Randall Randall

@robinhanson Happy Valley has effectively unlimited energy, a lack of nanny safety culture, and enough shipping coming in and out that they have undocumented immigrants and high school graduates can go to college on Earth. The fusion plants really drive all of this abundance.

I just don't believe the scale, luxury, & variety shown on Mars in For All Mankind S5.

@MorlockP Lots of other pilots were also involved…

We risk hundreds of lives to save one life because Scots Irish enlisted people are disposable pawns whereas officer pilots who went to college and then got $30 million of training are real people of the elite class.

@MuseZack @hradzka “Beyond” might not be the most accurate term, here.

Weir is exactly the kind of tech-obsessed, vaguely libertarian nerd who used to be an SF mainstay but science fiction publishing at some point decided they wanted to move beyond. But it turns out there's still an enormous audience for his brand of problem-solving techno optimism.

@turchin @robbensinger @KatjaGrace The preservation is much higher fidelity.

@robbensinger @KatjaGrace Why people who hesitated to sign for cryonics for years on cheaper plans, would rush to sign to Netcome?

Message I sent to my family about the time-sensitive opportunity to maybe cheaply escape natural death this month: As a heads up: Some of my friends are signing up for a new procedure that can be used to chemically put the brain and body in deep freeze and potentially revive you later. It's something I'd generally recommend for older people (e.g. 70+) and terminally ill people. The tech doesn't exist today to revive people, but it seems as though enough information is preserved in the brain that medical technology will eventually advance to the point of enabling revival. (Assuming humanity doesn't destroy itself first, anyway.) I'd put this in the category of "if it weren't new and it weren't weird / outside-the-box, it would probably be standard-of-care as a last line of resort for people who medical science can't otherwise save". There are plenty of other medical procedures that are similarly risky or experimental, but that buy you far fewer years of healthy lifespan if they succeed. The biggest risks and downsides, from my perspective, are: (a) The company doing this, Nectome, is new and untested, and might turn out to be incompetent or dysfunctional in some not-yet-obvious way. (b) If it takes medical technology a long time to reach the point of being able to revive people, then Nectome might stop existing first, or some natural disaster might occur, etc. to damage or destroy the bodies. (c) Nectome only does preservation with advance notice, so you're out of luck if you pass away in a sudden accident. Some more info: - A write-up on Nectome, plus some high-quality discussion (from people I broadly respect) in the comments: [LW link] - A more general (and fun) write-up on this whole approach to end-of-life care: [@waitbutwhy link] (note that this is a ten-year-old post, and the tech was worse at the time). Per [Nectome link], Nectome's preservation services normally cost $250,000, but until April 30 they're doing a pre-sale where you can buy a $20,000 card that makes the procedure cheaper the longer you wait to use it. E.g., if you pass away in 10+ years the total cost is just the flat $20,000; if it's in 6-7 years, it's $20,000 plus an additional $90,000; etc. The card can be freely transferred at any time to anyone who needs these services, so you could potentially buy several and give them to friends and family as needed. Overall: weird stuff, but weird and neglected innovations like these are sometimes where the biggest surprises turn up. I don't think this is a super safe or ironclad bet, but I'd guess it's worth the cost if you generally care a lot about your lifespan and healthspan.

@AdamasNemesis @interpretantion If they were funding things like Oct 7 in, say, Japan or Singapore, I think they’d be in a tougher spot.

@interpretantion North Korea, meanwhile, just has chilled out with a fully functioning nuclear arsenal for like 20 years at this point, and nobody seems to want to bother them (probably because they're not pointing their missiles at Israel, in particular, but even so...).

The insane irony of all this is that if Iran had demonstrably gotten the bomb a year ago the whole world, including America, would be safer right now

@allie__voss Directions assume so much. The assumptions are easy for someone who has done this 20+ times, but not so much people who pride themselves on never cooking.

