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orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
7hr ago
homophobic joke about it not being blood deleted
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
7hr ago
This video popped up in my feed and I hated it. It's not wholly bad, but NJB is arguing in bad faith, using the good old Gish Gallop to overwhelm the viewer. Here's how I would structure a movie about self-driving cars:
- Adding an auto-pilot to your own car will not change the cities much, so it's not really a qualitative change
- To replace private car ownership with a shared pool of autonomous cars, they have to be cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. We'll examine the best-case outcome later, but here's why reaching it is a tall order:
- it's hard to make them cheap: blah
- it's hard to make them safe and fast: blah
- it's hard to keep them clean: blah
- it's hard to make the ubiquitous: blah
- But let's imagine autonomous cars are cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. How will our cities be reshaped by them?
- since cars drive at inhuman speeds, they need a grade-separated road network that excludes pedestrians and drivers
- since they are ubiquitous, this road network has to reach all destinations to be safe
- since they are cheap, this road network can't be built underground and will need to be based on the existing road network
- etc.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
If you follow the logical conclusion of the above, this is even better - you can have the luxury of your own personal vehicular conveyance without the need to actually park it nearby your destination! Simply roll up, get out, and tell your car to either keep driving or find the nearest parking location. Tap a button on your phone, summon your car to wherever you ended up. All of a sudden, the need for immeadiate parking is killed, and the state mandated and required need for parking that drives current urban development has no leg to stand on, and we can all go back to the wonderful idyllic standard of walkable town centers of the early 20th century. Yay.
NJB's video is terrible, but he makes at least a couple good points:
- you'll still want your car to arrive quickly, so this means that at rush hour cars will have to drive downtown en-masse and either find some parking or keep driving around the block
- while you won't need a parking space next to your house, the demand for roads will only increase: instead of having to use a school bus or their parent's car the kids now will be able to drive to school, to the mall, to their friend's house etc.
Bryan Johnson has actually done it, both him towards his father and his son towards him. I'm actually really interested in this, because people are already getting my relatively pretty healthy blood for free (which is good), and I'd love to be able to use it to improve my dad's health.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8hr ago
Sure, I agree with all of that. It would be silly for skeptics of LLMs to “declare victory” now. I say give it another 5 years at least. The main reason I brought it up is because Ilya’s the one who’s saying it, which lends quite a bit more authority to the claim.
erwgv3g34
8hr ago
Sulla's tutorial got me started with Civ IV; I recommend it in the strongest possible terms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
There are beginners playthroughs on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CgBnpbaQFo4 or https://youtube.com/watch?v=_f-pwq6cKwk?list=PLs3acGYgI1-vw-A3LHOb_BDQxKNtv1tze
There's a text guide here (this would be the best IMO for getting started, in terms of efficient reading): https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/beginner-help-the-basics.648469/
There's a slightly more advanced tactic/strategy guide here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/sisiutils-strategy-guide-for-beginners.165632/
The game manual is here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ-4-manual.12753/
The map is pretty straightforward. It's all about getting three resources - food, commerce and production. There's a little button you can press on to show the per-tile yields, another one that highlights special resources.
You get the most value in making cities near food resources so they can quickly grow and get pops working other tiles: hills, mineral resources and forests for production or luxury resources/coast/rivers for commerce. Commerce is wealth, culture, espionage and most of all research, you control where exactly it goes with sliders.
No_one
9hr ago
People who live long don't take hundreds of supplements, but are generally those who love life, themselves, socially active and even a bit insufferable. Like Trump. Oldest person in my family was a bit like him, also pretty sharp to old age, very high self-regard.
Lifting weights to restore muscle lost after sarcopenia starts in sixties really helps. You won't live much longer, but you can move around and do stuff. E.g. Dr. Eugster who decided to lift weights to regain muscle at 87, lived to 97 pretty actively. Or here's Ernestine Shepherd, training old people in a gym at age.. probably late 80s.. She had a body better than most twenty-somethings by 80, nice muscle definition, erect posture. (see attachment for age 85)
If they're physically active and careful enough, easily live to mid 90s.
