It sounds like the only person we know was using LLMs was the plaintiff. He believes the court was as well, but I’m not aware of any reason to believe his accusation

Who said anything about overthrowing the whole system? There are plenty of examples of people who got what they wanted by violence, like the suffragettes or the IRA

No, the wires do not become less dense.

There is a virtual force acting to separate each part of the chain from each other part, but locally that force is orders of magnitude less than the bonding forces holding it together. The structure and density of the chain is therefore dominated by electromagnetic forces, rather than the expansion of space.

At large enough scale the expansion force will grow to become comparable to, or exceed, exceed the binding forces. That will cause the chain to stretch, but the electromagnetic forces will still exist and still be applying a restorative force trying to contract the chain again.

I’m pretty sure this requires many light-years of chain though, unless the acceleration of the universe is accelerating (in which case this same principle will eventually tear apart all matter, of any size), and I very much doubt that physics allows a material with the necessary properties

How about falcon 9? That was flying for years before it worked properly. The only reason it didn’t get the same criticism as starship is that they were using it to actually launch payloads during that time.

Starship can’t get away with that because the upper stage is big enough they can’t be careless about letting it drift back to earth, they have to be in control, but it’s not actually taking more time than falcon 9 did.

Meanwhile falcon 9 is now the most successful and reliable rocket in human history, so criticisms you can level at spacex, you can’t claim their approach doesn’t work

The only reason these test flights aren’t reaching orbit is because they’re actively aiming for a suborbital trajectory. They’re not “yet to successfully launch anything from orbit”, they’re yet to want to go to orbit in the first place. The difference between what they get and an actual orbit is minute, relatively speaking. They’ve amply demonstrated that if orbit was what they wanted, they’d be there with every flight.

They’re sticking with suborbital flights for now because they still have things to work on to make it more reliable, but none of them are “the rocket’s too heavy”

I can’t see how they’d do it, proton gets installed by the steam client. That client doesn’t run with root privilege, so at the very least they’d have to trigger a password dialog which would be highly obvious.

Also, the answer to your actual question is no. There’s definitely no way to block people from using any particular characters at the kernel level.

What you seem to be asking for is a way to absolutely forbid all software from writing certain characters to files, and/or from reading those characters. Aside from requiring that the kernel inspect all data in detail before letting other software have it, which would slow everything way down, it would prevent anyone from reading or writing binary data which happens to contain those sequences of bytes by coincidence. Binary data includes things like the programs which make the system work, so blocking those characters would be terminal

It ought to look like a bunch of □, which is the glyph generally used to indicate that the font has nothing to represent the character.

Specifically you’d expect U+25A1 □ WHITE SQUARE

Yellowstone would really suck, but it would suck differently than nuclear winter.

For starters, I don’t think it would be directly catastrophic on the other side of the world. The Americas would be pretty fucked, but some places would probably only see climate problems rather than the actual end of days.

Also, nuclear winter would include nuclear fallout. It would involve far less actual material coming out of the sky, but what it did bring would be poison in a way which volcanic ash wouldn’t really match (not to say volcanic eruptions aren’t poisonous, but they’re not persistently and insidiously poisonous like radioactive decay could be)

In that case you’ll face two problems I can think of off the top of my head: first, a 3MW generator with big moving parts is probably great at creating sparks which could ignite the balloon. How likely that would actually be would depend on the design, but it’s a significant problem if the expensive turbine falls out of the sky (carrying a flaming balloon and a very long high-voltage cable) on top of nearby buildings, people, or anything flammable.

Second, it’s actually quite difficult to confine hydrogen for very long. You’d either need a constant supply of it, or a significantly more expensive balloon which the hydrogen couldn’t leak out of

Yeah, but not only does hydrogen has other problems as well, the headline clearly says “helium”

Oh yeah. I didn’t even spot that the cop was a bear

Is there a layer missing? The joke seems to revolve around a shadow which isn’t there

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.

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

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

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”