To be fair, we didn’t have these huge spikes in things like CO2 and methane until we started measuring them, so maybe if we stop looking…let’s pass around the paper bags to put our heads into collectively.

There is the analogy of a balloon’s surface where every point moves away from its neighbor, or a better analogy of bread expanding as it is baked, since that’s more three dimensions. The idea is that space is expanding at the atomic level at a certain rate, but it’s so small that it takes an astronomical amount of these atomic increases to be able to measure it (we can’t measure expansion at solar system scales, or even between our galaxy’s stars, as gravity drowns out the effect. But space is so large that over distances like between galaxies, the light that has traveled all that way has had to travel over this expanding so much that we can see a shift in its wavelength. And overall everything is shifting red, so either we in our section of the galaxy are the center, or it’s something that’s common in any part of our universe. One of these is far more likely.

Reddit had simply changed for the worse after ten or so years. Some of the niche subreddits I was in were still okay and not touched by the issues (yet), but I felt that it was for the best to move to other places. The Reddit migration popularized the Fediverse idea (that had been there already), and it made sense to me to decentralize discussions to resist control. For the most part the past few years this has felt more or less like old Reddit, and even previous forums before I found Reddit, because in the end discussion areas are made up of the people posting in them, not the architecture they’re on. It’s the transitions between that are the hardest.

I agree on the point of solving a problem, it’s just a matter of time, skill, and some luck. The biggest problem I see with AI right now is that it’s marketed as something it’s not. Which leads to a lot of the issues we have with “AI” aka LLMs put in places they shouldn’t be. Surprisingly they do manage pretty well a lot of the time, but when they fail it’s really bad. I.e., AI as sold is a remarkable illusion that wow, everyone has bought into even knowing full well it’s not near perfect.

The only thing that will “fix” current AI is true AGI development that would demonstrate the huge difference. AI/LLMs might be part of the path there, I don’t know. It’s not the real solution though, no matter how many small countries worth of energy we burn to generate answers.

I say all this as an active casual experimenter with local LLMs. What they can do, and how they do it is amazing, but I also know what I have and it’s not what I call AI, that term has been tainted again by marketers trying to cash in on ignorance.

My mother’s car, a 1981 or so Dodge Aries K-car. I guess those who went to a driving school got their license from there as well? Back then we just got a short course in high school, drove a few times with the instructor, and then had to go to the DMV with our own car to do the actual test.

It took two times. The first time I had trouble starting the car (because it was a Dodge/Chrysler POS) so that instructor denied me after the third try at cranking it. Of course it rattled 17 year old me. Second time (different place, different instructor) went a lot smoother, only issue was my slamming on brakes for a red light, but that probably helped me rather than running it.

Still not as bad as pulling segments off Usenet to piece together based on faith in a description.

Apparently given his own definition, even Socrates needs to touch grass.

I prefer clover myself.

Yeah, because we dialup users definitely didn’t do all nighters online. At 300 baud. Nope, sure didn’t.

No point in research, we can obviously see that people die in floods. /s

The two arguments against the reasoning that tax burdens are too high are simple questions - who is paying the majority of these taxes, and how efficient are the taxes being used. Once you realize the answers to those questions, saying anything beneficial to the public is too expensive becomes moot. Now if your argument as written means that taxes are unfairly distributed and used for the wrong things and there isn’t anything anyone can do to change that, you already understand my first point and are just resigned to remain oppressed and used.

I don’t think we’re sure what makes it and what doesn’t. Some of the first radio broadcasts were very strong and maybe even directed more, but over time due to competition limits were put on transmission power. Then there’s the question of general direction vs. a directed beam which would have more distance before it gets lost. Lastly, lower bandwidths were used as technology modernized, which would hide more in the background.

But even if the strongest part gets to a planet and lasts for years, what if their time to invent and use radio is still far in the future, or gone in the past and they don’t even look in those frequencies. It could be more a matter of timing than anything else.

I still wait for the darkly humorous joke until it really happens message to us, “Shhhh, they’ll hear you.”

This is the best theory.

They had fair warning. No way they didn’t pick up signals on the way here and still chose to land.

In space I doubt he was able to get enough momentum to kick through a space suit to do much. Which makes the last panel a WTF look.

You mean like using the word “tariff”?

Seems letting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air is geoengineering, so maybe we could form an Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on places doing this large scale.

Oh, we’re back on the “free market” bandwagon now?

Con-Air remake?

Was that country fine with this, or is it a matter of getting the flight there before they realize?

There are different kinds of players in the same game. But I agree that the whole ability to bend districts in any favored direction should be removed. There are impartial ways to determine districts that change over time with the population, but neither side likes them because it’s a loss of control and potential loss of seats for both. The irony is that it would favor the left more, just like changing how we vote would favor that lean, but that gets into the issue of what “left” means in the US vs. reality, and maybe that’s part of the problem as well.

He sounds like Jordan Peterson. How do you define “constitutional”? How do you define “term”? How do you define… oh shut up.

You don’t have to be intelligent to ruin things. Look at Trump.

At least a thinking machine would have a reason for doing what it might do, instead of bumbling along and overshooting any safeguards left. Which given Musk’s attitude, Grok would be the first and last safeguard for everything. So yeah, this is worse than Terminator.