There is a common myth that they were in dire straights and named it such because if It failed it would end the company. The truth is, they wanted to name it Fighting Fantasy, but that was already taken. Wanting to keep the alliteration, they changed to Final Fantasy, without a significant meaning attached to the title.

My first thought was Egypt was old enough that there were ancient Egyptian scholars studying ancient-er Egypt. I could see it as a particular form of gov generally lasted that long and new dynasties etc would reset the counter. Your explaination makes much more sense.

I wish they’d post them more than once a year these days…

Um, they very much did make promises to that effect. Neither were in good position to actually help the Poles when push came to shove, hence the Phony War. Brittain did some good with their navy, but neither could get enough troops to where it mattered to help, so they buckled down on ramping up their own war efforts at home to better mobilize. Did they fo it out of cowardice and throw the Poles to the wolves, or out of necessity because they would have been overrun had they over commited? That’s a question that has been the subject of much study. But they both very publicly and loudly commit to their defense, they simply failed to meaningfully uphold that commitment.

I mean, the obvious answer is instead of trying to divvy the sovereign nation between them, they should have stood up for them and defended them when the Nazis rolled in. Barring that, they should have liberated them, then left them the fuck alone. Even a stopped clock is right sometimes, this comparison is pretty clearly silly. They weren’t lamenting the lives of Nazis lost in the battle to push them out of Poland. They were lamenting the lives of the Poles after falling under the Russian boot, after the battles were won.

Just speak the incantation of motive energy and light the incense to soothe the machine spirit.

People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.

Everything bends when you move it, usually to such a small degree that you can’t perceive it. It’s impossible to have a truly “rigid” material that would be required for the original post because of this. The atoms in a solid object don’t all move simultaneously, otherwise swinging a bat would be causing FTL propagation itself. The movement needs to propagate through the atoms, the more rigid the object the faster this happens, but it is never instantaneous. You can picture the atoms like a lattice of pool balls connected to each other with springs. The more rigid the material, the stiffer the springs, but there will always be at least a little flex, even if you need to zoom in and slow-mo to see it.

Neesh is actually the much newer pronunciation apparently, TIL.

The way read it they were using it as an example where absurdity makes sense to poke a hole in the logic that infinity can be used as a number.

It wasn’t as unrelated as it might appear. Firstly, they used their D+ account to make their Disney account. Secondly, the whole point of that argument was that in the Disney account EULA, the relevant one, there is an arbitration clause. They only brought up the D+ account in passing because it has the same clause, emphasizing that they had to read and agree to the clause twice, and if they didn’t catch it it’s not Disney’s fault they lied about reading it. They basically said “look, this is an issue regarding the Disney account, and they said right here they read and understood the terms that include arbitration. And here, they read and agreed to the exact same terms a few months earlier on D+. This shouldn’t be any surprise if they were truthful when they claimed to have read it.”

Disclaimer, arbitration clauses are bullshit and need to be reworked/eliminated as they are generally very anticonsumer and I don’t think it’s good that they have that clause. But accepting that this exists, Disney didn’t really do anything particularly scummy.

According to another comment, the sea bass version will only be for sale online. There will be no coming back to stores, normal goldfish won’t be leaving stores at all.

The last thing the US wants is a civil war and mass instability in a nuclear nation. That has the capability to shatter MAD. At best, the US wants a regime change.

I suspect you’re right. But there really is never a good way to tell with these kinds of experimental techs. It could be a runaway chain of improvement. Or it is probably even odds that there is a visible and clear decline before it peters out, or just suddenly slams into a beick wall with no warning.

Makes sense, it’s basically just a Bing wrapper.

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

The hippocratic oath, in this case. Medicine is all about risk management, the worse the “disease,” the more tolerant we are of side effects for the cure. Pregnancy and birth are still pretty traumatic events that, while much safer than they used to be, are still dangerous. Female BC just has to be less risky than that. Male BC on the other hand, has to be as low the risk for a man impregnating a woman, which is to say, almost zero. Pretty much any negative side effect is worse than that, so it’s very difficult to pass. I would gladly take one with comparable side effects to female BC, but sometimes unflinching ethics are inconvenient. Better than the alternative, but still.

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.

I think so long as you maintain consciousness that issue is fairly null in this particular circumstance. There’s lots of tolerance for changes in thought while maintaining the same self, see many brain damage victims. So long as there is minimal change in personality, there are lots of other circumstances that have a stronger case for killing one person and having a new person replace them due to change of consciousness, imo, I don’t think most people would consider a brain damaged person killed and replaced by a new consciousness, or a drug addiction with radically altered brain chemistry, etc.

I don’t see an issue with that. A prolonged brain surgery that meticulously replaces each part with a mechanical equivalent in sequence. Could probably remain conscious the whole time.