That's why I always pack black electrical tape on any trip. Those especially annoying little LEDs get a little bit, and it's easy to clean up afterwards. Same with new computers - they get a heavy dose of electical tape where the LEDs can't be disabled - for some reason, raw power of case LEDs seems to be major priority in case design.
Data science is about shaping databases to better match phenomenon - often VERY badly, but good enough to work for business or solving some immediate problem at hand with the resources at hand. I've worked at it, and it's powerful and amazing in its own ways - but it's not neuroscience, at all.
Siri has some lovely canned responses, shaped to match common human inputs, and improved based on what new common inputs come in, largely by adding more human inputs rather than really dynamically generated content.
Data science can help you shape an estimate to match previous responses better, can shape a curve to match an exponent better - but it isn't neuroscience.
ELIZA and her informational descendants like Siri aren't immitating humans - they're selecting from a data set of mixed repeating inputs and canned responses, with a few lexical alterations for effect.
They're not systems fooling humans - they're humans fooling humans using sliced up prerecorded clips.
Almost all of artificial intelligence and even business intelligence is like that - focused on satisfying expectations to some percentage, not on actually modelling absolute truth. As long as customers are indicating improvement, managers give the thumbs up, it continues.
It's very much more stage magic than anything else - under the hood, it's ugly framework and empty air, but dressed up to show the illusion just where it can be seen.
Which makes sense - if you're spending millions, and millions, and millions on it - you expect some stagecraft, I mean "modern professionalism" painted on top to pretend every dollar was spend with perfect wisdom.
Siri-ously though - it's a cool extension of previous technology, and a neat way to present it to cell-phone users and the like. But it's also cheesy use of such tools, and shouldn't be taken as more than window dressing to other tools as it is. The promise of 'virtual assistants' from the mid 90's is nowhere closer with this. Wolfram Alpha might be closer - but they're mostly in the same bag of oddball interfaces.
I liked the first three Star Wars movies. Fun, clever writing for the era they were filmed in, explored ideas in a way that made sense for their circumstance without cheap drama, considering their inspiration of old serial films. Ewoks were annoying, but they didn't take up much time.
The prequels sucked. Basically they upped the cheap drama, placed an extra-whacky Ewok-equivalent front and center, and replaced the ideas with empty aphorisms and... midiclorians.
The recent follow up movies suffered many of the same problems - cheap drama followed by ANGRY cheap drama, and that modern-sci-fi variant of stretching all ideas out into teases for franchises. Lots of spinning wheels, nothing to really take with you.
The whole point of stories is that they are shared dreams. I'm not seeing anything worth while being explored for the past several decades of this franchise with those dreams.
Well, at least with the films. Tie Fighter the game, and the old RPG KOTOR were really fascinating in their take on ideas they explored - but I'm not seeing any real follow up on that stuff. Just more empty drama with the recent games/multiplayer things.
If I see someone paste clips on youtube, I'll take a peek, but no a-priori fascination off the bat.
However fast the AI becomes, it still has to work on the basis of those willing to pay for it.
Some manager or company owner somewhere is going to decide - "hey, maybe I can use this to sell these arms to replace dishwasher teams at large restaurants."
Then, he'd work with accountants will look at the cost of different configurations of robotic arms, toolset development, testing teams, potential market cap, cost to enter that market, marketing methods, and how easy it would be for competitors to just copy his approach and steal that market.
Eventually, it's all going to be open sourced projects with off-the-shelf modular tools - but for now and the next decade at least, what we call AI are really highly specialized database and hardware combinations, usually with some highly marketable gimmick behind it.
And that means it's only going to expand as fast as greed and market fear will let it. Very few open source teams are going to push the number of servers and dedicated funds needed to really open it up beyond isolated research projects for now.
Eventually - yes, because every part will get cheaper and more itself automated to buy into cheaply at scale- but those costs are going to go down slowly, short of some breakthrough that we can't predict as such.
They'll be fine. Whenever I had to write cursive, it grated by wrist bones after a while. Like most physical adjustments for a task, you do a little damage, your body heals, and over a couple of weeks you're a halfway-capable writing machine.
Writing isn't going away even in some far flung future - but it's understandable why kids don't want to use it constantly anymore compared with alternatives.
That particular kind of bone pain involved with mashing those wrist bones into shapes is validly a thing that makes you not want to practice writing.
But kids would still end up doing it, even if there aren't lesson plans. If there stuck somewhere and want to make a crude sign, they're not going to be unable to. They'll still write words in the sand with s a stick, and countless other interactions with language we're drawn to.
