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cynar ,

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won't need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don't do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

cynar ,

HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

cynar ,

Edge of tomorrow.

A remarkably good film, considering how badly it was advertised.

What do you think the Great Filter is?

The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi...

cynar ,

I don't think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to "specialised generalists" would be a major hurdle.

Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.

Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.

I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.

cynar ,

Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.

A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn't just luck out with the moon's large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.

cynar ,

Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren't actually that bad.

The problem is, we can't detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won't recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.

cynar ,

The key point is that LLMs don't process information, as we see it. The knowledge they have is predigested, and embedded into the text they were trained on.

Don't get me wrong, they are a big step towards a true AI, but they cannot do some things that seem fundamental to intelligence. The best analogy is that they are a lobotomized speech centre. They can put on a veneer of being intelligent and self aware, but it's a veneer.

I personally suspect they will be a critical component to a future AI, but are a dead end path on their own.

cynar ,

Screw thanking aliens, it's an incredible team of engineers that have the skills and dedication to do what seems impossible. This was 100% humanity at its best.

They rebuilt the most critical core code on a near antique spacecraft that has effectively left the solar system over an equally ancient radio link. They had 1 shot, and nailed it.

cynar ,

The consensus in the trans community is to let a potential partner know earlier, rather than later. It avoids the situation you've encountered. Some men also can react violently, when they find out, so it's quite a critical dilemma to them.

Unfortunately, not all follow that mindset. They also tend to bust out a lot, and so lead a lot of men on.

It's a bit like the scumbag dilemma women face. Very few men are scumbags, yet women encounter them regularly when dating. Most men try not to annoy the women they find attractive. They are careful in their approach mentality. This means they only make a few approaches (relatively). They also tend to pair off, and so exit the pool. Scumbags cast a wide net, and don't hang on to women for long. This means they make a LOT of approaches, and so annoy a vastly disproportionate number of women.

Basically most trans people try to be as polite and careful about it as possible. A few, unfortunately, can destroy the reputation of the rest by being scumbags about it, at least locally.

cynar ,

My phone autocorrect has been ducking annoying recently.

Thanks for the heads up.

New warp drive concept does twist space, doesn’t move us very fast ( arstechnica.com )

The researchers did indeed discover a warp drive solution: a method of manipulating space so that travelers can move without accelerating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the physicality of this warp drive does come with a major caveat: the vessel and passengers can never travel faster than light. Also...

cynar ,

I strongly suspect all solutions will either be invalid, or be limited to the speed of light.

The universe seems to have a lot of weird quirks (the speed of light being 1) what they have in common is that they make time paradoxes impossible. This points to some deeper physics causing these disparate effects. Anything travelling faster than C can be configured as a time machine, and so create paradoxes.

cynar ,

That also raises the question of how many of Russia's nukes are still viable, and how many of their ICBMs will work properly. There is also the factor of how effective the anti ICBM system that America explicitly does not have in orbit would be. 🤔

cynar ,

In the karate kid film, the sensi has him waxing a car. He complains that it is useless make-work. A bit later on, he gets into a fight. The waz-on-wax-off motion was actually a block to a punch in the face. The constant practice trained muscle memory, and power, allowing him to implement it perfectly.

In short, it's an apparently useless practice, that trains a useful skill better than direct practice.

cynar ,

It's horrifying that RA2 is almost a 1/4 century old.

cynar ,

I've got both pathways in my brain. Thinking without words is definitely faster. Verbal thought is better for communication and crystallisation of ideas. I.e. I think about something non-verbally, then internally verbalise the conclusions to help fix it in my memory and communicate it.

cynar ,

Not op, but I have a very weak ability to visualise. The data is more abstracted. A map is a set of spacial connections that define an area. My brain has learnt to pull that from a map. What I can't do is recall the map to figure out additional information. If my brain didn't think it was relevant when I looked at it, the information is likely gone.

There are definitely pros and cons to it. I'm not limited to what I could visualise, when thinking. This lets me dig deeper into more complex ideas and patterns. It also makes other tasks a lot harder. I struggle a lot with faces and appearances.

As for the dogs, I have an abstracted "model" in my mind. The size and breed of the dogs is undefined. There are 2 dog entities in my mind. 1 brown, which is quite generic, the other has pink attached to it, that cross links it with poodles etc.

I can personally push it to a visualisation, but it takes significant mental effort, and the results are unstable.

cynar ,

I also don't get dog breeds, just amorphous and blurry blobs with rorsarch like colors slapped on them.

That's akin to what I get. The core structure is there, but it's almost a sense of what should be there. It's akin to seeing things out of the corner of your eye, while overtired. Your brain tells you what it is, and you accept it, it doesn't necessarily match what you are actually 'seeing'.

I 'know' how dogs move, I 'know' their body structure. I can force that down to a single image, but it wants to be so much more. All the senses of 'dogness' compressed into a single entity.

cynar ,

It's spacially based. It makes more sense in 3D. It's just as compatible with echolocation as visual data. (The soundscape of a room tells you a LOT about your surroundings). I believe it's based within my visual system, just stripped of the superfluous visualisations. Interestingly, I can actually map mathematics into the same structures.

