indoordin0saur

I like the idea of fertilizing the dead parts of the ocean with iron oxide.

Destructive GRBs are actually so rare that I'd seriously bet on our spaceship getting attacked by a belligerent alien vessel before thinking the mission gets taken out by a GRB.

Whenever people say we are "x years away from this technology" I find it incredibly silly. You have no idea if in 2028 AGI is going to deliver some way to efficiently create and store antimatter. Nor do you know if (assuming AGI never comes) there will be some intellectual flourishing of humanity in a few decades. Nor do you know if we're on the precipice of a multi-millenia dark age.

And it isn't the first time lifeforms on Earth made their own planet less hospitable. See the Oxygen Catastrophe or the Azolla Fern Event.

I did actually use an LLM to teach myself photoshop recently for a fantasy map building project. Mostly I'd just ask it things like "I have a mask with 50/50 gray and would like an elevation height map to be an embossed layer on it. Where do I find that in the menus?" those sorts of questions.

I finished the project out feeling pretty confident in my photoshop abilities. Then I did a similar project later and realized I had to open up the LLM again as there were still a ton of holes in my knowledge. After this second time though I'm feeling confident enough on my own that referring back to the LLM is increasingly less common, as it's just a waste of time if I already know what to do.

This is about as useful as my personal time machine. It is a cardboard box that has "Time Machine" written on the side in crayon. It only travels forwards and at normal speed though.

> Given that c is the speed of causality itself, FTL communications would effectively be like predicting the future.

Wouldn't faster than FTL mean that that's the speed of causality? If I send a message from a light year away telling you to "jump up and down" and you receive it in 6 months doesn't and you jump up and down, then doesn't that mean that the speed of causality in that cause was actually 2*C?

But all of these proofs are unreadable and seemed to have hallucinated in a bunch of irrelevant stuff, making them not especially useful.

In Maine there are lots of early 20s workers that mostly seem to come from Balkan countries. I think those little tourist towns just don't have large enough populations to support the demand. Tourists probably outnumber actual locals. Places like NJ and Brooklyn though have plenty of 16-22 year olds who will work beach jobs.

If this is like what I saw in Maine coastal tourist towns this summer I suspect its popular with Europeans because the $15.10/hour local wage is attractive. But more so it's because you get to spend time a few months in a beautiful location surrounded by other attractive young people. Party scene is probably great.

You totally can. You just gotta shell out at least $2.5k for a good GPU, but then you own it. These big open-weight models aren't nearly as good as Opus 5.5 but I find them to be about as good as the big models were a year ago. It's only a matter of time until we catch up.

Or your computer

> Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses

I see what you did there.

Isn't this easily treated with anti-biotics these days? Surprised that someone would die of plague in this day and age so long as treatment is prompt, which for a lab worker it seemingly should have been...

> it's unclear what long covid is

It's just another post-acute infection syndrome that can occur from pretty much any contagious illness (flu, etc.). Most people reading this have probably experienced this. Ever had a cough that persisted multiple weeks after the rest of your illness went away? That's not because your cold permanently damaged your lungs or even that the virus is still around. It's because your immune system will sometimes get confused and continue to wage war in your throat (or whatever it thought was infected) long after the virus has been eliminated.

I think the walking distance the key aspect here. I have many friends with kids and they always jump at the chance to get a sitter or the in-laws for a break from parenting.

Post-viral syndrome is a thing common to most (all?) viral infections. For example, I got pretty sick in 2014 with some strange illness, maybe it was a bad flu or perhaps mono. Then for the next few months it'd seemingly resurface and cause little flare-ups of fatigue, nausea and a vague malaise. Just as it seemed to be fading I went on a lengthy post-college trip I around Asia where I'd spend multiple days a week feeling completely at ease hiking all day and partying all night but also had completely random days where I swore I felt like I was coming down with a flu and the littlest things would get my heart to race. When I came home the docs said it seemed like some sort of post-viral reaction then it resolved itself shortly thereafter. Covid doesn't seem to have been special other than that it gets tons of scrutiny and everyone got to experience it at once. Sometimes an overactive immune system will react in a counterproductive way and take a long time to get back to baseline, much like an army regiment that never got word that the war is over.

Live in NYC and my wife and I were just commenting on how when we learn about our friends' lives in the suburbs in our home states they really seem to lack a social life. It's like it just dies in your 30s. This seems to be independent of obvious things like having kids, as the parents I know who live here seem to have similarly rich socialize lives to the DINKs I know.

There should be a name for the amnesia people seem to experience for the covid era. For 2 years, more or less, most forms of social activity were frowned upon or (in some states) made outright illegal. I feel strongly that this has affected our collective psyche more than anything since WW2. My sister (10 years my junior) seems to have had an extremely different early-adulthood from me. The lack of reflection on it is strange...

My wife and I are in our mid/late 30s and American and I'd say I we go to a proper party hosted by friends or host one ourselves at least once a month. In a "third place" we probably socialize another 1.5 times a week with friends at places like bars or meeting for dinner. This seems to be the norm around me. What's the difference? We live in NYC. It's very easy for us to get around, there's no drunk-driving and there are of course many opportunities for social activities outside the home. Back in the suburban state I come from I've noticed this is not the norm amongst my friends who still live there.

This just means they're "doing well". Whether or not they're also "doing good" depends on what exactly that company provides to society.

> TLDR in this hypothetical, it's just Xi on an 100 story podium, no one else is even in the building. Unless we eventually credit someone for portable fusion, i.e. 60% of global oil used in transport that can't be displaced at utility scale energy solutions, and one credits Xi for MIC2025/PRCEV/battery then no one will ever even dethrone Xi.

Ehhhh, I'd say he's not in some league of his own. Xi is also industrializing with fossil fuels and China became the planet's largest producer of CO2 under his leadership and he's been outsourcing dirty industries abroad, particularly to Africa. I'd give more credit to people lower-down the totem pole in China, who are leading the charge for clean energy such as Wang Chuanfu, but he's very explicitly following in Elon's footsteps.

It's also a little wild to discount pollution already produced in previously unseen amounts while crediting to them hypothetical future reductions. Last year China had it's highest CO2 emission ever, and even with solar it's possible that their CO2 output will increase.

Nice job. Best answer I've heard. I think Musk is still a better candidate for fighting global warming, as China has also done an enormous amount of polluting, burning of coal, etc. But I'm not really sure how it nets out. It could totally be that Xi's the most culpable for polluting the planet, rather than saving the planet.

A funny thing I like to do with people like this is point out the fact that Elon has perhaps done more than any person in history to get humans off of fossil fuels. And then when they sputter in disagreement I always like to ask who they'd propose instead. If they have any answer at all they inevitably give the name of a person who just demands that someone else do something (e.g. an activist or media figure), never actually someone who has put their time, effort and money into building a better system.

China launched some classified mission just last week which was quite possibly weapons for disabling other satellites.

How is that the second part of the plan?

> they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system

In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.

Related, but has anyone else noticed that Maps has gotten really slow in the past several months? I don't think its just my internet connection. Not sure if Google is throttling it or its getting slammed by AI

If you've ever done an extended fast (at least 36 hours, but ideally 60+) you'll know how rich your senses of smell and taste can be. In something as basic as a baked potato you can taste all sorts of nuances of sweetness, nuttiness and savoriness. Something like a steak explodes with such flavor as to border on a psychedelic experience.

Wait... you mean this was all just a marketing and PR ploy?