The kids will be fine. It's the adults we should really be worried about - there's some things really wrong with them.
For those wondering, there's been studies and research on maximum genome size, and beyond a certain point (a couple hundred picograms) the mechanisms don't work for copying/processing/maintaining DNA. The largest animal genome would be around 132 micrograms (marbled lungfish)
A picogram is 1/1,000,000,000,000 of a gram, so yeah, getting up to a full gram of the stuff, you can store a LOT of raw data - but it's not something you're going to have survive on its own without a very specialized sort of engineered life/system, and likely secondary specialized critters to defend it against regular old microorganisms.
The other problem would be read/write speed - DNA replication isn't fast with current life processes... scale that up a few billion times, and you're definitely going to have to do something different than how life as is does things.
That's kind of the whole point of just going through with it and automating every dumb job - we'll never be 'ready' if we pretend life is a contest of who is most willing to bend over backwards to work harder for their employers, as the chairs start falling away, and the music speeds up.
This gets posted a lot, but it's a decent freely-readable short story on the subject:
In our current economy, folks sell stuff that others want to pay money for. Everything else is an expense - and human experience and effort is not valued in the economy itself, unless it can be packaged and sold.
That's cool, and offers some important efficiencies, until the game gets optimized too far. The most efficient system is monopoly, and we keep bounding up against that over and over, with increasing frequency.
Which is kind of ironic, given how the concept of 'incorporation' came into existence - as contracts of limited time to operate by governments, with limited liability.
Now, those same incorporated entities basically consume any task, just in order to gobble up that sweet, sweet government-backed currency, that artificial food of pure economics. They now control government to a great degree, just to have more free access to those dollar dollar bills.
And it's at the moment, the primary goal of most folks entering the world - to find a corporation to be employed by, to help a company grow, to spend 50+% of your waking hours, forgetting about your personal interests, and worrying about not having your professional persona hurt at your workplace.
Could we get an economy build on humane scientific exploration of possibilities next? Like, actual exploration of truth?
Here's the thing: It costs billions and billions, and billions to make and maintain those roads. That's considered a worthy service built by shared effort of the society. The additional cost of running buses across those roads is much less, basically a small percentage of cost to increase the the capacity and utility of those roads more.
It makes the overall society more efficient, since those tax dollars are saving millions of individuals much more money over time, usually folks who actually spend money in the economy instead of the savings/investment classes that tend to shelter their activities from the economy at large.
Ad described, at least, makes sense to me - and would be nice to use if I ever visit there.
Carbon capture? Really? As in the fig leaf that defines 'clean coal'?
I understand that the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good - but the whole clean coal thing mostly marketing for essentially free-wheeling carbon spewing, rather than an actual process to prevent environmental degredation.
It's like one of those phone calls for police/firefighter funerals - that when asked only give "up to" 15% of their take to their cause - they're PRETENDING to give to something you want to help, eating up all the good will that should be going to something the public wants to help, consuming that good will while the actual cause withers.
Sure - carbon capture can take a small percentage off of some effects of carbon spewing - but it only exists to pretend that you're doing something about a fundamentally wrong approach for our shared efforts as humans. It's basically the opposite of actually doing anything for the environment and the future of humanity - a fig leaf instead of clothing.
I actually think of that as the "easier" problem - once you're just out of our own galaxy, mechanisms might survive enough to fine-tune the aim with home-galaxy input, and you can work out a path to go 'slow' enough, and/or loop with negative gravity assist so that gravity wells will work to keep you in-galaxy. You still kind of have to be a dumb missile at the delivery end though, with what I can imagine. As long as you can slow, it's more like golf than archery - a hole in one is difficult and complex, but just getting on the green when the ball is rolling is potentially good enough. You get a LOT of stars in a galaxy to approach, with a lot of passes potentially.
You might build sort of solar drag-sails (parachute?) that only unfurl out of our own galaxy, but I don't know if they'd survive or be worth it. Kind of a whirly-bird (elm tree fruit) approach if you went with that.
Hopefully futuretech is better than any of that, but imagining with what we have it how we get ideas to get better stuff.
In order to take advantage of that without some unforeseeable technology, you'd need to do some rather extreme things though.
Not just planning hundreds of thousands of years in advance, but planning across many, many kinds of entropy that we're not used to engineering around - and even then, you'd be very limited with what you could do.
