pbmonster
10d ago
Is the technical difficulty of an attack like this significantly below building a two-axis gun turret or building a bomb?
If you still need to aim the laser, might as well aim a gun. If you don't need to aim the laser (e.g. you use some clever way to reflect the light onto people, which will cost you in effective range), might as well build a bomb.
All those things almost never happen, because the people with the skills and high agency to do something like that almost universally don't want to.
pbmonster
14d ago
So, how to defeat akrasia? How does one lengthen their time horizons and truly spend time better?
I think for many people, this is the one clear advantage the structured environment of university/community college has: it takes the long-time-horizon task of "get a degree" and breaks it down into many medium-time-horizon tasks ("this semester, I need to pass those two courses") and short-time-horizon tasks ("this week, I need to hand in these exercises"), and it introduces an element of accountability that these tasks get done within a certain time frame (failing a class).
So if "living up to your potential" means getting a more impressive job and a college degree, start by finding a degree that interests you and find out what its course requirements are. Then work towards getting an associate's degree that shares many of those classes. You can probably do the first few classes online, at night, and not pay much money for them. If that works out, you transfer the credits to a 4 year college and get a bachelor's.
If you're in an industry that works around certifications, you can also start getting a couple of those. Basically same principle, but you might get your company to pay for them and find it easier to work it in around your job.
pbmonster
17d ago
The entire transport sector is 20% of CO2 emissions. But ocean shipping is only around 3%. Ships are incredibly efficient.
pbmonster
17d ago
For overall purchasing power, it might go either way. But what I can say for certain is that it will significantly reduce purchasing power of cheap consumer goods, the kind of crap you buy from Shein, Temu and AliExpress. Stuff that will never ever be made again in the US.
And if you look around the house of a lower middle class person, it's often really all they have.
Ah, I see. I feel the goalposts keep moving, but that's not necessarily your fault.
Maybe hydro's Lions are really a different beasts than the ones I know. I wouldn't call them a conservative institution at all, they are purposefully fully centrist. My local club is currently assembling Christmas boxes for the refugees in the city - most of which the average conservative on this website would directly deport, I'm sure. But anyway...
So the goal is a conservative, but atheist community, at low cost. Unfortunately, that kills a whole lot of religious resources and stuff like the Young Repulicans, respectively. Is service even a criterion? Because if we drop that, you could just go to a rifle club meet-up or the cheapest sailing club you can find. I've done both at below $100 per year, and got to use club equipment for that fee.
This seems like exactly the sort of regular, scheduled volunteer work that gets Social Security deciding you can hold down a job and aren't really disabled.
I wonder who would tell them? And if someone did, 2 hours a week is a long shot from a job. But I have no idea how they work... I would probably just ask them flat out, they shouldn't fault you for giving a structured activity a try.
Our food bank hasn't been doing so well lately with regards to supplies, and from what I've seen, has been scaling back their operations
First link on Google was the most impressively professional effort to organize volunteers by a non-profit I have ever seen: https://foodbankofalaska.org/individual-volunteers/ They seem to place hundreds and hundreds of volunteers every month. 30 seconds in, the system looks to be uncharacteristically efficient and streamlined for an NGO.
pbmonster
21d ago
no club would ever want me as a member
Objectively false. Concluding this from a quick look at a small section of some of the most traditional and elitist clubs is a bad idea.
A single, quick google search shows me that Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage has a "No One Dies Alone" program. They are looking for volunteers. Maybe this would be a better start, and offer some opportunity to meditate on what kind of life is lebensunwert.
If their volunteer requirements are also to stringent (hospitals usually require no criminal history because of the kids, and vaccines because of, well, all the sick people), just go help out at a food bank. They won't care about either.
pbmonster
21d ago
join a community org(lions club is always recruiting)
In general, good advice.
His experience with Lions might vary. Depending on his location and especially age (my local Lions' youth org is much, much more open), his club might truly always be looking for people who just show up and do the work.
All those traditional service clubs are invite only, and so is every Lion's local I know. They are all very similar in vibe.
Joining on your own initiative (as opposed to being surprised by an invitation) is more of a serious long-term project for all of them, unless your local chapter is very young and small. Basically, you make contact with them and then work with them on a few projects - usually from a position where you can give them something they need. And speaking of serious: once you join, being a member is often also a pretty serious project. All clubs I know meet several times a month, and attending meetings is really not optional. If you don't come, you'll be missed, and you need to excuse yourself. If the club is doing a project, participating is not really optional. The club needs to be a very high priority, always.
But there are other options. If you want to do service, you can also look at Red Cross, Goodwill, your local food bank, shelters, or which churches do services beyond fund raising. Hospitals and nursing homes often also have volunteers doing service work.
pbmonster
22d ago
Those service clubs vary greatly between local chapters. My local Lions Club is not expensive at all to join, but some locals are - often, that's because they are primarily networking clubs for businesses that also do charity on the side. And those networking-heavy chapters kind of want to keep the rabble out.
