Looks like we're in another period of "double-check every headline to see if it's real or from the Onion" for me...

And so we pat ourselves on the back for not falling for the "capitalist propaganda," not recognizing all the propaganda that we have fallen for. I'd mention some examples but of course that would garner downvotes and disapproval, and thus the cycle continues.

It was a very Kerbal landing technique they were attempting, got to respect them for attempting new things even when it's their first try at a lander.

Last I heard, speculation was that the solar panels were pointing to the west and so it might "wake up" again later in the Lunar day when the Sun gets past zenith. They landed in Lunar morning to maximize the usable duration of sunlight, so right now the panels would be pointed directly away from it.

The AI witch hunt is kicking into high gear. This law explicitly allows burning people that had nothing to do with AI witchcraft in the first place.

How convenient for the witch hunters that this includes people who make parodies about the witch hunters.

Investment companies are often only able to buy other companies like this when they're already declining significantly.

Magazines in general are on their way out. It makes me nostalgic-sad too, but the world is changing and this is one of the ways in which it is changing.

I feel like that "corporate wants you to find the differences between these two photos" meme. Isn't everyone in those photos, in both the top and bottom rows, white?

Edit: Ah, I see, OP has given this a highly misleading title. The "whiteness" of the faces is not actually particularly relevant. In another thread someone summarized what the article is actually about:

For anyone who doesn’t want to read the paper, they basically took an 60 white men and 60 white women, and showed them a whole bunch of white faces, half of which were generated by AI. It turns out that AI faces were rated as more human-like than actual humans, and they had some hypothesis why. Principally that AI, by its nature, generates images close to “average”, while real people tend to have features that are not “average”. The reason the study focused on white people is that most AI have been trained on white faces, so AI tends to do better with white faces.

I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.

Here's the SRD entry for the spell. It definitely nukes the neutrals.

The evil equivalent is Blasphemy, which nukes all non-evil creatures. Yes, the neutrals get it from both sides.

Then there's Word of Chaos and Dictum, the Law and Chaos equivalents of those Good/Evil spells. Neutrals, believe it or not, death!

Pick a side, you neutral scum!

I was in a campaign some years back that involved time travel in its later half. Early in the campaign, before time travel became known to us, one of our first big triumphs was to collect a bounty by killing an old war criminal that had escaped justice. He was a guy called the Butcher of Bracken Ridge who had ordered his troops to massacre thousands of prisoners of war rather than let them go.

Much later on in the campaign we discovered time travel and in one of our flubbed attempts at a targeted hop we wound up in the vicinity of Bracken Ridge, the day before the atrocity was supposed to occur. The way time travel worked you could go into the past and participate in the things going on but if you changed history in a way that interfered with your own personal timeline bad things would happen.

So my character used Disguise Self to disguise herself as the Butcher of Bracken Ridge, went to the PoW camp a day early, and ordered half of the PoWs to be massacred. The other half escaped in the confusion. The next day the "real" Butcher of Bracken Ridge arrived to find the camp deserted and that he was now a wanted war criminal.

It was kind of messed up. I was able to save half the PoW's lives without screwing up the timeline, which was nice, but I also was responsible for massacring half of them. And also, it meant that the old war criminal we'd killed earlier in the campaign was innocent.

I think on the balance it was a good use of disguise self. But really makes you wonder.

I mean, it's kind of inevitable. According to the stats on this page the total biomass of our livestock is 3.9% of all animal biomass, the total biomass of humans specifically is 2.3% of all animal biomass, and all wild mammals is only 0.3% of the biomass (with all wild birds accounting for a further 0.1%).

According to this article 38% of Earth's land area is used for agriculture. The remaining 62% is presumably generally among the less fertile sorts of land - mountains, deserts, etc.

It's not even a question of climate change. We've reduced the total volume of non-human-centric biomass on Earth, replacing much of it with a monoculture of our highly successful species and its domesticated associates. We've also spread around some hangers-on, like rats, that have filled a lot of niches that used to be occupied by more diverse local species. The remaining biomass simply cannot sustain as many species any more.

The only way to stop or reverse this trend would be to reduce the human population and increase its agricultural efficiency. Fortunately, that is possible. But only through continuing advancement of our technology and standard of living.

I've been seeing this news article circling around the internet all day, and I have yet to see anyone mention what the monoblock actually is. It's starting to feel like some kind of mysterious primal artifact, like maybe the master computer from which all flavors of Linux originated.

Indeed. In a thread a couple of days back on a different (though related) subject I was accused of being a rape apologist because I was insistent on the presumption of innocence and the beyond-reasonable-doubt standards that need to be overcome when accusations like this are slung. But it works the same in the other direction too - we can't assume that an accuser is guilty of fraud or libel or filing false reports or whatever just because they failed to prove their case.

It would not be good for justice if these situations ended up being "now that the accusation has been made someone is going to go to jail, either the accused or the accuser." The Thunderdome is not a good model to emulate.

And good luck finding replacement moderators who are knowledgeable and passionate about the subject.