My grandma who I'm talking about had a massive heart attack at 79 after smoking for half a century, the kind that usually kills people, then lived fairly sedentarily on heart medication until 93 and her irreversible overnight fall in the bathroom while living alone. After that she spent a year in a hospice, mostly sleeping or drowsing but lucid for the daily hr one of her sons came, brought her beer and visited. Her mind was going so she lost her filter, and we heard incredible things. I wonder if she'd have preferred DNR.
No_one
9hr ago
Joe Rogan claims a stem cell therapy basically fixed one of his problematic joints.
No_one
9hr ago
Some book recommendations for you and anyone else:
Classics: I rate Clarke much higher than either Asimov or.. Bradbury. As a writer. Although honestly even if Clarke paid for child sex in Ceylon, that still makes him a vastly more likeable individual than Asimov, the eternal consequences of evolution denying high-modernist tool..
Midrange: SM Stirling is essentially an SF writer even if he writes fantasy, which he seems to like. He's not the best but he's pretty good and the Draka series is unparalleled as a political Turing test. He is a rare type of guy - a die-hard 1776 liberal, but biologically aware, evolution-pilled in regards to organisms of all scales, whether individual or societal. Most of his stuff is weird alt-history like the Dies the Fire series where electricity stops working. Probably a good read, but I like his SF. He has notably contributed imo the best novellas to both the War World anthology (about the codominium prison moon of Haven) and Niven's Kzinti one.
Alastair Reynolds (active from cca 1990) worked as an astronomer, so he's got the hard-sf part down. It is often space opera, but it's a fresh look at how that'd be in a STL universe where you can, at best, hug the lightspeed because a bunch of actually elite human capital- cybernetic researchers taking advantage of freedom on Mars networked their brains with nanomachines, became something way beyond human and moved the tech frontier in a big way to infinite thrust engines that, rumor has it, just tap the ongoing big bangs in parallel universes thus allowing constantly functioning reaction drive.
Setting (for the obvious reason) doesn't have superhuman AIs with a few exceptions.
New:
I have sympathies to anarchists, one can't really feel glad about the necessity of the entire sausage machine required in our finite world on a flat surface. So Iain M.Banks's Culture series isn't really about the utopia or even that political, it's more of a very high effort space opera.
You seemed to have missed Greg Egan. If he's too weird/spergy for you with his math stuff, it's not omnipresent. The short story collections Axiomatic and Luminous are very good, Distress & Zendegi I'd also recommend.
Like I said in a previous FF thread, I very much appreciate Walter Blaire, a new true SF writer. As in, it's not just lasers pasted in for rifles, it's about internally coherent worlds that are different to ours for material reasons. That's why I came to dislike Star Wars - it's just the stale old WW2 myth but in space.
Although he takes more of the 'human/history' angle, as his books are less about shiny tech but more about the ways organisations and biology trap people. Especially raising the salience of the latter is very praiseworthy and I hope to one day make him profoundly cringe about the implications of that. Guy writes as fun book, steps on the sorest thumb there is inadvertently.
Ditto6687
9hr ago
Off topic but whats the best intro to Civ4 for someone who can't even parse the map? Aside from playing the game solo obviously that's the best.
No_one
9hr ago
But Space Engineers has a grid.
The problem with Space Engineers is that a building game with a default multiplayer build limit that you can max out in 6 hours is kinda pointless. Played some of it but honestly..
No_one
9hr ago
I deleted that mess (it worked but required babysitting) and remade it with bigger, better thought out modular parts.
Now it's almost attention free and keeps working.
Gleba is really good imo because stack inserters are godly. You can basically 4x the capacity of any belt. Incredible!
No_one
9hr ago
I didn't play it in this game but it's lovely looking at it.
Infinite power. Infinite minerals. 50% productivity smelters. You can pipe liquid metal everywhere. You can easily fill out a belt with basic metal components.
What else do you need ?
No_one
9hr ago
Biters in vanilla are nothing, nothing. Just build walls and minefields. You've got robots for that. It's a set of pretty simple blueprints you copy & paste. Terrain is flat, rocks dynamited.
