pharke

It is but they get cleared out of the equation by f sub c, the fraction of intelligent life that invents high technology capable of interstellar radio transmission.

I've never understood the Von Neumann probe conjecture. Why would anyone design a probe that uses all of the available resources within a system to produce new probes that are sent to the N nearest systems? Surely it's more efficient to use a smaller number of more capable probes than to use a larger number of less capable ones when you consider the fuel mass necessary to get them to the next star. Ideally, you need one foolproof probe that can bootstrap a manufacturing facility in the next system. More likely you would send a few backup probes but you wouldn't send billions of them.

I think multiple Von Neumann probes could have come and gone from our system using little more than a few asteroids and a sip of the Jovian atmosphere.

It's also worth repeating that Von Neumann probes are only useful for information gathering. It would be highly impractical to pre-build all of the colonization infrastructure ahead of time and then mothball it for millions more years while the biologicals caught up, assuming they ever did. So these devices would be limited to scientific exploration or monitoring.

The only thing that I think Star Trek got right about the future is that many people will live in space full time aboard starships. All the planet hopping they do is just to further the plot and provide a familiar backdrop to the audience. Once a species transitions to living in space they will most likely stay there and have little use for planets. Depending on their mastery of fusion or other energy sources they may not even bother hanging around stars anymore. If we want to talk about anthropocentric perspectives the whole concept of visiting other worlds is probably as progressive as vacationing in natural caves, an entertaining novelty done once but never repeated by people who enjoy a roof over their heads, modern conveniences and climate control.

It's a historic railroad bridge that was originally designed to allow the passage of ships. Both its original use and the accommodation afforded by its design show deference to the city's industrial economy. I'd bet 10:1 that if the original designers were around today and you asked them what we should do they'd say "Just remove the middle part, that's why we built it that way" and would have no qualms about it.

I thought the 'commotion' was due to them wanting to demolish it originally.

Others have already commented in a similar manner but I think this is worth driving home since the argument you provide is so typical when it comes to these discussions.

The money spent on the yacht has improved society.

The evidence of such is that the public officials in Rotterdam are willing to temporarily move a bridge so that construction of the yacht can continue within their municipality. They see it as a greater benefit to their society to encourage the construction of such yachts. Oceanco employs 320 people whose salaries are likely taxed at a fairly high rate. They have two shipyards in Rotterdam on which they probably pay significant property tax among other fees. They are a manufacturing business and yachts consist of a huge variety of different materials and finished goods so they will be deeply integrated with the supply chain which means there is a large outflow of cash from them to other businesses. The production of luxury goods has a significant impact on an economy, by their nature they demand the highest quality parts and workmanship. Attracting those materials and skills to a city has many knock-on effects that are beneficial. If you removed the demand for or the option to buy super yachts, Rotterdam and other cities would suffer a loss of jobs, skills, tax income, and probably several other businesses.

It's being framed in terms of nuclear power because the original arguments that led to this situation were also framed in that context. The anti-nuke movement of the last century directly resulted in this situation by preventing the construction of new nuclear power plants and in some cases cancelling existing ones such as the Zwentendorf in Austria[0][1][2]

Those decisions made almost half a century ago were shortsighted, emotional, and led by ideologues lacking the ability or the desire to realize the consequences of their actions which we are now reaping in the form of an energy crisis and an environmental crisis that has become much worse than it need have been.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_Austrian_nuclear_power_re...

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24881697

Available land is not the limiting factor on new cities or communes. Look at the chart in the article and compare the amount of land used for urban development.

Starting a new city or commune is the same as starting a new social media platform, why should I move from my current platform/city to your new one? How do you get your first 1000 subscribers/residents? What do you offer that other places don't already have 10x of? I'm not going to move to your commune/app unless all of my friends and family do too. etc.

Isn't the simple solution to just not engage with comments on social media? Honestly, that's where the problem is aka trolls and partisan bots. Have face to face conversations between scientists and skilled interviewers, the scientist supplies the answers and the interviewer generates the questions and keeps the conversation moving along and interesting for the viewer. Publish the content on social media since that is really the only thing it is good for but don't read the comments. We have specialists in this area already, they're called journalists. All they need to do is make a phone call, set up the interview and record it.

The goal is to harvest heat that is already being wasted by escaping to the environment. They aren't putting an additional load on the system unless they are foregoing insulating the pipes but there are a lot of cases where pipes are not insulated and these devices would be applicable.

