Government-sponsored facial recognition aside, I was gonna celebrate this as a rare event of a government doing something right, but then

The measures don’t apply to researchers or to what machine translation of the rules describes as “algorithm training activities” – suggesting images of citizens’ faces are fair game when used to train AI models.

and I feel like that undermines the entire idea, since you can easily hide behind that excuse and not give a shit. And given previous circumstances, I feel like a lot of companies are gonna get away with it.

You’d be entirely correct, and that’s exactly why there’s an ongoing debate in physics and cosmology as to why there’s so much matter, and so little antimatter in the universe.

Unfortunately for us, the sun isn’t an egg timer, and it’s pretty much completely impossible to determine exactly when and how strong the next solar flare is until it’s hurtling through space and potentially in our direction (beyond general trends like solar cycles and such). Would be great if it worked like that though.