FaceDeer

I’m a reasonably good swimmer, I’ve had plenty of training and experience. And if I was in a flood zone I would definitely want to have a life jacket on. Being a good swimmer is only going to help a little bit in a mess like that.

Avoid getting into the water in the first place, of course. Flood water sucks. Climb on your roof, climb a tree, ideally evacuate before the water gets there. But if you’re in a situation where you might fall into the flood water anyway, have a life jacket on.

Indeed. I was in a thread on Reddit about exactly this subject, and it was truly bizarre how adamant a lot of people were about how you should not having a life jacket. They were pointing out all these things - you could get trapped inside your house, it doesn’t save you from being hit by debris, it doesn’t protect you against diseases that are in the water.

Yeah, those are all bad things. Don’t jump into floodwaters for fun! Stay out of the flood water if you can at all possibly manage it. But if I’m in a place where I might end up falling into floodwaters anyway, it’s far far better to have a life vest on than to not have it on.

I don’t often use the word “cringe”, but IMO this warrants it. This silliness is going to discredit attempts at serious conversation.

Canadian, here. Kind of hard to ignore our giant idiot neighbour to the south.

Which is no doubt why he doesn’t speak it.

You think Poilievre would have done a better job of standing up to Trump?

Those business are ad aggregation companies by default for the most part, and they aren’t gonna to survive without clickthroughs

Yes, this is it exactly. The web pages that depend on ad revenue are the ones in trouble here. They’re being undercut by pages that give people the information they want without going through all that stuff.

You’re confidently predicting that the AI summarizers are going to fail somehow, and then everything will just magically go back to the way they were. I suppose that’s a reassuring thing to believe. Why should I believe it, though? The AI genie is out of the bottle. I can run one locally on my computer if I want. All the existing online summarizers could go bankrupt tomorrow and I’ll still be able to get an AI to distill the information I want from the morass of ads and engagement-harvesting click farms.

All of those things remain true until one day they don’t. Do you really think that the United States and its position on top of the world is eternal?

Trump was first elected in 2016, which is almost a decade ago now.

The voters that elected Trump will still be around after Trump’s heart explodes from hamberder overload.

Did you read the article? The part of the web that is having problems with their business model are the sites that are not using AI. They’re sites like news pages, the “sources” for information on the web. The ones that are eating their lunch are the ones that are using AI. They’re the search engines and similar sites that people go to looking for information. Since AI is able to gather the information from those sources and present it to the user without the user having to actually visit that site, that undermines their existing business model.

I suspect it’s more because of Elon Musk hate.

It is also possible for someone who has done something bad to be the victim of something else that is bad.

It’s possible for both of those people to have done something bad.

Well, direct your ire at the EU for that, I suppose. I’m just pointing out that calling for massive retribution against Meta isn’t warranted here.

the social media giant will not sign the European Union’s voluntary AI code of practice.

Emphasis added. If the result of not signing a voluntary code of practice is massive fines and IP blocks, was it really “voluntary?”

I don’t see what that has to do with this. The joke is that Poilievre is being parachuted in to “represent” this riding that he has nothing to do with, just like the other hundred candidates he’s complaining about.

The joke is Poilievre running in this riding in the first place. The 100 other candidates are just making sure everyone gets the joke.

No, there’s ways to do this without damaging Earth. You could arrange the sphere so that there’s a gap that allows light through specifically to keep Earth lit, or you could use mirrors or straight up artificial light sources to maintain Earth’s sunlight levels.

Or you get over the obsession with maintaining Earth exactly as it always was and carry on without it. Once we’re talking about Dyson spheres a planet like Earth would be a very minor population center. Probably more valuable as a source of additional building material than as a place to live in its own right.

For a power-collecting Dyson sphere you don’t actually need all that much matter. Most of the sphere’s area can be thin metal foil that just acts as a mirror to concentrate light on power converters, for example. You could build it with asteroidal material.

If you really want to get massive, then Mercury is usually the first target people propose for demolition. Lots of heavy elements and already close in to the Sun. And nobody cares much about Mercury.

Sure, what would be the obstacle? You start by building a single solar energy collector. Then build another. Then another. And so forth.