The most hard-sci-fi solution I can think of to get through such a puzzle would be genetically engineering a culture of bacteria-sized critters to live in minimal-metabolism cycles (think water bears) for the long, long period between galaxies, until they sensed a solar body warming them up again. Then, they'd wake up to their their DNA-triggered-payload, and break through a seal to a block of stable metals and, start carving out circuits and shells for nanobots. Those nanobots would work with the organic components to make solar cells, harvest rocks, gather resources.
Eventually, they'd look for home galaxy signals, looking for an extensively protected series of keys and protocols to 3d-print further updates from home, until they can eventually become a hub to print people (or equivalent, given the timeframe) to live on what worlds are discovered, of what habitats can be built.
Anything like a modern machine just wouldn't make it there, and would be useless by the time it was in place, you'd kind of need a generic programmable platform to bootstrap what will actually be useful by that time. You have to have something that makes information from our future mean something in these far-off vistas, a foothold.
It's a real, if slightly funny-sounding measurement of a deadly risk (usually, for radiation). You see, a banana contains potassium, and a fraction of that potassium is slightly radiactive. A human living on earth, without being exposed to direct sunlight would get around 100 banana-equivalents worth of radiation just randomly across a day from the environment.
If you think it's likely a risk - quantify that risk, and compare it to something we can at least relate to in every day life.
If you haven't read it - it has some of the greatest 'moments of awesome' of any book, combined with an overarchning plot that is a hilarious take on cyberpunk (halfway mocking, halfway loving). Think the Tick, for cyberpunk, with a less purely absurd basis.
The main character is named 'Hiro Protagonist", basically one of the guys who invented the 'metaverse' virtual reality simulation of the story, who carries around katanas IRL, and delivers pizzas for the mob. Oh, and the entire world is owned by corporate nation-states, also in a clever half-parody of cyberpunk stories.
As a bonus, it illustrates how bonkers crazy early religion is in one of its sub-plots, though that may get skipped in the series, understandably. The author kind of has a thing for illustrating the crazier side of indoctrination in the middle of otherwise crazy good stories - see the Diamond Age for a sequel of most of these aspects.
But anyway - it's a superb storyline - it'll be really interesting to see how they adapt it.
Cute. Solar space ain't as stable as you'd think though. Solar winds, and all those damn teapots just mess up ALL your feng shui you're trying to set up, whenever you're trying to make a zero-gravity zen garden out there.
Seriously though, it's difficult enough to have anything on this planet deal consistently with the chaotic effects of a giant nuclear furnace blazing down on it for portions of the day through an atmosphere and frequent clouds. A metal sheet of even significant size would be battered in a large number of ways. You'd need a death-star-like artificial moon to have the effect you're alluding to, and all the comets in our system wouldn't even amount to enough. Perhaps you could move another planet in place - but at that point, it would be cheaper to just fix our own world.
We might consider being a little careful with our planet, and doing actual science, rather than just Cliff Clavin-ing a pretend fix any time any complains to the mega-majority of scientists for decades, from pretty much every field touching on our planet's future, and our ability to survive it.
Nah. As addressed earlier, I've got folks I love and want to help.
Also, look to history. Like, any extended period of history. There's a general trend over time.
The first trend is peace. There's a very strong trend towards less violence over time, across all places in the world, all societies, etc. The worst wars of the past centuries are less violent, in terms of population killed violently, than the peace of previous centuries.
The second trend is welfare of the average person. There's definitely setbacks for those - lots of inequality popping up across history - but those also tend to get eroded too.
A third trend would be rule of law. This is seen more of a classically 'conservative' trend, but it works for everyone. It's also crucial to the peace trend.
I think my ideals (both conservative and liberal) are more likely to be met by time passing and people acting, than the lopsided pseudo-conservative brand of cruelty at large at the moment.
More folks just have to find better ways of seeing what's going on, and seeing past the feeble messages distorting things - like happens in many generations. Perspectives shift, and no distortion holds past too many generations.
I'd also prefer to prevent our own silly system from hurting the rest of the world too much, as much as I can.
I know - and I agree - but most Americans are completely unaware of, or told vehemently wrong things about every other social system in the world.
Asked about the same ideals that make those other industrialized nations work objectively better towards those ideals - like healthcare, social mobility, education, etc - they would agree wholeheartedly with the ideals and even mechanisms - but then turn away at the labels and identity politics.
It's a silly, confused little pocket of perspectives we've built up in this nation.
...if we had a basic floor by some mechanism, where someone couldn't fall below, leading to a semi-permanent drain on society, and a society that was unwilling to have people die for their own benefit.
You know, something closer to the biblical ideal espoused in the 'new testament' part of the most consistently referenced book in this nation, but with the freedoms espoused in the other largely revered document, our constitution.
