Yes, that’s what I meant 2 comments above by “fungus” (though to be fair, whether slime molds are fungi depends on your definition, they used to be classified as one, before “protist kingdom” was made up to mix protozoa, algae & molds, but I keep preferring the traditional autotroph / absorptive heterotroph / digestive heterotroph division).

I also mentioned ants who can find the optimal path by simply following scents left by other ants without understanding how this helps with that.

You can be intelligent without being aware of your intelligence, or you can be stupid without being aware of your stupidity… like how humans are actually creating problems for themselves in many cases.

Intelligence != awareness

Yes there there as many types of intelligence as there are types of problems. Emotional intelligence deals with emotional problems, social intelligence deals with social problems. This doesn’t conflict with my definition, it’s still problem solving.

Just because a being is intelligent does not mean it can solve all the problems of all kinds, it would require general intelligence, and even a generally intelligent being needs the right training… if you are trained wrong or trained for a different kind of problem that does not fit the current one then your current experience might actually get in the way, as you point out.

They’re no more intelligent than an AC/DC converter

The problem is in the definition of intelligence.

To me, intelligence is simply problem-solving ability. It does not necessarily imply consciousness, having self-awareness or anything like that. A simple calculator is already displaying intelligence, even if limited to a very narrow situational set of problems, in the sense that it can resolve mathematical questions.

That doesn’t mean the calculator is self aware… it just means it can resolve problems. Biological systems can also resolve problems without necessarily being aware of what they are doing… does the fungus actually knows it’s solving a maze the scientists prepared for it when it just expands following what is preprogrammed by its biological instincts determined by natural selection? Do the ants really know what they are doing when they find the shortest path just by instinctively following a scent of pheromones left by other ants?

Knowing exactly what causes consciousness is an entirely different problem… and it’s one that has not been resolved by any scientist or philosopher in a satisfactory manner. So we simply do not know that.

Ah sorry, I misunderstood completely, I didn’t read it right. For some reason I thought you were talking about the router / wifi service being SOWPL.

HDR and EXIF are great changes… APNG, if already being used for some apps/services, seems a logic choice. Maybe it’ll finally mean the end of gifs once and for all?

What I’m more excited for though, is the improvements in compression that the article hints that are being worked on. Specially if it can beat other more modern formats that have added lossless compression like jpegxl. I feel it’s best to have separate formats for lossless and lossy, to prevent the off-chance of lossyness getting through.

IANAL, but I feel that coffee shop case would not be different if the software were under AGPL… if you are providing a service to other people, even if “the other people” are the customers to your shop, it could be argued that under the terms of the AGPL (not to be confused with GPL) they should have the right to see the source of the service that they are making use of.

But if the SOWPL requirement really does apply to private code that isn’t providing service to others, the implication would be that even if you are the only user (no coffee shop customer), and even if you are the only one who knows about it, you would still need to make the source code public in some way… which I feel this is very impractical and probably unenforceable anyway.

Even if you did block it, the fact that you blocked it is also trackable… so it might actually single you out even more, and it’ll still allow them to fingerprint your browser (you can test your fingerprint here).

It might make more sense to randomize / spoof the data so that it becomes inconsistent and useless so that you aren’t identifiable.

alias lt='ls -t | less'

Good idea! I’ll steal that but I would rather be able to give a directory path as parameter (and show in colors, and don’t pause if less than 1 page of content, and support the scrolwheel), also piping ls forces it to be 1 single column so might as well show more details, personally I’m gonna use this instead:

lt() { ls -t --color=always -Fgoh "$@" | less -RF --mouse; }

Also, printf '\a' will output an alert bell character which should make the terminal beep/blink and be highlighted for attention by your wm/compositor if it’s unfocused.

I have that aliased to a to get notified whenever a long running command finishes just by adding ;a at the end.

Aren’t all motivations emotional?

I mean… what would be the “logical” reason to use FOSS? I feel you can’t just use pure logic as a form of motivation, ever. Something that only uses logic and not emotions cannot take any action like a computer algorithm made of pure logic with no hard-coded instincts that simply operates mathematically, in reality there’s no logical reason to act in one direction or another… morals/goals are always emotionally grounded.

