Pretty hard to detect. But… probably easier than finding the petunias I guess.

He was my fave until Capaldi. It’s hard for me to rate them against each other, but they’re both head and shoulders above the rest.

Exactly, it was (very relatively) cheap and quick. And they figured when, not if, it breaks, it will be again quick to repair.

Damnit, I can’t find the bandit greentext. Think I’ve got it saved at home.

I agree, but it isn’t so clear cut. Where is the cutoff on complexity required? As it stands, both our brains and most complex AI are pretty much black boxes. It’s impossible to say this system we know vanishingly little about is/isn’t dundamentally the same as this system we know vanishingly little about, just on a differentscale. The first AGI will likely still have most people saying the same things about it, “it isn’t complex enough to approach a human brain.” But it doesn’t need to equal a brain to still be intelligent.

It helps that when one uses them on their own land, they are more likely to carefully track where they were used and can conduct cleanup operations when feasible.

Yes, the energy of the explosion is a function of the total energy between the output of the laser and the shield, specifically the shield energy being pointed at the laser origin. That’s why they randomly hid some maximum powered, monodirectional shields facing up when they fled the attack. So that even the relatively weak personal shields would still have a large impact. In general use, the shield energy is being projected in all directions, so the amount facing the laser origin is very small. IIRC, an average powered lasgun hitting a personal shield creates an explosion that can range between roughly an HE hand grenade and an HE naval shell. They only went up like nukes because the Harkonen were using the lasguns at max energy, and the shields were tweaked abnormally. And as another comment says, the actual point of the explosion is at a random point along the beam.

Starting a new habit is easy, keeping up with it longer than a couple months is hard. For what it’s worth, regarding your question, I used to get in a 10 min walk every day, and that was the time I felt the least dragged down mentally and for the first time in my life had some actual motivation amd energy. It was never right after the walk, just kind of overall after I kept at it a few days. New job with different schedule nixed that, and I’ve been trying to get in some sort of exercise for years now with no luck, back to feeling bleh all the time.

Yeah, would probably like to see ranked choice swapped out for something else too. My preferred tool is STAR, but there’s a lot of other options. The biggest benefit of RC is it isn’t as bad as what we have, which is good, but it isn’t great.

Even when you own the medium that’s true, it’s just much harder to enforce. As media has gotten more and more capable of being widely shared, the licenses have clamped down harder and harder. From books, to home videos, to video games.

It isn’t really used to mean figuratively though. It’s used as an intensifier, and all of its synonyms are as well. And they all have been for hundreds of years. Really, truly, honestly, actually, etc. Seems so strange to me that this is the single word from the group that gets dogpiled on, and the perception that it’s some new phenomenon, Mark Twain used it in the same manner.

Nick was supposedly fired for failing to meet goals, goals he was apparently never informed that he should be targeting.

In addition to that, I’ve heard that a large portion of that R&D spending is on iterating drugs they already own so that when the patent runs out they can patent a new version and lobby the old one to be made obsolete so generics can’t be made.