They announced that they're dropping that requirement.

Which is why the Quest 2 and Horizons Workrooms can track supported keyboards[0] and the next gen headsets will have full color passthrough. These problems are being recognized and solved as we speak.

[0] https://support.oculus.com/articles/horizon/getting-started-...

This is already possible with the Logitec K830 and the Apple Magic Keyboard

https://uploadvr.com/best-wireless-bluetooth-keyboards-for-m...

> Creating content for these empty rooms is actually a problem as there are no open standards, the tools are complicated, there are lots of hurdles, and a lot of gate keepers with dollar signs in their eyes

I have to disagree, most 3D models can be used in VR. There are millions of assets out there that have been produced for the games industry. Both Unity and Unreal Engine have huge communities with lots of tutorials both official and independent on VR development. OpenXR is an open standard supported by many of the big players.

> The only people that bother with going through the trouble for this so far are game studios.

This is wrong, there are plenty of indie studios and individuals building VR experiences. It's actually the other way around, the big studios want to make games that essentially just have VR bolted on whereas the independents are the ones experimenting with the medium.

> 3D movies

I don't see how 3D movies would be compelling in VR. They are still fixed POV so you'd have to watch them on a screen like any other movie. You wouldn't want to have it replace the feed going to your headset since you'd have to keep your head still or risk disorientation and motion sickness. Netflix and Prime are on Oculus btw.

> IMHO, any content that works in VR should be trivially accessible using a normal 2D screen as well.

I'm sorry but that's not feasible unless you use VR controllers with the display set to your monitor. Even then having to control the look direction with a joystick would be terrible compared to just moving naturally and you'd be lacking the ability to dodge, duck, aim, etc. Sure you could make those actions trigger from button presses but then you've just got a bog standard FPS which is not a good VR experience. VR is a new medium, saying that all VR content should be accessible via 2D is like saying all movies should just be filmed stage productions. It doesn't work. Great VR games make use of the full 6DOF, they have you physically push buttons, throw switches, dodge bullets and swords, punch your enemies, walk across narrow ledges. Having these be real physical movements is a radical difference from tapping buttons on a keyboard or controller. It'll only get better as things like full body tracking and haptics improve and come down in price to the point that they are part of the purchase of a headset.

> there's nothing stopping us from building a metaverse right now

Also disagree, I've played Second Life and other 3D chat programs and they can't hold a candle to VR Chat (and VR Chat is put together with bailing twine and bubblegum so I'm not a big fan of it). Presence is a real thing in VR. Our brains really are that dumb (or that adaptive) where chunky polygons presented stereoscopically with a few other tricks really does make you feel like you're in a room with other people. It's weird but also fun. The VR goggles are necessary for any version of the metaverse to get off the ground.

I don't think that our current media will go away any time soon but I do think that VR is here to stay. 10 years down the road I think most households will have more than 1 VR headset. I think it will probably compliment our current UIs, you can put 2D UIs in VR after all and probably make better use of them by having them laid out in virtual space the same way you arrange things in a physical office. Speaking of offices, I'm pretty sure VR will be the default for work from home folks, at the very least for meetings if not for the whole work day. VR is just better than video calls for talking to people and as time goes on we will have a lot more social VR experiences and there will be a lot of people that exclusively socialize in VR.

Anecdotal, but a lot of people seem to be able to get over their VR motion sickness. I personally did by just playing the janky Rocket Mode in Richie's Plank Experience a lot. Same goes for heights in VR, at first it's terrifying but if you repeatedly expose yourself to it it loses its effect. There's also a story of a VR dev who built a demo to get rid of his motion sickness, it involved just repeatedly dropping his POV from a height and then looping back to the top. Granted, some people will probably never get rid of their motion sickness for whatever reason but I think those will be in the small minority.

Come join the other introvert techies on Helios[0][1] Fair warning, it's still under development and the meetups generally operate on a schedule but that also means it isn't overrun with annoying first time Quest owners. The founders are very active and responsive on Discord.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1047640/Helios/ [1] https://www.helios-vr.com/

Technically, there are methods that would allow you to trace money all the way through the economy.

I don't feel like that addresses the part of the comment I was speaking to:

> "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.