I feel the problem has more to do with social reasons, and pragmatic reasons.

What determines a behavior being “extreme” often has more to do with what is the average behavior of the people you surround yourself with. It’s a relative term.

In a world where everyone used free software and saw that as the norm, with things being designed around software being free, someone going the extra mile just to use proprietary software would be seen as “extreme” too.

Also, I’m not convinced that the numeric balance of who killed the most from the other side in a war is what should determine who is in the wrong.

That was long ago, I wonder if he might be using now GNU Guix, since it’s a GNU project.

• Pretty Good Privacy (PGP): The first implementation of a set of methods used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, emails and files that ultimately became a standard called “OpenPGP” (RFC 4880), the program itself was commercial/proprietary. Sometimes “PGP” is also used to call the standard itself for short.

• GNU Privacy Guard (GPG): A popular Free and Open Source program from the GNU project that uses/implements the OpenPGP standards

If you are happy with the default, then just use the default.

Some of us use the terminal more than any other app, so I like my terminal to be super lightweight and snappy in all situations so it opens instantaneously (I doubt this one is like that though, if it has big dependencies like GTK / Qt), preferably if it does so without sacrificing in features (true color, things like sixel for graphics, allowing to set fallback fonts, maybe font ligatures, being able to set the app-id so my compositor can treat special terminal windows differently, etc).

You can increase the number of items shown by bumping up the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults setting in about:config.

But you won’t get a scrollbar even if you bump it till it goes beyond the height of your screen.

The approach to taxing isn’t determined by this tool, but by the government. What this tool tries to prevent is hidden money exchanges, which affect both methods of taxing, not only flat taxes but also income-based taxes (since a hidden sale is giving the seller a hidden income and potentially placing them at a lower income tax class).

It does not have to be something mandatory…

I mean, there could be some form of “metacommunities”, something like being able to group multiple communities together in a “view” that shows them to you visually as if they were a single community despite being separated. Bonus points if everyone can make their own custom groupings (but others can subscribe to them… so there can be some community-managed groupings).

In theory you could have multiple “metacommunities” for the same topic still… but at least they could be sharing the same posts if they share communities. I feel grouping like this would be helpful because small communities feel even smaller when they are split.

I think reddit has something similar to that, multireddits or something I think they are called.

IANAL, but as far as I know there’s no problem with distributing MIT software as a GPL component, since MIT allows imposing extra restrictions (like the share-the-source limitations of the GPL) to the code, so you can in theory turn every MIT software into GPL, what you can’t do is turn GPL software into MIT, so if the GPL software links MIT libraries that are part of its function, that instance of MIT software needs to follow the GPL.

Yes, I understand that more mining could be done, but what I was saying is that I don’t think it could be sustained to the level of silicon. Bismuth is a rare mineral, and 100 times more expensive than silicon.

China is the world’s largest market for semiconductors (50% of the chips in the world are traded there), if they want to use locally produced bismuth chips they would only be able to tackle a very small fraction of that. Either they are only used in special applications (like some particular specialized hardware at smaller scale) or it would be impossible, the Earth does not have enough resources to produce bismuth chips at the same scale as silicon. So I’m not sure if it could work as serious competition to silicon.

But we’ll see, maybe I’m wrong.

Silicon is like $3/kg (and that’s the higher price, it’s actually cheaper than that outside USA). I’m not sure if we could sustain the same level of manufacturing using bismuth without side effects. One of the best things about silicon is that it’s the second most abundant element in Earth’s lithosphere (the first being oxygen)… I don’t think the “line must go up” attitude around pushing for Moore’s law is a worthy effort. I’d rather we pushed for software to be more efficient, I don’t feel my PC is significantly faster than it was 10 years ago, despite its Hz having doubled.

I could understand using this for specialized applications, but I’m not convinced it should be something that should be made as widespread as silicon tech, so I don’t think this should really be seen as a replacement for it.

Would using bismuth in chip production affect the price of medicaments?