A 'basic income' system would work, but some mix of unions/safety net if that wasn't possible could at least mitigate those falling through the cracks.
Education also helps - but everyone can be suckered, or just have the bad luck to be taken advantage of for too long. Even the smartest folks can live most of their lives in abject circumstances for the sake of loved ones, or ideals where that intelligence doesn't help them.
A more ideal case would be if everyone had some base line, could be sure that everyone they loved would at least survive in some level of comfort, and were free to help, not in the confines of a arbitrary-hour work week, but could use tools to be available whenever made sense, without fear of becoming bankrupt later in life for pursuing whatever they felt helped others the most.
Money should still matter - what folks are willing to reward more or less can still matter... but it shouldn't be increasingly the ONLY thing that matters, above life, death, and everything else.
Shared social value should matter for SOMETHING, shouldn't it?
Here's the thing about emotions. They don't mean what you'd expect. Emotions ARE logic to an extent - short-circuited logic, quicker and made with incomplete information. They're the quick-and-dirty half-logic that makes us able to function in a world of unknowns for millions of years as a species.
They aren't 'serious business' - they're formed and dismissed in fractions of a second, and most of them don't trigger facial emotions - and even then a raised eyebrow muscle can mean confusion, pronounced indifference, mild surprise, or just positioning to move your eyeball, or many other things.
Like most things, this ain't mindreading - it's just more polygraph logic being applied, ironically like emotion itself is applied - for the basis of 'asperational truth', or bullshit they hope might pan out.
The whole reason I went with a netbook years ago was the price. Now, though, when I need a cheapo laptop, I definitely go with used corporate - Dell frequently has quite nice extra-durable laptops that are basically leased en mass to companies that make them dirt cheap, and VERY easy to provide service to if you're giving them to relatives.
The designs are inherently rugged, can be thrown into a backpack no problem, accessories and batteries are commodity priced, and the appearance won't cause anyone to blink. I understand the appeal of light-as-possible, but there's just too many advantages to rugged cheapo-bulk laptops. And if you REALLY want mega-light, there's some models that do that too, I'm sure.
People are germy. The space station contains people.
That, and to germs, we are the space station. The bacterial cells alone outnumber human cells by roughly 10 to 1. Viruses are so absurdly numerous beyond even that, that it's difficult to consistently measure. Heck, the viruses that attack us are almost always a misfire of them preying on their actual target mechanisms - the bacteria living in us.
Nothing particularly dangerous in the space station having pockets of germs, in context. They aren't especially likely to mutate into something horrible at that scale - if anything, it is the very 'clean' aspect of the environment that is going to cause immune systems to relax, and cause more harm than the bacteria/viruses.
Make sure you list both prices online then, with a clear explanation - Otherwise, I'll just think that Walmart just sucks in terms of prices, compared to other stores in that timeframe.
I already shop at Aldi for most food items, and use Slickdeals and other comparisson shopping places for most non-perishables. Walmart has long since lost its image as a 'low prices' store - and now sits in my mind as the same as the old department stores as a place I only go for specials and items I can't find elsewhere.
I do understand they completely squeeze their business partners for increasing margins every financial period they can - but from what I'm seeing, those same vendors have learned to just make crappier stuff for Walmart, while pushing better actual values onto other marketplaces.
Look up any documented case of feral humans, either in the wild or confinement. If they have a few years first with parents beforehand, they tend to be OK after a period of catching up - but left completely "unprogrammed", they tend to be completely unable to cope.
Humans need interactions on several levels to "become" humans as we recognize them.
It's not at all surprising that computers would need some of that same kinds of interactions to be able to speak to us on our terms. We take a LOT of faulty shortcuts to real logic in order to play our roles in society, conversations, and our shared understanding of the world.
You can get a lot of that odd 'logic' just by building associations - but it takes a LOT of misunderstanding and correction before you can know if those corrections really work the way others understand them.
Shouldn't it be "the overwhelming majority of computer scientists who've even casually looked at voting security" in favor of paper ballots over the current implementation of computerized voting? Hasn't this been the case for well over a decade?
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I always pack black electrical tape on any trip. Those especially annoying little LEDs get a little bit, and it's easy to clean up afterwards. Same with new computers - they get a heavy dose of electical tape where the LEDs can't be disabled - for some reason, raw power of case LEDs seems to be major priority in case design.
Ryan Fenton
Data science is about shaping databases to better match phenomenon - often VERY badly, but good enough to work for business or solving some immediate problem at hand with the resources at hand. I've worked at it, and it's powerful and amazing in its own ways - but it's not neuroscience, at all.
