Do you have any proof you’re not a chatbot?

Our future AI overlord is currently a malfunctioning AutoGPT instance

Why do you think destroying public education is a key right wing priority?

Well, if you’d like to reduce your risk of losing data to a minimum, you should still test your backups anyways. Shit happens, even to the good people at Backblaze sometimes.

Or things like your offsite provider taking a shit and corrupting your backups without realizing, meaning when your local backup goes kaput your 2nd backup has already silently failed. That exact thing hitting one of their off-site providers was what convinced one of my clients to let me fix their backup procedures (or at least try)

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Admining an MS shop is like “haha yeah isn’t it great? all these tools! so great!” dies on inside knowing all these tools are tied into cloud infra that we’ve had to assume is unsafe ever since SolarWinds, can’t challenge anything because your boss saw a list of open source CVE’s and isn’t aware there isn’t a similar database for how many foreign governments and criminal enterprises have backdoors in Azure

If you’re just looking to mess around, Bard isn’t half bad. Okay, it’s pretty terrible, but it can do Internet searches and has a Python interpreter built in, so you can do stuff with Bard you can’t do with GPT-3.5

Quantum mechanics presents the most meaningful challenge to determinism because unlike chaos theory it asserts that reality really is indeterminate. Physicists have been wrestling with this problem since quantum mechanics was formulated. Even Einstein tried to prove quantum indeterminacy was false, but he shrank from the implications of his own solutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory

Spoiler: there’s no strong evidence for most hidden variable theories. There has been a revival of interest in some deterministic re-interpretations of quantum mechanics over the last few years (recommend Lee Smolin, he has a book and some talks on Youtube re this discussion), but right now, the prevailing theory is that reality really is just fundamentally indeterminate. Hey, I hate it, makes my skin crawl, but that’s most likely the way it is based on the science.

EDIT – I’m not a strong advocate for free will in the abstract, but I do think the basic worldview underpinning certain forms of hard determinism has been superseded by a non-deterministic view in physics.

EDIT – for greater precision/clarity

I have nothing to say except this is very cool and I’m keeping an eye on it! Thanks for sharing!

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Oh, I know. But see how downplaying serious threats to civilization plays out. The IPCC 2007 report screwed the climate movement during likely its most critical period (earlier action is always better, but the late 2000’s-2010’s were sort of our last window for avoiding the really awful stuff, so in a way that was sort of the most important time to be ringing the alarm imho – at this point, we just get to respond to the out of control emergency that’s now starting to play out) because everybody could officially point to it and say “look? see? we’re fine! it’s fine! shut up!”

Climate denialism that merely comes from a CYA/institutional politics angle is still climate denialism.

There’s a speed standard in the USA and it mandates 25 down and 3 up? Could someone tell my ISP?

Thanks for clarifying, but I mean, that hardly seems any better. Why does it matter if the temps “only” got too hot for life in the river and they reduced output to avoid environmental damage? Do you mean to imply stripping that environmental regulation and letting them kill off life in the river with overheated wastewater would be an acceptable tradeoff if temperatures got too hot for too long?

Yeah, but since there are no moving parts and no emissions, you can site solar panels in places you could never site a nuclear power plant. You can even put them on farms, which is actually of interest to farmers now since climate change means many farms are dealing with excess heat stress and water retention issues in their soil. Revenue-generating shade devices that protect their yields are of interest to farmers. There are a million ways you can creatively use wind and solar technologies because they’re not just inherently extremely harmful and dangerous.

Cf. agrisolar.

Go ahead and put a nuclear power plant anywhere and continue to use that land for anything else. Or cover a city’s rooftops in nuclear reactors. Go right ahead, I’m sure nobody will have anything to say about that.

Your argument sounds great as long as we forget literally all of the specific characteristics of all of these technologies that differentiate them other than power output. Only thinking about power output is why we’re dealing with a 10-dimensional stack of environmental problems only the largest of which is climate change.

EDIT Made some tweaks after posting sorry if you were replying.

Current favored theory about his Twitter takeover is that he was just fucking around with the stock price, as he is wont to do (this is the guy that was forced to step down as the head of Tesla because he manipulated the stock price as a joke), and the Twitter board and SEC called his bluff. He’s been backed into a corner and is now trying to drag it to bankruptcy so he can get out of the mess he made.

Yeah, but we don’t just need technological solutions that can crank out the requisite energy, we need technological solutions that aren’t going to facilitate nuclear proliferation even more than has already occurred. The United States right now is in an insane position vis a vis Pakistan because even though Pakistan shelters the US’s enemies and is effectively a passive-aggressively hostile power, it would be worse for the US (and the world) if the current Pakistani state just collapsed. It’s a nuclear power, after all. What happens if, in the chaos, ISIS affiliates get their hands on Pakistani nukes? Or, I dunno, the Taliban? Or they disappear onto the international market and two years later the Sinaloa cartel proudly announces it’s the world’s latest nuclear power? That’s the calculus with nuclear proliferation.

This is such a drastic risk the US can’t bring itself to do anything about the people who sheltered Bin Laden and the Taliban during the Afghanistan War because that’s a lesser evil than running the risk of losing control of the nukes. Nuclear proliferation is a big deal.

There are US states where insurance companies are refusing to offer new home insurance plans and are dropping customers who have spent six figures and more making their homes more resilient to the new climate environment.

If you want to slightly recast that, there are now US states where it’s not economically viable to extend basic services that are generally considered necessary to live in an area.

Yeah, but the only way you could weaponize a solar panel is to drop it on someone. You can’t just misconfigure a solar array and render the entire area unlivable.

Like, what part about “if this power plant falls into the wrong hands it could be turned into a weapon of mass destruction” sounds even remotely acceptable as a trade-off when cheaper and vastly safer alternative techs are available?

I think we need to accept that we don’t have the technology to sustainably deliver as much energy as the capitalist economic system now demands and will demand in the future. We are, in fact, going to have to figure out an economic system that can meet our needs without ever-spiraling energy requirements.

There are other issues, too. France is dealing with issues with their nuclear plants because they designed them around the idea that river water would always be cheap and abundant. They’ve had to start shutting down nuclear reactors in summer when water levels get too low, and they expect this issue to get worse over time. They are planning new reactors around the new environment, but I just don’t see how we can effectively plan nuclear infrastructure in an environment of global climate change and reduced security. Conflicts like in Ukraine aren’t going to become less common over time.

I read the Fourth IPCC Assessment in 2007 and was like “wow, they have to know they’re being too conservative with their estimates”

Basically, if anyone had looked at the IPCC reports that had been produced even before 2010, it was obvious how much airbrushing and wishful thinking was going on to make it look like everything was fine. But instead of looking at the reports overall, people just wanted to read the comforting, obviously wrong even then conclusions at the very end.

If you really looked at the level of uncertainty involved in the projections, and thought about it honestly, anyone could have have realized long before 2010 that, at level best, world “leaders” were literally gambling with the future of this entire global civilization.