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The word "robot" was invented to label a being whose worth was defined only in terms of the labor it performed. The point being that to value someone that way is to deny them any chance for humanity. An android is designed to take a place among humans and has the option to aspire to belong among them.
Data isn't a robot, he's an android.
"You never blow the cover of an agent in the field." --Jackson Lamb
Re:You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @12:40PM (#49896183)
> Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

Television.

Obviously the most proximate human being in the decision-making chain that led to the AI agent being deployed. The nearest person with the power to say no who said yes.
Re:Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents on Monday September 28, 2026 @03:58PM (#49883516)
Long-term-stable color photo processing didn't become widely available until the late 1970s-early 1980s.

So if you were an artist and interested in building and maintaining a permanent portfolio, B&W was pretty much your only option.

Re:Who owns the code? on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @08:08PM (#49354742)
Yes, but to sue for infringement, you must register the work with the Copyright Office, and the registration must specify clearly what's AI and what's human-created, and only the latter is protected.
Re:Who owns the code? on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @07:36PM (#49354463)
It's already been established by court ruling and enshrined in Copyright Office regulations, that you can claim copyright on a mixed AI and human-authored work, but to sue for damages you must register the work, and the registration must clearly specify which parts are AI generated and which are human generated. Copyright can only be claimed on the declared human generated portion of the work.
I have found myself wondering a lot lately about the alternative universe where all the effort and resources devoted to developing and using AI coding and debugging agents were instead simply dedicated to fuzzing human-generated code. How would the code quality and total usefulness of the results have compared?
Re:A.I. Doomaxxing Is Bad for Our Economy on Monday June 22, 2026 @12:54PM (#48632725)
I for one welcome our new AI overlords.
Re:AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:47AM (#46941958)
> makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

That is to say, just like every headline-grabbing programming "innovation" of the last thirty years.

Re:Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C on Monday January 12, 2026 @10:24AM (#46589702)
What's the performance hit?
The best carbon capture device is the ocean, and for the last 10 years or so huge amounts of free-floating sargassum seaweed have grown in warm ocean waters around the world. Nobody is certain why the sargassum has appeared in such volume lately, but it's plausible to speculate that increased CO2 in ocean water plays a role. As far as I can see the only remotely efficient way to sequester carbon at scale is to leverage the ocean by gathering the seaweed and dumping it on marginal or desert land, both to trap the carbon and fertilize the soil, thus promoting additional carbon-binding plant growth.
Whenever I hear the word "culture," I reach for my remote.
Re:The Future of Large Files in Git Is Git on Saturday August 16, 2025 @02:12PM (#44925691)
Shortly after git became popular, the Subversion team released a tool that enabled replicating a SVN repository or any subset to a local independent repository, which could be used for local development and re-synced to the main repository at any time.
Nice feather in your cap Pritzker, now can you go back to working on a public option for health insurance?
Re:Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers on Wednesday July 30, 2025 @09:58PM (#44741613)
By definition, it is.
It's a dry heat, so as a Florida man I'm sure he felt great.
Re:What's so awkward about an awkward silence? on Thursday June 26, 2025 @02:06PM (#44389779)
Um...
Is there a comprehensive list of all supported social media platforms anywhere?
"There's A Riot Goin' On..."
Re:Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @06:37PM (#44175522)
I've also heard that pandoc now supports typst, and will turn typst format files into html, independent of typst's own code. Have not confirmed.
Seems like a worthy breakthrough, but the reported effect only produces temperature differences of 4-5K. They conjecture they can go to 22K deltas in the future.

Can an effect that small be practically scaled to grid-level usefulness, efficiency notwithstanding?

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