Darrell

Droids are coming. This generation's rugpull is "go into the trades" just before robots start multiplying tradesman productivity. AI is going to be more lastingly effective at replacing skilled physical labor than white collar workers.

@JaxJacksonw1fk @whimsical523456 @martianwyrdlord Where's your evidence otherwise? When a story survives full of demigods and divine intervention, and outrageous elements like the trojan horse, the normal expectation is that other aspects have also drifted far from the truth.

@darrellprograms @whimsical523456 @martianwyrdlord You base that on what exactly? Where’s your evidence it’s made up?

Historians used to say the same thing about the Iliad. Anyhow, here's Troy.

@Bad_Tweet_Man It's explicitly described as a "cabin". Has a loft. Windows, doors, and shipping are included. Engineer-approved with stamped drawings available for permitting. Solid wood construction should last a long time. I don't think it's a bad deal for a summer getaway cabin.

Live in a shed with no insulation for 21k!

@GPrime85 This is just a pun on "eyecatch" isn't it? The anime industry term for a very short clip to play at the start and end of commercial breaks.

> Find a good artist > Give them a healthy budget and some time > Watch as they make gold > Repeat

@theodorvaryag I mean, Windows 11 happened primarily because they let management get corrupt and hire people who kick back half their salaries instead of people who can do the job, but this is also a factor.

Programmers really really want to believe there's just one little hotspot where performance matters and then they can skip doing their job everywhere else spend 5 fucking seconds thinking about it and you'll realize this is 100% how Windows 11 happened

@BrianAcity This is one of the silliest ideas I've ever heard. The increase in life expectancy was mostly from reduction of infant mortality.

The philosopher Michel Serres, who taught at Stanford for many years and was close to Rene Girard, noted in a number of books that the doubling of lifespans, as occurred in the twentieth century, had seismic social consequences: marriage vows designed for a decade or two become 65-year contracts; inheritance arrives in your old age instead of your prime; the willingness to die for a nation becomes less prevalent when you have six decades of life ahead. The radical slowdown of aging that some say is on the horizon would invert every institution built on the assumption that the old will soon yield to the young.

@RayCalla1312 @Anarseldain That's simply not true. Armed antifa thugs were blocking routes of retreat from what they had turned into a riot, moving barricades. One waved a gun, forcing him into a wrong turn, and then another struck his car as he approached the crowd, making him think he was being shot at.

@darrellprograms @Anarseldain Lmao. Yes I think the racial agitator who drove through a crowd of protestors on a blocked off street is the person who moved the barricade. Seems like quite simple logic if you’re not a racist who needs to defend a murderer.

Self defense is just illegal if you’re a White man in America. I want to again bring attention to James Alex Fields. In 2017 a violent mob of antifa members (terrorists) attacked his car, so he feared for his life and accelerated. An obese woman died of a heart attack after contact. For that, he received 2 life sentences + 419 years. Many states have now passed laws which make it legal to accelerate when protestors attack your car, but Fields came too early, and activist judges took his life away. An antifa professor named Dwayne Dixon, who has now fled the country to avoid the FBI’s investigation of antifa terrorism, literally admitted to chasing James with a firearm. Dixon was also charged with two misdemeanors during a different event, one of which was “going armed to the terror of people.” Liberals jeered as Fields was sentenced to TWO LIFE SENTENCES PLUS 419 YEARS IN PRISON for accelerating his car in an attempt to escape a violent mob which was bearing down on it, and actively attacking his car in an attempt to get at him. Leftists were literally brandishing firearms at him, and he was sentenced to prison for trying to escape.

@RayCalla1312 @Anarseldain I think the "unite the right" rally was a colossally stupid idea driven primarily by feds. "Let's all go associate our cause indiscriminately with any supposedly 'right wing' ideology, including literal self-described fascists." But that doesn't mean it initiated violence.

@RayCalla1312 @Anarseldain If antifa had not initiated violence, there would have been no violence on that day, just an orderly demonstration with all the proper permits.

@romanhelmetguy To avoid further incidents like that, they wrote the first encyclopedias.

The Cyclopes are real btw. I saw one in Sicily, it was terrifying. And the “nobody” trick doesn’t work anymore, they know about that now.

@Austen Its main business has been profiteering for decades.

Wait a minute, the department of war doesn’t have the right to repair its own military equipment?

@whimsical523456 @martianwyrdlord There was a Troy. It's entirely likely that some Greeks beseiged it at some point. All the other details are more likely to have been hopelessly mangled in the retelling, or just made up, than to be accurate.

@darrellprograms @martianwyrdlord Homer fictionalised things to about the same degree as William Shakespeare did. The basic elements of The Iliad are true historical events, but the Gods being involved and whatnot was the embellishment.

@Anarseldain You've got to be able to take the racial aspect out of it and imagine he was behaving this way toward white people. Because you don't have to show favoritism toward blacks to conclude he's guilty of more serious crimes than the man who attacked him after his provocation.

@Anarseldain Fields was a naive young man likely just running scared from antifa attackers when he made a driving error under pressure, but Chud went around harassing people and provoking them until he finally succeeded in provoking an attack. Supporting him is an unforced error.

@GuapoGringo1 @LearnParty1 @bumbadum14 @jakozloski Oh look, another dating site revenue model that's: "Pimp out women to rich men." The "marriage bounty" is a heavy fine for not ditching the girl within 18 months.

