Firstly, I have a good relationship with my employer, so I'm the one choosing my hours. It would have been legal for them to reduce my hours to zero, but I trusted them not to do that, and indeed they didn't do that.
Secondly, we have the NHS, so my access to healthcare is not tied to my employment nor my ability to pay.
I can only share my experience, and as I said, I recognise this isn't the norm for most zero-hours contractors out there, who are in much worse conditions and have uncertainty, which is why I support the changes in law around them.
Taiwan is a country. This is not some contested area but well established 80+ years old government with strong ties to NATO etc. No single CCP Soldier or clerk out there. Pure Independent nation
Well, no, it's very much a contested area, with a neighboring nuclear-armed power claiming it is not independent, a nuclear-armed global hegemon very deliberately being ambiguous in its statements about Taiwan's status, limited diplomatic recognition, and no UN membership. It's literally anything but simple or cut-and-dry.
Competition can increase cortisol but it's usually a relative thing:
When you are world #200 playing against world #50 might be stressful. When you are world #2 playing world #50 is probably another day in the office. Etc
I imagine once you win your first Grand Slam in tennis the nerves improve a lot - you kind of saw that in Andy Murray who needed a couple of attempts to break through the psychological barrier of winning Wimbledon, including winning the Olympics.
I would posit that the old folk tale is more related to the fact that centuries ago, most people were hyper specialised and standardised widespread education was less of a thing.
You'll find plenty of intelligent people in all walks of life depending on how you choose to define intelligence.
Until very recently, 19 of the last 20 quarterbacks who lost their first Super Bowl never made it back to the title game (Jalen hurts in 2024 is the one).
Historically, out of 38 QBs to lose their debut, only 4 eventually won a ring (Dawson, Griese, Elway, and Manning).
I'm not familiar with the Super Bowl could you help us understand this observation? Is it that people who lose never psychologically recover or that winners go on to become champions?
Skynet is already out. Choosing and finding targets is already here. Self manned drones: check. All we need is to automate the button to release the Hellfire missile...
Gaza war was almost like that.
All we need to do is dead mans switch system with AI launching missiles in retaliation. One error and BOOM
If I remember correctly, the original Terminator story is that Skynet was put in charge of operating a vast amount of infrastructure, became self-aware and deemed humans as a threat to its goals.
It then launched a nuclear strike against them and ordered a machine army to eradicate the remaining ones.
I don't think we're that far away from that. Just the decision of someone to put an AI in charge of critical infrastructure and defense, or a series of oversights allowing an external AI to take control of it.
Looking at the past year and all the unpredicted conclusions AI came to, self-awareness is probably not needed for an AI to consider humans as an obstacle to achieve some poorly-phrased goal.
The Paperclip maximizer theory [0] comes to mind...
Oh for sure, if given AI access to critical infrastructure, lots of bad things can happen. But a self aware AI is still far away, just as a AI that can build things on its own without human intervention.
Try and error with some scripts until something sort of works and building computer chips and engines and everything else on its own is not really in the same league. Eventually we are getting there, but it is a really, long way to go.
And I use claude, too. It is impressive, but without human intervention it often gets stuck, because it lacks real understanding.
If we are getting detailed about Skynet, the plot of the first two movies (IIRC) is that there is a central Skynet that the resistance is about to destroy for good. It's only from T3 on that they describe Skynet as being distributed.
So the question is which Skynet, the one in the common conscience or the one that the continuity established via bad movies only a few people care about.
Well, we may not be confronted with a self-aware Skynet machine in the aftermath.
Maybe it'll just some dumb model in a datacenter with badly phrased objectives, which just happens to have caused severe destruction via various APIs and agents before anyone noticed...
If you remove commercial and edu and gov sites it's still doable today to track NEW unique websites today. There are less and less personal webpages due the instagram and fb etc
OpenBSD it's much easier to setup than NetBSD, on user friendlyness obsd beats nbsd, but as you said nbsd it's better on portability, I can literally run NetBSD 10.1 under simh/vax running under... 9front. No X, because the emulated ethernet in the port of simh here just simulates nat with no option to bind it outside, although I didn't test it further. But for sure it runs at decent speeds, almost like an emulated Pentium 90, enough to run Slashem under vt(1) (vt100/220 emulator for 9front).
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