ignirtoq

That strongly depends on the job. If the company has to follow regulations to meet some security posture, wiping the OS (and all the security tools and configuration set up by IT) to put your own favored OS without matching the security requirements could wind up with you getting fired.

I think it was pine, actually, but it was over 10 years ago so I can’t say for sure.

Not only did my math master’s thesis adviser use Linux, he read his email from a command line program and wrote his papers in plain TeX, considering LaTeX a new fangled tool he didn’t need.

they hired a voice actor

This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person’s tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.

I don’t get this. Why are you assuming they constructed the voice with only the samples from another voice actress and didn’t use any from Johansson? Why are you assuming they used the samples from that voice actress at all and didn’t only use samples of Johansson’s voice they scraped from all corners of her prolific history of work?

Any random company I would give the benefit of the doubt, but these AI companies have specifically shown they don’t care about copyright law specifically or ethics in general, and they definitely have no qualms lying about where they get their data and what they do with it.

No, it doesn’t say why. And it also doesn’t actually say Biden spent that money. It says Congress “allocated” $7.5 billion. There are plenty of processes between allocation and actual expenditure that could be holding this up.

The human fatality rate of COVID-19 is 1-3%, depending on how you count cases. From what I’ve seen reported, the human fatality rate of this strain of bird flu is closer to 50%.

(Lots of “ifs” coming) If this starts to spread human-to-human, if it spreads as easily as COVID, and if we don’t lock down and this becomes endemic like COVID, COVID will look like a walk in the park compared to what this will do. I’m crossing my fingers that COVID was in that mortality sweet spot where it was bad enough to cause a lot of deaths but not quite bad enough to make officials make people angry with actually taking care of the problem. 50% mortality should be comfortably on the side of “deal with it at all cost.”

If all countries under discussion ramped up to full war time economies, like Russia is already doing, the West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two. Any suggestion otherwise is either ignorant or a bad faith argument.

But I think Putin knows this fact of economical imbalance, as he’s doing a superb job undercutting Western support of Ukraine through subversion of the political process via corrupt politicians, keeping the US and others in a state of hand-wringing and infighting. If he truly believed any of his own propaganda, he would already actually be at war with NATO (instead of just claiming to be and not actually touching any NATO territory), and the West would coalesce around the clear immediate threat and begin the war time economic ramp up.

I remember you saying that that was exactly the plan, so that they could bleed the western economies to death right there at the eastern border of Ukraine

The economies? I could see the argument for Russia bleeding Western political support for Ukraine, but it’s just fantasy (or propaganda) to suggest a single economy the size of Russia could bleed the combined economies of all Western countries to death.