Siri has some lovely canned responses, shaped to match common human inputs, and improved based on what new common inputs come in, largely by adding more human inputs rather than really dynamically generated content.
Data science can help you shape an estimate to match previous responses better, can shape a curve to match an exponent better - but it isn't neuroscience.
ELIZA and her informational descendants like Siri aren't immitating humans - they're selecting from a data set of mixed repeating inputs and canned responses, with a few lexical alterations for effect.
They're not systems fooling humans - they're humans fooling humans using sliced up prerecorded clips.
Almost all of artificial intelligence and even business intelligence is like that - focused on satisfying expectations to some percentage, not on actually modelling absolute truth. As long as customers are indicating improvement, managers give the thumbs up, it continues.
It's very much more stage magic than anything else - under the hood, it's ugly framework and empty air, but dressed up to show the illusion just where it can be seen.
Which makes sense - if you're spending millions, and millions, and millions on it - you expect some stagecraft, I mean "modern professionalism" painted on top to pretend every dollar was spend with perfect wisdom.
Siri-ously though - it's a cool extension of previous technology, and a neat way to present it to cell-phone users and the like. But it's also cheesy use of such tools, and shouldn't be taken as more than window dressing to other tools as it is. The promise of 'virtual assistants' from the mid 90's is nowhere closer with this. Wolfram Alpha might be closer - but they're mostly in the same bag of oddball interfaces.
Ryan Fenton
I liked the first three Star Wars movies. Fun, clever writing for the era they were filmed in, explored ideas in a way that made sense for their circumstance without cheap drama, considering their inspiration of old serial films. Ewoks were annoying, but they didn't take up much time.
The prequels sucked. Basically they upped the cheap drama, placed an extra-whacky Ewok-equivalent front and center, and replaced the ideas with empty aphorisms and ... midiclorians.
The recent follow up movies suffered many of the same problems - cheap drama followed by ANGRY cheap drama, and that modern-sci-fi variant of stretching all ideas out into teases for franchises. Lots of spinning wheels, nothing to really take with you.
The whole point of stories is that they are shared dreams. I'm not seeing anything worth while being explored for the past several decades of this franchise with those dreams.
Well, at least with the films. Tie Fighter the game, and the old RPG KOTOR were really fascinating in their take on ideas they explored - but I'm not seeing any real follow up on that stuff. Just more empty drama with the recent games/multiplayer things.
If I see someone paste clips on youtube, I'll take a peek, but no a-priori fascination off the bat.
Ryan Fenton
However fast the AI becomes, it still has to work on the basis of those willing to pay for it.
Some manager or company owner somewhere is going to decide - "hey, maybe I can use this to sell these arms to replace dishwasher teams at large restaurants."
Then, he'd work with accountants will look at the cost of different configurations of robotic arms, toolset development, testing teams, potential market cap, cost to enter that market, marketing methods, and how easy it would be for competitors to just copy his approach and steal that market.
Eventually, it's all going to be open sourced projects with off-the-shelf modular tools - but for now and the next decade at least, what we call AI are really highly specialized database and hardware combinations, usually with some highly marketable gimmick behind it.
And that means it's only going to expand as fast as greed and market fear will let it. Very few open source teams are going to push the number of servers and dedicated funds needed to really open it up beyond isolated research projects for now.
Eventually - yes, because every part will get cheaper and more itself automated to buy into cheaply at scale- but those costs are going to go down slowly, short of some breakthrough that we can't predict as such.
Ryan Fenton
They'll be fine. Whenever I had to write cursive, it grated by wrist bones after a while. Like most physical adjustments for a task, you do a little damage, your body heals, and over a couple of weeks you're a halfway-capable writing machine.
Writing isn't going away even in some far flung future - but it's understandable why kids don't want to use it constantly anymore compared with alternatives.
That particular kind of bone pain involved with mashing those wrist bones into shapes is validly a
thing that makes you not want to practice writing.
But kids would still end up doing it, even if there aren't lesson plans. If there stuck somewhere and want to make a crude sign, they're not going to be unable to. They'll still write words in the sand with s a stick, and countless other interactions with language we're drawn to.
The kids will be fine. It's the adults we should really be worried about - there's some things really wrong with them.
Ryan Fenton
For those wondering, there's been studies and research on maximum genome size, and beyond a certain point (a couple hundred picograms) the mechanisms don't work for copying/processing/maintaining DNA. The largest animal genome would be around 132 micrograms (marbled lungfish)
http://www.genomesize.com/stat...
