publius

@khm @donray@mastodon.online

South Africa is an important producer of uranium, which is recovered from gold-mine tailings. In fact South Africa supplied a substantial amount of the uranium required for the Manhattan Project, and for US nuclear activities of all kinds for years afterwards.

South Africa also had an early interest in nuclear power, because of the long distance between its major coalfields and the large industrial and population centers of the Cape Town and East Cape regions.

Today's A STEP FARTHER OUT on #anonradio has NASA going to the Moon in a very desultory fashion ; nobody going to Mars this year ; me unhappily going to Washington DC and then onward to Canada, a science-fiction convention in the Dallas area, and then Europe ; and Friedrich Merz admitting that antinuclear policies are wrongheaded, but not going to try to change anything.

https://anonradio.net/asfo-2026-01-17/

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

I decline to state whether "artificial general intelligence" is possible or not. I do not believe that we understand the problem adequately to frame the question, much less answer it.

But I can say with great confidence that "large language models" are quite irrelevant to the whole topic. They pose, however, a very special kind of epistemic risk, in that they corrupt the automated, high-speed information indexing and retrieval systems which modern society depends upon.

@robbienorlyn@babka.social @ParadeGrotesque@mastodon.sdf.org

Anyone who would caucus with a party which has Mr Trump at the head of it has exactly no credibility with me. And anyone who says he's not EXACTLY that stupid is trying to fool someone (maybe himself).