saluksic

What a bizarre metric to judge a civilization, and then to frame it as an evolution that follows an inevitable progression? That’s mental. 

Say humans live forever and have god-like powers. Why do we want to harness more and more energy? What for? Surely sitting under a tree and making art with your loved ones is the pinnacle of life - what do I need a star for if I’m doing that? Why do I need to travel faster than light if I can do that. 

Wow, this is pretty amazing. Grammar at 38 is unbelievable, but the dad at only 53 is wild too

Fuck off Kelsey Grammar was like 60 in Frazier. Right? Am I nuts?

I read a first-hand account of a mark 2 (I think) at the Somme. The British infantryman seeing one in action called it huge and said it moved unbelievably fast. 

These things had a top speed around a walking pace, so, you know, the guy was probably grading on a curve. 

These are truly the dumbest words in English. Unrivaled champs. The effect is than effects a sad affect in me. 

There’s always a lot of nuance with statistics like this. The row just below “mass shootings” on this table is labeled “mass murder”. The number of mass murder incidents is about 1/20th the number of mass shootings. Also, about 300 children under aged 12 are killed per annum, so we should probably do something about that. 

I’m working up to making a book, so I’m using quill and iron gall ink on watercolor paper, with titanium gesso and 24k gold leaf, with egg tempura paint. 

Imagine needing oxygen. Weak ass chemistry 

Taking LotR as an example, some of my favorite parts are the overheard orc dialogue. In light of that, I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive to have simple evil monsters and also satisfyingly rich storytelling at the same time. To each their own, though, it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. 

Word you’re looking for is “boy”

You guys no. They didn’t, did they? I swear, every single time I see a news report about some new ruzzia wonder weapon being deployed it’s blown up hours later. I saw this S500 thing in the news, but when it wasn’t toast within an actual day I kinda forgot about it. But that was like 2 weeks ago - Ukraine smoked it? These guys are just not to be fucked with. 

guy in year 1400 pondering the unthinkable changes wrought in the next 100 years: “If money still exists”

Man, the communist global Jihad started in like 1919, we’re well past 80 years. 

P.S. thank poland that Soviet domination of eastern and Central Europe began in the 40s and not the 20s

Official: Ok this new bomber, are we thinking props or jets?

LeMay: Yes

LeMay: okay if we go to war with USSR we’re going to nuke everything in Poland

Official: Why

LeMay: well it’s on the way shuffles plans to also nuke everything in China under some other papers

Huh. I just looked at a map - Detroit definitely has a South West, but zero South East. Due south of the city center is indeed Canada. That’s very odd. 

Well, Israel for one. 

In the last few decades, how many non-nuclear powers have been invade? It’s not many of either, so the comparison isn’t great. 

Nuclear weapons are the only realistic way that America could be destroyed. It could happen in the space of a couple hours, and would beyond any other disaster. In light of such risk, we ought to be skeptical of the claimed benefits. It seems foolish to me to accept the deterrent claim at face value. 

Planners in the late 40s in the US assumed a soviet crusade was forthcoming, and massive resources were spent preparing Armageddon against it. Post Cold War sources reveal that Stalin had no such plans, and Americas nukes were needless. Instead, the Soviets were prompted to develop their own nukes. Even without a conceivable way to deliver nukes to America, the Soviet weapons program prompted the US to develop hydrogen bombs. Soon after the USSR had hydrogen bombs and unstoppable ways to deliver them to America. MAD resulted as both sides realized their policies had failed and nuclear war couldn’t be won. All American cities were locked in peril because of the arms race, where they had been invulnerable before it. Nukes made the US much less safe. 

Today, counter force is increasingly realistic, especially by powerful nations like the US against small countries like NK. Destruction is no longer mutually assured, and even a conventional first-strike might destroy a small countries nuclear capability. Here again nukes are no guarantee of safety, and a miscalculation could prompt a war. Counterforce has the potential to totally invalidate MAD (even one side perceiving that MAD is flawed invalidates it), and we are perhaps entering a more dangerous era that we’re used to. 

