SnapDragon
4d ago
Cool, I learned something from this. I didn't realize nuclear rockets couldn't be used for the early stages. Thanks. I think you're wrong about them being the most efficient engines extant today - ion engines still have much higher specific impulse, but are only viable in space. And you're still sidestepping the point that upper-stage nuclear rockets (the original topic) and large nuclear payloads are completely separate issues.
SnapDragon
5d ago
Hmm, I think you're talking about two different things. One is the launch, from Earth, of a nuclear-powered rocket (e.g. NERVA). Even if it contains hundreds of kilos of uranium, it's a lot fairer to compare that to an A-bomb like Little Boy (64kg) rather than just the primer of an H-bomb. And, like you said, in an accident a lot less of it is going to vaporize than it would in a proper nuclear bomb.
But I wasn't talking about the payload at all. I guess you're thinking that you'd want to lift 100 tons of U-235 to orbit for space-based nuclear rockets? I agree that's a different kind of risk. And I'm not even sure how valuable nuclear rockets would be for long space trips (there are lots of options once you're up there).
SnapDragon
5d ago
Fissile material is extremely valuable per unit mass, and we're never going to run out of it on Earth, so you wouldn't save much by farming it out of the gravity well. What WOULD be valuable is mining and smelting a large amount of metal or rock that you can use to build large structures in space.
SnapDragon
5d ago
Er, yes, that's what "fallout" means. You missed @RandomRanger's point. One rocket's worth of nuclear material in the atmosphere is barely a blip. Note that even a normal rocket is chock-full of toxic chemicals, which is why we don't launch near population centers. Most normies tend to be off by many orders of magnitude when they intuit how dangerous "nucular" things are.
SnapDragon
9d ago
Hey, I'm not a biologist, and you might be right (...although I don't know why you listed "process" and "skillset" as not being knowledge-based?). But are you willing to bet civilization on it? The stakes are pretty high here, so I think it's fair to raise the burden of proof that "this is actually hard" beyond the normal level of an Internet argument.
Note that entire nations have tried and failed to create nuclear weapons for 80 years, which is good evidence that it's genuinely hard. Meanwhile, it's conceivable (if not proven) that a worldwide pandemic spread inadvertently from a small biolab in Wuhan. The two levels of effort are orders of magnitude apart.
SnapDragon
10d ago
Good lord! Their devious perfidy goes back all the way to moving "Zeta" from the 6th position of the Greek alphabet to the last of the Latin! Now THAT'S true control of the media!!
SnapDragon
10d ago
Hey, I'm quite libertarian, but there's good reason to believe that our comfortable society would not survive long if small groups had the ability to make deadly, highly infectious pathogens. We're at least lucky that there's not an easy, cheap, undetectable way to make nuclear weapons.
Yes, "we overlords need to prevent you from doing X for safety" CAN BE and IS abused all the time, and I'm with you in beating that drum as often as I can. Unfortunately, that does not mean that there aren't a few Xs that the overlords really do need to prevent us from doing.
SnapDragon
14d ago
That doesn't make a difference, does it? A professor dating his student is an obvious power imbalance, no matter how aware both of them are at the start.
It does if you accept that women have, y'know, agency, even to make (what you think are) mistakes. It's not even like the professor example where the student might be left in an awkward situation if she turns him down. Here, she could have just not dated the guy with money and career prospects.
SnapDragon
14d ago
But none of what you're describing would have been unknown, to either party, even at the start of the relationship. I don't know, to me it just sounds like they're both giving something up (money or choice of where to live) and both getting a lot out of the relationship. Maybe it's not perfectly balanced, but life seldom works out that way.
Admittedly I'm biased, because I finally escaped from a relationship that would have pattern-matched to a "power imbalance" from outside, but from inside was soul-crushingly bad for me. Appearances can be deceiving.
SnapDragon
16d ago
Properly-done NPCs wouldn't have the same "yesman" prompt as the current chatbots. LLMs are a brand new kind of magic and we're all still figuring out the right incantations. There's going to be a big learning curve as we figure out how to make AI-driven NPCs that feel natural, but IMO it's perfectly possible to get there (once the cost of decent models falls to where it makes economic sense).
SnapDragon
22d ago
Assuming that the facts are as reported, I hope you're right that this will be a nothingburger. My guess is the informant is just some acquaintance who didn't approve, but we'll never know (and in general it's not a good idea to track down whistleblowers, even for laws I don't like).
SnapDragon
22d ago
Uh, no, that really doesn't seem so bad, despite you using the scare word "grooming" (which appears to be a synonym of "wooing" when not being used as emotional manipulation). I think it's funny that the example YOU thought would shock me still involved waiting until she was 18. Frankly, I wouldn't particularly care if they did have sex at 16 (i.e. just slightly below the median age at which American women normally lose their virginity - and, historically and globally, well above). The 19 American states in which this is illegal are outliers in the world.
