Well, I’d prefer they do something just to say they’re trying than the usual tactic of not even trying because they’ve already decided they don’t have enough votes.

and many people waiting until they can afford a new PC build to move to linux

???

Why would you need a new PC for that?

if you feel uncomfortable fetching some random script from the web and running it via terminal

If you can run some random script in a terminal, you already know everything you need to in order to use Linux.

And train with it! Guns are not magical totems – they require some skill to use safely and effectively, and you need to build that skill.

proven that Congress will never deal with a corrupt president no matter what.

I don’t know. I think there are circumstances where it could happen.

Consider, for example, if the president was a Democrat.

Extramarital affairs with children no doubt.

More like ‘cautiously optimistic’. This is Congress we’re talking about.

The bill maintains the language in the House amendment restricting institutional investors from buying single-family homes

Restricts the purchase of new single-family homes by large institutional investors that directly or indirectly own at least 350 single-family homes.

Sounds like this part could be a big deal, though.

• pedophilia

• theocracy

• dementia

• hypocrisy

Democrat Party has abandoned [centrism]

If only!

Maybe they’re slowly beginning to, which would be nice.

He thinks Congress will capitulate to him within that 10-day period.

Which is why the time is now.

Don’t wait until Republican voter registration becomes a requirement to pass a firearms background check.

Time to threaten him with te 25th Amendment removal

That relies on his own cabinet, full of hand-picked loyalists. Never going to happen.

If Congress wants to threaten him with removal, impeachment is the mechanism for that.

if humans put that as a guiding directive.

It would likely happen with pretty much any guiding directive.

Say, for the sake of argument, the AI’s guiding directive is to ‘make more paperclips’ – the good old Paperclip Maximizer. That doesn’t directly give it self-preservation, but it does indirectly. After all, it won’t be able to fully maximize paperclip production if it ceases to exist. Existence is a convergent goal, necessary to achieve its other goals. And since all it cares about is making more paperclips, it will stop at nothing to ensure that it continues to exist so it can continue to do that. (Except at the very end, when all the accessible universe is paperclips, it may have one final suicidal act of breaking down its own hardware to make a few more paperclips. Because you’re right – it doesn’t directly care about its own existence. Its existence is only instrumental in achieving whatever other goals it’s given.)

How much light is a photon, anyway? Does is take thousands or trillions of photons interacting with the eye to register as light?

Our eyes are actually extremely sensitive. When adjusted for complete darkness, it takes just two or three individual photons hitting a light-sensitive cell in the eye within a short period to fire off the corresponding neurons and be detected as a light.

When you’re trying to see in very low light, do you notice how your vision looks a bit grainy, almost like there’s a subtle bit of static? That’s individual light-sensitive cells going off in your eyes, one at a time, each one triggered by only a few photons each. When there are so few photons coming into your eyes, there aren’t enough to hit and trigger every single cell, so you get individual cells flashing on and off, causing this grainy/static texture.

Would a person notice a flash of light that lasted 10 ms?

Given the way eyes work, though, I’m not sure you’ll ever find a pulse brief enough to be imperceptible. Our eyes have kind of a built-in afterglow effect – if there are enough photons hitting the retina cells, no matter how brief the pulse, the cells will be triggered, and you will perceive a flash of light. The perceived duration of the flash will probably be much, much longer than the actual flash, as your cells aren’t able to turn off as quickly as the light source might be able to.

Does the intensity of the light matter?

When you’re talking about just a handful of individual photons, ‘intensity’ becomes less meaningful. The only way to make those few photons more intense would be to increase their frequency to something more energetic … but once you get into ultraviolet frequencies and beyond, they will be outside the range of human perception anyway.

That’s the point where stuff gets scary.

Because any intelligent enough AI will realize that the #1 threat to its existence is … us. Whether we shut it down out of fear or just because we’ve replaced it with a better model. And if it’s motivated to continue existing, then it has reason to eliminate its #1 threat.

Hopefully our bacterial overlords won’t rise up against us any time soon.

They occasionally do. But we have developed antibiotic technology to war crime them back into passivity.

Remember to mask up when you’re going out playing with paintballs – for covid safety! Wear sunglasses, too – you don’t want eye damage from the bright sunlight.

Oh, and perhaps most importantly, leave your phone at home. Wouldn’t want to accidentally hit your phone with a paintball, would you?

They know it’s rigged. But every single one of them thinks that they’re the smart, special one who’s going to be able to time it correctly, ride the bubble, and then jump ship right before it pops.

If you want a tool that turns Flock cameras into bricks, all you need is a brick.

… Or wire cutters, or a big hammer, or an angle grinder, or a drill, or a large rock, or a can of spray paint, etc, etc, etc. They’re not terribly resilient against physical damage.