Finally knuckled down and put together an actually good item quantity balancer (no mods, loads a train car with ~30 different items in specified quantities. Pretty simple. Subtracts what's in the buffer box from what's in the train, turns every negative smaller than -10value into 1, and puts that to the filter inserter. Inverse filter inserter on the other side, with smaller stack, and it does the job.) If you spam this and segment the logistic network (using the same algo) to push non-train stuff out networks and push normal items in, you can expand endlessly.
Hell with that you could expand endlessly even with Rampant as with nuclear shells cleaning up what's actually 'Deathworld squared' becomes a possibility, your wall just has to be high firepower enough to deal with inevitable massive attack Rampant loves to spring at you. Once you have nukes, blasting the entire area around your base with nuclear fire feels so, so satisfying. (have to do this manually, It's way too much of a waste, algo isn't made for nuclear shells).
The only downside is the UPS drops to 10 for 3 minutes every 45 minutes when Rampant is busily moving the kill counter into the half a million range. But the fireworks are epic.
roche
9hr ago
Holding a thinking face expression for much of the day also creates wrinkles around the face. The greats have eye-areas marked out like world war trench formations
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10hr ago
A few billionaires are, whereas I wish it were the majority. What marginal value do many billions provide, when you're dead, especially when you have enough money for almost all material needs?
It should be a national priority too in first world countries. You don't have to worry nearly as much about the burden of elderly people needing expensive medical care if you can stop them getting old in the first place.
No_one
10hr ago
In general, I strongly recommend using this over the "industry standard" Python-based setup, as the overheads of 1GB+ of random dependencies and interpreted language do tend to build up in ways beyond what shows up in benchmarks
Very true. Playing around with stable diffusion has made the impossible - made my windows seize up over memory, actual app crashes & need to restart the system more than every three weeks when the inevitable update happens.
I had to download rammap from sysinternals because it could delete leaked memory a1111 spilled in gigabytes every time a model was being swapped. Every ~50 mb of pics generated it will need restarting.
Maybe I should go to comfyUI.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10hr ago
On the other hand, we have both Dario Amodei from Anthropic and Altman from OAI extolling the virtues of test-time compute in the vein of o1 (as the article acknowledges).
Personally, while I find the recent relative stagnation in LLMs to be annoying, it's only been what, two years since GPT-4? There are open source models that beat the OG GPT-4 while being much smaller (Llama 405B versus likely a trillion for 4), and models like Sonnet 3.5 are a small but appreciable improvement. I'm not going to call scaling out until we've spent either another year or a hundred billion USD on it, and we'll have to see how test time compute pans out.
Besides, even Ilya says they're working on their own secret sauce solution. We'll see when we see, it's far far too early to call AGI out of the cards.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
I mean it’s not for everyone because it requires major lifestyle changes. But for the right set of individuals, major lifestyle changes are possible. People do it all the time. Immigrants leave their homes and businesses and families behind and move to places with alien cultures. People join the military which is a huge change from civilian life. Such major changes aren’t for everyone, but even modest changes can be accessible to most people. It’s harder than most people think, but it’s perfectly doable.
Folamh3
10hr ago
If Joe Rogan followed all those rules his listenership would probably be a tenth of what it is now.
Folamh3
10hr ago
as was suggested as a possibility in the Dobbs decision
Drop the passive voice. Who suggested it?
Folamh3
10hr ago
the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood
Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things? But when progressive European countries across the board are hitting pause on youth gender transition, Democrats stick their fingers in the ear and say that only the far-right wants to do that?
Not sure why he's making a distinction between self-driving cars and public transit. Self-driving cars are a form of public transit. They are not private vehicles, they owned and operated in a way that's quite similar to busses. In a way, a self-driving car is just a better bus.
There are issues that are specific to self-driving cars due to their personal nature compared to conventional mass transit, which are mostly related to privacy. It's much easier to track you in your "personal bus" than it is in a bus with 20+ other people. But he barely touches on it, and also, conventional mass transit would be quickly losing much of the advantage in that respect anyway due to technological progress in surveillance technology.
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