WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @sh.itjust.works

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6 mo. ago

Maybe because we are going to lose between 2% and 10% of the entire human population over the next 25 years due to famine and heat stroke in the face of the relentless effects of climate change?

I'm more impressed that they had the technology to make synthetic amethysts in 15th century Poland.

It gets absorbed and reemitted by the walls of the room. Its reemitted as infrared light, due to the temperature of the walls. Eventually it just all ends up as heat.

The answer to the question "where did the energy go?" is "heat" 99% of the time.

So...is he single?

There's really no difference between "offensive" and "defensive" weapons. Israel was able to start a war with Iran precisely because they knew they would be protected by the "defensive" anti-missile systems provided by the US, and from US assets directly shooting down Iranian missiles on their way to Israel. Weapons are weapons. Don't fall or the marketing.

That wouldn't help protect companies from liability from their LLMs. Companies are still liable for what their employees say. If your doctor gives you really bad medical advice that results in you getting heart, the hospital that employs them will be named in the medical malpractice lawsuit. If an employee at a local business throws out a minority customer, telling them "we don't serve your kind," the company can't escape legal liability by saying, "that isn't our official policy, it was just the employee exercising their first amendment rights."

The first amendment just means that the government can't tell you what to say or not say. It doesn't shield you, or the company you are an employee of, from liability for damages that arise due to something you say.

If it doesn't work for actual human employees, it certainly won't work for LLMs.

Start a YouTube channel where you go around trying to get people to sign your petition to give you a Wikipedia page. If you got big enough, eventually you would get a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia wouldn't even have to accept the petition; it might be a bad precedent to set that people can get a page just by submitting a petition. Instead, they could give you a page simply because you became mildly famous for trying to brute force yourself onto Wikipedia.

OTOH, maybe speed cameras as a money grab is a good thing. We have all sorts of sin taxes - alcohol, tobacco, gambling, etc. Why not a sin tax on speeding?

Well then they obviously don't give a shit about government policy and are just mindless fools following the breeze. They can vote Democrat if they want, and their votes are welcome. But "not turning them away" implies actually trying to adjust the party's positions to appeal to them. Sorry, but we don't need to for example, throw trans kids under the bus, just to appeal to a bunch of idiots that happily voted for a known rapist. These are fundamentally not good people.

A climate of mild paranoia.

Ken Paxton deserves to be tied to a millstone and thrown into the ocean.

Honestly I wouldn't mind paying for news. It has to be paid for somehow, and if we're not paying for it, the billionaires are. At the same time, I don't pay for news. The news subscription model is completely broken.

The idea of paying $20+ dollars per month made sense in a world where you got most of your news from your home town newspaper. And in exchange, that newspaper had the funds to do a tons of local and national reporting. But now? Most people get their news from dozens of different news sources. I'm not going to pay to subscribe to dozens of news websites, when I will only visit each one a handful of times. Each paper's subscription prices assume that they're going to your primary information source. But my main information sources are news aggregators.

What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.

I want to support journalism, but their prices are just completely divorced from how modern audiences actually consume news. They're still pricing their newspapers like it's 1990. (Made up numbers), instead of trying to get $20/month out of 1 million people, they should be trying to get $2/month out of 10 million people. But every news site just wants to charge you an arm and a leg and trap you in their own walled garden.

And this is why Brian Thompson got what was coming to him.

Yeah, it's crazy what people do with insurance. We have a really odd car insurance plan. We just have a single mid-2000s Carola as our only vehicle. So we don't bother with full coverage. If the car gets totaled, oh well, we're out a few thousand. But what we do go all out in is the liability policy. I'm not worried about the 20 year old Toyota. I'm worried about losing our life savings if I cause an accident and end up putting someone in a wheelchair for life. So we buy the largest liability coverage we can, and then we have a million dollar umbrella policy on top of that.

To me this seems the only sane way to do it. Not only do I want to make sure I'm not financially destroyed if I cause a big accident, but also, just from basic compassion, I want to make sure that anyone I might hurt is well taken care of.

Who are some of the best? And not USAA. I'm talking ones anyone can apply for.

Yeah I recommend. The chief antagonist of the series, Morning Light Mountain, is one of the best examples of a truly "alien" alien that I've read in sci fi. It's about as far from the trope that aliens are just humans with crap glued to their foreheads, or stand-ins for various real-world human cultures, as you can get.

I loved the concept of Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth saga. People invent wormhole technology. Interstellar colonization is done by opening wormholes directly to alien worlds. Except the tech isn't cheap or easy. IIRC they described an interstellar generator as made of half a cubic kilometer of intricate machinery. They're giant machines that can open portals to distant star systems.

Because of the immense expense, they need to make maximum use of these gateways. The generators operate on regular schedules, connecting to different worlds in the human sphere of colonization. And to make maximum use of the gateways...they run trains through them. You travel to a distant star system by buying a train ticket.

Exactly. Have people forgotten how Project 2025 explicitly wants to classify trans people and queer people more generally as inherently pornographic? Like, ultimately they fundamentally do not accept that trans folks just want to live as we are. They believe that people transition as some sort of public act of sex exhibitionism. They believe it is akin to child abuse for a child to be exposed to the concept of gay people existing. That is what they truly in their hearts believe. They believe that any LGBT content is inherently pornographic. If the theocrats can pressure Mastercard to shut down porn, they can do the same for any content produced about or by queer people of any sort. If they can pressure Steam, they can pressure YouTube or Nebula. As the smaller player, Nebula would be a lot more vulnerable to pressure. What would happen if Nebula had to choose between accepting credit card payments or hosting queer content creators?

Or imagine the worst case. Gabe is the world's greatest prankster. He's a true internet troll for the ages. He's spent decades getting millions and millions of people dependent on his game hosting. He's got hardware. He stands astride the game industry like a colossus. But the key is that Valve is still a private corporation. In theory, Gabe could do whatever he wants with it. Including, finally committing the last stage of his ultimate prank. One day...he just flips the off switch. Steam never enshittifies. It just shuts off forever without warning.

And thus, with one stroke, his master chess move concluded (to reasons comprehensible only to Gabe), he just shuts it off and walks away. His last words in public are, "it turns out, I was the greatest gamer of all the whole time..."