If your local Lions are expensive, you can check if one of the other "classics" is somewhere near you: Rotary, Kiwanis, Zonta (female only), Soroptimist (female only), Round Table (male, under 40).
pbmonster
29d ago
Are you sure it just doesn't come down to physical size? Huge things are awe-inspiring. Humans put things in relation to their own body. And especially seeing something so large move so quickly and precisely triggers something in us. Maybe its an ancient fear response, a residual from a time where mammals where small and large things where dangerous.
I've worked with very impressive technology, arguably both more complex and a greater net positive for humanity (chip fab and MRI machines). But one produces things much smaller than a human, and the other only slightly larger than a human. So instead I dream about rockets, airships, space stations and aircraft carriers.
Oh, and I also worked with particle accelerators. Also way more awe-inspiring.
pbmonster
29d ago
I get what you mean, but the Chinese navy is purpose built to blockade the island anyway, and innovation that is making this easier isn't really helping them much. Instead, it moves the power balance towards parity in favor of Taiwan, who now will have a much easier time attacking ships than they had before. At the same time, it is of course also moving the power balance from a US carrier group towards China - for the same reason. And sure, I have no doubts that China's drone capabilities will be (or most likely, already are) top of the line. The thing with drones is just that offense is vastly easier than defense.
I also think that marine drones (as in: relatively large drones that are swimming and/or diving) will have a bigger impact on the Taiwan situation that quadrotors will have.
pbmonster
1mo ago
I broadly agree, but I'd like to add one point:
-- Speculative drone warfare timelines? Ukraine has shown us what you can do with a couple of months, a couple of jetskis and a couple of tons of explosives. Maybe China is afraid of what Taiwan/western MICs can do with years and billions in funding. How do you blockade an island, let alone run an amphibious assault against one, that has thousands of maritime suicide drones attacking in swarms? Drones that are better at diving, much higher range, higher speed and more autonomous than what we've seen in the Black Sea?
pbmonster
1mo ago
Connecting “my” (landlord's) water heater to the internet and installing a damn app that requires an online account with an extensive privacy policy is the only way to extract diagnostic codes to figure out why it keeps beeping (near my bed and loud enough to cause hearing damage
Tangent, but this can be solved by saying "That's not working, the App is not connecting, it's still beeping, send a plumber" over and over again, until the problem goes away. Renting is the reason I'm absolutely not looking at diagnotistic codes, ever.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Do they also have a strong sense of honesty, integrity and work ethics?
The interesting question is if you even need that if everybody has 180 IQ. I propose they would quickly notice their peer's increased intelligence, and then immediately all collectively adopt the Schelling point of "corruption ruins everything for everybody, let's just not do this".
pbmonster
1mo ago
I am an architect. I build buildings that harm your mind.'?
You would think that if an architect responded to a city's call for plans for a new middle school building and said 'my plan is to create this building, which I believe will maximize the amount of discomfort and pain felt by anyone who gazes upon or enters it,' that his plan would be immediately rejected and that he would probably suffer some sort of social consequences.
I think you're making this to complicated. No matter what Eisenmann says about his goals - many, many people who care about architecture agree that his designs look cool as fuck. And that's entirely enough.
pbmonster
1mo ago
I don’t think a literal iPhone drone would be able to power extended flight (“many miles”)
Yeah, that was hyperbole. I was thinking more in terms of the exact processors, cameras, microphones and other sensors, but of course re-arranged for aerodynamics, duplicated (you'd probably want a second/third camera module with significant optical zoom) and hardened against electronic warfare. Extended flight certainly would need more than one pouch cell - but you could use the exact cell from the phone, just duplicate it several times.
nor that sleep mode with passive sensors would massively increase operational life
Landing and waiting would certainly increase operational life when compared to loitering in the air, or even when compared to traditional cluster munitions (which often had some sub-munitions on delayed timers in order to hit rescue/cleanup operations after the strike). You can even shut down most of the processing power, just wake everything when the microphones pick up voices/steps or the accelerometer picks up the vibrations of a vehicle.
pbmonster
1mo ago
I think I pretty much agree with you. But unless you're in a thread with only a few other people, forums also never had the "group discussion" feeling, either. "Shouting at a riot" is more accurate.
you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.
This is exactly what happens in an active linear thread, too, but now the separate convos become a lot less readable because they aren't organized by topic.
you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.
True, but again, that's just group size. Can you imagine a linear forum with a weekly discussion thread with 1500 replies? It would be unreadable. So each top level comment would need to be its own post with linear comments. This is how Elements and Slack handle replies to messages - you can start a thread from every message, but only once. No nested comment trees. I find it useful, but the way they do it can be just as confusing as tree-style, since the newest messages can suddenly appear far upstream.
Still, probably better group discourse than tree-style comments. 50 replies per week would still work nicely for linear comments. Maybe worth a try.
Full autonomy seems to me to favor larger drones, rather than disposable and cheap swarms. It’s also more expensive, I’d think.
