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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 22nd, 2024

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  • So if someone made a photoshop of him in blackface with racist iconography and he didn’t like it you’d post it everywhere? ‘Look at putin depicted as a disgusting stupid black guy! It sure is humiliating for him to be associated with terrible things like black people!’

    And yes I know it’s tempting to write off things like this with ‘it’s not complex bro, I just do what I feel like and it’s OK because in my heart it’s a progressive act of kindness!’ but life isn’t so simple, actions have unintended and unconsidered implications.

    There’s so many reasons to laugh at putin, even if he was gay it wouldn’t be one of them. Assume the story that this upsets putin didn’t exist as a meme (which btw is likely nonsense anyway) what would be the point of this image? What would it convey? Just homophobia.







  • This is a fascinating one.

    Some things to consider, a toddler can easily defeat a baby but a 40 and 45 year old are evenly matched. There’s also the question of how much is there to learn, at some point the tech tree is pretty much done - iron is much stronger than brass but maybe light-speed heavy plasma guns are pretty much maxed out and physics simply doesn’t allow more.

    This could result in interesting stalemates, a natural limit to the size of conflicts for example if it’s possible to maintain a defensive sphere that can withstand the maximum level of abuse that a circle of attackers can provide - any weapons platform too far back being unable to increase the force applied. We might get technologically perfect civilizations effectively combined to bubbles of influence around their power sources.

    What is possible is that at a certain level of tech we discover how to tap into the universal internet, aliens give us the rest of the answers to physics and philosophy then show us how to build VR gear so we can explore the cosmos in perfect VR and no one ever needs to build Dyson spheres or hyperwarp megastructures because we can do anything with a dark matter powered computanium smart phone.



  • It doesn’t have to be storage, another option is building over capacity so it’s winter output is sufficient then using the excess in summer months to perform useful work.

    For example a desalination and pumping station at the mouth of the Arizona River, you can scale the pumping from a storage lake by the desalination plant to one or more of the upriver lakes raising their water levels to replace the water used for industry and agricultural.

    Carbon capture and manufacture of e-fuels or similar is another great possibility, it can be scaled with energy production vastly reducing the cost of the process and allowing further transition from oil in areas which might otherwise be difficult.

    E-chems are important because there’s a few things which are vitally important to modern industry but currently produced fairly cheep as an oil by-product, if demand for oil derived fuel declines as we hope and production falls dramatically then the price of those chemicals would skyrocket - being able to transition into using sequestered carbon would save a lot of difficulty, and if it helps create a market for sequestered carbon it could help us start bring atmospheric co2 ppm down slowly.




  • When I was a kid people said the same about typing, homework has to be handwrittena because no boss will ever accept a typed report.

    We had the same when media studies became a lesson, everyone freaking out that kids learning to watch TV is stupid but of course that’s not what they’re getting taught - media literacy turned our to be a hugely important subject even for those that don’t go on to work in the huge and ever growing media sector.

    Teaching kids to use AI tools effectively is the same, you hear it and imagine ‘they put homework prompt into chatGPT and hand in the output’ it’s the same as imagining media studies as being nothing more than watching TV. AI is going to be an ever more present and useful tool in our lives so kids need to learn how to leverage and utilize it or they’ll be at a huge disadvantage.

    You can’t hold back time by denying your kid a full education, they need to know how to effectively use the tools everyone else will be using.