@LearnParty1 @bumbadum14 @jakozloski He and his business partner will block you if you ever mention it 😆

Gee, look at this matchmaking app with a 6-to-1 female to male ratio... I wonder why? Can it be that women get to sign up for free and are matching with guys who have 50k to throw at a matchmaker?

@STCorpo @edplaysjazz @AllForProgress_ On that day, Pulsar Fusion achieved "first plasma", which is something high school kids have achieved in tabletop fusors, not "fusion ignition" or a self-sustained fusion reaction without external heating, which no one has achieved and would be regarded as a breakthrough.

@edplaysjazz @AllForProgress_ pray do tell?

In a workshop on the outskirts of Bletchley (it had to be there, didn't it), on the 26th of March this year, a small British company called Pulsar Fusion did something that has not been done by any other company or government on Earth. It ignited a controlled plasma inside the test chamber of a working nuclear fusion rocket engine. The plasma held, along with the chamber. The fusion reaction was the kind of reaction that, contained inside a sufficiently engineered magnetic bottle, will one day take a crewed British vehicle to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months, and that will, within the working lifetime of the engineers presently building it, make the outer planets of the solar system accessible to anyone with a British passport. The geography of the achievement deserves a longer moment of pause. Bletchley, in 1942, was where Alan Turing and his colleagues broke the Enigma cipher and almost certainly shortened the war in Europe by two years. Pulsar Fusion's headquarters sits roughly 600 yards from the Hut where they did it. The country that did the maths inside that hut has just, less than a mile down the road, ignited the plasma that could power the next century of human space travel. There is a continuity of British scientific lineage here that is, on the face of it, almost embarrassingly providential, and it is almost completely unreported in the British press. It's not quite Kitty-Hawk-to-the-moon in 61 years, but it's close. Like so many great companies of profound importance, Pulsar Fusion is pretty small. It was founded in 2013, and employs around 50 staff. Its chief executive, Richard Dinan, is a working British physicist who has spent the last decade quietly assembling the team and the capital to do what the world's national space agencies have been promising for 60 years and consistently failing to deliver. The competing American programmes, principally at NASA's Glenn Research Center and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, are years behind on the propulsion side. The competing Chinese programmes are obscure but, on what is known publicly, also behind. The European Space Agency is, as ever, organising a workshop. Pulsar fired its plasma in March and has been preparing the next-stage tests in the months since. What this kind of capability means, when commercialised, is genuinely vast. The economic argument for getting a payload to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months is not principally about the human passengers, though there is one. It is about cargo. Given a 30-day transit, Mars becomes a logistically tractable destination for the kind of infrastructure-build that turns it from a flag-planting science mission into a working industrial site. The argument for the outer planets is even larger. The asteroid belt alone, on conservative mineralogical estimates, contains more economically viable platinum-group metals than the entire crust of the Earth has been mined for in industrial history. The first country with reliable fusion propulsion is the first country with reliable access to that supply. The country that holds that capacity, fifty years from now, will be holding the most consequential industrial advantage of the 21st century, and there is no obvious second prize. The standard British response to this kind of thing is to either ignore it entirely, sell the company to an American buyer at series B (the DeepMind path) for fire-sale prices, or fund it at the level of a Whitehall departmental tea and coffee budget (the Skycutter and Orbex paths). The standard British response will not be sufficient. Pulsar Fusion needs the kind of patient capital that turns a working demonstration into an operational engine, and that, in turn, into a manufacturing capability. The British state, on present form, is structurally incapable of providing it, British pension funds are structurally incapable of investing in it, and the British political class will, on present form, only notice if it somehow manages to swing a leadership election. I wantt= Pulsar Fusion treated as a national-strategic asset, and beyond that as a potential subject of national destiny. The Sovereign AI Fund that backed Ineffable Intelligence has a clear template. The Prosperity Zone programme we designed at Progress that anchors heavy industry at SaxaVord and Teesside has the geographic flexibility to include a fusion-propulsion cluster in Buckinghamshire, six miles from the most evocative site in modern British scientific history. The procurement architecture of every major British defence and space agency should, from this autumn, be writing offtake contracts contingent on Pulsar's milestones. There's nothing extreme about these ideas. We could have been doing it decades ago. I always conceived of Britain as being as much among the stars as it is on Earth. To buy into the idea of Britain as a culture and polity is necessarily to buy into the concept of the human being as an illimitable force. Our history is littered with happy instances of people of great fortitude hitting upon obstacles and, with a cry of "This will not stop us", clearing the way for our brothers and sisters to follow through. A small British company in Bletchley has, while nobody was looking, extended that arm of our tradition, by accomplishing one of the most important pieces of scientific engineering of the decade. The country that produced them is, in a measurable sense, the same country that produced the Bombe, the Colossus, the jet engine, the structure of DNA, and the World Wide Web. The capacity is intact. The political class capable of recognising it must catch up, and will.

@MarkovWalker @mikemearls "There are six ability scores that all characters have. Name all six, or as many as you can." The sentence structure is too confusing. People end up giving you abilities and attributes of memorable characters, so you get answers like "magic", "dwarf", and "kindness".

@darrellprograms @mikemearls How else do you ask that without saying the names?

I can 100% vouch for the results of this survey. When I worked on D&D, we saw this in every study we did of the general population. People who claimed they played D&D described a game that looked nothing like what was in the rulebooks. troypress.com/dd-rules-accor…