Human psychology hasn’t changed during that time, so the same kinds of tricks or weakness that can drive a population into that mode of thinking still work today, if the details around them are adapted for some modern culture. If anything, it might be slightly easier, given those trying to achieve it have historical examples of what is and isn’t effective.

ornithopters arent exactly new

For how long though? The issue with detecting AI generated stuff, Id imagine, is that a picture contains a finite amount of information, especially a digital one. These things have been improving relatively quickly, and I cant think of any fundamental reason why one could not eventually create images where every pixel is as it would be if that image were real, or at least close enough that detection is not even theoretically possible if you dont have some actual proof that the event depicted couldnt have happened. We may not be there yet, but the closer we get to it, the more prone to error and therefore less useful any detection algorithm must be.

Quite the exaggerated headline from the look of it.

I think drone warfare so far has shown that one of the advantages of drones, for a weapon, is their ability to be produced cheapy, en masse, and with a relatively limited manufacturing infrastructure. Assuming you have the computer parts anyway, which are abundant in today’s society. One of the implications of that, I think, is that in future asymmetric or civil wars and the like, they’re not going to be like fighter jets or tanks, where one side will have them and the other must improvise countermeasures. They’re going to be like guns and explosives, where both sides are going to have access to at least some degree.

Consume the upper class? Vore the bourgeois?

Those are the ideas I was referencing as taking decades tbh. Technically a few, especially the laser sail, can potentially get to high enough fractions of lightspeed to get that noticable time dilation effect, but given that makes something that already costs a huge amount of energy, much more expensive than it already is, I’m not sure if you’d actually want to go to those speeds very often.

I mean, saying it would take half of forever with existing technology, when we do not have the technology to do it in the first place, seems a bit redundant. There are any number of hypothetical technologies for travel to relatively nearby stars that, while we don’t have them presently, at least do not violate physics and are more an issue of requiring a civilization of much larger scale than ours to afford to build them rather than one of if they’re physically possible.

An analogy I once saw was this: suppose you were to go back in time to meet a medieval blacksmith, and you show him the blueprints for a modern jetliner. You might, with a lot of explaining of the relevant physics and engineering behind all the parts, be able to convince the guy that the machine could work if constructed. But, he’d have no idea of the process for how many of the parts are made, or the materials they’re made from, and if you included all that information too, the whole process would be so expensive and the size of the economy back then so small that in all likelihood, not even the richest kingdom on earth in his day could possibly afford to actually build and operate one. However, if the blacksmith took all that information and concluded “this can never happen, it’s just too hard”, time would prove him wrong.

Terraforming would seem a bit unnecessary if you can send a crewed ship there. Manned interstellar travel, unless we’re wrong about the whole speed of light thing, is going to take decades at least to reach the very nearest stars (I’d imagine that it is more likely we’d go to those stars first, and only reach Trappist when people from those stars later launch their own ships, until eventually the outer edge of settled space reaches 40ly).

That implies that, if you can send some colony ship to another star, you necessarily have the technology to build a space habitat that can sustain large numbers of humans in sufficient comfort to run a small civilization and all relevant industry, self-sufficiently using only the materials available in space from asteroids and such as inputs. You have this tech first, because the colony ship is itself just one or more of these habitats, on top of some massive propulsion system.

As such, why even bother with terraforming planets? That’s a process that may potentially take millennia to truly finish, longer than it took your ship to even get there with some of the possible propulsion options, will only be viable on a fraction of worlds, and will still get you a place that probably does not have an earth like day or gravity or any number of other differences. You would then be back in the bottom of a gravity well, which requires a ton of energy expenditure to get back into space again. Why not instead, find some asteroids and comets in your target system, there’s probably going to be some around somewhere if our solar system is any indication, and build more of those habitats as needed.

You can find plenty of weird furry fetish art on the fediverse too if you find the right instances, that’s just an internet thing.

