Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
Some people are so addicted to anger that they’ll shoot themselves in the foot just so they’ll have something to complain about.
“The gimp” is a character from Pulp Fiction. You’re imagining things and refusing to use a powerful tool in response to that imagined slight.
Seems like lemmy.ml is really collapsing in on itself. Overall not good for the general health of the fediverse.
I’d argue that a biased overly-centralized instance like that collapsing in on itself is good for the general health of the Fediverse.
there needs to be some kind of accountability/ redress if open & free communities are going to be a long term project.
The redress is having lots of servers to switch to, much like how on Reddit the redress was “start your own subreddit if the one you’re on is moderated poorly.” I can’t imagine any system that would let you “take control” of some other instance without that being ridiculously abusable.
Different countries have a variety of very different approaches to appointing judges, and some of those methods are not nearly as easy to corrupt as the American system.
Americans are subject to a lot of cultural indoctrination about how their system is the “greatest democracy in the world,” “leader of the free world,” and other such platitudes. It’s really not the case, though. America’s system is one of the earliest that’s still around, and unfortunately that means it’s got a lot of problems that have been corrected in democracies that were founded later on but have remained embedded in America’s.
Doesn’t help that America has a somewhat problematic electorate as well.
I mainly use LLMs as a programming assistant, as a brainstorming buddy and creative assistant while working on adventures for the tabletop roleplaying campaigns I run, and as a search result summarizer/interpreter over at Bing for the sorts of generic queries I used to use Google for.
Sometimes peoples’ heads just fall apart.
Well, rarely.
Okay, once. Sheer coincidence that it was such a prominent person and in such a prominent moment. And that Lee Harvey Oswald just happened to be cleaning his gun by that window at the time. But hey, sometimes weird coincidences happen.
I don’t think you’ve thought through the logistics required for the sort of war where you’d just go around and shoot everyone who lives in hundreds of solar systems. Even assuming they do nothing at all to defend themselves, how do you even find them all?
It’s not specifically oxygen that’s linked to life, it’s chemical disequilibrium. Oxygen is highly reactive, there are lots of minerals that will bind it up and there aren’t any natural geological processes that unbind it again in significant quantities. If you put an oxygen atmosphere on a lifeless planet then pretty soon all of the oxygen will be bound up in other compounds - carbon dioxide, silicon oxides, ferric oxides, and so forth. There has to be some process that’s constantly producing oxygen in vast quantities to keep Earth’s atmosphere in the state that it’s in.
There are other chemicals that could also be taken as signs of life, depending on the conditions on a planet. Methane, for example, also has a short lifespan under Earthlike conditions. You may have seen headlines a little while back about the detection of “life signs” on Venus, in that case it was phosphine gas (PH3) that they thought they’d spotted (turns out it may have been a false alarm). These sorts of gasses can be detected in planetary atmospheres at interstellar distances, especially in the case of something like Earth where it’s quite flagrant.
Even if these are sometimes false alarms, in a “Dark Forest” scenario it’d still be worth sending a probe to go and kill whatever planets exhibit signs like that. It’s a lot cheaper and quieter than trying to fight an actual civilization. That’s why I can’t see why we wouldn’t have already been wiped out aeons ago in this scenario.
But that’s not actually true. We’ve been “broadcasting” the fact that there’s life on Earth in the form of the spectrographic signature of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a clear sign that photosynthesis is going on. There’s no geological process that could maintain that much oxygen in the atmosphere. The Great Oxidation Event is when that started.
We have the technology to detect this kind of thing already, at our current level. Any civilization that could reach out and attack another solar system would be able to very easily see it.
Well, “relatively cheaply” is a hard standard to nail down. I would say “no”, though. Antimatter is very expensive to manufacture and store and you’re going to need a lot of it. All of the energy that comes out of an RKV hitting its target has to be put into it in the first place, probably several times over given the inefficiencies likely inherent in the process.
The problem for the Fermi paradox is that there’s no reason to do stuff like that before we start colonizing other solar systems.
Also, how do you destroy a civilization that has a Dyson swarm already? That’s not exactly an easy task, and if you insist on remaining stealthy yourself it’s nigh impossible.
Relativistic missiles. Nothing moves faster than the speed of light. So if you can get a big rock to go 95% of the speed of light, we’d only be able to detect that it’s coming right as it hits.
This is a very common answer to “how”, but it comes with lots of problems in the Dark Forest context.
And ESPECIALLY if your civilization is still mostly planetbound.
Absolutely not guaranteed to be the case. Earth’s civilization could have easily had offworld colonies by now if circumstances had been slightly different, so a Fermi paradox solution that requires reliably blowing up Earthlike civilizations before they can get offworld doesn’t work. They’re already too late.