A picogram is 1/1,000,000,000,000 of a gram, so yeah, getting up to a full gram of the stuff, you can store a LOT of raw data - but it's not something you're going to have survive on its own without a very specialized sort of engineered life/system, and likely secondary specialized critters to defend it against regular old microorganisms.
The other problem would be read/write speed - DNA replication isn't fast with current life processes... scale that up a few billion times, and you're definitely going to have to do something different than how life as is does things.
Ryan Fenton
That's kind of the whole point of just going through with it and automating every dumb job - we'll never be 'ready' if we pretend life is a contest of who is most willing to bend over backwards to work harder for their employers, as the chairs start falling away, and the music speeds up.
This gets posted a lot, but it's a decent freely-readable short story on the subject:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
In our current economy, folks sell stuff that others want to pay money for. Everything else is an expense - and human experience and effort is not valued in the economy itself, unless it can be packaged and sold.
That's cool, and offers some important efficiencies, until the game gets optimized too far. The most efficient system is monopoly, and we keep bounding up against that over and over, with increasing frequency.
Which is kind of ironic, given how the concept of 'incorporation' came into existence - as contracts of limited time to operate by governments, with limited liability.
Now, those same incorporated entities basically consume any task, just in order to gobble up that sweet, sweet government-backed currency, that artificial food of pure economics. They now control government to a great degree, just to have more free access to those dollar dollar bills.
And it's at the moment, the primary goal of most folks entering the world - to find a corporation to be employed by, to help a company grow, to spend 50+% of your waking hours, forgetting about your personal interests, and worrying about not having your professional persona hurt at your workplace.
Could we get an economy build on humane scientific exploration of possibilities next? Like, actual exploration of truth?
Ryan Fenton
Here's the thing: It costs billions and billions, and billions to make and maintain those roads. That's considered a worthy service built by shared effort of the society. The additional cost of running buses across those roads is much less, basically a small percentage of cost to increase the the capacity and utility of those roads more.
It makes the overall society more efficient, since those tax dollars are saving millions of individuals much more money over time, usually folks who actually spend money in the economy instead of the savings/investment classes that tend to shelter their activities from the economy at large.
Ad described, at least, makes sense to me - and would be nice to use if I ever visit there.
Ryan Fenton
Carbon capture? Really? As in the fig leaf that defines 'clean coal'?
I understand that the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good - but the whole clean coal thing mostly marketing for essentially free-wheeling carbon spewing, rather than an actual process to prevent environmental degredation.
It's like one of those phone calls for police/firefighter funerals - that when asked only give "up to" 15% of their take to their cause - they're PRETENDING to give to something you want to help, eating up all the good will that should be going to something the public wants to help, consuming that good will while the actual cause withers.
Sure - carbon capture can take a small percentage off of some effects of carbon spewing - but it only exists to pretend that you're doing something about a fundamentally wrong approach for our shared efforts as humans. It's basically the opposite of actually doing anything for the environment and the future of humanity - a fig leaf instead of clothing.
Ryan Fenton
I actually think of that as the "easier" problem - once you're just out of our own galaxy, mechanisms might survive enough to fine-tune the aim with home-galaxy input, and you can work out a path to go 'slow' enough, and/or loop with negative gravity assist so that gravity wells will work to keep you in-galaxy. You still kind of have to be a dumb missile at the delivery end though, with what I can imagine. As long as you can slow, it's more like golf than archery - a hole in one is difficult and complex, but just getting on the green when the ball is rolling is potentially good enough. You get a LOT of stars in a galaxy to approach, with a lot of passes potentially.
You might build sort of solar drag-sails (parachute?) that only unfurl out of our own galaxy, but I don't know if they'd survive or be worth it. Kind of a whirly-bird (elm tree fruit) approach if you went with that.
Hopefully futuretech is better than any of that, but imagining with what we have it how we get ideas to get better stuff.
Ryan Fenton
>>That's an interesting post, but what does it have to do with the story?
I see definitive hints of planets in other galaxies, I wonder how we, as humanity would reach them. Don't you?
Ryan Fenton
That's - that's ACTUALLY far out, dude.
In order to take advantage of that without some unforeseeable technology, you'd need to do some rather extreme things though.
Not just planning hundreds of thousands of years in advance, but planning across many, many kinds of entropy that we're not used to engineering around - and even then, you'd be very limited with what you could do.
