causi · HackerTrans

Indeed. Real people are just so danged inconvenient. Even just talking to them involves this degree of ritual where the desired communication is bookended with wasted time on introductory small talk and then a denouement you're never quite sure where it ends. If you're meeting up in person it's almost guaranteed you're going to be tired of their company before you actually leave, and then you have wasted time again traveling home.

causi

4년 전discuss

Well that's depressing.

causi

4년 전discuss

Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a lot, probably most, goes to pushing woke politics?

Hold up a second. The last time I saw an article whining about political bias on Wikipedia the complaint was that Wikipedia were a bunch of incel neckbeards and/or Nazis. Has something changed?

causi

4년 전discuss

When I was a kid, the younger you were the more computer-savvy you were. I figured it was due to being exposed to computers earlier in life, and I thought that in the future young people would be tech geniuses from growing up immersed in the internet. I was a fool.

causi

4년 전discuss

Yeah, a 21st-century version of Microsoft Home would be incredible.

causi

4년 전discuss

It still happens a lot but those tracks rarely make it onto the streaming service copy. Usually you need to buy the disc version.

causi

4년 전discuss

True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page. The internet taking over turned everything back into text, and then as bandwidth grew the only thing we thought to use it on was higher and higher bitrate video.

When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking/tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there's just no market.

causi

4년 전discuss

The value itself might be wrong but there's no denying that a human cannot conceptualize an infinite number of other humans as "people". When you see a news story about two hundred miners dying in an industrial accident you don't feel two hundred times as sad as when you read about a single-vehicle fatality in your hometown.

causi

4년 전discuss

Because open source is driven by hobbyism and passion. And people are really passionate about the computers they're not allowed to use at their jobs anymore. But all those ifdefs scare and discourage the rest of us.

Isn't this the same process you yourself referenced? There's nothing stopping people from forking and building leaner versions of these programs, but it turns out that projects with those passionate, nostalgic developers are more successful even with the support burden than that same project without them. That backwards-support might be a cost rather than a waste.

causi

5년 전discuss

Accelerando is a great book even if his writing style is a little dry. The mass of one planet being able to simulate billions of planets is only possible if the simulation is rather poor. You can't create a perfect simulation like that any more than you can perfectly simulate seven atoms using three atoms. Computation is never going to be more efficient than physics.

why do it?

Everyone doesn't have to do it. Just one person out of billions does. Think of the strange and perverse collection of behaviors we observe in a population of a few hundred million people online and speaking English. Expand that to billions of hyperintelligent minds and somebody is going to want to colonize the universe.

causi

5년 전discuss

Agreed. At a bare minimum, human thought patterns have to be rare. At some point we're either going to murder ourselves or create a Von Neumann machine capable of interstellar flight. After that humans or human-derived machines will fill the universe. Since that obviously hasn't happened with alien machines, the aliens are either not alive or totally unlike us.

comments