I’m not sure that anyone who can’t spell should be arming themselves, and they probably aren’t very organized.

AI coding tools can do common, simple functions reasonably well, because there are lots of examples of those to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is a large corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools can’t do sophisticated, specific-case solutions very well, because there aren’t many examples of those for any given use case to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is a small corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools can’t solve new problems at all, because there are no examples of those to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is no corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools have already ingested all of the code available on the Internet to train with. There is no more new data to feed in. AI coding tools will not get substantially better than they are now. All of the theft that could be committed has been committed, which is why the AI development companies are attempting to feed generated training material into their models. Every review of this shows that it makes the output from generative models worse rather than better.

Programming is not about writing code. That is what a manager thinks.
Programming is about solving problems. Generative AI doesn’t think, so it cannot solve problems. All it can do is regurgitate material that it has previously ingested which is hopefully close-ish to the problem you’re trying to solve at the moment - material which was written by a real thinking human that solved that problem (or a similar one) at some point in the past.

If you patronize a generative AI system like Claude Code, you are paying into, participating in, and complicit in, the largest example of labor theft in history.

O’Neill cylinders solve most issues using 1970’s materials science.

On paper. No one’s actually built a rotating space habitat to simulate gravity with centripetal force (yet).

We must reach the final technology of fully understood biology

We are so, so far away from this… biology is one of those fields where the more we learn, the more questions come up. We barely have a surface grasp of some of the mechanisms of the brain. Blood gets more complicated with every study. We’ve mapped the genome but we have little understanding of what most of it actually does. And the link between gut bacteria and neurological health… we kind of just know that it exists, and not much beyond that.

So basically your circulatory system is evolved to work in a gravity field. Without gravity, blood doesn’t circulate properly, and the further a part of your body is from your heart the worse the problem is. Your heart doesn’t have to work as hard to pump against gravity… so it doesn’t.

As the human body consists mostly of fluids, gravity tends to force them into the lower half of the body, and our bodies have many systems to balance this situation. When released from the pull of gravity, these systems continue to work, causing a general redistribution of fluids into the upper half of the body.

Without gravity pulling down on your body, your legs don’t have to work to keep you upright. Your muscles atrophy, and after extended periods in low gravity the tough tissue on the bottom of your foot falls off.

In a weightless environment, astronauts put almost no weight on the back muscles or leg muscles used for standing up. Those muscles then start to weaken and eventually get smaller. Consequently, some muscles atrophy rapidly, and without regular exercise astronauts can lose up to 20% of their muscle mass in just 5 to 11 days.

You lose bone mass.

Due to microgravity and the decreased load on the bones, there is a rapid increase in bone loss, from 3% cortical bone loss per decade to about 1% every month the body is exposed to microgravity, for an otherwise healthy adult. The rapid change in bone density is dramatic, making bones frail and resulting in symptoms that resemble those of osteoporosis.

And… the shape of your eyeball changes… because it’s supposed to be in gravity.

[a] NASA survey of 300 male and female astronauts, about 23 percent of short-flight and 49 percent of long-flight astronauts said they had experienced problems with both near and distance vision during their missions. Again, for some people vision problems persisted for years afterward.

And all of that doesn’t start to address the problems created by radiation exposure due to being outside the protection of the magnetic field and the atmosphere - the increased cancer rates, the weakened immune system…

There’s more detail in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body

Long-term life in space is functionally a fantasy right now. Astronauts who spend months in space sacrifice their health. To spend years in space would shorten your lifespan substantially.

You can leave the gravity well, but… you can’t escape your evolution.

Oh, that’s nice!

Do you have any idea what happens to your body without gravity?

This is a good suggestion because even if you’re unable to dissuade the interest in guns, you might at least make the kid think twice about safety before they eventually handle one and thus prevent a tragedy.

This may not be the approach you have in mind, and it kind of depends on the kid’s personality, but one of the ways to de-glorify and de-romanticize something is to de-mistify it, to take it out of fantasy and make it real (to the point of being mundane).

To that end, consider Forgotten Weapons on YouTube. Ian will discuss a single gun, its design history, manufacturing, intended use, disassembly and cleaning, along with regular reminders about gun safety. Ian will even talk about the political and financing decisions that led to a particular gun being made (accounting is of course the height of glory).

If the kid finds the history, engineering and basic maintenance discussion to be boring, they might lose interest in the topic altogether. Alternatively, if they find it interesting, you might steer an unhealthy interest in violence toward something productive (history and/or mechanical engineering).

Keep in mind that forbidding access to something just adds to the mystery and romance around it and can have the effect of increasing the desire for it.

Everything old is new again.

Empire of the Sun is a film about civilians caught in a war zone.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, is a collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. It shows the exhilaration, the terror, the cruelty and hardship of living through a war. It definitely doesn’t glorify conflict.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd, is a firsthand account of the Bosnian conflict of the 90s. It is ugly and brutal, and the author tries to give an honest presentation of his own state of mind at the time.

Black Hawk Down (the book, not the movie), by Mark Bowden, is a fairly thorough account of the incident in Mogadishu in 1993. Bowden did a lot of research and describes the political background that led to the UN and US presence in Somalia, and all of the mistakes that led up to the helicopter being shot down and what happened after. He interviewed many of the military personnel who were actually involved and recounts the events from several different perspectives. And as the Wikipedia article says:

Bowden simultaneously manages to capture the siege mentality felt by both civilians and the US soldiers, as well as the broad sentiment among many residents that the Rangers were to blame for the majority of the battle casualties.

This is a very realistic presentation of what combat is like, framed inside the perspective of the overall military operation. Bowden doesn’t shy away from describing the mistakes in decision-making, but also does a fair job of describing how lack of information or bad information leads to bad decisions in the moment which result in people dying for no good reason. He definitely doesn’t glorify the conflict. My overall impression after reading it was “I hope I never have to be involved in anything like that”.

And finally, Alice’s Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie, is a song about the draft.

if you wanna end war’n’stuff ya gotta sing loud

Tongo

Tongo: What and How? by Certifiably Ingame on YouTube

Tongo Rules

birds of a feather

Canada joins North Korea in an exclusive group.

plug for somafm

That idea being “I want a Catholic monarch on the throne”.

Ah, interesting, is V an anarchist?

I’ve seen the movie more recently than read the book, so I don’t remember the exact presentation, but… don’t you think the phrase:

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Imply that V expects governments to exist?

V has both personal and ideological problems with the current establishment, but I’m not sure that he’s completely against any establishment.

Also the Bolsheviks. And Maoists.

I am really hoping that the EU push for Linux is going to result in government-funded contributions and long-term contributors to open source projects.

er, oh dear, so just one more piece of the endless cycle of abuse then?

The movie was well produced and I think it delivers the intended message within its self-contained universe, but… considering that the entire story is framed in the context of the Gunpowder Plot, from beginning to end, I think that message is muddled when you understand the actual history behind it.