The most hard-sci-fi solution I can think of to get through such a puzzle would be genetically engineering a culture of bacteria-sized critters to live in minimal-metabolism cycles (think water bears) for the long, long period between galaxies, until they sensed a solar body warming them up again. Then, they'd wake up to their their DNA-triggered-payload, and break through a seal to a block of stable metals and, start carving out circuits and shells for nanobots. Those nanobots would work with the organic components to make solar cells, harvest rocks, gather resources.
Eventually, they'd look for home galaxy signals, looking for an extensively protected series of keys and protocols to 3d-print further updates from home, until they can eventually become a hub to print people (or equivalent, given the timeframe) to live on what worlds are discovered, of what habitats can be built.
Anything like a modern machine just wouldn't make it there, and would be useless by the time it was in place, you'd kind of need a generic programmable platform to bootstrap what will actually be useful by that time. You have to have something that makes information from our future mean something in these far-off vistas, a foothold.
Ryan Fenton
Just to be clear: Can you measure the risk in relative to a banana equivalent dose?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's a real, if slightly funny-sounding measurement of a deadly risk (usually, for radiation). You see, a banana contains potassium, and a fraction of that potassium is slightly radiactive. A human living on earth, without being exposed to direct sunlight would get around 100 banana-equivalents worth of radiation just randomly across a day from the environment.
If you think it's likely a risk - quantify that risk, and compare it to something we can at least relate to in every day life.
Ryan Fenton
If you haven't read it - it has some of the greatest 'moments of awesome' of any book, combined with an overarchning plot that is a hilarious take on cyberpunk (halfway mocking, halfway loving). Think the Tick, for cyberpunk, with a less purely absurd basis.
The main character is named 'Hiro Protagonist", basically one of the guys who invented the 'metaverse' virtual reality simulation of the story, who carries around katanas IRL, and delivers pizzas for the mob. Oh, and the entire world is owned by corporate nation-states, also in a clever half-parody of cyberpunk stories.
As a bonus, it illustrates how bonkers crazy early religion is in one of its sub-plots, though that may get skipped in the series, understandably. The author kind of has a thing for illustrating the crazier side of indoctrination in the middle of otherwise crazy good stories - see the Diamond Age for a sequel of most of these aspects.
But anyway - it's a superb storyline - it'll be really interesting to see how they adapt it.
Ryan Fenton
Cute. Solar space ain't as stable as you'd think though. Solar winds, and all those damn teapots just mess up ALL your feng shui you're trying to set up, whenever you're trying to make a zero-gravity zen garden out there.
Seriously though, it's difficult enough to have anything on this planet deal consistently with the chaotic effects of a giant nuclear furnace blazing down on it for portions of the day through an atmosphere and frequent clouds. A metal sheet of even significant size would be battered in a large number of ways. You'd need a death-star-like artificial moon to have the effect you're alluding to, and all the comets in our system wouldn't even amount to enough. Perhaps you could move another planet in place - but at that point, it would be cheaper to just fix our own world.
We might consider being a little careful with our planet, and doing actual science, rather than just Cliff Clavin-ing a pretend fix any time any complains to the mega-majority of scientists for decades, from pretty much every field touching on our planet's future, and our ability to survive it.
Ryan Fenton
Nah. As addressed earlier, I've got folks I love and want to help.
Also, look to history. Like, any extended period of history. There's a general trend over time.
The first trend is peace. There's a very strong trend towards less violence over time, across all places in the world, all societies, etc. The worst wars of the past centuries are less violent, in terms of population killed violently, than the peace of previous centuries.
The second trend is welfare of the average person. There's definitely setbacks for those - lots of inequality popping up across history - but those also tend to get eroded too.
A third trend would be rule of law. This is seen more of a classically 'conservative' trend, but it works for everyone. It's also crucial to the peace trend.
I think my ideals (both conservative and liberal) are more likely to be met by time passing and people acting, than the lopsided pseudo-conservative brand of cruelty at large at the moment.
More folks just have to find better ways of seeing what's going on, and seeing past the feeble messages distorting things - like happens in many generations. Perspectives shift, and no distortion holds past too many generations.
I'd also prefer to prevent our own silly system from hurting the rest of the world too much, as much as I can.
Ryan Fenton
I know - and I agree - but most Americans are completely unaware of, or told vehemently wrong things about every other social system in the world.
Asked about the same ideals that make those other industrialized nations work objectively better towards those ideals - like healthcare, social mobility, education, etc - they would agree wholeheartedly with the ideals and even mechanisms - but then turn away at the labels and identity politics.
It's a silly, confused little pocket of perspectives we've built up in this nation.
Ryan Fenton
...if we had a basic floor by some mechanism, where someone couldn't fall below, leading to a semi-permanent drain on society, and a society that was unwilling to have people die for their own benefit.