I don't even believe people who say they can't cook Maybe you don't enjoy it, maybe you can't do anything high-level, or maybe you've just never tried, but you CAN follow basic directions if you're literate

@drowzydizzy @PointmanC Mark is a pushover who exists to get beaten up and just barely win, sometimes. I haven't seen the latest season, though.

@PointmanC this can't be real because i can't imagine Mark not immediately killing cecil on sight

"Cecil... what the hell happened?" "Well Mark its gonna be hard to explain so I'm glad your sittin down for this." "Well whatever happened I'm ready-" "Eve had an abortion done while you were away from earth" "....this isn't funny Cecil she's in critical condition" "this isn't a joke, Mark. I wouldn't open with that, thats what happened. I got it on tape. Watch." "Cecil I don't want to see--" "shh. Nah watch this." "Okay what am I...OH GOD. WHAT JUST HAPPENED? THE SCREEN WENT PINK!" "Yeah so remember when Conquest "killed" Eve? basically thats what the baby did to the whole clinic." "Jesus." "Lot of people are dead Mark it was like they took a hammer to an A-Bomb. I don't know why she didn't talk to you, me, or anyone before doing this."

@ELMAGAIN "What city was I born in?" WTF? From an unknown number? You're probably being scammed. Or your son is, actually. :(

Either hell has frozen over or we had a major shift. My oldest son, who wrote me off 5 years ago, texted me today. He changed numbers, so I have not been able to contact him. Please let this be a good shift. I miss my kid

@HighKoalas @EigenGender @AdsoOfBelk ...but they would have a place to stay. For 6 months.

@EigenGender @AdsoOfBelk Idk, 6 months in jail would get a lot of people evicted

Why does the parkChicago app sometimes prompt me with a city ordinance about assaulting parking agents with the option to “cancel” or “continue”

@tagame Making something the 51st state is more like "let's hang out all the time" than "let me control you like a limb".

冗談だとしても、アメリカは 「占領して仲間にしてやることが友好の印だ」と思っていそうで、ちょっと寒気がした。 気に入ったから仲良くしようじゃなくて、気に入ったから手足にしてやろう、みたいな。

@AndToddsaid Actually well before the case: #Wong_Kim_Ark" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St…

Hold up. I just learned something. Some time after the Supreme Court case, the parents of Wong Kim Ark moved back to China. That means that the assumptions the Supreme Court made regarding domicile and based its decision on were... wrong.

@DavidGr08051597 @martianwyrdlord The rocket they are using isn't capable of putting Orion into a lunar orbit (with enough fuel to get back). This is the ultimate cause of all the "transfer to a separate landing system that got there autonomously" shenanigans that gave us the "Lunar Gateway", now canceled.

@martianwyrdlord Did NASA only dare one flyby without entering orbit because 1) the material is too old (and why is that?), 2) the diverse crew wouldn't be able to handle orbit insertion, 3) NASA itself is now staffed by DEI incompetents?

It turns out that Modern Audiences aren't actually that interested in reboots that repeat stories that have already been told with Diverse casting choices. The three white men crewing the Apollo 8 mission burned into a lunar orbit insertion and orbited the Moon ten times, by the way; Artemis will do a single flyby, using the Moon's gravity to slingshot into a return trajectory without actually entering lunar orbit. The plot of the original series was more interesting tbh.

A thermostat can have a terminal goal of keeping sensed temperature within a set range. You may object, "The thermostat is doing this for an instrumental purpose", but that's not represented in the constructed goal structure of the thermostat, because only systems external to the thermostat care about why the temperature should be kept in this range. More complex systems often do not have legible terminal goals, because the only commonality for various instrumental goals or subsystems' goals is outside the system in question (an OS, considered as a whole, for example), or because the goals which the system implements aren't consistent in the first place (humans, for example).

@randallsquared @tautologer Name a specific concrete terminal goal that a system has?

@PrinceVogel @tautologer Being "better" is directionally dependent on one's goals.

@tautologer I don't think I could do it per se but in the limit I do think they exist Do you think there are no arguments that convince people to be better, if you do believe the orthogonality thesis?

