Yes, well, timeline shenanigans. ;)

Meet one of my former D&D characters: Kronos, master of space and time (chronurgy wizard), accidentally turned himself into a grung while experimenting on frog familiars. Jokes that he is his own familiar now. Also has a frog familiar. Claims it is himself from another timeline. Campaign goal: to recover his lost powers. Secret: is delusional, or is he?

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.

I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding

while (0){};

Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.

Usually it’s a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.

The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there…

https://xkcd.com/979/

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.

I kid. But LiveBarn is cool, letting you rewatch after the game. :)

It might not be their own crash. Just a crash that snarled up traffic to drive around.

Mass Effect 1 citadel