domain:reddit.com
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
11hr ago
Little one brought me a gift from Kindergarten. Kindergarten gifts are always either one or the other: A cold or a flu. So on the one hand, I was pretty much knocked out and asleep for most of the week. But on the other hand, when I wasn't acutely feeling like snot and headache, I was on my own and nobody bothered me, so I managed to crack open Unreal and poke around a little. Chiefly, I tried to see in how far Unreal's double-precision-by-default nature actually allowed me to create a larger game world without needing to rely on illusions and sleigh of hand.
-
Unreal offers "Landscapes", which are not just heighmaps but come with a bunch of physical and graphical bells and whistles. I made one a few months ago as a backdrop and playground, but it always looked a little ugly, with black lines and patches everywhere. I assumed that this was some z-level issue, or maybe the shaders breaking down because I made the landscape too large. As it turns out, it's the shadows, stupid. The shadows break down at large distances. So, my options are to either not use shadows at all, to enable ray-tracing and multiply the hardware footprint of my project a hundredfold, or to change the shadow settings for my landscape so that shadows look like ass up close but decently alright at a distance. I chose the latter option for now, since the landscape is extremely low-res and you shouldn't be seeing shadows up close a lot anyways.
-
I put a big sphere in the sky and began to move it up and scale it up. I wanted to see whether I could put a moon into the sky at real scale. I didn't get that far. At a few kilometers in size and distance, it began flickering pretty badly. A little experimentation showed that it's reflections that do this. But I'm not sure how to fix it short of disabling reflections altogether. The latter wouldn't be a deal-breaker here; I don't strictly need those reflections, but it's a little annoying that this breaks down so quickly and already requires special treatment as such modest scales.
From the start of the war every single action done in support of Palestine has been claimed to have terrible optics, and in the beginning it worked because sympathies with Israel were still high after october 7th. Recently though, not so much. People have been seeing a steady stream of bombed out and now emaciated children for months. Joe Rogen, Theo Von and even Piers Morgen have turned on Israel recently. The band Kneecap who I might make a separate post about, (but to make it short, they very explicitly hate Israel) have entered the Itunes chart for Brazil, Italy and Germany for the first time.
In the UK a founding member of Conservative friends of Israel recently said in parliament that he regretted his support of the war in Gaza and doesnt think of himself as a "friend" of Israel any more. When I went to work yesterday people were surprised this was the first something like this have happened due to how horrible that war has been, and due to media always highlighting how violent and dangerous Pro-Palestinian activists are.
Israelis know that western populations have rapidly lost sympathies with the Israelis, and this is why propagandist like Hen Mazzig tried to paint the embassy workers as "peace loving" and critical of their government on x. But people could just search up Lischinskys X, which was anything but peace loving. In fact, his last tweet was someone calling the UK antisemitic for demanding more aid enter Gaza. He was also a Trump supporter.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
11hr ago
· Edited 11hr ago
So you're positing that there is a new species which rapidly becomes the largest source of biomass on Earth over the course of a decade or more
No, I'm positing that it does so faster than that. Algal blooms are fast; they're just limited by nutrients to small areas. Here, the entire ocean can support a max-density algal bloom.
And no, this wouldn't permanently wipe out the biosphere. Life would survive and eventually recover, because even without something evolving to eat it (and it would, although it'd likely take a while), it probably wipes itself out from lack of carbon and/or the oceans freezing over and eventually the dead algae on the seafloor get subducted, incinerated, and re-released as CO2 via volcanoes (and there are quite a lot of reservoirs of life that are shielded from "oh noes the CO2 is gone" on quite-long timescales). As noted, this probably wouldn't even be enough to wipe out humanity by itself (because we could build closed biospheres not subject to being leeched, and top up whatever leaks did occur with coal-burning power stations) - we'd lose most of humanity because we wouldn't remotely be able to build enough fast enough to support the current population, but we wouldn't quite be wiped out absent further disruption (e.g. chaos from all the starving mobs preventing/destroying the closed biospheres, industrial collapse leading to being unable to do maintenance, or killer robots showing up).
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
11hr ago
Airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_airstrike_on_the_Iranian_consulate_in_Damascus
rudig
12hr ago
rudig
12hr ago
Well I think OP means that the US have chosen to ally itself with Israel, a country that routinely does these kind of actions in other countries (including western allied ones). Im sure DC spends big amounts of money on security for the Israeli embassy, but there will always be some lone wolf willing to throw away their life and thats why these low level staffers got targeted.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
Well, I got myself into a bit of a pickle. To avoid paralysis by analysis, I powered through with just coding until I have something working, and figured I'd optimize later, which is what I've been doing for the last few weeks.
