Thanks! Already caught up a bit on Scott Manley, but I have to check out Tim Dodd too. His RFA / ISAR video is awesome. It seems a lot of new rocket and spacecraft have materialized in the last few years.

Huh I recently watched a video about how SpaceX basically squandered the renewed interest in the moon (EDIT: It was actually a remix of a Smarter Every Day video, about how they need dozens of launches for a single flight to the moon). Arguably the creator Thunderf00t is a very biased shitposter, but their plan seemed absurd and included blatant corruption. Imho SpaceX has done some good stuff but it’s a pretty mixed bag.

Do you know a youtube channel that is smart about reporting about spaceflight without overt fanboy biases?

All this reads weird. Private spacecraft sucks, recent Boing corporate culture sucks, SpaceX sucks even more. But this is Boings first flight and it seems it’s a relatively minor problem so I’m curious why there is so much backlash. I guess it’s a mixture between general anger at Boing for mismanaging their expertise, fatigue about private aeronautics and maybe spaceX fanboys?

Dunno. I’d imagine astronauts would kill for more time in space, part of this seems manufactured drama.

Lets do Taiwan and Georgia next!

This needs more nato, you can barely see it

Hmm. Is money the weapon of mass destruction that will lead to the end of the world?

Yeah we should have, after promising Russia not to expand Nato “one inch to the east”, almost IMMEDIATELY expanded Nato to the east. And then within 14 years be at their border. That would have destabilized the situation much more. If we only had done that! My point is that whatever we did to get to this point, we just should have done more of it.

Luckily we now get the war that was promised! And luckily we also get to do the exact same thing again with China and Taiwan! How great is that?

And here I am buying flour and eating pancakes all day long. Or potatoes. If only I could afford corn flakes!

On the bright side, once AI actually CAN answer things like this we’d have “Artificial Ethics”. A way to judge questions objectively or at least without emotional tempering for each specific case. This could solve some fundamental problems like “who watches the watchers” - we simply build the perfect watcher.

Of course we’re far away from that yet. And then we’d just ignore our perfect watcher anyway 🤣

I’ve recently read a comment saying the great Chinese firewall somehow “learns” that you are using a VPN. So people doing quick tests “yep VPN works” but then a little later it doesn’t work anymore. No clue if that is true though.

“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
– Aaron Bushnell

Don’t do it… since God is infallible any contradiction would negate all of existence!

Toilet Paper is a lie!

This assumes rewritable media, of course… because we need feature parity.

I’d be fine without, if you can just append records to overwrite or delete previous files. For backup or long term storage RW doesn’t matter that much. Or at least, I’d much rather have a cheaper non rewritable disc with a capacity like this.

Yeah in some fields like food production or medicine you want less efficiency and more surplus and reserves in times of crisis especially with climate or possible wars coming.

I don’t really know much about all this but I’d think ideally we should have at least 50% of the needed calories for a year in reserve. Presumably there should also be incentives to leave fields fallow but be able to quickly start planting food crops if there is a crisis. And less intensive agriculture should also mean less intensive fossil fuel usage. Of course we also should drastically reduce meat consumption.

Local efforts like FarmLink are awesome but maybe we should do more under something like the UN World Food Program. And you’d want food distribution to be run non-profit or more like a public utility. We are now in the time of AI where we should be able to create an objective semi-planned economy that optimizes quality, sustainability and fairness. Basically a piece of software that can plan globally in real time and offers farmers multiple options for contracts to grow stuff, or contracts to build food storage, and can manage or help to plan food distribution. You want less market volatility and some kind of monetary and food reserve to buffer fluctuations.

We should also have a push for open source robotics in farming so you can build and repair and maintain your own farm robots. This doesn’t have to be so complicated compared to e.g. 3D printers. I’m not sure how if and how soon solar powered agri-bots can become truly useful and replace big and energy intensive farming equipment and reduce fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide use, but the sooner the better. I imagine patents and IP will severely hinder adaption too just like with 3D printers.

Instead it seems farmers are being neglected by governments or bought out by big agricultural corporations. Or they are co-opted by Russian propaganda to destabilize democracy.

No clue but maybe you confused it with this one?
https://www.privacytools.io

The US helped Saudi Arabia bomb the shit out of Yemen for a long time (search). I’m not properly educated about this myself but there are war crimes, starvation, a lot of shit. I mean you can’t keep up. But to them, enforcing sanctions against Israel creates local support, otherwise they are a pretty bad Islamist regime. The Houthis are also not proxys of Iran. So US bombing them probably helps them too internally.

But there is so much shit going on that it’s hard to keep up.

I think people are going a bit overboard with the reddit hate. I used the site for over a decades, learned a lot and had a lot of laughts and fun and gripes. To want to “burn it down” now because of api and ai stuff is understandable, but seems just vindictive. What public good is supposed to be achieved with this?

I’m feeling a bit of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and a little of 12

Using IP laws to legislate this could also lead to disastrous consequences, like the monopolization of effective AI. If only those with billions in capital can make use of these tools, while free or open source models become illegal to distribute, it could mean a permanent power grab. If the capitalists end up controlling the “means of generation” and we the common folk can’t use it.