Back when computers were nowhere near capable of teaching kids, one can handwave away issues with the tech by saying “when the tech is ready to do this, it will be great” essentially. When the tech is at the point where it can sort of do something, but not do it well, one instead imagines how badly things might go if one tried the notion right now instead of at whatever point in the future the technology is good enough to actually do a good job.

I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.

Iirc the Russian casualty rate was supposedly on the order of 1000 a day recently, so probably implying the former.

The first bit of that is exactly what I was trying to say, indeed almost exactly the same as an example I considered giving but didn’t to avoid extra length, so we’re in agreement there.

The second, though, I think misses that there is a distinction between physical possibility and practical ability. In theory, it breaks no physical laws for me to become richer than Jeff Bezos by the end of next year. In practice, though, the fact that most pathways to achieving that level of wealth, especially quickly, involve a whole lot of luck on very low likelihood (but not impossible events), means that there is probably no sequence of actions that I can actively decide to take that stand any reasonable chance of me achieving it. There are technically sequences like “buy a lot of winning lottery tickets in a row” that might do it, but because they rely on abilities I don’t have (like knowing which tickets win in advance), I can’t actually attempt to take those paths.

Maybe, I suspect we’re just disagree on semantics without much meaningful difference, but I guess a simpler way of putting what I was saying is more “if you think that the “means” aren’t justified by the “ends” when all is said and done, then you haven’t actually achieved the “ends” at all, so if they would have been a good thing or not is now a moot point.”

I’ve always thought arguments about “do the ends justify the means”, or the somewhat rarer reverse form of “is x the right thing to do regardless of the consequences it has”, to be a bit of a false distinction. The means are part of the ends, and achieving some goal is the entire reason to take or not take any action. If you wish to achieve a certain end state, whatever state you end up with in the attempt includes the consequences of whatever you did to get there. If those consequences result in an end state that you find undesirable, then it doesn’t mean that your desired end state is actually bad, it means that what you desired is unachievable via that path. If you can’t find an end state that is likely to equal what you desire once those consequences are included in it, then it may just be that what you want is something that you are unable to achieve.

I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.

Ive been varying my drawings a bit recently, but I mostly draw vore (not very well, but still), its a bit of a meme in that community that vore artists draw mouths and teeth with more detail than the rest of a character even without meaning to

why doesnt it make sense for a natural system? What do you expect a natural system to look like? As far as I can imagine, a universe that can be observed must display some consistent sent of mathematical rules (because any universe that did not, would be too chaotic to allow an ordered system like life to exist within it, and therefore all observers will find themselves existing within the limited ones), and a simulation is itself just executing a bunch of mathematical rules, and so any universe you can exist in will appear indistinguishable from a simulated one from the inside (unless the simulators do something specifically to reveal it).

for me that would be the teeth, considering what I draw. That being said, the stuff I actually show family tends to be things like fish, that dont really have anything like that to notice

This is why I keep one or two “normal” drawings saved to my phone

Did the judge actually determine it, or did the judge just relay information given to them by someone else?

I am genuinely surprised Europe has so few, given how much I’ve seen Eurofurence mentioned on my social timelines whenever that one approaches. I suppose that’s the only European one I really hear about, but still, the impression I got was that there were a fair few people in Europe that would go to one.

I’m not really convinced that this would change their behavior much tbh, given that corporations are already prone to sacrificing their own financial future for short term profit increases, despite existing for nothing but financial gain.

Step 1: create a new instance of some platform, so as to be able to repost without moderation issues

Step 2: set up bot to repost 8 billion times

Step 3: Rawr!

This must be what that one cop was afraid of

I have, that was how I heard about them in the first place actually

I’ll believe it when they actually generate net electricity output. I don’t necessarily think they’re a scam per se, but given the relative resources available and difficulty even for international projects to get fusion power working, I don’t suspect their efforts will be successful. Would love to be proven wrong of course, or if not for their work to at least contribute useful progress to the effort.

Funnily enough, in an actual coincidence, Hitler himself also had a nephew (well half-nephew, but still) who hated and wrote about him (to the point of joining the US military while it was at war with his uncle, even).

And here I thought it was ironic mimicry of a boomer humor “wife bad” post.