I managed to get te number of mysql queries from absolutely insane to merely retarded, but I have to keep chipping away at it. My tinkering time was pretty limited, so I didn't get very far.
How are you doing @Southkraut?
Pigeon
coo coo
12hr ago
The one time I (was confirmed to have) got it I was pretty miserable with a few days of quite painful laryngitis that made swallowing difficult. It kinda sucked, wouldn't recommend
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12hr ago
Agreed. But unfortunately...
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
13hr ago
-
I have actually spent years learning biochem and have a minor degree of fame under my real name due to my precociousness in doing so. Biochem is not a spook and understanding of it is actually meaningful. It is... irritating to have some random just go "nuh-uh". If I could give you the kind of feel for biochem that would lead you to see all of this as obvious I would; I already gave you the quick rundown and you dismissed it.
-
I think the policy of "ignore all dangers until they've happened at least once" is not a very good one even for normal dangers, and is practically a reductio ad absurdum in the case of apocalyptic dangers (because apocalyptic dangers kill off humanity, thus being impossible to look back on, it reduces to "ignore all apocalyptic dangers", which if any of them are real means you sleepwalk into them).
-
A good-faith survey of the current world basically rules out interventionist deities being active on Earth. Deism is quite plausible (note the identity of deism with the simulation hypothesis), but while it is plausible that such a creator might judge us after death, there is basically no way to tell what the grading rubric actually is. Maybe it's the Christian God. Maybe it's Allah who'll smite me for idolatry if I think Jesus is divine. Maybe God's a social justice warrior. Maybe God agrees with Jack LaSota. Maybe God is testing for ability to act rationally about X-risk. I dunno, and for the most part the big question mark cancels out to "this shouldn't affect how I live my life" (because for every rubric there's an anti-rubric which cancels it out; this is the problem with Pascal's Wager if you aren't privileging the "Christian God" hypothesis, because there might also be an anti-Christian-God who punishes Christians).
cjet79
13hr ago
America dodged a bullet when Trump dodged one.
Don't think any other event in my lifetime has been so close to setting off a civil war.
I know at least two men that are a combination of drunk, belligerent, massive Trump supporters, and in possession of enough firearms that they could have easily turned into a problem. The problem is that I don't know tons of country rednecks, maybe a dozen. So that is probably a bad sign of just how fucked things might have gotten.
Their goal wouldn't have been taking control of the government, it would have been shooting the politicians they didn't like.
At best it wouldn't have been a civil war, just a decade or two of people deciding it's ok to shoot politicians they don't like and all the impacts of that norm.
By comparison we are fine nowadays. There is always going to be a low background noise if violence and murder in a country this size. Certainly sucks when it's you or someone you know that is the victim. But as long as you are staying out of certain cities and areas you are unlikely to be that victim.
What sets off ugly civil wars is being forced to choose sides. "Help me find the rebels or I torture you until I'm satisfied you don't know" vs "Help me hide from the government or my friends come back and kill you and your family". It doesn't start that bad, just a case of ping ponging escalating consequences.
TowardsPanna
13hr ago
Yeah, that type of thing.
There's no panic, but it seems like poor "opsec" to have thousands of opinions over the years tied to one username and potentially my real name.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
13hr ago
The Ukraine war went from being sexy urban warfare 'Hordes of migrants, tanks built up in front of Kyiv, hot women crying and destroyed cities' to more conventional unsexy warfare in the woods.
The cities are still being destroyed, it's just that instead of engaging in stupid sexy urban warfare Russia's reducing them to rubble first.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13hr ago
Regardless of the reasons why OP prefers Wuhan Flu, I still don't think it's a bad name. It came from Wuhan, and while it's not an actual flu, 95% of the time you can't tell the difference without testing.
I'm quite confident that if it had, for some reason or the other, it had taken over instead it COVID, it really wouldn't have taken much of a PR push to explain the differences versus standard influenza. If governments were able to convince people to stay indoors for months and to wear masks even longer, then it's hot a big ask to have them inform people that the standard flu shot isn't the right vaccine. Let's not even get into the wacky treatments tried despite the unique name.
I just don't think the name mattered all that much.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13hr ago
Which embassy did they bomb? And when? I’ve just did some cursory Googling but I didn’t turn up anything.
