I imagine he means things like Chromebook, rather than Chromebook itself. Mass-market consumer hardware which comes with Linux by default

The safety designed into Rust is suddenly foreign to the C family that I’m honestly not sure you can do that. Even “unsafe” Rust doesn’t completely switch off the enforced safety

Those two things aren’t being claimed by the same people.

There are people with functioning brains, who are aware that AI is shit at programming, and there are managers who have been sold a sales pitch and believe that they can replace half of their software engineers.

AI doesn’t actually need to be effective to cost a bunch of jobs, it just needs to have good salespeople. Those jobs will come back when the businesses which decided to rely on AI discover the hole they’ve dug for themselves. That might not be quick though, because there’s no rule saying that major businesses will have competent leaders with good foresight.

I don’t know what names are typical, but they certainly aren’t using actual norse gods. All the characters, gods included, have german-sounding names, but they’re mostly long enough that I doubt people use them routinely in real life

There are a million ways to back data up, many of them are as simple as “copy it to removable media”, and don’t require any clever operating system features at all.

What removable media you can use depends on the quantity of data, and how long you need the backup to last. Maybe DVDs, or USB drives. If the data is valuable enough, you can also pay for cloud storage and upload it

The point of this sort of thing is to attract public attention, not to directly persuade the authorities.

They might not care about the starving prisoner, but they’re much more likely to care about the general public turning on them.

How effective it will actually be in this case I couldn’t say, but historically it worked very well for the women’s rights movement.

The reason I tend to object to these things is that bikeshedding isn’t free, it creates work and technical debt. That raises the bar for changes we ought to make, and I think it raises it quite a lot higher than objections which are frequently specific to the US and are largely imaginary (which is my honest interpretation of most of these changes).

That said, “genocide” is clearly unnecessarily provocative. It’s also not an industry-wide change, it’s just one function, so this particular change seems sensible to me

snag bites of the apex predators

I don’t think the author knows what “apex predator” means

Be cautious about trusting the AI-detection tools, they’re not much better than the AI they’re trying to detect, because they’re just as prone to false positives and false negatives as the agents they claim to detect.

It’s also inherently an arms race, because if a tool exists which can easily and reliably detect AI generated content then they’d just be using that tool for their training instead of what they already use, and the AI would quickly learn to defeat it. They also wouldn’t be worrying about their training data being contaminated by the output of existing AI, Which is becoming a genuine problem right now

You were asking for definitions, and I responded by pointing out that they definitely exist. The fact that you or I don’t personally come from a background which values those definitions doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that other people don’t use them.

I didn’t actually downvote, but I do object to your characterisation of this as misleading. People aren’t labelling their products with the intent that the people buying it believe they’re eating meat.

Those labels are designed to communicate what sort of thing you can do with it. If you label something “burger”, for example, everyone will understand at a glance what they’re looking at, and that you might like to put it between two buns with some lettuce. It will also catch the attention of people who are looking to make burgers, but might not have considered non-meat options.

Also, common usage of words like “burger” aren’t limited to anything specific. People talk about “chicken burger” or “turkey burger” all the time, for example, and nobody accuses them of trying to trick people into eating chicken. Why not a “lentil burger” as well?

Various holy books, I believe. See also pescetarianism, which stems from the same place

Throwing paint into a jet engine really is damage. You gave to take the engine apart and meticulously clean out the paint before you can run it again, because otherwise the engine could do itself serious harm next time it’s started. That’s a very expensive thing to do.

That actually makes it a very effective act of protest, which is why the government has come down so hard on them

Oh, absolutely. It’s not something which should be encouraged, and against a well designed modern system it probably isn’t possible (there must be some challenge-response type NFC systems on the market).

I’m just saying it isn’t unambiguously “illegitimate”

That’s probably debatable, if they have permission. They probably shouldn’t have been given permission, but that’s a separate issue

There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services.

The federal reserve disagrees with you. https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

When you want to buy something, that isn’t a debt. It’s only a debt if you already own the thing and haven’t paid for it yet, so the law about accepting dollars in payment for debt doesn’t apply.

It’s only true of badly designed bridges, these days. Modern engineering tools can calculate the resonant frequencies, and they make certain that those are far away from the frequencies which humans or wind can create

Attacking a massive corporation is a very different proposition than attacking individuals, I don’t think that parallel is terribly concerning

Light is a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum

No, it’s not. In physics, we call the entire spectrum “light”, because it’s all fundamentally the same thing.

We can talk about “visible light”, but that’s a subset of light in general. Microwaves, radio waves, x-rays, gamma radiation, and any other section of the spectrum you can think of are all light

Sure, but there are far more things which will kill the entire person at the same dose they’ll kill the cancer than things which can be carefully controlled by choosing the right dose.

These studies which claim to kill cancer in a petri dish usually turn out to be the former, because not killing the host is the difficult part