I'm doing a piss poor job of explaining it. Language lacks the nuance to describe it well, and I lack the skill to bend it into shape.

cynar ,

I can remember it fairly quickly. My spacial sense is particularly good. I can easily get a sense of negative space (hidden rooms etc) as well as good predictive skills. My personal problem is when maps get large or don't overlap. It's either mapped well, or not. It can take me a while to join up multiple smaller sub maps in my mind. (Think office or stadium sized spaces).

cynar ,

It makes a lot more sense in the earlier versions of chess. The queen used to be the "Vizier". The sultan made the decisions, the Vizier ran around and implemented them.

cynar ,

I think the key difference is that it's "easier" to apply a meta to a RTS game. In shooters, the meta often involves quick reflex decisions, where to hide, where to shoot etc. This is hard, and requires practice. It also means there is a significant number of players not applying it, or doing so sub-optimally.

With RTS games, the metas are easier to apply. This means that, in human Vs human games, the newer players often get flattened. It also means that far more complex metas can be developed and applied.

Shooters tend to back load the difficulty curve. It's easy to get into them, and not do badly, but hard to do well. RTS games tend to front load the difficulty. You need to get over the initial hump to get "ok" with it. Once over the hump, the curve smooths off and you get good fairly rapidly.

One of the big differences between nerds and normals is that nerds enjoy punching through that wall. The difficulty is seen as a challenge, not an impediment. Most people want a faster feedback loop on the dopamine reward. FPS type games deliver that extremely well.

cynar ,

I've seen them done well in airports. They have additional extraction and filtering. They are also kept at a negative pressure, so the smoke doesn't roll out whenever someone opens the door.

I've no issues with what people want to put into their bodies. I only take offence when others are forced to be exposed to it.

cynar ,

I'd definitely be the annoying shit on that one. I would insist on proper PPE for the environment. If the smokers in the team want to handle it without PPE, that's entirely on them.

It's also worth noting the smoking rooms are effectively empty, except for lights and some seats. Most staff can avoid it entirely.

cynar ,

Take a look at some of the taxidermy at the time. It's horrifyingly bad. Then again modern amateur taxidermy can be as bad as well.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/hilariously-bad-lion-taxidermy

cynar ,

There will be.

Colliders work best at specific speeds, like gears on a car. The big collider is fed by a smaller one. That one is likely fed by an even smaller one. Eventually, you get small enough that a simple linear accelerator can get the gas up to speed.

Oh, and likely a scientist/engineer grinning manically as they "push the trigger" on the largest rail gun in existence.

cynar ,

The difference between science, and blowing shit up, is in the recording.

cynar ,

A depressing number also decided, I voted labour, and nothing changed (when they didn't win). I'm going to try conservative now.

cynar ,

It will likely be a mix. E.g. you might have 10 trucks on a particular run. You put a driver in the lead truck, as a human-in-the-loop safety. The rest play duckling to the mother duck.

What it will do is lower the skill level needed, and lower the stress. A driver having a nap isn't a problem anymore. They just need to be able to get involved either if the autopilot has issues and has to stop, or if they need to fill out paperwork at the destination.

cynar ,

I believe it's common to have separate long haul trucks and last leg trucks. If the depot is right next to the motorway/highway, then it provides an obvious place for a handover. It also means drivers can stay in 1 area, and so go home each night.

cynar ,

For those who are confused. It's an experiment to see if gravity is smooth or lumpy. Relatively assumes it is smooth, quantum mechanics says it is lumpy. By knowing what is happening, we can tell which is more wrong. Both seem hyper accurate in their realms, but neither allows for the existence of the other.

Effectively, 2 pendulums are put close together and left to swing. Relativity says they will slowly move into sync. Quantum mechanics says they will move together in fits and starts. By checking at the end, they can see if the syncing is lumpy or smooth. They will also have to run it a huge number of times, to pull any difference out of the noise.

Previous ideas for experiments relied on forcing 2 masses into a diffuse state, then letting them entangle with each other. Getting matter into such a state is hard however, let alone keeping it there for long enough to work. The new experiment dodges around this problem.

cynar ,

It's definitely not an easy experiment, it's an order of magnitude easier than the other ideas though. It might even be within the realms of current equipment.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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  • cynar ,

    At least over here there are some benefits.

    • Additional help at school
    • Counselling/Therapy (currently completely overwhelmed, unfortunately).
    • Legal requirement for "reasonable accommodation" at work.
    • Knowing what the FUCK is wrong with your brain.
    cynar ,

    I helped start a makerspace (aka a Hackspace or hacker space). Our membership seems to be at least 50% neurodiverse.

    Just hanging out with other neuro-spicy people can get awkward. Doing so, with something to do tends to be a lot more natural.

    cynar ,

    That one is also the main reason I got diagnosed as an adult.

    cynar ,

    Weren't they planning on herding everyone to the roof and blowing it up?

    The plan was to do that to cover their getaway. Herd the hostages up to the roof, nominally to stop snipers while they got in a helicopter. Then flow it all up. By the time they sorted the body parts and realized they weren't there, they would be gone and safe by a different route.

    This is also why getting the detonators back was so important. Without them, they couldn't blow the roof.

    cynar ,

    A more subtle one. Get a bunch of bag clips (I used IKEA ones) then write the name of all the things you keep in the freezer (peas, sweetcorn, chips etc). You want 2 of each. Attach 1 to each bag in the freezer, open or closed. You also want a piece of string attached somewhere. When a bag is empty, put its clip on the string. Congratulations, you now have a shopping list. Once you restock, just attach the clips to the appropriate bags, before putting them away.

    At least for my household, this seems to flow well. There are no hard steps, and an obvious flow to it. Unfortunately, I've yet to figure out how to extend it to canned food, but it works for any bagged foods (pasta etc)

    cynar ,

    My phone tabs are permanently on the ":D" where it passed 100 open tabs. It's been well over a year since it showed a number.

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