A somewhat interesting Orson Scott Card (cowritten) book on a hypothetical civil war had some ideas (but is mostly just a thriller, notable for (major plot spoiler) >!the main character dying halfway and replaced by a promoted side character!<). Basically the President and VP were assassinated (using leaked military red team plans intended to strengthen security - a mortar team and a dump truck into a limo respectively), followed by a revolt in a few densely populated cities essentially led by a high tech private militia backed by a super billionaire or two. It doesn’t end up working, really. Although at the end they pull a “it was a plot all along” by some other cabinet member to take power and become a strongman after elected President. It’s not entirely convincing that the military would actually be infiltrated as much as it was, or the militia grow that powerful without a check, but the core idea of a motivated billionaire with at least some demographic support seems more likely as a civil war case than some of the other ideas I’ve seen. I guess I could see a state national guard get into a minor standoff or skirmish, but hard to see that ballooning. Either way, I agree that civil war concerns are like, 3 decades too soon at the minimum.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
13hr ago
I mean, yeah, obviously the solution to AI risk is to not build hostile superhuman AI. Just pointing it out.
@RandomRanger I figure this does double duty as a reply to you.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
13hr ago
I agree that shutting GoF down would be good, and also that COVID was very far from the upper end of the badness scale.
But I have to be contrary here.
an incompatible-biochemistry alga with reduced need for phosphate and a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO Release this, it blooms like crazy across the whole face of the ocean (not limited to upwelling zones; natural algae need the dissolved phosphate in those, but CHON can be gotten from water + air), zooplankton don't bloom to eat it because of incompatible biochemistry, CO2 levels drop to near-zero because of better carbon fixation, all open-air crops fail + Snowball Earth. Humanity would probably survive for a bit, but >99% of humans die pretty quickly - and of course the AI that did it is possibly still out there, so focussing only on subsistence plausibly gets you knocked over by killer robots a few years later.
All of the algae in the world, combined, pull down a total of about 2e14 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. The atmosphere as a whole has 2e15 kg of CO2. All living things on Earth, combined, contain about 5e14 kg of carbon. So you're positing that there is a new species which rapidly becomes the largest source of biomass on Earth over the course of a decade or more (probably much more, carbon capture gets harder as co2 concentration decreases), and during that time, nothing natural or engineered figures out how to eat it.
I don't buy it. I think using a biological agent to permanently wipe out the biosphere is a much harder problem than either "kill all humans" or "wipe out the biosphere by any means possible, including but not limited to Very Large Rock Dropped From Very High Up™".
FtttG
14hr ago
You're absolutely right. I noted in another comment that, during the period, Sweden had fewer excess deaths per capita than the EU average.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14hr ago
In Russia, Yeltsin shelled Parliament with tanks during a massive economic depression killing over 100, with a an unstable new government. No civil war. The military obeyed Yeltsin.
Also in Russia there was the Prigozhin failed coup, still no civil war. The military obeyed Putin.
Either Russia is an inherently stable country (unlikely) or it's just very hard for an urbanized, industrialized, well-developed country to have a civil war.
I think the US would need a massive military defeat and an economic depression for a civil war. Maybe, maybe Trump's assassination attempt succeeding would be enough but I doubt it. Civil war needs more than just discontent, it needs parity between the sides. If they blew Trump away then, it'd be a pretty convincing deep state victory: no civil war just a smooth continuation/consolidation.
ulyssessword
14hr ago
Your tone sounds like it's dismissing the concerns, but your claims are the furthest thing possible from reassuring.
Who's funding terrorists on American soil? How can the US claim to protect their allies when it can't even protect their staff? Who would want this outcome (okay, that's kind of a long list)?
A "reassuring" way for embassy staff to be shot dead is random crossfire from an unrelated crime. State-sponsored assassination or terrorism is the worst scenario.
HalloweenSnarry
14hr ago
But at the same time, is it not true that the fighters of the Syrian Civil War were an utter minority compared to the total population of the country? And yet now the old government is gone and the country may well be in utter chaos that dwarfs the civil war.
What I'm saying is, don't discount the potential of the left in inciting a civil war, the critical mass needed for a social breakdown may be smaller than you assume.
functor
14hr ago
Israel bombed an embassy a few months ago and has a long history of fighting dirty. They shouldn't be surprised that they get the same treatment back. The expectation can't be that they can finance terrorism, assassinate people, and bomb embassies and then not get the same back.
GBRK
14hr ago
They have such little force projection that even terrorism would likely be kept within Democrat strongholds.
It's worth remembering that from the democratic perspective, they only actually need to control the democratic strongholds. That's where the preponderance of the nation's money and services are generated. Primary and manufactured goods are a different matter, but between the coasts, border with mexico, and great lakes, leftists can plausibly trade for those.
The federal government derives the legitimacy it uses to bolster its tax-collecting authority from being broadly popular in blue areas. If that stops being the case, blue areas can still ensure that their citizens receive welfare and medical care, but red areas can't ensure that blue areas will contribute to their economies or enforce their morality. The sanctuary city stuff is a clear-cut example of that. Blue areas wanted a cheap labor force, so they got one, regardless of red areas thought about being undercut.
Would that also hold true for only children?
More options
Context Copy link