jkf
3hr ago
I think maybe you misunderstood my point. I'm saying that exploring, conquering, and extracting resources is pretty normal. That's what most species do if they can.
I understand your point perfectly -- my point is that if only the first of those is something that a species can do vis a vis space exploration, which certainly seems to be the case, then they will not do the other things.
If your Von Neumann probes are star-hopping around the galaxy, they really only need enough resources from the solar system to hop on to the next few stars in your path -- where they will do it again. That doesn't seem like a lot of resources, and burning more resources than you need is wasteful, which is also something that most species are evolved not to be.
jkf
3hr ago
Yeah, transhumanism is dumb -- I think aliens who are roughly subject to the same constraints and desires as humans are very much more likely than otherwise; you can put a separate 1E-20 in your Drake equation if you want trans, uh, -alien aliens.
jkf
9hr ago
The argument sort of shifts though -- "sending probes to explore is normal, we've even done it" moves to "sending probes for conquest/destruction is normal, anyone would do it".
Exploratory probes do seem pretty likely for sufficiently advanced civilizations, but unless the probes are remarkably inefficient at replicating you should be able to explore the galaxy pretty effectively without harvesting every scrap of energy/matter from every star system you visit -- granted on a long timelime, but I think we are stuck with that anyways. (thanks Einstein)
A lack of deliberate conquest/destruction type probes seems to point equally well towards "space is hard and there's not really much point in conquering/destroying other star systems because they are too far away to be either useful or harmful" as "everyone would obviously want to destroy/conquer anywhere in the galaxy that might produce a species that could compete with them (on massive time scales)".
Historical examples of grabbyness involved a lot more "grabbing stuff will make you super rich" than "you will probably never even know what you've grabbed; better destroy it just in case somebody else grabs it".
jkf
12hr ago
if the likelihood of intelligent life developing is high enough that likely to produce a Renaissance Italy level civilization 150 light years away, it follows that (probably) there have been thousands if not millions of intelligent extra-terrestrial species who have had the opportunity to send a probe and/or a colonization wave through our solar system.
If...
The thing is that all of this stuff depends on exactly which values you wanna plug into the Drake equation -- any options between "we are alone" and "spacefaring intelligent life is pretty rare but not that rare" seem on the table based on what we can observe.
The assumption that Von Neumann probes would necessarily/likely be maximally grabby paperclip maximizers does seem like reasoning from sci-fi to me -- like, would you design a system that just goes around raping every star system it encounters? Why would the aliens?
jkf
13hr ago
If development of intelligent life is so likely as to produce intelligent civilizations that close to use in space and time, then almost certainly there would have been either Von Neuman probes or a colonization wave (from other intelligent civilizations) passing through our solar system hundreds of millions of years ago. And we don't see these things.
But how would we know if a probe had come and mined a bunch of asteroids (or sucked Mars dry, or something) some millions of years ago, then moved on?
jkf
4d ago
Tesla wasn't just ambitious, it was standing on the shoulders of legacy giants
Tesla hit the goldilocks zone in so many ways it is incredible.
sure buddy
jkf
5d ago
How many divisions has the eurozone? If some country wants to leave it, it could be done -- I doubt that the will exists anywhere at the moment, but things do fall apart eventually.
jkf
6d ago
I burned bridges and access and money over the last year+ trying to stop this from happening and as you can see I failed miserably.
Is that you, JD?
jkf
6d ago
Introducing a contradiction in the set of lemmas you give a system will indeed break it.
"Break it" in the sense that it will give a wrong answer, though -- or "break it" in the sense that it will become confused/non-functional?
jkf
6d ago
Eh, that's like "if the religious right are smart they will shut up about abortion" -- I don't think it's in their nature. (lol, lmao)
jkf
6d ago
Pray the diesel stays high -- when it drops you will know that the big recession is finally coming.
jkf
6d ago
White women were in fact 52-46 (Blue) according to the exit poll; this is a regression since it was much closer to 50-50 in 2024 as I recall. This time wipipo as a whole were split down the middle.
"Pander to white women" is maybe more feasible than "pander to minorities" as a Republican path to victory -- not sure how you shake off the abortion albatross though.
jkf
7d ago
IDK, the SC margin seems like it's stretching as they count lol, so what do I know!
While it's nice that Florida came around, a two percent margin there seems a bit concerning?
jkf
7d ago
Eh, i dunno -- AFAICT pretty much everywhere has been counting whatever forms of early/mail-in ballots they have first -- so you could be seeing some blue mirage action with only 25% counted and a pretty small margin?
Florida senate was leaning blue until like 80% counted!
jkf
10d ago
I would argue the other side on "troon" -- it's a neologism for one thing, and not at all an established diminutive in English. Not inherently insulting per se, but AFAIK as you say was coined by haters so two strikes at least.
"Tranny" is much older; even if you exclude transmissions from the conversation, it was common argot for "transvestite" for the longest time before the gender deal was much of a glimmer in anyone's eye.
The fact that the people who are making a big deal about being called how they want in terms of pronouns and/or general gender essence are also wanting to dictate the name of their condition is a pretty big push actually -- "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" is actually a pretty mild form of disagreement in such cases, and (as you say) it could be done in a much stronger way.
