Did you take physics in high school (or elsewhere) and learn about half lives? Many of the main ingredients in nuclear weapons all have half lives: tritium, plutonium, etc – and most have fairly short half lives. They need to be continuously produced, enriched, refined, etc. to keep the purity high enough to be detonated. Some of them require breeder reactors and other fun thing.

Well, okay, U235 has a half-life of 700 million years, but you still need to enrich uranium to increase to proportions of U235, since U238 cannot sustain a chain reaction.

The original nuclear weapons were U235 weapons. Later bombs added all the harder to make stuff to make them bigger – fusion bombs still usually have a U235 starter to get the reaction going, but rely on things like tritium and plutonium to do the fusion bits. Even the Lithium-6 (which is stable) slowly decays to helium and tritium inside the weapon as neutrons from the other components hit it.

Anyway, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

The good news about nukes: they have a shelf life – most soviet-era nukes needed to be replaced every 12 years, as the loss of fissile material to natural radioactive decay would render them dirty bombs after a certain point. Now don’t get me wrong, a dirty bomb still sucks, but it’s no nuke.

So when a collapsing Russia is hypothetically selling nukes, they’re probably selling old depleted nukes or nearly expired nukes. To a terrorist it is almost the same thing, but to nation stations looking at MAD, it really isn’t.

Not in favour of the individual suffering here, but illegal mining is about the worst thing that can happen anywhere.

Furthermore, in most jurisdictions where illegal mining happens, you get these gang run pyramid scheme shenanigans going on where the miners are very nearly enslaved to their handlers. Shutting them down can only be a good thing!

On the larger scale: Environment and safety regulations exist for a reason.

That said, the suckers in the mine starving themselves to avoid arrest might not see it that way.

Probably the money paid for whomever Alex Jones lost lawsuits against – so like Sandy Hook victims.

Generally speaking, I like duck typing for function inputs, but not as much for function outputs (unless the functions are pure mathematics).

All I’m hearing is complaining. It’s open source. Fix mate then so it does what you want.

Duck typing is the best if fully embraced. But it also means you have to worry just a little bit about clean failures once the project grows a little. I like this better than type checking relentlessly.

It also means that your test suite or doctests or whatever should throw some unexpected types around now and again to check how it handles ducks and chickens and such :)

How did you switch to Azerbaijan?

Well, that’s on mate then. In KDE you could remap to a combo of your choice with ease

The ideal result? LLMs are just early versions of much better things that come later.

The unlikely result: we develop a separate human curated internet somewhere, complete with verification that a human wrote every bit. Basically verifiable digital id and signing on everything. Maybe.

The probable result: the internet turns to shit as AIs are trained on content created by AIs.

I don’t use mate, but assuming that it has a file manager and that file manager has hotkeys that conform to the muscle memory that is built using other file managers… Try it and see what happens?

Shift-del

All this shows is that other countries (China, etc.) will have carte blanche if they have nukes. If they don’t, they’ll get them. Imagine a nuclear armed Venezuela going after their neighbours because conventional intervention is too risky suddenly. Blah.

Atwood is also one of the sanest centrist voices I’ve ever read, in essays and interviews. (Centrist by Canadian standards – probably quite left by US standards). She always seems to be acutely aware of institutional inertia and how things like independent courts are vital to free societies. Wish there were more like her.

Does it matter if they don’t honour the patents of the rest of the world?

The legal and administrative overhead to do all of that would incur significant additional costs. We shall see.

Personal anecdote. I run a small business with a business partner (co-owner) and we have no employees. We need an employee. I’m personally a huge fan of employee-owned companies.

But from a hiring perspective, it is mind bogglingly risky for us to hire someone and just automatically stake them. Like, what if it’s the wrong person? How do we claw back control? Do we risk dilution sending the company in another direction?

It’s just so much easier just to pay someone and not have to deal with the complexity. And therein lies the rub.

Depending on the carrot, the skin can be significantly more bitter. And sometimes peeling can be quicker than trying to scrub dirt out of particular lumpy carrots.

YMMV

The premise here is that Trump loses but refuses to back down, attempting to forcibly claim victory. If Trump legitimately wins, there is a different path. Then…

Assuming multiple systematic failures occur simultaneously, including any of: actual voter fraud, fraudulent electors, congress refusing to certify, a captured supreme court acting in favour of Trump, or actual insurrection on or before Jan 6th.

I actually expect the US Military to step in. Every member is sworn to uphold the constitution. But if the constitution has been discarded, then I’d expect them to step in to restore it.

Failing that, the US likely fractures and we leave the Republic phase.

LKML and patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=0fc810ae3ae110f9e2fcccce80fc8c8d62f97907

He cites his work as being a variant of a patch submitted by another developer, Josh Poimboeuf. It’s a team effort folks :)