Most people in America have nothing to fear from their water, but there are problems at the underprivileged fringes. Surely you remember Flint, Michigan. The last lead service line there was removed, IIUC, just a couple of months ago – over 12 years since the crisis began!

Amazon filters would not have remotely been a reasonable solution to that problem.

I would not call Deep Space 9 a dystopia. Nor Babylon 5, for that matter. They are not happy places to live, for sure, but both settings are abundant in hope and possibility.

Deep Space Nine is about people from a utopia dealing with the realities of a place that is just emerging from being a dystopia (Bajor under Cardassian occupation). Later, they struggle with the need to uphold their utopian values in a conflict where it might be more expedient to abandon them.

You also have Captain Sisko's arc where he is declared, and ultimately follows the path of, a prophet for the Bajoran people. And it works because for all his protests he fundamentally is a good person from the enlightened (if imperfect) 24th century of Roddenberry's vision, in the necessary place at the right time.

That the writers at this point in Trek canon started playing pretty fast and loose with Roddenberry's vision doesn't erase the deeply optimistic and even spiritual grounding of that show.

I was thinking of mentioning Babylon 5, but it's worth contrasting the situation aboard the station with the fascist takeover of Earth. Maybe "dystopia with hope" describes it better.

Also worth mentioning the recently deceased Walter Koenig who had said that playing Alfred Bester in Babylon 5 was his favourite role, despite being much more famous as Chekov in the original Star Trek.

The situation on the station in Babylon 5 is that intergalactic peace is incredibly fragile and the station is basically a last ditch effort of making it work. It, like most of Star Trek, is also a military operation.

I think the key thing for a university student is to get the big ideas down: what is a container exactly, how does it work, how does it differ from a VM, what assumptions does it make about what you're running (and how do you run something that doesn't fit that pattern), why do images exist in layers and how are layers implemented, what are the performance benefits/tradeoffs, etc. etc.

When I was learning Docker I can't tell you how many people would describe it to me by analogy to a standardized shipping container, and start going off about shipping container dimensions and supersized cargo ships and trucks and railcars... and finish by smiling beatifically, like they had just explained the whole thing in a masterstroke. Let's... uh... not do that. :-D

In a problem set, the student might learn a bit about dockerfiles or docker-compose.yml... but only, I think, so they can try building and running a container of their own!

So they completely ignored the discoverer's suggestion. Humbug.

That doesn't make me nervous at all. I've been waiting for the legal challenges from deep pockets to roll in.

I'm not entirely sure they will, though.

I agree, it wasn't clear at all to me... until I clicked the links.

Now it's clear to me.

Surely we live in the AGI times that were prophesied.

I think the answer is straightforward. You complain that a substantial PR is no longer evidence of good faith. What is evidence? Participation in the community.

I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.

Goodhart's Law. If community participation becomes a hard requirement we'll see AI agents swamp them too.

No, It's pretty obvious when someone is using an LLM to compose their messages

Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/

That xkcd is exactly what this thread is about, and so your lazy linkdrop is completely beside the point. The bots are currently posting lots and lots of (often superficially) "constructive and helpful" comments, and it turns to be a complete slog and burnout for humans to figure out whether to press the "constructive" or "not constructive" button.

Not so much if the community is private or restricted.

Realistically, a lot of projects simply have a Discord now. If you want to contribute, you have to go participate in that first.

I do dislike the fact that they nowadays use Discord though, there are better alternatives like fluxer.gg available, though I do understand that most/some people are already on discord and it has become more normal to create a discord server than other alternatives if one wants to which requires having members which is much easier on discord.

As compared to the friction of another app even though they might be really great, I highly recommend trying out fluxer)

Then also if the developer has already created a discord server, then its hard to slightly migrate the existing users on their discord.

But I am sad about this development though, the community of open source or communities in general moving to discord does feel like moving to a walled garden (one which has increasingly more issues like trying to auto-detect your age and then asking for age-verification and plethora of other issues that a user is exposed to just by using the app which they might be using for the community itself, I really dislike it and I do wish if forums or something better could be used more as compared to discord.)

[Side-note: I built https://mirror.forum which is intended for communities to have both discord/fluxer & also other discord alternatives like stoat/matrix links to eventually help migrate users to these platforms and to help in finding the communities present in these spaces in the first place, I would love some feedback as the website is mostly crickets to be honest]

Speaking of everyone setting up their own stack, when's someone gonna do the thing and make self-hosting a Discord clone popular?

Fluxer.gg is really good and in my opinion, tries to be the most similar alternative to discord in terms of UI/UX so it should "just work"

I highly highly recommend you checking it out, I must say that the first time I used it, I was mind blown that this open source discord alternative actually feels so usable in day-to-day lives.

There are many alternatives to be honest, stoat, matrix,fluxer but fluxer is the alternative I would recommend for public spaces.

The issue now is I think mostly just moving the userbase over to there.

[I have talked to the dev and tried to share it a few times on hackernews as a submission to help get more userbase as I think that HN would definitely love fluxer if it came to know more about it]

(Very slight advertisement but I have tried to build something in this space at https://mirror.forum which can allow a community to have discord,fluxer,matrix,stoat links in the same place for the purposes of discovery of servers in other places than discord and also for the migration of the userbase itself as i think that the problem of an open source solution is mostly solved and this was my attempt at trying to partially help in fixing the moving the userbase issue and making people more familiar with alternatives, though the website mostly has no activity nowadays and I would love activity to happen but I am unsure how to realistically approach so... that's why I am advertising perhaps, I would love to get feedback as well :-D)

There exist several clones, but they all have some drawbacks. Unfortunately few people are willing to tolerate them.

This doesn't sound like a barrier to bots

Discords have been popping up all over too.

Crypto has been sold many many ways, but most of it is not a stable store of value.

Stablecoins are what are supposed to be stable sources of value, but Zeke Faux's book Number Go Up points out how opaque and unaccountable the companies managing these currencies are. From his reporting, their "tractor app" appears to be not so much farmers in sub-saharan Africa receiving aid payments but criminals looking for anonymous ways to transfer lots of money.

Are they? And how would you know if they were?

The blog post provides some context but no understanding.

It's meaningless because it's unverifiable. Dario all but said we wouldn't notice if they were pacing or not, because they have no intention of stopping development. The bits we could in theory verify are the external audits, whose independence has already been called into question.

At the very least, dumping a new model on the world before the ink on the glossy brochures of "Pacing the Frontier" was even dry calls into question their commitment.

... in fact the "pace" seems to have all but increased AND the surface area of the "frontier" has all but increased: There's the Pareto frontier, the AGI frontier, the price frontier, the structured output frontier, the open weight frontier, the Chinese chip-trained frontier, the inference frontier, harnesses ...

It's a blog post, not a white paper

So you agree the term remains vague and thus open to criticism.