Attach motors and a tiny shaped-charge explosive to an iPhone - voila, the hardware is done, way below $1000 at scale. For military hardware, that's a cheap drone, and they'll deploy swarms of those for the right objective. This hardware would be capable of flying for many miles, radio extensive intel back home, ignore its burned antennas the moment an EW attack starts and then kamikaze towards the next human the vision model behind its cameras identify. The hardware would be easily fast enough to identify infrastructure and vehicles, or uniforms and weapons, or sex, age, race, ect.
where does this leave us with humans?
My view is pretty dystopian the moment there will be a hot conflict between near-peers. We'll dump heavy duty cargo pallets worth of drones out the backs of cargo planes (airborne or not), and everybody not under the multi-layered umbrella of a concentrated military presence will have to huddle in their building's basement. But unlike during the air raids of WWII, this time bombed cities/front lines will become mine-fields, since an unexploded kamikaze drone can just turn dormant and wait for something to steer it awake again days later.
The only hint of optimism I have is that this might bring back an age of mutually assured destruction, making near-peer conflicts more rare again. "You can violently disarm Taiwan, you can even land troops, but your people can't ever leave base once they get here." An interesting difference is that iPhone-drones are much, much easier to proliferate than nukes. All the processors, sensors and motors are heavily dual-use items that everybody can buy. In that sense, the number of opponents that are effectively "near-peers" to the west will dramatically increase - unless current smartphone tech (mainly processors and sensors) gets retroactively heavily regulated in the future.
The field is moving quickly. Sound is just a stop-gap for this year.
Medium-term, we'll put at least one small-caliber point defense cannon on every single vehicle and aircraft. Small, mass-produced phase array antenna for a millimeter-wave radar, a couple of current-gen cellphone cameras, maybe IR if you feel fancy, network between locally adjacent guns, the rest is software.
Those 70GHz+ radar modules exist today, autonomous vehicles need several of those. Automotive pricing policies ensure they cost single-digit dollar amounts. They go out to 1000' and have amazing resolution. Picking out small things going faster than 30 mph is trivial, even if they are hugging the treeline or the ground. Slewing the gun with two high power servos motors is trivial, getting below 100ms to line up on target is not unrealistic. Standardize the ammo (probably some type of buck-shot effective at 500') and prepare to produce it in absurd quantities.
Potentially we will see electromagnetic field producing weapons that could neutralize a wide angle…
Unfortunately, wrapping your drone in aluminum foil mitigates most of that. You might lose your GPS antenna and the radio link to base (unless that one is highly directional, looking away from the E-field gun), but most autonomous targeting functionality is pretty easy to preserve.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Can you explain why? In my opinion, forums only work for threads with single-digit active participants. Otherwise the discussion keeps derailing constantly, and people keep having conversations past each other, with new participants bringing up points made two pages previously.
I was part of a particularly active forum 20 years ago, and on active threads, moderators regularity had to remove comments by posting "No derailing! Open your own thread on that topic!" Which is trying to force the tree-style comment format onto a system that doesn't support it.
Tree-style comment threads pretty much solved that issue 15 years ago, and I never looked back. Introducing voting on comment quality might have been a mistake in general, but I maintain its a good idea for technical question threads - because it can get the objectively correct answer to the top quickly.
pbmonster
1mo ago
I'd like to add one more point:
- Companies pumping money back and forth that actually does very little besides making lines go up and filling slides in shareholder presentations. If you have advanced financial markets or advanced insurance markets, this is easy to "grow" organically. But all large/"modern" companies like to partake in schemes like that: complex compliance infrastructure, management consulting contracts, software as a service, ect.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Latin Mass is beauty, strength, and Truth.
Interesting, do you have a functional understanding of Latin, or is the ritual more important than the message?
pbmonster
1mo ago
No reason to have a SS agent run down to the store and buy a DJI to buzz around at 100'. Just get a domestic MIC prototype and fly it higher.
I really have no idea about the legal basis of what is happening here, or even the details. That's why I asked for clarification. But since late second trimester abortions are only legal in a handful of severe cases almost anywhere, I assume it all plays out like this:
A women presents around the third trimester for the first time. They discover the baby to be severely malformed, e.g. anencephaly. Since the baby would not survive its own birth for even an hour (and is likely to die in utero before birth), an abortion is performed. This late in the pregnancy, the abortion is indistinguishable from an emergency induced birth. The baby lives briefly after the procedure. Apparently, legally, a doctor in Minnesota would have had to put it into an incubator before 2019. Everybody knows this to be in vain.
I'm happy to be corrected here. If they leave the baby to die from exposure in cases where the 1 year mortality is comparable to that of a heart attack before 40, I strongly oppose everything about it. But since neither the article nor you have explained any of the details of what they are doing, I'm starting to think this is a pretty poor attempt at propaganda, and it's trying to exploit the emotions of people who also don't understand what's going on. Because it sure sounds inviting to just believe they are double-tapping cute little preemie babies because mom didn't want them.
Side note to that point: cities have slowly been figuring out the exact math on that - which is why many new low density suburban developments necessarily come with a HOA, and the cities forces the HOA to take on road maintenance for the new development. Otherwise, fancy suburban neighborhoods can be so low density that they become a net loss for a city once the infrastructure starts to show its age and the city is forced to re-invest in the neighborhood.
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