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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I don’t think it’s performative to want the bigots to become people that aren’t bigots rather than wanting them dead. I mean I’ll take dead over spreading the sort of hate he was in a case like that I guess, and I get that the later is something other people have much more control over than the former, but still.



  • Depends on the time frame. In the period immediately following such a venture, sure, but if you actually properly establish settlement off earth, the total resource base and thus carrying capacity of civilization as a whole increases and continues to increase until we either hit the limits of that part of the universe one can theoretically reach (which is so big as to make the entire earth less than a speck of dust by comparison), you decide to just stop space colonization (which gets more difficult the further on you go, because the number of potential polities to launch a new mission increases the more space is populated), or you find yourself boxed in by alien civilizations in all directions (since we haven’t seen any, they’re most likely far enough apart on average for this to still leave an extremely vast chunk of space). A hypothetical spacefairing civilization should be able to reach sizes so vast that it would be physically impossible to create enough jobs on just one planet to equal it, even with just this solar system even.

    Job creation by itself is not exactly the best motivation to pursue this though, since the jobs created will after the initial period be generally far away and therefore not likely to be worked by anyone except the people that end up in those colonies, who wouldn’t even exist otherwise.


  • Isn’t VR bad for younger kids even ignoring stuff like this? (which honestly sound like the same kind of issue you get with any internet communication system, if anything I’d imagine proper moderation in a non-text context where people’s movements and real-time voice are involved to be even harder than most platforms to the point of being nearly impossible)

    I could have sworn I remember some widely reported study a couple years back to the effect that a lot of VR exposure before one was like an early teenager or something had a negative effect on a kids sense of balance or similar. Was that found not to be the case at some point, or am I misremembering that?



  • Ive only been using linux for a few months and still dont feel confident that I know what im doing except when the gui can do a thing intuitively, so probably that beginning stage, except the distro Ive been using (ZorinOS) isnt on here. I think its based on Ubuntu tho so maybe that covers it idk. Been thinking about trying a different distro to see if its any better but reinstalling all my stuff again sounds like a hassle so I might just stick with the setup I have for awhile longer.


  • I think that the general idea of artificial intelligence in education hold some promise, in the sense that if you could construct a machine that can do much of the work of a teacher, it should enable kids to be taught in an individual way currently only possible for those rich enough to afford a private tutor, and such a machine would be labeled as an AI of some kind. The trouble is, like with so many other things AI, that our AI technology just doesn’t seem to be up to the task, and probably just won’t be without some new approach. We have AI just smart enough for people to try to do all the things that one could use an AI for, but not smart enough for the AI to actually do the job well.












  • It is a prefix that isn’t specific to gender (I don’t know of a particular use in sexuality though that doesn’t mean there isn’t one), but in other uses that I know of, it isn’t used by itself as a descriptor of an aspect of a person’s identity, but as part of some other word. It basically means the opposite of trans (as a prefix, so not just “cisgender means someone that isn’t transgender”, but anywhere that the prefix trans- could be used, for example, when talking about spacecraft visiting the moon, the space farther away from earth than the moon is is sometimes referred to as translunar space, and conversely, the space between the earth and the moon can be called cislunar space). In general, if one is talking about people, especially if it’s just used by itself with nothing else attached, it just refers to everyone other than transgender people.




  • It does seem a bit strange that it’s taken basically as a given that accidentally stumbling upon a picture of people not wearing stuff that didn’t even exist when the species evolved will do some sort of inevitable psychological harm to a kid. Intentional exposure sure, that’s about as sus as it gets, but that’s not what the kid finding something not aimed towards kids entails anyway.