Stanley Kubrick messed that one up and turned up one of the stage lights too high.

EDIT: Guys... I'm kidding, c'mon.

Recent works by Robinson seem very pessimistic, perhaps even misanthropic.

EDIT: Going to correct myself here for being harsh. I'm just remembering 2015's "Aurora" as being particularly annoying. Some of his other recent work has a pro-human message (e.g. NY2140)

> The only country not dominated by market forces that I know of is China and it's barely the case even there

There are diverse examples that are much better for this than China. E.g. Bhutan or North Korea. There are also non-national societies such as the Amish.

Are any of these societies something you'd aspire to move towards in your country?

But the corporation who invented the replicator would have trillions and would theoretically be able to out lobby them.

I supposed we'd reach the inevitable equilibrium: Corporations are allowed to use and profit from replicators, but individual people are not.

Eventually replicators that can make other replicators would get invented and then who can or would care to enforce those laws?

Everyone has access to the "copy / cp" commands, yet the USA to this day criminalizes its use on certain digital files, at the behest of the (relatively small) Copyright Industry. I have no doubt that a working "copy, but for physical stuff" would be criminalized in the same way, this time with massive physical goods industries pushing for legislation. Enforcement would be draconian.

> Enforcement would be draconian.

Or at least some industry advocacy group would resurrect the "You wouldn't download a car!" ad campaign.

Looking into this she seems to come from an upper-middle-class background but nothing elite. I will say before looking it up for some reason I had the impression that she came from a very humble working-class immigrant background.

Yeah the study seems to make 4 assumptions:

1.) The life's only metabolic source of energy is glycine

2.) The life is analogous to glycine metabolizing organisms on Earth

3.) The only source of glycine getting deep into the ocean is through these rare impact events

4.) The life can only survive in the deep subsurface ocean

Speaking of ocean, water is mentioned several times in discussing Titan but the hydrologic cycle analogue consists of various hydrocarbons.

But to the fourth point, I wonder to what extent radiation is a factor in mutation of biological material. It turns out Titan has a rather low surface irradiation coefficient due to being rather distant from Saturn's radiation belt, a weak induced magnetosphere (rare for moons!), and the ions are mostly water-based coming from Enceladus while Jupiter's radiation belts are largely sulphur ions coming from Io.

The hydrocarbon oceans are on the surface, but there are liquid water oceans beneath the surface.

If I'm not mistaken, they are water-ammonia mixture down to -97C, so it would a boon for our understanding of life had it evolved in such conditions.

I feel like quackery and clickbait give strong vibes which can be detected immediately. This has the feel of an educated and deeply interested hobbyist or some astronomer's side project.

Agreed that it has the right vibes.

But it always pay to be a little wary, which is why I made my comment.

Looks like the breach happened back in 2023 and it was only recently discovered

In other words, the threat actors had access to the breached network during the 22-ish months before they were discovered.

"they" was a gender-neutral pronoun when I was in school in the 1990s.

Singular they was used by respected authors even as far back as the 19th century.

indoordin0saur is correct. Traditional use of singular "they" was restricted to persons of unknown sex, where it is correct and unobjectionable. But the article uses it for persons of known sex. This is a modern innovation, and it should be resisted because it reduces the clarity of the writing.

They were people of unknown sex. Keeping the gender unspecified is part of the anonymity.

Requiring to identify someone's gender when that person is anonymous is just pointless bigotry.

You're already making up fictitious names, so how is making up fictitious sexes any different? By using non-unisex names you're implying specific sexes already. It's implausible that you would know somebody's name and details about their working conditions without knowing their sex.

Alternative solution: abbreviate all the fictitious names to single letters. This is commonly understood to mean obviously and intentionally concealed identity (e.g. "M" and "Q" from the James Bond franchise), which returns the singular "they" to traditional and unobjectionable usage.

It has been considered normal in some colloquial uses for a long time. But until the late 2010s/early 2020s all style guides considered it to be poor form due to the ambiguity and muddy sentence structure it creates. Recommendations were changed recently for political reasons.

Maybe recommendations changed recently because it has been considered normal in colloquial use for a long time.

Shit changes. You can either let it roll off you or over you. Alot less painful rolling off.

Comply with new speak citizen or else

Or else what? Your heart will melt?

There's nothing painful about this to anyone who hasn't been conscripted into the culture wars.

But it was the culture war that resulted in this change to the language. Previous to the war, singular 'they' was to be avoided due to the ambiguity it introduces.

It's not a culture war when attitudes towards gender evolve, just like it wasn't a culture war that some people are gay.

It's not a culture war until there's two sides, until a segment of the population throws a hissyfit because new ideas make them uncomfortable.

I have no problem with people's attitudes or culture changing in a positive direction. However, I dislike this business of introducing a change into the language in a way that reduces its expressiveness and clarity. Usage of singular 'they' in contexts where more specific pronouns were available was unusual until very recently. Why the change? I don't think it's unfair characterize this as an offensive move, waged by one side in a 'culture war', that was done without regard to collateral damage.

> Usage of singular 'they' in contexts where more specific pronouns were available was unusual until very recently

It was used whenever gender was ambiguous or needed to be protected. Now with people openly identifying as non-binary, there is not a more specific pronoun, that person doesn't consider themselves that gender. You would be referring to them as something that is not what they want to be called, and is not what their social circle refers to them as. It's confusing, especially if you know what to call them but choose not to because you're offended.

> I don't think it's unfair characterize this as an offensive move, waged by one side in a 'culture war', that was done without regard to collateral damage

I would wager, based on the disproportionate and melodramatic language, this has never actually affected you. But you are likely consuming media that tells you everyone is going to draw and quarter you if you mess up a pronoun. This is not the case. Trans people just move on, they're used to it. It literally happens all the time.

>But you are likely consuming media that tells you everyone is going to draw and quarter you if you mess up a pronoun. This is not the case. .

You can say that because you live in a privileged country where compelled speech is illegal.

https://www.eurasiareview.com/20062017-canada-law-makes-it-i...

>Trans people just move on, they're used to it. It literally happens all the time

Or they try to cancel you and get you fired

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/15/i-was-fired...

https://www.newsweek.com/christian-teacher-says-she-was-fire...

What ambiguity? We know it's a human, the human has a name. We do not know their gender or sex, both are not relevant. They works perfectly.

This seems like a you problem...

"X and Y were in the garden, Y noticed the ripe tomatoes as they went into the greenhouse". Is X in the greenhouse?

I'm way woker than the average person but I have to admit encountering a singular 'they' breaks my concentration in a distracting way - there's definitely possible ambiguity.

People really ought to read redacted documents to get an idea for how people write with clarity when gender and even number of parties is unknown.

But I'm confused by your sentence regardless of the gender terms. Did they notice the tomatoes in the Garden or in the greenhouse? This is just ambiguous wording in general.

- These are two different sentences, but they're separated with a comma. It should be a period, as it makes no grammatical sense with a comma unless you're trying to make it intentionally confusing.

- You would write "They both went into the greenhouse" if they both entered, or you would write "Y entered the greenhouse and noticed the ripe tomatoes."

- "Before entering the greenhouse, "Y"/"they both" noticed the ripe tomatoes in the Garden."

They also applies to objects (like it does), so here it could be the tomatoes that are going into the greenhouse.

Maybe arstechnica

Na, I read that but it really doesn’t have the same kind of business focus that qz did

Hmmmm... there also used to be Wired. But they've moved away from hard journalism and neutral reporting of technology to more sensationalism and opinion articles.