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octaane

Yes.
Re:Butlerian Jihad on Saturday October 17, 2026 @12:27AM (#50127943)
The actual linked wikia article is short on the actual detail and background of exactly why the Butlarian Jihad actually happened. I’m an avid Dune fan. Sidebar/background: The son of the Dune writer, Brian Herbert, and his cowriter Kevin J. Anderson wrote the setting, events, and conclusion to the actual Butlarian Jihad conflictt. It’s largely derided by scifi fans, but is highly entertaining. It’s actually still ongoing almost 3 decades later. And frankly not as deserving of the harsh criticism it got when it came out. But I digress…

Here’s how it went down in the dune universe (I’m certainly messing up some details, but these are the broad strokes):

Humanity has spread to the stars. No FTL involved, just good old fashioned sublight engines. The dune universe takes place about 50-60,000 years in our future. Mankind has spread across a couple dozen solar systems and everything is going peachy. However, mankind gets complacent, fat, and happy with their success and society stagnates. A handful of eager, ambitious humans scheme about how they can take it all over. They do, and then eventually start turning themselves into cyborgs, or disembodies brains in a jars that swap bodies and are effectively immortal. One of the cyborgs gets lazy and makes an AI to manage things, which promptly takes over, overthrows the cyborg rulers of humanity, makes the cyborgs it’s slaves (who have great autonomy/are conspirators) and generally rules over everything. A small group of solar systems is left under human control, who fall back to a feudal-ish type system of government with lords and dukes and whatnot.

The AI does all sorts of nasty shit to the humans in it’s dominion. Unit 931 and Auschwitz type experiences, slavery until death, etc. Untold billions, if not trillions, of humans live in animal-like conditons worked to death. The human group of systems isn’t cool with this, but they can’t do much and are vastly overpowered by the cyborgs, so a fragile peace is held. One day, the son of one of the subservient cyborgs knocks up a human slave, and they have a kid. In the background, all sorts of rabble rousing and shenanigans are being done to stir unrest amoungst the slaves by the free human system. The human systems develop FTL, with spice as a catalyst, except it doesn’t work 10% of the time and kills the pilots. The AI’s main henchman (who does all of the nazi and Unit 931-type experiments) decides it would be cool to kill the baby of the cyborg son and the slave. The slaves last name was “Butler”/ This sparks a massive revolt by the slave worlds. The free human systems then go on to fight a prolonged war against the machines, using the FTL drive at great loss of life, to begin a “Butlarian jihad” to free the humans from thinking machines. Lots of other stuff happens, and humanity eventually wins, but this is why machines no more advanced than a desktop machine are allowed in the dune universe, and why they technologically hobble themselves.

Re:Breaking Bad star RJ Mitte dies aged 34 on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:38PM (#50064073)
RIP to an actor who was not defined by his disability in the show, but also at age 16 managed to hold his own against veteran actors dean norris, bryan cranston, aaron paul, and betsy brandt.
Re:Anduril lands $2.9B Navy submarine shipyard contract on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @09:44PM (#49986907)
Blatant corruption.

>Anduril lands $2.9 billion Navy submarine shipyard contract days after Founder joins Pentagon weapons group[1]

{1}https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/anduril-lands-2-9-bi...

Re:Nvidia projects $673B in sales as AI demand widens on Thursday August 27, 2026 @02:22PM (#49469077)
If I give you 10 dollars, and then you put it in your pocket, and then you take it out again and give me 10 dollars back - no actual economic growth occurred. It's simply shuffling money around; the amount stays the same.
I would argue that it is not underfunded, as most big pharma companies with oncology products have dumped enormous amounts of money into research pipelines and clinical trials. Immunotherapies like nivolumab or ipilimumab or pembrolizumab have varying (but often very decent) efficacy data for metastatic disease across tumor types.
Ask the oncologist directly. Also, try contacting Revolution Medicines directly (the manufacturer), and/or go through their early access page: https://www.revmed.com/expanded-access-policy/
> Four years after that, he contacted his father to share what he’d been told and Prince Laurent agreed to a DNA test.

“We went to the hospital together and I remember him saying, ‘I’ll go first so you’re feeling at ease,’” Vandenkerckhove told VTM.

Good on the dad for not trying to weasel out on this and stepping up.

Yeah, no shit. As a non-tech person who has tried to use it for non-tech stuff: Having the compulsively-lying, halluciating POS algorithm that everyone thinks is the second coming of Christ burn an obscene amount of non-renewable energy to create said lies while my company wants us to train it to steal out jobs is kinda something I'm not interested in.

How is training my replacement on a plagiarism machine that is actively putting people (including myself) out of the job while destroying the environment (but whose results are still not as good as a human) in any world a good thing?

There is no boost in productivity for non-tech related stuff. If you need to double-check the output, it is de facto not as productive as a human, since you need to effectively do the work twice.

Also, it adds nothing of value where is is being crammed into everything, and just seems to be a cynical techbro PE driven buzzword play.

Re:Why Thermodynamics Rules Future Orbital Data Centers on Thursday June 11, 2026 @05:01PM (#48496356)
Science fiction beat the author of this article to the punch re: novel cooling solutions in space. The author proposes squirting oil from one arm, through open vacuum, to another arm - the oil droplets radiate the heat en route from arm 1 to arm 2. However, like most modern tech, science fiction writing has anticipated it. In the book Saturns Run (2015), by John Stanford and Ctien, their spaceship cools down it's megawatt nuclear reactor by using a eutectic metal as coolant, which runs as a molten ribbon through open vacuum from arm 1 to arm 2.
My take is also a missile, but as an interceptor, not offensive purposes. North Korea has shown that they can deliver a payload to Japan if they want. If the NKs do decide to launch something at Japan, it's not going to be tipped with conventional explosives. It'll be a nuke. Hypersonic interceptor seems the more likely application is this tech to me.
Re:GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay on Monday May 04, 2026 @10:20AM (#48009146)
Long-time ebay seller here. I'm seeing comments floating towards the top that are essentially positing that the physical GameStop locations can be used as hubs where people can buy or sell their stuff in general (especially items that are 'pick-up only'). A pawn shop, basically.

