Oh, it’s definitely interesting.
I think people here just got rubbed the wrong way because these articles often make it seem like Roman concrete is better than ours, rather than “look what they accidentally did occasionally”.

We can make self healing concrete today, we just usually opt not to, because the downsides or unpredictable nature makes it unsuitable for the significant cost increase.
The phrase “the bridge is infested with bacterial spore colonies” isn’t one that makes engineers happy.

We mostly know how they made theirs, and could make our own version of it, but we optimize for different things.
The Romans optimized for “that’s cement and it works well”, because they didn’t have anything close to the level of chemical understanding we do now.
We optimize for strength and predictability. Ours can hold a higher load and will likely need repairing about when we predict.

Roman concrete can sometimes, in certain circumstances and with variable effectiveness, repair certain types of damage by chemically interacting with the environment. So maybe it crumbles in a decade or maybe it lasts a millennium.

Article basically points at some researchers who are looking to see if they can bring that healing capability to modern concrete in a predictable and more versatile fashion.

Hell, I’ll take someone who wants to be a billionaire, as long as they do it without exploitation. It’s just that that’s nearly impossible to do, since very few people actually individually create a billion dollars worth of value.

Look at their actions, not their words specifically.

It’s a culture where being unkind is particularly unacceptable, not specifically where you’re not allowed to be honest or forthright.

You’re allowed to not like someone, but telling someone you dislike them is needlessly unkind, so you just politely decline to interact with them.
You’d “hate to intrude”, or “be a bother”. If it’s pushed, you’ll “consider it and let them know”.

Negative things just have to be conveyed in the kindest way possible, not that they can’t be conveyed.

Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn’t been a net negative.

Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).

Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.

He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.

Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.

I guess I don’t see how a surgeon being unwilling to do maintenance on a non-FDA approved medical device is fucked up.
If it fails to meet the criteria for being safely used in a medical context, it’s irresponsible to try to maintain it.

Er, selinux was released nearly a decade before Windows 7, and was integrated into mainline just a few years later, even before vista added UAC.

Big difference between “not available” and “often not enabled”.

FDA approval is contingent on so many factors that even if it was entirely open source, including all hardware design and the instructions for assembly, maintenance, and manufature it would be entirely plausible for it to lose approval if the company responsible for continued development went bankrupt.

Without approval, no reputable surgeon will do anything beyond remove it.

A device not having a clear and unambiguously documented path for addressing defects found in the future is more than sufficient reason to lose approval.

That might just be a growing up near water thing. I think that on average, Canadians live closer to larger bodies of water than Americans do, since more than half are within day trip distance of the great lakes waterway, and then there’s Halifax and Vancouver.

Growing up in a place with water, basically everyone I know also has at least a passing knowledge of recreational small watercraft.

Where I live basically every location is some combination of “French, native American, English, Scandinavian”, “pronounced natively or not”, and “spelled like it’s pronounced or not”.

The fun ones are the English pronunciation of the French transliteration of the native word.

Yes, but that’s the case regardless. My message going through has always depended on someone else’s cell towers, all the random routers and switches in between, and the other person’s device.
My server likely has worse uptime, and if I’m hosting from home it probably has more hops to transit through it.

I believe their point was that even encrypted messages convey data. So if you have a record of all the encrypted messages, you can still tell who was talking, when they were talking, and approximately how much they said, even if you can’t read the messages.

If you wait until someone is gone and then loudly raid their house, you don’t need to read their messages to guess the content of what they send to people as soon as they find out. Now you know who else you want to target, despite not being able to read a single message.

This type of metadata analysis is able to reveal a lot about what’s being communicated. It’s why private communication should be ephemeral, so that only what’s directly intercepted can be scrutinized.

We should also ban long hair.

I’m sure plenty of women only prefer to have long hair because they think they would be shunned or stan out if they cut it short.

I’m all for people getting to wear their hair like they want, but I’m confident that many women would actually prefer to wear their hair short, and so can’t be trusted to make that choice for themselves or express an honest opinion about it.

The first step in women’s liberation is making it clear that they lack agency and that other people know what’s best for them.

That’s sorta the point of it.
I can recreate the phrase “apple pie” in any number of styles and fonts using my hands and a writing tool. Would you say that I “contain” the phrase “apple pie”? Where is the letter ‘p’ in my brain?

Specifically, the AI contains the relationship between sets of words, and sets of relationships between lines, contrasts and colors.
From there, it knows how to take a set of words, and make an image that proportionally replicates those line pattern and color relationships.

You can probably replicate the Getty images watermark close enough for it to be recognizable, but you don’t contain a copy of it in the sense that people typically mean.
Likewise, because you can recognize the artist who produced a piece, you contain an awareness of that same relationship between color, contrast and line that the AI does. I could show you a Picasso you were unfamiliar with, and you’d likely know it was him based on the style.
You’ve been “trained” on his works, so you have internalized many of the key markers of his style. That doesn’t mean you “contain” his works.

Imagine being able to recall the important parts of a movie, it’s overall feel, and significant themes and attributes after only watching it one time.

That’s significantly closer to what current AI models do. It’s not copyright infringement that there are significant chunks of some movies that I can play back in my head precisely. First because memory being owned by someone else is a horrifying thought, and second because it’s not a distributable copy.