That’s how they always do it.

It’s usually terrorism, sometimes treason. But there is always an unproven accusation of some heinous crime, which is why most people will just accept it, because “it only affects the criminals”. And it is also how they motivate their henchmen to do the dirty work.

Communists and Jews in Nazi-Germany were accused of causing millions of Germans to die in WW1 and of causing poverty in the depression through exploitation. And this is why the Nazi henchmen worked diligently to get rid of the Jews, because they had lost family members in WW1 and lived through Depression poverty and they wanted to help their country become great again by getting rid of all the undesirables.

Of course, I totally agree with that

If that email needs to go to a client or stakeholder, then our culture won’t accept just the prompt.

Where it really shines is translation, transcription and coding.

Programmers can easily double their productivity and increase the quality of their code, tests and documentation while reducing bugs.

Translation is basically perfect. Human translators aren’t needed. At most they can review, but it’s basically errorless, so they won’t really change the outcome.

Transcribing meetings also works very well. No typos or grammar errors, only sometimes issues with acronyms and technical terms, but those are easy to spot and correct.

It is definitely here to stay, but the hype of AGI being just around the corner is definitely not believable. And a lot of the billions being invested in AI will never return a profit.

AI is already a commodity. People will be paying $10/month at max for general AI. Whether Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Llama, ChatGPT, copilot or Deepseek. People will just have one cheap plan that covers anything an ordinary person would need. Most people might even limit themselves to free plans supported by advertisements.

These companies aren’t going to be able to extract revenues in the $20-$100/month from the general population, which is what they need to recoup their investments.

Specialized implementations for law firms, medical field, etc will be able to charge more per seat, but their user base will be small. And even they will face stiff competition.

I do believe AI can mostly solve quite a few of the problems of an aging society, by making the smaller pool of workers significantly more productive. But it will not be able to fully replace humans any time soon.

It’s kinda like email or the web. You can make money using these technologies, but by itself it’s not a big money maker.

Also, a lot of people, myself included, make it a point to go to the bathroom before swimming.

And I don’t usually consume food or drinks until I am (almost) done with swimming. A four hour stretch of just recreational swimming and chilling is easy without food or drink.

Genocide is not just about numbers. If the Bosnian genocide qualifies as a genocide, then Gaza definitely qualifies too.

In my view, the Gaza genocide is also worse than the Holocaust in many respects. For one, most Germans didn’t know about, or support, genocide, nor did the Nazi’s have any kind of democratic mandate.

Whereas in the US and Israel, this is the first time a democracy is committing genocide with popular support.

By all accounts, China isn’t killing Uyghurs, but re-educating them.

The Uyghur genocide is better described as a cultural genocide, not a real genocide.

It is still awful, still bad. But it doesn’t involve large scale murder and it doesn’t meet the criteria used to qualify as a legal genocide.

In contrast, the Gaza genocide is definitely a genocide, as was the trail of tears.

I have only seen them online. I figure they are trolls or bots.

But I do think that China has a better human rights record than the US and Israel.

They are still evil in how they treat Uyghurs, Tibetans and democracy activists. They definitely use torture on dissidents.

But it’s not that difficult to be better than slavery, genocide, war and colonialism. And the US and Israel also use torture.

So maybe I am the tankie that OP refers to.

Not all religions claim to know everything.

Yes, the ones that do tend to be violent and oppressive, so I understand the criticism.

But many religions are more about searching truth, learning to love each other and have community. And their followers definitely tend to be modest and have a “I don’t know enough” mentality.

I read that Ubuntu is trying to solve this with the Snap Store.

But to be honest, I’m just not the target demographic for that.

I honestly think if the EU had continued with rolling out Mandrake and SuSe to public sector employees 20 years ago, Linux would be dominant today. Microsoft lobbied hard to stop it.

And I think the way forward will be to have a handful of big customers making the switch. Either China or the EU will probably drive this.

Maybe Huawei might sell MacBook alternatives based on Linux. Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.