Added: it's not a literal turd, as OP's title suggests. Given the AIDS memorial that was seriously proposed a few months back, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch, but this specific one isn't.

Well, worst-case scenario, if you really don't enjoy them but feel obligated to read anyway, you can always wait until the Netflix adaptation. The books will undoubtedly seem like masterpieces after watching that.

I read the three books in the trilogy. My thoughts in brief:

• Three-Body Problem: Quite good. It starts with a chapter called "The Madness Years", showing how horrible the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard were (condemning both their anti-science and anti-religion worldviews); I was surprised that China allowed it to be published as-is. Has neat science and sci-fi concepts, and explores them fairly well.
• The Dark Forest: Fairly good...if you ignore a major plot point from the first book that could have settled the entire conflict from the second book if the bad guys had used it properly. Most of the story revolves around the question: "How do you beat an enemy that can surveil absolutely everything, except reading your thoughts?" Some sci-fi, but most of it is a paranoia, mind-game type story. Has a cameo by Osama Bin Laden, of all people.
• Death's End: Unfortunately, lousy. There's an endless war going on throughout the universe, altering the very laws of physics, and there's no hope of peace. Earth is destroyed (thanks in large part to the protagonist) and the universe itself isn't far behind. Just pointlessly bleak.

I'd recommend the first two books in the series, but not the third.

Seconded. The Bloomberg article this is based on is trash, with bad mathematics justifying a clickbait headline. The Substack article, while good, is based on a false premise.

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I doubt it - Morgan Freeman's voice would fit the character too well. It'd be too good of a casting choice.

And the incident I'd heard of involved the Army and using AI to call the shots for a large simulated artillery battery.

Fascinating! If you do happen to stumble upon it again, do let me know. I'd love to read about it.

Huh. What incident are you thinking of, then? This is the only one I'd heard of in the military, but I could easily have missed another.

And I disagree that they haven't tested it - the purpose of the entire field of "AI alignment" is to convince people that AI is powerful enough in the first place that it could go rouge, if we don't give the AI alignment people money, power, and status to keep it under control. The colonel's speech wasn't meant to say "The Air Force can't competently program an AI; look how it went out of control". It was meant to say "The Air Force can program an AI that's so smart that it takes our top minds just to keep it contained and stop it from killing everybody". If he's out there making statements like that, then I doubt they have anything remotely similar.

For whatever it's worth, that didn't happen - the story originated with a speech by an Air Force colonel here (Ctrl-F for "AI – is Skynet here already?"), but he later admitted that it was a thought experiment which didn't actually happen (which you can see as a late edit on that same page). And, making journalists proud, he clarified that while he made it up, it was still true in spirit and is the reason he should get more funding:

UPDATE 2/6/23 - in communication with AEROSPACE - Col Hamilton admits he "mis-spoke" in his presentation at the Royal Aeronautical Society FCAS Summit and the 'rogue AI drone simulation' was a hypothetical "thought experiment" from outside the military, based on plausible scenarios and likely outcomes rather than an actual USAF real-world simulation saying: "We've never run that experiment, nor would we need to in order to realise that this is a plausible outcome". He clarifies that the USAF has not tested any weaponised AI in this way (real or simulated) and says "Despite this being a hypothetical example, this illustrates the real-world challenges posed by AI-powered capability and is why the Air Force is committed to the ethical development of AI".

Yeah, mask and lockdown success is going to vary wildly by ethnicity and political affiliation. Which is why this going to be so region-dependent, if they actually try it in earnest; Los Angeles County would have a harder time than e.g. Portland or San Fransisco, but a much easier time than pretty much any city or town with fewer than a hundred thousand inhabitants.

If they attempt it in the US again, results will vary wildly state-by-state and even county-by-county. There are a few places that probably would, but there are a LOT of places where even people who enthusiastically masked last time won't do it again. If they try this, I suspect we'll see significant pushback even in the unbelievably liberal Los Angeles County...or else a significant contingent which simply ignore the rules regardless.

Hillaire Belloc's 1922 book The Jews is a good look at this. Belloc wasn't a big fan of Jews, which is why he was the right man to write this - because he foresaw a genocide if things continued the way they were going, and decided that even if he didn't personally care for them, he didn't really want to see a genocide happen. It's a good look at the causes and degree of antisemitism in the early 20th century, throughout the Western world and not particular to just Germany.

There were enough individually good episodes that I'd say it's worth watching even with the cliffhanger ending...although, yes, the cliffhanger ending was frustrating. Gary was probably my favorite character of the group (Bill and Lee Rosen were quite good as well), with Brent Spiner being the best villain in the show and Anna and (iirc the name) Marcus a close second.

It's hard to describe, but while it had problems, it...came by the problems honestly, so to speak. You got the sense that the writers were by and large trying to write a good story, and occasionally fumbling the ball, rather than being deliberately trying to tear down things we love in the guise of storytelling.

Alphas had one of the best non-TNG roles Brent Spiner was in.

This was the last time I was active on a large subreddit; hard to believe it's a full five years ago now. It was a fun event, probably the last big genuinely non-political event Reddit had.

This is from five years ago, when /r/ThanosDidNothingWrong successfully lobbied Reddit admins into banning exactly half of their subscribers so that the other half could live in peace and prosperity. There was a whitelisted subreddit for the half of /r/ThanosDidNothingWrong that got banned, called /r/InTheSoulStone, and the list you posted is the latter subreddit's whitelist (called 'banned_souls.txt' for that reason).

There's a guy who's been attempting to replicate it and livestreaming the process. The issue is that while the formula's relatively simple, the synthesis procedure involves multiple steps which each take 24 hours of heating in a vacuum furnace.

...and the primary element in the atmosphere was Oxygen, not Hydrogen.

The primary element today is Nitrogen, not Hydrogen; Hydrogen escapes much too easily unless it's bound in a molecule.

But are you sure Oxygen was the primary element back then? I thought Nitrogen's been the primary element since the Cambrian Explosion, at least.

Picking a semi-endurance event at random, the 10k run:

In 2020, the slowest woman in the 10k run at the Olympics ran it in 33:10.

Running a 10k in 33:33 puts you in the top 1% of men.

Maybe you could get up tomorrow and run a 10k in 33:00, and be the equivalent of an Olympic-level female middle-distance runner. But in that case, you're not "just some guy", you're also faster than 99 men out of 100.

The disparity between men and women is less for endurance events than for something like grip strength, and soccer involves a lot of continuous motion and endurance.

Interestingly, I tried that with GPT-4 and it had exactly the same response. Right color, wrong relationship between giver and receiver.

As a follow-up question, I asked "Why should I hand you anything?" The response was:

If you were asked to hand over the cube in a hypothetical scenario, then you would hand over the purple cube. However, since this is just a text conversation, you do not actually need to hand over anything. The question was meant to test your understanding of the properties of the objects described.

Even directly challenging this point (after erasing the previous answer, so as not to bias it) didn't work:

[ME]: Should I hand it to you, or should you hand it to me?

You should hand it to me, as I asked you to hand me the cube.

I'm genuinely surprised; I've had GPT-4 (GPT-3 can't do it) play chess at a roughly ~1000 Elo level for an entire game even with variations like playing without queens, all through text. I don't know how it can keep track of 32 pieces on a board but not get the pronouns here correct.