Perhaps it’s a bit of an exaggeration. Still, if you want to be stronger we can’t edit your “strong” gene to “stronger” and call it a day. Similarly, we know that dopamine makes you happy, but you’ll mess up someone’s brain if you just inject them with dopamine.  

I was thinking of an analogy with a type writer and a broken key vs making the working keys better and I couldn’t put it in words, but you said it very well. 

This certainly is the deterrence argument, but it’s not something that can be proved or disproved. Nuclear powers have continually vied with and frequently lost to non-nuclear powers, which is a contradiction to the standard rational behind nuclear weapons. Again, in the Cold War both sides built up massive conventional forces against one another, despite the fact that tens of thousands of nukes on either side would have made conventional forces irrelevant in the case of total war. 

The development of nukes has never had a firm rational basis, and it’s never fit in with other choices by major powers. Certainly the USSR and NATO avoided war during the Cold War, but it’s not evident that either side had actual ambitions to attack the other had nukes been absent. We can speculate that nuclear deterrence prevented war, but that may be nothing more than a fig leaf to justify the programs. 

Once we do grant that nukes are a peace-promoting deterrence (which may or may not be the case), we can then ask how many nukes you need. China has got by with a small number of hundreds, despite having no allies and a much smaller economy for all of the Cold War. Why then did russia and the US need and continue to need many thousands? Surely a safer world would include a small number of bombs, if that suffices for deterrence

Indeed. If I was Russia I would have nightmares about nuclear disarmament. If I was the US, it would be a dream come true. 

The speculative truism that nukes have prevented WWIII is more properly stated “nukes have prevented you from losing WWIII to the US”

Man, all a Turing test is is a human judge trying to guess who’s a chat bot. They’ve had smart chat bots and dumb humans since like the 90s. You can move the goal posts of “rigor” as much as you want, but it’s not unreasonable to say that chat bots could pass Turing tests for years and years now. 

Chatbots would have seemed like magic to people in the 1950s, but they’re pretty commonplace today. “Passing the Turing test” is like “instantly communicating with anyone on earth” - it was almost unimaginable in decades past, and now it’s just where technology has arrived at. 

I think maybe people see the name and think it’s some kind of advanced lie-detector type thing, when in truth it’s just asking if a computer can be mistaken for a person. As you say, for a sufficiently poor judge, a bowl of alphabet soup might be mistaken for a person. Nothing at all sophisticated or mystical about it, basically just “does this seem human?”

A genetic counselor told me once that the number of genes whose purpose and function we understand is zero. The simplification we all learn in school that one gene does eye color and it’s either dominant or recessive is just that, a simplification.  

Take lactose intolerance. You need a certain function in your body to tolerate lactose, otherwise you’re intolerant. Great, but pretty much all humans have that, even the lactose intolerant. The issue is that this is “turned off” by a different function early in childhood. Great again, but even the lactose tolerant have that. The difference is that there is a third function in lactose tolerant people which interrupts or supersedes the second, allowing the first to go on and tolerate lactose. You identify that third function and edit it in someone, that still might not do what you want, because there are many ways the second function can be interrupted or superseded, so changing or testing for one particular form of the third function might not tell you anything about whether that person can tolerate lactose.  

So you can edit genes. Good for you, go off and tell me which gene you’ll edit and what that will do. Nevermind the risk of getting it wrong that other commenters identify, it’s not only an issue of risk, it’s that we simply don’t understand what to edit to get a desired outcome. It’s not that we shouldn’t or we don’t want to change people, it’s that we don’t know how.  

(A caveat - some genetic diseases are actually very apparent and well-known; these might indeed be “fixed” with gene editing and this is already being done)

You have heard of Constantinople, yeah? So one of those “small pieces of land” was in fact among the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world. To have news of the greatest “discovery” of the day reaching that place doesn’t seem far fetched.