polemic

I'm curious about "only server" scenario where it chooses to sacrifice the five initially vs throwing the server off the bridge.

Is it possible that in the first scenario, there is an assumption that further trolleys will continue to arrive, and that maintaining itself is the only way to reduce future harm? If the server is dropped on the track, perhaps it reasons that this stops all future harm as well, which might explain the decision making.

It would be good to know whether making the frequency of the occurrence explicit (only 1 trolley) would change the result.

Not just in remote locations. We just got a new public toilet in my suburb's town center. But the lack of public facilities is certainly noticeable when traveling.

Never really understood why people like Tom Clancy, it's not as if it's enjoyable to read about a bunch of mililtary hardware. At least with Dan Brown you've got a load of interesting mysteries and locations to get off on.

(more seriously: I think both authors understand their markets and are savvy about delivering what they want, critics be damned)

Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic.

It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.

Countries with functional and affordable healthcare didn't there with startups and less regulation.

Yup - in NZ the infrastrucutre and the provider were separated as part of the nation-wide fibre-to-the-door rollout.

I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.

Suspicously easy.

A very similar thing happened here in New Zealand where we tracked right with fairly dire and predictable consequences, from a left-wing government that was shouldering the blame for a whole lot of macroeconomic issues they had little control over.

It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.

> We're forking Flutter. This is why.

Cripes I wish people would explain who "we" is. "Flutter Foundation"? Which is "Flock" but not "Flutter"?

To get an inert object through the atmostphere and do real damage it has to be very large. That's a very inefficient way to use mass that you've boosted to orbit, even if it's relatively cheap to get there. So any weaponary they put up there will likely look fairly conventional. The speed of deployment and difficult of intercept would be the game-changer.

Seems a stretch to call it open source.

Messenger Kids was a pragmatic effort by Meta to improve safety on the Messenger platform. It works well, and it looks to me like Instagram Teen accounts is a similar effort. You can bemoan the effects of social media or whether teens should be there but the teens are there, so credit to Meta for making a serious investment.

Always lacking in these conversations is a proper definition of "social media". Kids want to talk to their friends, many want to be social, so if we're going to talk about the dangers of social media we need to be specific. E.g. the problems with algorythmic content are entirely different to the issues of bullying and inappropriate direct messaging. Conflating them under a "social media is bad" banner doesn't help us build healthier, safer systems.

My younger ones use Messenger Kids and it gives me some confidence that Meta has thought about the problem and have solutions that actually work for all parties.