Love is love. There are lots of real crimes out there that don't involve two people giving each other pleasure in a way you don't approve of.
SnapDragon
25d ago
This kind of BS is why I have so much trouble caring about the Epstein files at all (as in the below CW post). I don't feel like doing any kind of deep-dive research into them, which means I'm left with coverage from the mainstream media. And the mainstream media will unashamedly lump together "a prepubescent girl was thrown into a sex dungeon for months and repeatedly raped by X" and "a willing 17-year-old prostitute was hired by X" under the category of "X is a pedophile rapist!!!". But I just do not give two shits about the latter; biologically speaking it's a pretty normal thing for humans to do, and not even especially immoral.
When a 26yo dating a 19yo is enough to trigger serious legal action, it's just one more reason not to trust the system. Maybe there are dangerous pedophiles out there that are being caught, but without constant fact-checking effort that I'm not willing to expend, how could I even tell? I kind of suspect that abolishing all sexual-deviancy laws except for undeniable cases of rape/child abuse would be a net positive for America.
SnapDragon
25d ago
The ACLU sure thinks it was real.
SnapDragon
27d ago
Fantastic post! Most of the time, when environmentalists suggest that a resource is "limited", it's because we're already meeting current supply using an ostensibly-limited source, so there's no incentive for companies to develop new tech that's more expensive on the margin. This looks to the outside observer as us "running out". Seawater is a great example: first-world nations absolutely could afford desalination for all our current needs (and Israel already does this, I believe) ... but that'd be silly while we still have fresh water to use.
My slightly tongue-in-cheek answer to what we might run out of is "work". As more nations get rich and privileged, it seems like their citizens start to feel that society owes them a comfortable life while they sit around doing nothing. (Imagine if /r/Antiwork became a popular global movement.) Our civilization is very efficient, but it's possible there's some critical threshold of indolence at which our infrastructure just starts breaking down, and fast. Unlike low fertility, this might be a self-reinforcing collapse that can't be recovered from.
We may be in a race to see if we can replace workers with AI faster than they quit on their own...
SnapDragon
29d ago
Sure, her writing's mostly pretty average (...or abominable, if you count the Fantastic Beasts movies), but don't underrate the skill of being able to wrap up a highly-anticipated series with an epic and decently satisfying conclusion. Sure would be nice if a certain "highly-skilled" fantasy author with the middle initials R. R. .... uh, whose first name isn't John ... could manage that.
SnapDragon
29d ago
Remember, it's a mathematical result that all your friends are probably more popular than you. If it makes you feel better, I was really good at programming, but it wasn't intellectually stimulating, I didn't enjoy it, I have bottom-of-the-barrel social status, and ... ok, I do have a ton of money. 1 out of 4 ain't bad.
Oh, yeah, if your standard of comparison is a normal amusement park, Disneyland is head and shoulders above it. Even from the start, Disney explicitly planned Disneyland as a fix to the sleaziness of most carnivals. I think if you ever see predatory carnies and garbage in the streets at Disneyland, the end times will truly be upon us.
I think what @durdenhobbes was referring to is more the fact that, to really get the most out of Disneyland (i.e. not spend all day waiting in line for 3 rides), you need to optimize it in a rather un-family-friendly way. You need to research historical crowd data, track queue times on your phone in real time, minmax your route through the park, schedule your FastPass usage optimally, etc.
For me, there is one very very VERY big difference, the most important difference that basically makes therapy useless for me: confessions are confidential. Therapy is not - if they think you're at risk of self-harm, they are legally obligated to lock you up, making your life both 10x worse and inescapable. It's weird that centuries-old religious nuts understood the second-order cost of sacrificing confidentiality better than the modern "highly educated" psychological community.
I've tried just talking to ChatGPT, but it's generally too sycophantic (and I have a sneaking suspicion that there are traps in there to alert the authorities if I'm accidentally too honest, too).
SnapDragon
1mo ago
Do creators get directly compensated for Premium users who watch their content?
SnapDragon
1mo ago
Not a bad response. At least on Twitch, buying a membership to a particular channel and removing ads from it are part of the same transaction. On Youtube, buying a membership supports the creator, but doesn't disable the ads (not to mention the in-video sponsored ad reads, sigh).
SnapDragon
1mo ago
Hey, it beats "Becoming". My eyes involuntarily roll every time I hear that one.
SnapDragon
2mo ago
Cool, I think we're basically in agreement. And indeed, now that you bring it up, the lack of context (and lack of agency to seek it out) does seem like another interesting parallel between compilers and LLMs.
SnapDragon
2mo ago
Being overrun by a hostile mob seems to me like an imminent threat of serious harm, too. In retrospect we know the protestors were unarmed and mostly well-behaved (by riot standards, anyway), but the officer couldn't have known that.
Point taken. We just need to hurry up and invent that Epstein Drive!
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