You know, something closer to the biblical ideal espoused in the 'new testament' part of the most consistently referenced book in this nation, but with the freedoms espoused in the other largely revered document, our constitution.
A 'basic income' system would work, but some mix of unions/safety net if that wasn't possible could at least mitigate those falling through the cracks.
Education also helps - but everyone can be suckered, or just have the bad luck to be taken advantage of for too long. Even the smartest folks can live most of their lives in abject circumstances for the sake of loved ones, or ideals where that intelligence doesn't help them.
A more ideal case would be if everyone had some base line, could be sure that everyone they loved would at least survive in some level of comfort, and were free to help, not in the confines of a arbitrary-hour work week, but could use tools to be available whenever made sense, without fear of becoming bankrupt later in life for pursuing whatever they felt helped others the most.
Money should still matter - what folks are willing to reward more or less can still matter... but it shouldn't be increasingly the ONLY thing that matters, above life, death, and everything else.
Shared social value should matter for SOMETHING, shouldn't it?
Ryan Fenton
Here's the thing about emotions. They don't mean what you'd expect. Emotions ARE logic to an extent - short-circuited logic, quicker and made with incomplete information. They're the quick-and-dirty half-logic that makes us able to function in a world of unknowns for millions of years as a species.
They aren't 'serious business' - they're formed and dismissed in fractions of a second, and most of them don't trigger facial emotions - and even then a raised eyebrow muscle can mean confusion, pronounced indifference, mild surprise, or just positioning to move your eyeball, or many other things.
Like most things, this ain't mindreading - it's just more polygraph logic being applied, ironically like emotion itself is applied - for the basis of 'asperational truth', or bullshit they hope might pan out.
Ryan Fenton
The whole reason I went with a netbook years ago was the price. Now, though, when I need a cheapo laptop, I definitely go with used corporate - Dell frequently has quite nice extra-durable laptops that are basically leased en mass to companies that make them dirt cheap, and VERY easy to provide service to if you're giving them to relatives.
The designs are inherently rugged, can be thrown into a backpack no problem, accessories and batteries are commodity priced, and the appearance won't cause anyone to blink. I understand the appeal of light-as-possible, but there's just too many advantages to rugged cheapo-bulk laptops. And if you REALLY want mega-light, there's some models that do that too, I'm sure.
Ryan Fenton
People are germy. The space station contains people.
That, and to germs, we are the space station. The bacterial cells alone outnumber human cells by roughly 10 to 1. Viruses are so absurdly numerous beyond even that, that it's difficult to consistently measure. Heck, the viruses that attack us are almost always a misfire of them preying on their actual target mechanisms - the bacteria living in us.
Nothing particularly dangerous in the space station having pockets of germs, in context. They aren't especially likely to mutate into something horrible at that scale - if anything, it is the very 'clean' aspect of the environment that is going to cause immune systems to relax, and cause more harm than the bacteria/viruses.
Ryan Fenton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Well produced, and worth watching if you have a taste for almost-not-fiction science fiction.
Ryan Fenton
Make sure you list both prices online then, with a clear explanation - Otherwise, I'll just think that Walmart just sucks in terms of prices, compared to other stores in that timeframe.
I already shop at Aldi for most food items, and use Slickdeals and other comparisson shopping places for most non-perishables. Walmart has long since lost its image as a 'low prices' store - and now sits in my mind as the same as the old department stores as a place I only go for specials and items I can't find elsewhere.
I do understand they completely squeeze their business partners for increasing margins every financial period they can - but from what I'm seeing, those same vendors have learned to just make crappier stuff for Walmart, while pushing better actual values onto other marketplaces.
Ryan Fenton
Look up any documented case of feral humans, either in the wild or confinement. If they have a few years first with parents beforehand, they tend to be OK after a period of catching up - but left completely "unprogrammed", they tend to be completely unable to cope.
Humans need interactions on several levels to "become" humans as we recognize them.
It's not at all surprising that computers would need some of that same kinds of interactions to be able to speak to us on our terms. We take a LOT of faulty shortcuts to real logic in order to play our roles in society, conversations, and our shared understanding of the world.
You can get a lot of that odd 'logic' just by building associations - but it takes a LOT of misunderstanding and correction before you can know if those corrections really work the way others understand them.
Ryan Fenton
Shouldn't it be "the overwhelming majority of computer scientists who've even casually looked at voting security" in favor of paper ballots over the current implementation of computerized voting? Hasn't this been the case for well over a decade?
Ryan Fenton