Not to mention, today's useless trivia night just be tomorrow's billion dollars industry.

Like look at bauxite. Before electricity it was literally considered mine poison that made the ground near useless.

Nowadays it's our main source of aluminium.

Oh, no doubt already started.

To those anti-science, lead suckling, nimrods, mRNA might as well be the word that summons bees to come crawling from their nipple. They're freaking terrified of "that unnatural stuff."

It's so freaking stupid. Hint: your body is full of that stuff. Messenger RNA is a big part of how your body communicates on the genetic level.

Really hope the air-iron batteries starting production next year work out in practice for that reason.

A way to turn the decay of the most common metal in the universe into power? Yes, please!

Yeah. Fucked pretty much sums it up.

Russia has had troubles for years, but one of the reasons so much of its shit got tolerated was how Putin was seen as this iron fisted genius. Somebody that slowly was stabilizing a country wrecked by the collapse of the old glory, when Soviet fell apart. Somebody that, while not nice, was simply needed in a place of great corruption and hopelessness.

Like, that 180 turn in global opinion is going to be written about for centuries. He went from untouchable genius badass, to Emperor Pantsless The Conman Fooled in freaking months.

Heck, at current rate, with how the war is tearing apart Russia's future one man at a time and undermining basically every bit of international trust it's built since the freaking 90s, I'm really wondering if Russia will even survive the current century.

Not many are still clamouring for a return & reunification of The Sick Man Of Europe, you know? That sort of history that's seldom talked about, because it's inglorious.

Gold is already used in plenty of electronics, though.

And~ people spill coffee on their fancy gaming computer all the time.

So even if optimally stored is 200 000 times more charges, I'm sure plenty of consumers will frick with things.

...That would be an interesting side-effect, honestly.

Curious how the antivax crowd would react to each and every 'jabbed' suddenly having fairer skin. Lizard People transformation rumors, I suppose?

Smallpox. Rinderpest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_diseases

Five more are currently on the chopping block potentially. Including mumps, measles & rubella.

Sounds familiar a combo? That's the MMR vaccines target. The one the disgraced EX-Dr. Andrew Wakefield started the modern antivax movement to discredit for money.

https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc

Isn't that kinda like saying: "I really like transport, but don't think anybody prefers a rusty Lada over a rickshaw," though?

Like, we're not exactly talking cutting edge or usually even proper maintenance with the phone-bots.

Love first person stories that's locked to one person.

It's a TOUGH perspective to write well in, but when it works I find it the most exciting one since you learn one individual character on such a deep level. Even something as small as what they focus or ignore can be a huge deal.

I kinda get it, even if its dark and cynical for folks actually involved in fossil fuels and such... Like, no sense slaughtering the golden goose when its only eating people you don't like, right? That sort of crud.

But I genuinely cannot wrap my head around the people so... conservative, I guess, that the idea of there not being an oil industry somehow fills them with dread.

That's a weird thing to stake pride in.

Also, the office building is a huge revenue generato for rich twits, but only as long as it's filled with people.

Tax cuts. Deals with the city. Owning auxiliary business nearby that's technically not associated with the office like restaurants & gas stations at nearby roads. Investment in oil & car companies or retailers...

Renting you your apartment. While keeping houses beyond expensive.

All that takes a nose-dive if poeple are suddenly sitting halfway around the world at a computer, and thus cannot be sheparded from local fleecing station to fleecing station, and a certain type of rich prick is getting existential dread from that easy but initially expensive and thus exclusive money making scheme going away.

Makes sense.

A lot of people don't get that part, but global warming = more energy in the entire system that is planet Earth.

So it's not just over-all hotter. You get stuff like wind or current pattern changes too. Or even stuff like locally becoming colder, because the energy got moved elsewhere by said changes in air and water patterns.

So... yeah. Bad, bad news if your only source of water is, for example, the rains that used to come like clockwork once or twice a year. Or the glacier that simply isn't getting enough snow on top anymore.

You're welcome.

And yeah, cherry picked examples, of course, but I really think the Art-AI stuff is sliding under the radar of the public right now due to how much else is going on.

I've even seen faked signatures, speach bubbles and Patreon links. För now, those are just blobby swirls that look right only from a distance, but still.

I'm not sure if this is where we'll see the birth of some of the first true AI... but if nothing else, this seems like the next smartphone to me.

Just... poof, everywhere overnight for those that weren't paying attention, and THAT'S when the public freak out for a bit.

Hadn't seen that one in particular, but I'd believe it.

Charlie, AKA penguinz0 did a video two weeks ago, where he was basically playing around with Stable Diffusion 1.5, and he made some really cool stuff.

https://youtu.be/MVu-bD5keAs

A lot of it looked wonky, of course... but some of it I'd definitively stood and stared at for a few minutes if I'd seen it up on somebody's wall.

I'd buy that increase rate, given how quickly art-AI is moving right now.

Less than a year ago, you got pretty and well colored but abstract blobs.

This was three weeks ago.

This is 23 hours ago as of posting.

Do pardon the MLP focus, but the first images where my own 'holy frick, AI art has come that far?!' moment, so I wanted to keep things fair so the difference is highly visible.

But... yeah. We certainly live in interesting times, and I'm very curious what the coming years will hold for us.

Going to presume at least one of them is that vaccine against... cervix cancer, I think it was?

HUGE deal when it was new. Still not nearly wide-spread enough yet, but it's slowly getting there.