If I wanna get my propaganda from more than one world power, that’s my right under the first amendment. Or it was.

Yeah, elements heavier than iron, like uranium, only form in supernovas at the end of a star’s lifespan. So, arguably still solar energy, just not our solar energy.

Isn’t wind caused by a combination of heat from the sun and the spinning of the planet? I think we’d have to cover a bonkers amount land with turbines before we saw an appreciable increase in stagnant air.

I miss the behind the scenes footage

I mean, there’s no reason it can’t be bundled with shows on the streaming platforms, but they just don’t

Have yet to see anything outside of DS9 use Section 31 well. It’s inclusion manages to turn what’s supposed to be a hopeful story of the future into just another police procedural that happens to use Star Trek™ branded props

to say nothing of Star Trek IV

“Double dumbass on you!”

…what. They’re everyone’s largest trading partner, why would they do that?

Personally, it seems more likely to me that he never expected to get away with it for as long as he did, didn’t really have a plan beyond getting out of NYC, and went to that McDonald’s to get caught.

Maybe I’m wrong, that’s completely possible. But… I dunno… a lot of eyes are on this case. It would be very very dumb of the cops to manufacture a suspect with all the attention on this. Maybe they are that dumb…

I can’t say I disagree. The tendency to outright dismiss christianity online is understandable, but a little frustrating. Even with that horrifying core, a lot of people find solace in it. For many, it’s the only semblence of community that’s lasted into the 21st century.

On another level, it’s just plain interesting the sorts of stories people felt needed to be preserved. It speaks to how they lived and what they valued. A lot has changed, and a lot hasn’t. That kind of narrative window into the past is valuable, and I’m glad I grew up with it, even if I don’t consider myself Christian anymore.

McDonalds canned their automated ordering experiment, and that was across 100 stores and lasted several years.

I am not convinced this replaces labor. Like any advancement in hardware or software, it can expand the efficiency of labor. But you still need people to do work. People who own things for a living would really really like that not to be the case - their interest in this is not rational decision-making, but deluded optimism.

that’s how you teach them to highlight and copy/paste text

It’s interesting that that relationship changes, isn’t it? Like, early on God is the sort of deity to turn you into salt or flood the world if He’s displeased. And over time, He does that sort of spiteful intervention less and less. It’s hard not to see it as Him getting wiser and more compassionate. But… if He’s all powerful and all knowing to begin with, why does His approach to people change?

A few years ago, didn’t the British prime minister threaten to cut Ukraine out of economic relations if Zelenskyy negotiated with Russia? Kinda seams like that’s already happened.

It was just one line of dialog, but the sequel did mention that the company is expanding from just resource extraction to selling settlements to the wealthiest who are fleeing a dying earth

kinda depends on your definition of politics

the one I heard that I think is the most useful is, On the broadest level, Politics is how societies decide how and where resources are distributed

by that definition, healthcare can only be a political question, cus no matter how you set it up, you’ve made a decision about how it’s staffed and funded, who it caters to and what its goals are

gotta agree

nicotine is more addictive than cocaine, I’d never touch the stuff

but gun to my head? I’d take a cig over a vape any day. looks soo much better

I think there’s a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It… kinda makes sense… superficially, there’s some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.

In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn’t actually make sense? Doesn’t harm anyone, right? Except…

…except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They’ll tell you it’s only a few short decades away! And I think that’s cus they don’t see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it’s happened once - so it must happen again right??? They don’t see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don’t think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we’ll need rocketships. Now that they’ve got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.

I think labeling things made by AI is a reasonable request. In this specific example, someone who’s buying 4K Wallace & Gromit is doing so out of a love of claymation and Aardman’s work in it. They want it in high definition specifically to see the details that went into a handcrafted set and characters. Getting a smoothed over statistical average, when you payed for it expecting the highest quality archive on an artistic work, would be more frustrating than just seeing it in lower definition.

More generally, don’t people working with these models also want AI output to be properly labeled? As I understand it, the model starts to degrade when its output is fed back into itself. With the rapid proliferation of AI posting, I’ve heard you can’t even make large language models with the same level of quality as you could before it was released to the general public.

I’m also kinda skeptical that this stuff has as many applications as are being touted. Like, I’ve seen some interesting stuff for folding proteins or doing statistical analysis of particle physics, but outside highly technical applications… kinda seems like a solution in search of a problem. It’s something investors really really like for their stock evaluations, but I just don’t see it doing much for actual workers. At most, maybe it eliminates some middle-management email jobs.

kinda sucks to be less free than the fucking geese

I guess you can draw that comparison, but then human territories are exponentially bigger than anything an equivalent social animal might claim as “enter at your risk” area. A traveling pack of dogs can just go around another pack’s territory. We can’t do that, we’re boxed in. There’s no neutral space left. I guess you could argue there’s international waters, but that’s practically inaccessible to most people.