As I said previously, Earth has been quite obviously life-bearing for at least 2 billion years. Why wait until something like an RKV is needed, and even that is not guaranteed? They could have destroyed life on Earth far easier, and thus far more stealthily, if they’d done it a billion years ago.
How do they do it, though? It’s not really a valid solution unless you can explain how it works, otherwise it’s just “maybe some magic happens that kills civilizations.”
Once a civilization has begun spreading to hundreds of other solar systems I have yet to hear of any plausible way to reliably “kill” it.
I think others wouldn’t bother with us until we started demonstrating likelihood of using dangerous tech or crazy exponential expansion.
Why do you think that, though? It doesn’t make sense, frankly - if you’re worried about competition evolving you shouldn’t wait until the last possible second to destroy it. That raises so many unnecessary risks of being slightly slow on the draw, and then it’s too late. Why not do it at the earliest convenience, when it’s super easy to do by comparison and there’s an incredibly long margin of error if you somehow miss the first couple of tries?
I don’t remember well, but I think civilizations stationed their defensive or offensive tech away from their own civilizations, just dispersed around.
I think its explanation for why no one or anything has colonized the galaxy though is that if anyone shows signs of becoming that strong, they get zapped.
But they’re already doing it, you just said they’re putting outposts out there. If they can’t do that secretly then the Dark Forest doesn’t work in the first place. Placing a secret weapon base in another solar system is no different from placing a colony there.
My real preferred theory of why we don’t see other civilizations though is that I think they choose more inward, VR, computer-based evolution that doesn’t result in big mega structures.
As with many Fermi paradox solutions this one fails on account of requiring every single civilization (and every single subset of those civilizations) to all decide to do exactly the same thing, forever, with no exceptions. In a scenario like this what happens if a single subculture of a single advanced civilization decides for whatever reason that they prefer not to do that? They would be able to spread throughout the cosmos without opposition, everyone else is locked in their little dream boxes and therefore is basically irrelevant. It only needs to happen once, and the universe has been around for a very long time.
We actually spend a great deal of effort preventing it. Environmentalism is a really big thing these days.
But even if we didn’t, it’s not an extinction event for us. Humans are actually doing extremely well.
The “Dark Forest” is fine for a scary sci-fi series, but it has many flaws that make it unrealistic as a real solution to the Fermi paradox.
Unless it’s one of those monkey’s-paw wishes, in which case everyone immediately dies.
One thing that might be nice is if there could be a standard for user IDs that would allow multiple systems to work seamlessly together.
You could have Mastodon continue to focus solely on being a completely open media aggregator and social network, but also have some other completely independent and secure private messaging system that uses the same user ID system. Then if you want to send a private message to someone who’s made a Mastodon post you can use that and it “just works.”
Creating a universal user ID system that would work across all of this is challenging, of course.
One of the important features of Mastodon is that you can choose what your feed is. Everyone’s feed has an algorithm determining what’s in it even if it’s just a simple “list the posts of everyone I’ve subscribed to in chronological order.”
If someone else wants to see a feed of content that is curated and sorted in a different way, why get angry at them? They’re not forcing you to see that feed.
It sounds like they weren’t “being fed into an AI model” as in being used as training material, they were just being evaluated by an AI model. However…
Have you spent more than 4 seconds on Mastodon and noticed their (our?) general attitude towards AI?
Yeah, the general attitude of wild witch-hunts and instant zero-to-11 rage at the slightest mention of it. Doesn’t matter what you’re actually doing with AI, the moment the mob thinks they scent blood the avalanche is rolling.
It sounds like Maven wants to play nice, but if the “general attitude” means that playing nice is impossible why should they even bother to try?
I’m Canadian so I’m not a voter in the contest you’re presenting, but if I were I would vote Democrat. And of the trio you present for the Democrats, I would say that the position I’d compromise on would be gun control. Not because American gun culture isn’t bananas and it’s not a serious problem, but because I can’t see any plausible way to fix it in the short term. So might as well let it go for now and deal with the more important stuff that affects more people.
I think a more reasonable compromise would be to give Republicans most of what they want on immigration reform. That seems to be something they consider to be of critical importance, but that I think can be allowed without it causing significant harm. If the American economy starts to suffer as a result of not having illegal immigrant workers then that will be motivation for further reforms. I think it’s important to have the laws try to reflect the realities, though, and having the economy literally depend on large-scale lack of adherence to the law of the land is a bad place to be. Just make sure not to be monstrous about it - don’t do the concentration-camps-for-children thing, try to maintain basic asylum access for those who truly need it, and so forth.