Thing is, GameStop is, well, for videogames and videogame paraphernalia. It's not a general store. Doing this would turn them into a thrift shop, not a pawn shop, as people are trying to offload their carpets, desks, etc - bulky stuff.

I don't think this makes sense.

This does make sense when you consider the collectable market, another domain I'm involved in. Trading card games, specifically pokemon, have exploded over the last 5 years. GameStop is making a killing off of buying, selling, and grading these cards. Ebay is the primary marketplace to buy and sell those cards. There's also tax free havens ("Vaults") offered by multiple companies, grading service passthroughs, and scalping offered through ebay too.

Viewed through the above lens, that's what's prompting this offer, I think.

This is an unconfirmed rumor. This should not be posted here.
Re:Scott Adams has passed away on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @04:47PM (#46608679)
His comics were often funny, and bleakly real. His politics and opinions were unfortunate. Bye Scott.
He's an absolute goddamn nutjob who has no business having the power he has. He is a vaccine-denier, and holds positions on a variety of topics that are extremely hazardous to public health. A broken, f'ed up clock is right twice a day.

Anything he says has no validity and should be given no credence by any sane person.

> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.

You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.

You are absolutely bonkers. This post and the rationale behind it are beyond insane.

We do not understand these ecosystems beyond their extreme fragility and low entropy conditions. This is an incredibly destructive and expensive manner of resource extraction that destroys the seabed. Why would anyone sane ever support this beyond, I don't know, someone who also thinks that clearcutting the amazon is a good idea? What kind of vested interest do you have in this blighted technology?

Keytruda, pembrolizumab, (what he probably received) can only do so much. If it was in his GI tract it was also elsewhere in multiple places. The PD-L1 drugs at this point have more than 400k patients treated, with decent efficacy. I'm sorry for your loss. If his melanoma had metastasized to his GI tract it was too late for anything except palliative care.

This drug has been used in a huge number of patients for more than 11 years; the next gen of drugs is currently being used. I'm sorry for my curt style of writing, but - people like your father have helped pave the way for that next generation of drugs by constraining clinical trial designs.

Sorry, as someone in this field, this is bullshit. It is in mice.

Several things trigger my bullshit meter. Quote:

"This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agents)"

PD-L1 monoclonal antibodies are only effective against cancers that are, you guessed it, PD-L1 positive. At high percentages, ranging from 1 to 50%. Are these authors even familiar with the state of the art when it comes to cancer medications? Mouse tumors do not equate to people tumors. Many tumor types are not PD-l1 positive.

Doxy is an ancient SOC chemo.

This is a nothing burger.

Give me phase II/III clinical trials, and then let me know what their PFS/OS was after 5 years. and what the medians were at 3- and 5-years. Also, ORR and CR and needed.

CAR-T is ahead of the game, and will be the ultimate winner here as it grows to scale.

I feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company, to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience? No shit it isn't going well.
Re:Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @12:19AM (#46285065)
The only benefit as I perceive it re: orbital data center hardware is regulatory avoidance. Think...DDOS machines that can't be shut off; or financial hosting services for unsavory individuals. However, it's very expensive by all metrics (including those talked about in the article), and frankly, these satellites are sitting ducks for the hunter killer satellites the various space powers have, if they actually wanted to do something about these hypothtical data centers and the problems they would cause.
Re:Atomic time source failure at NIST Gaithersburg campus on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @11:45PM (#46214175)
Good to know they have multiple backup clocks across the continental US.
https://www.tsunami.gov/?p=PHEB/2025/12/08/25342050/2/WEPA40

Shouldn't be too bad; USGS forecasts up to 1 meter tsunami.

Re:Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft? on Friday November 28, 2025 @09:21PM (#46084724)
So, I'm going to chip in with a different perspective from that of some other commentators on here. The overwhelming majority of computers in the entire world, used by our entire species, have windows as their OS.

While I applaud the use of alternatives to windows and it's apps, universities teach it because it is what their graduates will use in the real world. Governments use it because while it has it's flaws, it mostly works and is a universal standard. It's the toyota of operating systems. The parts and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere, and it's cheap and reliable.

Re:250MWh 'Sand Battery' to start construction in Finland on Thursday November 27, 2025 @07:35PM (#46074476)
It's probably my ignorance about this sector, but I do find it impressive that they are getting that much storage capacity in a small area:

> "This latest project will use locally available natural sand, held in a container 14m high and 15m wide."

Re:Physicists drive antihydrogen breakthrough at CERN on Thursday November 27, 2025 @05:56PM (#46073899)
There have been several proposals. This paper proposes a feasable mechanism[1]:

-"a SBH could be artificially created by firing a huge number of gamma rays from a spherically converging laser. The idea is to pack so much energy into such a small space that a BH will form."

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803

Re:Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @08:01PM (#46064221)
I disagree. It has everything to do with ideologies. He seig heiled on TV twice; that's not something they will ignore.
Re:Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @08:00PM (#46064213)
Europeans have still not forgotten the impact of WW2. Musk sieg heiling on live TV (twice!!!) is not something they take lightly. Tesla sales of cratered over there, rightfully so, because of his completely unforced error.

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