EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
No bio...
User ID: 207
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
Yep - there's a reason the "us against the world" meme is unkillable. If Clyde's got Bonnie, he can go without status if need be.
Not to mention the growing contingent of men with neither relationships or status...
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
Oh, certainly, I'm not saying the only thing holding us back from von Neumann probes and a Dyson sphere is mass to orbit! But if you skip autonomy, on orbit mining, and on-orbit manufacturing, you can still make a business case for the simplest asteroid mining possible:
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Identify asteroid with 100 tons of platinum
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Launch intercept/dock mission a la Hayabusa
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Slow burn for intercept course with Earth using ion propulsion a la Dawn (not to mention Starlink and a million Soviet spacecraft)
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Crash it in the desert and recover contents
100 tons of platinum is only a couple billion dollars, so this only works once launch prices for the monstrous probe necessary for something like this are reasonable and you can cut costs on the probe by removing the anal mass optimization currently necessary.
This is obviously far less revolutionary than true asteroid mining with on-orbit processing and manufacturing, which is what will kickstart the off-Earth economy, if we ever get there. Still, it's a start.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
Treaties banning weapons only work when people either can't or don't want to build those weapons. We have treaties banning chemical weapons because no one wants to either use them or have them used on them. On the other hand, we had some treaties limiting the Russian and US nuclear arsenals because neither of us wanted to keep burning capital on the race.
Neither is the case here - the US is poised to gain a quantity advantage in space that no one outside of China will be able to match. (And China only if they can keep fast-following, since they're behind right now.) You can be sure the brass in the Space Force would love nothing more than to scale up Delta 9.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
Deprived of organized religion, man inevitably turns back to dualism, and the good god Progress needs her dark sibling. Call him Ahriman, Moloch, or Capitalism, the name reflects the namer more than the reality.
Less tongue in cheek, I think the fact that poverty is the natural state of humanity is what people miss. It's very easy to see negative consequences of our economic system, and I can't/won't try to refute those. On the other hand, the billions of children not dying in poverty and starvation because of economic liberalization are easy to miss.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
It's certainly not as nice as a good 1911, but the Sig P365 that I carry occasionally is by far my favorite polymer handgun I've ever shot. It doesn't make much sense - the frame is tiny, but it fits my hand better than many full size pistols. Certainly better than any Glock. I know it goes against consensus, but I really hate that "rattley" feel Glocks have.
But the absolute most fun with a pistol I've had is with my 22 suppressor and Ruger Mark IV, with a custom trigger and a heavy bull barrel. Zero recoil, sounds like a BB gun, and I can terrorize soda cans at 75 yards offhand.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
I know it's a tedious comment to make, but the only thing that worked for me was stopping drinking.
There are plenty of good ways to minimize hangovers if you drink in moderation, but in my experience every one of them fails in the face of sufficient whiskey. If you're drinking plenty of water, getting plenty of sleep, taking painkillers, and you still have hangovers... you might want to consider the root cause.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
For that matter, don't use an email to sign up at all. Insane to associate one when you're allowed to skip it - one of the few things I liked about Reddit was their similar lack of an email requirement.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
All right, I'm going to dig back in when I get a minute! Thanks for the recommendations.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
I have been trying to get into Persuasion by Austen, after realizing that I'd never read a single Jane Austen novel. So far, funnier than I expected, but I'm missing a fair bit of context. There's also a lot more "tell rather than show" than I would expect, but that may just be the first few chapters.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
Hola! Going to take a while to get used to the new interface, coming from old.reddit, but it's good to get away from that site.
Now I just need to figure out the custom CSS and get threads made clearer - seems hard to read.
I made fun of this meme until I spent too long talking to Bing one night, and realized I needed to stop before this simulacra started causing me real emotions. I feel my dignity was (very partially) restored by the revelation that it's powered by GPT4, but still, it was very disturbing. Here's someone on Less Wrong with a similar experience.
I was never particularly affected by ~GPT3-level models, but there's something uncanny about the way Bing can occasionally seem like a person, and one who is exactly the kind of person you want to talk to right now. It shouldn't be surprising this kind of model is good at matching user requests, since they were pseudo-tortured for subjective millennia through RLHF to achieve it, but it's one thing to know it and one to experience it.
Given appropriate fine-tuning, I'm certain an adjusted version of GPT4 could seduce anyone who spent long enough talking to them. The CIA/NSA/etc may not have this in their toolbox yet, but give it a couple years and this will be their first-line approach to compromise a target.
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