Cool. Now cut the tax breaks for churches that talk about sex and sexual orientation. Oh, they won’t do that? Hmm, interesting.

That was a great guest character who should have been given a follow up episode. Or really any follow up from a whole crew finding themselves flung into the future.

This is the opposite of Galaxy Quest, where no matter how early you diffuse the explosion, the timer can only stop at one second left, because it always stopped at 1 on the show

Passively safe reactors should be the future of electricity generation. Modern reactors are designed so that the job of the operators is to “fight” the reactor to make it more reactive. If they walk away or are incapacitated, the reactor brings itself into a steady, low-power state. But whenever people think of nuclear power, they only think of Chernobyl…

“Sailor, Statesman” as a description doesn’t do Robert Smalls justice. Read up on this man’s story, and then can someone please get Lin Manuel Miranda to write a musical about him?

He speaks!?

I didn’t know about this. Thanks!

Unfortunately I’m in a first floor condo, so no access from above.

I’ve done projects like this before, but I’ve never had this much of a problem finding a joist. I’ve got no problem with patching a few holes, so this could work.

It’s not too heavy, but heavy enough that I wouldn’t be comfortable with just drywall anchors. Same with the projector screen.

I think UBI is where we’ll eventually end up, but I can’t see the transition being something smooth. I am anticipating some kind of economic collapse to rival the Great Depression, followed by a period of civil unrest, that (hopefully) turns into a near post-scarcity economy.

I can get why soldiers currently in the field who are being transitioned to it hate it, but I’d be curious if new soldiers who would be trained on this equipment from the start would see any improvement in effectivity compared to soldiers who were trained without it.

You’re kind of way off on how AlphaGo works. It wasn’t programmed with any knowledge of good vs bad moves in Go at all. It was programmed with the basic rules, and then played against itself millions of times, each time adjusting its neural network so that it learned how to make the best move in any given position.

I’ve seen a number of these! The Boston Symphony Orchestra typically does a couple of these events every season.

The only scary thing about a fission reactor on the moon is getting fuel there. Rockets are definitely moving in the direction of being safer, but a rocket loaded with enriched uranium, if it were to explode during lift-off, would potentially contaminate a massive piece of land with radioactive material. Even if a rocket only fails 1/100th of the time, that’s still a huge gamble to make.

Nice graph. Though I would actually take out having it be “per capita.” Since you’re using that for both axes, it’s actually not having any effect on the data points.

Dumb question, but wouldn’t the best use of old Christmas trees be to just use them directly as fuel. They’re just wood. Can they just be thrown into the furnace of a power plant?

Would the key inflection point for that be an AI that’s capable of writing and training another AI quickly?

The thing I keep worrying myself about is that any AI doesn’t need to be perfect to be threatening to peoples jobs, it just needs to be better and cheaper. We’re definitely heading to cheaper, and given that ChatGPT is already being used by students to help with essay writing, we’re not that far off from it being better.

If quantum computers ever come to fruition, the biggest challenge will be updating old encryption technology to be quantum secure.

As long as it doesn’t make the frogs gay I think folks will be alright with it.

General purpose AI. Imagine being a doctor or scientist or lawyer and not needing to read through a dozen papers to find the one piece of information you need.

Think of “the computer” from Star Trek that had every piece of information available at a single vocal command. That it what a general purpose AI could offer.

I would bet that we reach a level of commercial space travel akin to commercial air travel. The moon/mars will have some form of rudimentary base, probably after a couple of failed attempts. Though I don’t think they will be colonized in any real way.

If you believe yourself to be average, then any great accomplishment of yours could have been done by anyone.

-the ongoing source of my imposter syndrome and depression.