It self-heals so you don’t need fsck, its maximum limits are too big to realistically matter on human scales, and the documentation on it is pretty good.

Certainly, some interesting developments have happened, and we’ve realized our old models/thinking about progress towards AGI needed improvement… and that’s real. I think there’s a serious conversation to be had about what AGI would be, and how we can know we’re approaching it, and when it has arrived.

But anybody telling you it is close either has something to sell you, or has themselves bought it.

Critically, the people who build these machines don’t typically update drivers to port them to a new OS. You buy a piece of heavy equipment, investing tens, or maybe even a hundred thousand dollars, and there’s an OS it works on, maybe two if you’re lucky. The equipment hopefully works for at least 20 years, and basically no OS is going to maintain that kind of compatibility for that long. Linux might get the closest, but I’ll bet you’re compiling/patching your own kernels before 20 years is up.

This kind of dynamic is unavoidable when equipment vendors sell equipment which has a long usable life (which is good), and don’t invest in software support (which is them being cheap, to an extent), and OSes change enough that these time horizons likely involve compatibility-breaking releases.