My ‘favourite’ fact about Soviet-era bioweapons is that they had a facility on an island in the Aral Sea. Said sea vanished from existence after the Kremlin redirected all the rivers which fed it in an effort to grow cotton in the desert, causing it to shrink to some 10% or less of its original volume. As well as destroying the livelihoods of the fishermen of Aralsk in Kazakhstan, it also made the island full of fucking anthrax among other things part of the mainland.

I’ll say this for the Soviets, they didn’t do environmental disasters by halves. Also as a Briton we had our own anthrax island in Scotland from the war that was only decontaminated in the '90s.

Let’s not discount the possibility of creaking Soviet-era equipment that should have been replaced decades ago but the money was non-existent/spent corruptly/not enough to touch the sides of the neglect/delete as appropriate.

We’re talking about the country which operates the poor Kuznetsov which has been begging for death for many years.

While I’m not Welsh, I’ve lived in Wales for some time and I’ve been informed the reputation comes from after the English conquest in the middle ages; English law of the time apparently demanded death for those who stole sheep but lesser penalties for those caught shagging them. Therefore Welsh poachers when caught red-handed would claim to be having their way with the livestock rather than stealing it.

Nah I disagree, the state shouldn’t get to disguise the violence it inflicts on people. Executions should not happen full stop, but if they do I condemn any measure whatsoever that spares the executioners from the trauma of what they are doing.

If I were to be executed I’d much rather be hanged, beheaded, or shot and without a hood in any case - hangmen and other supporting officials have no business making it easier for themselves to sleep at night.

Also imagine some clown saying what you can and can’t do with your £4k+ GPU! At that far above what they’re meant to retail for it should be delivered by helicopter and come with some complimentary lines.

Is a rat fleeing a sinking ship still a ship’s rat? A fair few people moved to reddit from Digg, and 4chan once the /pol/ cancer metastatised all over it a bit later on. I preferred forums personally until reddit ate most of them, and now reddit is a shithole I’m on Lemmy and have nothing to do with reddit, don’t even lurk there now. The kind of people with a low threshold for moving aren’t necessarily representative of the group they’re leaving; I don’t think we’ll see a really massive migration from reddit, and I don’t think we’d actually benefit from it either.

You have to enjoy a place while you can, either outright failure or Eternal September awaits every online community eventually. One day people will bang on about this being Lemmy’s golden age, before the legions of dopamine jockeys found it. Personally I quite like how discussions taking place over days rather than hours makes Lemmy genuinely pretty different from reddit, even if it’s mostly made up of ex-redditors.

With that motherfucker it’ll be something vile or the kind of concentrated cringe that makes your earwax melt just sharing a biosphere with it.

Probably both.

They need a good humbling, and their own hubris will be the thing to do it.

We’re definitely of the same mind, we’d have a fun Christmas!

Genuinely Christmas would be so good if we had a rule that presents were abolished the minute you became an adult. I love Christmas but I genuinely hate the wanky consumerism associated with it, and the stress of Christmas shopping. It’s just a bunch of manipulative bullshit to get your wallet out for Bezos.

Let’s just get drunk and stuff ourselves with turkey, bollocks to consumerism.

deleted by creator

I’m keen on local models but prices are getting out of hand. I insured my workstation recently for more than twice what I built it for, because it’d cost that to rebuild it with identical parts.

If an AI was provably 100% correct then I guarantee you people would listen to it.

Intelligent people will believe the most obvious nonsense sometimes; engineers are represented among young-Earth creationists for example.

To be fair, it’s going to be more like running an electric kettle constantly which isn’t going to excessively load the grid.

Unless you’re in the UK of course where the grid operators have to manage capacity around half time of major football games as everyone puts a brew on at once.

I don’t have a lot of good things to say about British institutions these days, but internationally speaking Companies House is a pretty transparent and pro-public way of doing things. In a lot of the world this information is obscured behind paywalls, or not available at all, but here in the UK journalists can trawl it for shitehawks.

Fucking hell, that one’s got to be old enough to drink.

And now the oligarchs behind the big AI firms ingest pirated scientific papers at enormous scale to build their products, and they see fuck all consequences for it. It’s quite plausible the very papers Swartz was hounded to his grave over ended up in the training data. Justice is a fucking rare thing.

When I was a student there was a pub that was always heaving because you could get smashed on less than a tenner on horrible spirits. The gents toilets there was genuinely horrendous, very drunk people combined with questionable plumbing meant there was usually a half inch or so of stale piss pooled on the uneven floor by around midnight. Literally if I think about it I can still smell it, it was fucking rancid but nowhere else could you get a quad vodbull for £4 so we put up with it.

That exact smell must permeate all of these people’s houses. Unless they’re taking the piss I guess.

You ever drank baileys from a shoe?

What I find interesting is that all of this was happening after a civil war more bloody per capita than the First World War, the trial and execution of a king, a period of rather repressive republican rule, a restoration of the monarchy, and yet another revolution/coup which established monarchs couldn’t rule without Parliament’s consent. Part of the reason Britain wasn’t revolutionary later on like France was because multiple revolutions had already happened in the 17th century. The Americans were by the point of the revolution arguing George III was an absolutist and a tyrant, but that form of monarchy had already had its back broken in an English and later British context by the time the American colonies were being settled in large numbers (with some exceptions). It was an accusation much more apt towards say the French king at the time who in fact supported the Americans, and we all know how that eventually went for the Ancien Regime.

The colonist’s grievance was actually more with Parliament for the most part, they actively wanted the king to intercede on their behalf. George III wasn’t willing to do that being a constitutional monarch, which ironically got him labelled a tyrant.