Haha you’re forgetting the second part of the reaction: oxygen. You would need to somehow transport oxygen in addition to fossil fuels in space to burn em. You would need to expend a lot more energy in their transportation than what you would get from them.

Hence, this idea has merit only to be used for propulsion (for now). Once we crack fusion (which I’m sure we will within this century), fossil fuels lose this application in space too.

The absolute con is that heat is really really hard to shed in space and it’s really really expensive to get big heavy things to space.

The entire convo in one sentence.

Right now, it’s a terribly dumb idea. Here’s why:

• Getting shit to space is expensive
• Cooling those data centers would require radiative cooling. The radiators for that would have to be crazy huge.
• It’s economically unviable when you can build data centers on earth.

For me, this looks exactly like the “we’re going to Mars, so invest in our space company, yipeeeee” thing.

That being said, could we see space based computation in the future? Sure. Again, here’s why:

• It’s more to do with simple energy consumption (not just for computation, but just energy consumption in general).
• Energy consumed still stays on the planet as heat. Slowly, it radiates away to space. The speed of radiation however scales with the surface area of the planet. Meaning, there’s a strict upper limit of how much “energy consumption” we can do on earth before causing crazy global warming due to this waste heat. Note this is NOT green house gas caused warming. This is caused by more heat on the planetary surface than exiting. Waste heat
• Ok, so assuming that energy consumption increases 1% per year after the “exponential phase” begins, the planet Earth ITSELF would reach its limits from the standpoint of holding industry in less than a thousand years. The exponential phase for us seems to have started since the industrial revolution. Also, our current increase of energy consumption year over year is quite above 1%. Here’s the paper.
• Hence, for environmental reasons, there would come a time in human history where we have to put our industry (which includes data centers) in space. Anywhere but Earth.

Could we develop systems with crazy efficiency? Sure. Maybe. I don’t know. But even if we do, I can’t see a case where the Hedonic treadmill wouldn’t set in, still causing crazy energy consumption.

Hence, in conclusion, boo to current space companies grifting space based data centers. But yay to eventually putting all industry off planet.

Ignorance: Lack of information. Stupidity: Inadequate usage of logical reasoning to seek and process information.

That’s how I understand it

If God is real then God must die.

If God is real then God doesn’t love the creatures on this planet. This sentient creature created a reality filled with suffering of the highest order.

A counter argument to this is this:

We cannot understand God’s plan as we aren’t capable of understanding it because we aren’t God.

This argument is quite stupid in my opinion. Zeus raped people. Is Zeus bad? I think we can agree that Zeus is bad. If a super advanced alien created a human zoo, put humans in it without their consent and also put in wasps whose stings make the humans want to kill themselves. Would we say that the alien is benevolent? Would we say “oooh, Mr. Alien is too advanced for us to perceive their plan, but Mr. Alien definitely loves us”? No, we would try to escape and kill that alien so that it can never harm us ever again. Why does God get special treatment then?

I’m not sure if ur profile picture is real, but in case it is: You, sir have a magnificent beard!

No.

Also, I’d recommend caring about being cringe. True freedom is achieved when you stop caring.

I use Ubuntu. Have slapped on a really pretty material theme. A couple of blur extensions. A cute furry wallpaper. Never felt the need to switch to anything else.

I don’t think it would be in the advantage of a smart civ to willfully contact another smart civ till it is confirmed that the “to be contacted” civ has a really good understanding of game theory.

You cannot negotiate mutually assured destruction with a civ that does not understand what mutually assured destruction means.

Do I think we would be destroyed if some other alien civ finds us? No. If civ A observes civ B destroying civ C, everyone would want to destroy civ B immediately. The possibility of there being peaceful contact for civ B goes away.

Also, contacting us must be in the benefit of the civ that contacts us (assuming they are rational).

I don’t dislike AI. I dislike capitalist morons snake oil salesman-ing AI.

Yes, there is obviously a great great ethical use of AI. The utopian future is a publicly owned AI system, where all jobs are automated, where all labor is done practically without scarcity at superhuman competency levels. Humans sit on their front porch playing the cello, knitting, or perhaps just fucking. Any sort of progress necessitates the creation of AI in our day and age.

The definition of AI depends a lot on context. Are we talking philosophically? Well, that’s a rabbit hole I don’t want to get into at all right now. Technically? Well, here’s how I’d go about it:

“Intelligent systems are those that have a set terminal goal, and continually attempt to get closer to achieving their terminal goal, by refining each attempt by learning from past experiences interacting with their environment.”

So if we have to look at this as a function, AI would have these qualities: Input params and output params. AI is the function in the middle. AI takes input params and tries to correctly manipulate them to form output params. It uses results to change its model to be “more correct” in the future. So by this definition, your dumb 20 year old computer vision models would still qualify as AI.

Unciv is a pretty cool game! It’s basically FOSS civ 5 that can be played on mobile. Huge timewaster haha

For which office? You guys already have elected progressives in some offices

The only terminal goal that corporations have is to make money. As much of it as possible.

Production of Andor was greenlit with the assumption that investing money in it would result in a positive ROI. Nothing more, nothing less. The same applies to them funding the fascist admin.

Most monologues and speeches from Andor:

• Nemik’s manifesto: Talks about liberation and authoritarianism.
• Kino’s speech: I interpreted it as a call for revolution against the ruling class.
• Mothma’s senate speech: Talks about how fascism rises with a loss of an objective reality (in the public consciousness).

Andor’s really a banger! Please consider watching it if you haven’t already.

Yes.

The argument for privacy in monetary transactions is much more nuanced than the one for simple text messages. Reducing privacy in text messages only punishes the “good guys”, as bad guys can still use e2ee communication media very easily.

For monetary transactions, things get more complicated. Tax evasion, money laundering, human trafficking, purchase of weapons can be done using super private payment systems. If adoption of this becomes widespread, then liquidity of these currencies increase. For example, if I’m selling illegal weapons, then the Monero that I receive from that purchase needs to be somehow converted into real money so that I can buy a house, groceries and so on. If Monero becomes widespread, then I don’t even need to this.

Imagine Bezos, musk and all the other crooks just getting way way more of powerful.

How do they handle the traceability aspect? Like, if it’s a blockchain, that makes transactions public by definition right?

Not quite. They use something called “ring signatures”.

Centralised payment systems are much more efficient. Yes, corporate capture can make them suck (visa/MasterCard duopoly). To ensure security, financial infrastructure tends to be super capital intensive. This leads to an oligopoly in a best case scenario and a monopoly in the worst case scenario.

Being a natural monopoly, I would highly highly be in support of state owned financial “stuff”. Cooperativize operations as much as possible, but let the state raise capital for this. Good for national security too.

Certain types of crypto can be very good if you want transactions to be anonymous (Monero being the best example). Wanna purchase drugs from an illegal ecommerce platform? Monero is untraceable. Wanna buy weapons, launder money, etc? Monero works. Otherwise, it’s pretty much useless in the face of existing non crypto services.

BTC sucks for transactions. But its value proposition is kinda different. It’s kinda like gold (kinda).

Humans throughout history have based currencies based on items that can be easily verified to be real, and are scarce. Gold is an example. Gold can be mined, yes. But it’s pretty scarce. It’s easy to tell gold from “not gold”.

Hence, in a world where financial systems weren’t exactly integrated and digitized, assets and market info was hard to track, trust in other countries and their institutions was super low, gold worked.

But we abandoned the gold standard for a reason. Hence, do we really want a digital gold equivalent (in terms of verifiability and scarcity)? What even is the point? That’s why BTC doesn’t make sense (for me)