If the holy wine (I forget the proper term for it) is supposed to be the blood of Jesus, does that imply that if you concentrate that wine and then run an engine off it, you have a Jesus fueled car?

Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?

While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I’ve played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There’s something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It’s not a problem at all if I’m feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn’t take that long, but if I’m recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.

My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it’s probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.

The issue is that people will use votes for if they like the thing or not instead of if it’s in good faith, even if you tell them not to, both on purpose to harm opposing views, and unintentionally because they’re more likely to notice a bad faith tactic coming from someone disagreeing than from someone agreeing with them.

“hey Google, download Firefox for me please.”

-“Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that…”

There is quite a lot Trump could do to speed things up. He could, for one thing, send American troops to assist Israel on the ground; I have concern that he might do such, because Israel has increasingly been dragging other countries in the region into this, notably Iran, and Trump pursued a policy towards that country during his term in office that very well could have led to war had things gone slightly worse. Given his support for Netanyahu, whose government has itself been tempting fate of late by engaging in back and forth missile strikes, and his disregard for the consequences of attacks against Iran, I have serious fears that he might give Israel a green light to pursue a full scale war with that country, by promising to commit US forces in the event of such a thing.

At a lesser degree, he also could simply increase US military aid to Israel beyond the current level, and end what efforts (insufficient by a country mile but still better than their absence would be) have been made by the US to convince Israel to limit its actions, such as the recent threats to cut some of its military aid if Israel does not allow more food aid across Gaza. He appears to actively dislike Muslim populations, as seen by his efforts as president to ban travelers from Muslim majority countries, so it strikes me as rather unlikely that he would do anything, even something basic like that, to assist a Muslim majority country like Palestine against the wishes of one of his allies.

Also for the record, I do not think that I am simply protecting “my outgroup” in opposing him. I am of the view that he, (or more importantly, the fascistic movement that he has grown around him, of which Trump himself is the leader, but which may persist even after he is gone), presents an existential threat not just to myself and those whom I know, but to you, to everyone in the country, to everyone in the numerous countries who he seems actively hostile to (including but not limited to Palestine as I have said, and Iran, as I was saying earlier, and Ukraine), and to a lesser extent, to the future of every single person on this planet. That may sound a bit extreme, but we are talking about making a narcissistic old man showing signs of mental decline and known for lashing out at things that anger him the commander in chief of a nuclear armed state, we are talking about putting someone who does not seem to believe in climate change at the head of the world’s largest economy at a time when getting carbon emissions down is critical to keeping the planet livable in the future, and we are talking about putting the country with the world’s largest military budget in the hands of a person who idealizes fascists, has attempted to maintain power despite a previous election loss, and has a following composed to a large degree of racists and religious zealots.

I am not saying that I worry about what Trump will do as hyperbole, or to justify what the current dem administration has done in arming Israel while it bombs and shoots civilians, I am saying that I worry about what he will do, because thinking about it quite literally keeps me up at night and has quite literally given me actual panic attacks within recent weeks upon seeing the prevalence of his support in polls and among my coworkers.

I do not think the democrats are actually “willing to throw out trans people” the way you seem to suggest at the end there. I dont even think that they are happy with what their “ally” in Israel is doing. I think they are a fragile “everything that isn’t the R’s” alliance of much of the right and what passes for the left here that includes both LGBT people and their allies, and conservative types who never wanted them in their party in the first place but arent quite extreme enough for the republicans, who are sort of mashed together in a broad coalition that as a result has no real collectively agreed upon ideology and doesn’t have the guts to rock the boat by withholding military aid to a country traditionally seen as an ally, even though that country really deserves to have that aid cut right now. Their vague compromises of positions do not really align with mine on many if not most things, especially economic and foreign policy, and I resent that they stay just barely to the left of the republicans to get the support of the left while offering it little but scraps. I do not like them, except maybe a few on the leftmost edge. But we (or at least I, I guess I’ve just assumed you were probably also American if youre invested in our election but I guess with our international influence that doesnt actually mean much) live under a system that guarantees that if they dont win, Trump will, and when he and his cult look so startlingly similar to the fascists of history, just before they succeed in subverting the systems that constrained them, not voting for them is a luxury that I do not think that I or any of us in this country really have.