@eshear @tautologer Humans do not have internally-represented terminal goals, though sometimes we talk as if we do. Systems that could have terminal goals, but don't, cannot generate one from any rational or evidentiary internal process. Terminal goals are always imposed from some external system.

“The first, the orthogonality thesis, holds (with some caveats) that intelligence and final goals (purposes) are orthogonal axes along which possible artificial intellects can freely vary—more or less any level of intelligence could be combined with more or less any final goal.” The problem with this claim is that there final goals are a thing that exists. In reality there are only shorter and longer term goals. A final goal is a longest term goal, but there is no longest time horizon. Only the longest we’ve understood so far. Could I persuade Ted Bundy? Almost certainly not, but that doesn’t mean anything. I can’t convince most people of most things. But that’s just because convincing ppl of things via rational argument is really hard in general.

people who don't believe the Orthogonality Thesis: do you believe that there is a rational argument that you could present to Ted Bundy that would convince him that killing people is wrong, such that he no longer was motivated to do it?

@silqco @omegilla @chuckmonkey2010 I think some of us have been very confused because “radiation” includes light and radio, so how could they have jnstruments to detect electromagnetic radiation while it’s claimed that they don’t even know about it?

according from the book, they don’t know about radiation because their planet protects them almost perfectly from it. erid has an extremely strong magnetic field and a very thick atmosphere, which blocks nearly all harmful radiation from space and their star before it reaches the surface. since radiation never really affects them, their bodies never had to evolve defenses against it. and because it never caused any obvious harm, they had no reason to study or even notice it. no exposure means no problem, and no problem means no discovery.

i read the book and literally the reason why rocky had so much extra fuel was because eridians didnt know about relativistic physics. they thought time and distance worked normally (using the newtonian physics) so they calculated the trip all wrong. at near light speed, time slows down and distance actually gets shorter, so rocky ended up using way less fuel than expected. rocky's entire mission was based on wrong science and somehow that mistake is exactly what saves grace. #projecthailmary

@Ace_Archist @AiPinfu2003 4, 5, 2, 3, 6, then 1 if you want to get more memes with original context. 1 is just a different kind of movie.

@AiPinfu2003 I think 4,5,6 into 1,2,3 is probably the safest bet, but there is an order called “the machete order” that’s actually pretty good that goes 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6 that really enriches episode 6.

アメリカ人、スターウォーズを観る順番を教えてくれ。 4→5→6→1→2→3がベスト？ 1→2→3→4→5→6でもいいかな？ あと7,8,9は堆肥ゴミなのか埋め立てゴミなのか分別はどうなってる？

@Fifongirmfo @TheStalwart A static space elevator would be considerable longer from the moon. In fact, static elevators are quite difficult anywhere. What's lower in both effort and risk is rotovators, and those are useful in higher orbits and for interplanetary travel, too!

@TheStalwart We will probably build a few space elevators elsewhere before trying it here. Our own moon would be an obvious choice.

As I said at the end of this episode, to me it seems like only a matter of time before we build a space elevator. I'd be shocked if we don't have one in the next 1000 years.

@DatFishe @romantiktheory @BlumenMit A radical change in belief or behavior from a single (possibly fragile or incorrect) example. The video game sniping meaning doesn't seem to apply as directly to changing minds, except, uh, physically. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-shot_…

@randallsquared @romantiktheory @BlumenMit It doesn't imply that at all actually, what do you think "one-shot" means?

My mother was completely one-shot politically by the Aligator Alcatraz concentration camp thing. I told her how they were building a literal concentration camp to throw immigrants in and how they put it in a swamp so that aligators would eat escapees and them selling merch of it

@romantiktheory @BlumenMit Haha. I was only pointing out that “one-shot” implies the new belief is wrong. It might be, but clearly the OP didn’t think so.

@BlumenMit @randallsquared he's right tho, you kinda of two-shot her if she only believed after months