So I'll argue that using "tranny" is just a way of saying "i reject your hypothesis" -- aggressive, but only as insulting as you want to make it and far from contentless.
Even 'gay' is not (hopefully) a slur when you are talking about an actual gay person -- if there were a movement to require non-chuds to refer to gay people only as 'homosexual' (certainly no homo!) or something even more cumbersome, would you support it?
The term obviously was invented by people who are against "trannies" with the intent to offend
This is not even slightly obvious to me -- the very same word is (very commonly for like 50+ years) used to refer to a somewhat cumbersome to pronounce/type automotive component, and the general format is in extensive use in casual English. (see esp. Australia; "sunnies", "mozzies", "footie", "barbie" etc etc etc)
It doesn't at all diminish/insult transmissions! Why would it be an obvious slur against... trann-o's?
We could just continue with the regular culture war thread, but assign everyone a flair of "woke" or "chud" at the desired ratio, and flip them every week!
Failing to argue in accordance with your flair would be an automatic two week ban, starting at the beginning of the current week -- call it "devil's advocate or STFU"...
Seems like the sort of thing that might be in the /drama codebase already, and if not they might like to back-merge it!
jkf
11d ago
99.99% of the messages translate to "Emmanuel Goldstein is personally raping a child right now, and you can't do anything about it, have a nice day".
No, I'm pretty sure most people know what is up -- in case "scruffy dude" wasn't clear enough, it's more like "Jimmy MacTrailerpark lost custody of his kids and is taking matters into his own hands", and everyone is well aware. (very occasionally Trish MacTrailerpark, but this probably reflects the way the cookie crumbles in family court more than any gender bias in poor decisionmaking.)
Apparently Canada has chosen to lock all alerts at "Presidential" level, so I also get tidal wave warnings when there's an earthquake in Alaska -- the name might be helpful actually, possibly TDS can be leveraged to alter the situation...
jkf
11d ago
Almost always a disgruntled biological dad (occasionally mother) who's lost custody in a separation dispute -- way more than 60% from the alerts I've seen (which go out province-wide for some reason); pretty much 100% of them are like "be on the lookout for a scruffy dude in a red Camry with a six and ten y.o. kid 1000 miles away from where you live" and come out at 1:00 am.
jkf
19d ago
And as far as I'm aware, decompilation is a kind of reverse engineering.
It's pretty different as used here though -- for one thing "super-decompiler" is pretty neat, but not nearly as impressive as "can code office from scratch"* in terms of broad applicability of the tech.
Decompiled software is also still covered by copyright, so while new forms of piracy are also pretty neat I don't really see much of a business impact here?
*More like "can code an office demo from scratch" AIUI at this point, but still pretty impressive
jkf
22d ago
No, "cast" means "fallen and can't get up" for horses essentially -- horses are weirdly fragile for something so big and strong, if they can't get their legs in quite the right position they can't get up. Which in itself is enough to kill them in a matter of hours; in this case the guy was getting pretty hypothermic too.
jkf
23d ago
Even if you manage to cultivate a horse-focussed large animal practice, brute strength is often a limiting factor -- we actually had a husband-wife team (mixed practice, both vets) for a while, and even though she was probably more knowledgeable about horses than he was, there were a lot of of calls that she simply was not physically effective at dealing with. One time he and I skidded a cast horse around to get his legs pointing downhill in -10 and blowing snow -- then lifted him to his feet (the horse, not the vet) with straps around his belly. If the wife had been on that call, the horse would have died.
jkf
26d ago
It was the same story in the later 2019 reports
What reports are those? And what in the world makes you think that the Deep State is putting its true goals in reports on the internet? That seems like the very opposite of their MO, no?
Tulsi Gabbard was also pressuring against the 2026 war
Tulsi Gabbard is strongly against frivolous warmaking and diametrically opposed to the Deep State on most any matters that come to mind; it's kind of her whole deal! Trump was clearly not listening to Tulsi on this one.
No, my counter-argument is "nobody CAN do it", in the case of conquest -- space is too big for conquest to be meaningfully possible. You can posit some scenario (generation ship fleeing a dying sun, say) in which it might make some sense -- but then one can counter-posit that this too sounds pretty rare, and just add a few more (small) terms to the Drake equation.
Similarly with destruction -- I can see how it might be possible for some civilization to send probes around that blow up and/or harvest all the matter from every system that they encounter, but my argument is that there's no obvious motivation for this behaviour, so it would probably be pretty rare too.
One can reject the Dark Forest hypothesis on the basis that interstellar conquest is largely impossible, therefore nobody has any reason to hide or become omnicidal -- and one can further note that "all the matter/energy in a star system" is way more than any self-replicating Von Neumann exploration setup would have reason to harvest.
Which leaves you with adding terms for "probability that any given intelligent lifeform wants to destroy the galaxy for no reason" and maybe "probability that any given lifeform is incredibly sloppy and wasteful to the point of accidentally destroying the galaxy" to your modified Drake equation -- I really do think these terms can be small to the point of negligibility, although of course they interact with your guesses at the other ones. If you think life is extremely common in the universe you might make it work -- but IMO it would need to be common enough that we'd know of it happening more than once for the chance to be worth considering.
Wake me up when Elon finds some Martian dinosaur skeletons or something.
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