At a minimum, you could create a system that takes the budget and shows a percent breakdown of where your money goes. If you packaged it nicely so that you could understand it at a glance it would go a long way towards what the comment I was responding to was talking about. After looking at my city's budget, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. For my municipality at least, it seems to be a mix of specific and extremely nebulous items. I can see that the fire department purchased several new vehicles and even the type of vehicle but the road works department just lists additions to their "fleet" and the sanitation department just lists "new vehicles". I see items for sidewalk and street repairs along with the name of the street but no indication of how much pavement was repaired or what the breakdown of labor vs materials was. I think knowing all of the details would help the public assist their representatives to correct overages and would be a bulwark against corruption. e.g. If I run a business that sells fasteners and I see that the city government is overpaying by 30% for the bolts they use to put up new street signs I could bid on the contract next time around or maybe tip off the newspaper if it's more like 200% over retail.

It would be helpful if you could just go to a website, enter in a code from your property tax bill and see exactly how every dollar of the taxes you paid were used. This is one of the valid uses of a public ledger I can think of. In my opinion, all tax funded spending should be traceable like this with each transfer recorded and reported to the tax payer.

> the life of such pig would not even begin, which is a good thing

The comment I was responding to said nothing about increasing the quality of life of any living beings. It only asserted that non-existence is a good thing. I made the assumption that they came to that conclusion based on the reasoning that a pig that does not exist cannot suffer. I made the extension that you can also prevent suffering by immediately ending a life. Yes, there is a distinction between failing to breed another generation and immediately killing all members of the current generation but the end result is the same.

In which case it becomes an optimization problem where you have to find the optimal number of living beings to exterminate in order to provide the maximal amount of pleasure for those remaining. Not any better.

It most certainly would matter for hunter gatherers. They hunt and they would be hunting the same prey as the dogs. They are feeding the dogs by giving up some of their potential prey as food whether thats by giving it to the dogs after they kill it or allowing the dogs to kill it and eat it instead of them.

There's a lot of assumptions going on here. Domesticated pigs can live up to 23 years. We'd also need to know if heart failure is a leading cause of death in pigs, if it's not then the heart could be viable long past that age. There are a lot of completely unknown factors like how a xenotransplant will fare in the host body over a long period of time. That's open ended if there are no rejection issues due to gene editing. Also, the person in the article clearly doesn't share your view on death and there are a large number of people out there that agree with him. Their chance at a longer life shouldn't be curtailed by other people's preconceptions.

This line of argument also supports the extermination of all living beings because it prevents all future suffering. Think about that before you use it.

Only if they're made from fabric. Leather gloves would certainly be hand shoes.

Wait, you have outdoor socks to go with the outdoor shoes? What purpose does it serve to change your socks before going outside?

We've been here before, set that graph to show the last 15 years. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/879968

That last part is key, authoritarian countries operate in the same way a criminal or mafia organization does. Any significant trade will have money siphoned out of it through corruption or just outright theft. It doesn't matter who you deal with in the country, the regime will take a cut somehow.

Missed it, thanks. I still take issue with the design. I think over 1000 years the risk is much higher than they imagine.

They forgot the most important part about making a structure last 1000 years: it cannot be made of materials that people would conceivably want to repurpose in times of duress or those materials should be in such a form that it is extremely difficult to remove them from the structure. This is how many historical buildings were lost, they were mined for stone to use in other structures. It's also how many modern buildings get ruined by people looking to sell the copper wiring or pipe, and that's in a politically stable era.

A better strategy would be to build the house from massive blocks of the most common stone in the area. The blocks should be large enough that they would require significant effort to move or demolish. I wouldn't recommend using any metal in the structure of the house at all. Even wood could be conceivably stripped in times of need.

What's worse, inciting widespread discontent with a government that has illegally seized power potentially leading to a violent overthrow of said government or continuing to deal with that government in perpetuity while they abuse their people? In other words, how do you quantify and measure human suffering? Is it better or worse for there to be more acute suffering for less time or somewhat less suffering for a much longer period of time?

It's not an easy choice when human lives hang in the balance. My view is that allowing authoritarians to entrench themselves for years, generations, possibly centuries is by far worse. We know that democracy is a fragile state of affairs. It rarely occurs without a violent overthrow of the elite and often doesn't last very long. Despotism, on the other hand, is common and long lasting because it is unabashed about cowing people through violence, torture, murder, blackmail, and all the other evils you can imagine. If we want to keep our freedom we must continually resist all attempts to take it.