I am not simping for anything. I firmly believe Trump would be far worse for genocide (he has literally said that he thinks Israel should “finish the job” with regards to the war in Palestine, and when he was president, he was incredibly supportive of Netanyahu, and proposed a “peace plan” that was actually just carving up Palestine into a bunch of little pieces that could never constitute a viable state and giving Israel control of the paths between, effectively wishing to formalize Israeli control of the entire region) The only reason anyone can suggest he wouldnt be without getting laughed out of the room is that he happened to get lucky enough to not have the current escalation of Israel’s genocide happen during the time when he was president. From my point of view, any action that brings him closer to getting back in power is asking to throw gasoline on a genocidal fire, and saying that one’s motive for doing so is being against genocide is sickening in the kind of way that it would be if you saw someone suggest that Hitler should have won ww2 because of all the evil stuff that Winston Churchill was responsible for. Consider for a second what people making your argument look like, from that lens.

There isn’t a constitutional mandate that there only be two choices, it’s instead a consequence of poor design. The US, with the exception of a few state and local governments that have tried different things, uses something called first past the post voting: each person votes for one candidate, whoever gets the most votes wins the job. Then, we just hold an election in each of a number of geographic districts for each seat. That’s intuitive, but actually not a good way to design a democracy, because it forces a two party system. If you have multiple parties that have similar ideas, there’s no mechanism for them to form a “coalition” like you might get in other countries. If you win 30% of the votes in a state, split evenly such that you get 30% of the votes for each district, and someone else gets the rest, you don’t get 30% of the seats or 30% of the power, you get zero, because you were the loser for each of those seats, and it’s winner take all. Thus, any time you have two parties with similar ideas, it is in their interest to combine to form one party to get a higher chance of winning the most votes in a given district, and this process continues until every party of note has consolidated into one of two camps. Those two camps don’t consolidate with eachother because they represent views too different to tolerate, and anyone else must join the closest one in order to have a shot of actually winning (unless the election is local enough that personal connections can get you a majority in spite of this, which is why third parties tend to do better at local elections than national ones).

Now, there are going to be some parties left out of this, either those that idealize having more parties to the point of retaining independence at the cost of any chance to actually win at most levels, or those so different from the major ones that they just can’t fit with either. The fact that the two party system isn’t really originally intended means they still are allowed on the ballot and everything. But since most people voting care about their choice having a hope of winning, it makes pragmatic sense to not vote for them unless the election is very local in scale and you can organize enough people. Thus, only two effective choices even if more are technically on the list.

In some sense, you can say the two major parties basically are like the coalition governments you get in other countries, it’s just they’re stuck together despite not really liking it, they don’t have independent enough identities that they could easily split up and recombine into new ones, at best they could leave and watch their voters stay behind with the old party, becoming irrelevant, and at worst they could sabotage the side closest to them and ensure they get even less power than otherwise. This is why the democrats have such a wide difference in ideals between more conservative and progressive candidates, and the republicans have both “small government” people and “ban everything I don’t like” authoritarian types in one party, they’re both basically political coalitions stuck together with super glue that have to just go along with whatever most voters in their bloc do or else lose.

I can say the same about you. Putting “no there aren’t” in all caps and adding profanity and personal insults doesn’t make it more true, but it does make people remember that a block button exists for the kind of person that uses things as disgusting as a genocide as an opportunity to troll. I do not think that anyone who both has paid any attention to the past 8 years and is arguing in good faith can possibly support that conclusion.

The difference is that there are real, material differences between the actions the candidates take. It’s not a fair choice, but it isn’t false either, and choosing not to go along won’t give you a better outcome