Just a little technical note;
White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon because it operates primarily by heat and flame rather than toxicity, making it an incendiary weapon. Its use is governed by Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW)
Not saying that it can’t be used in bad ways but it has legitimate uses in combat areas (mostly as a flair) so the issue of supply, etc is not as simple as were it an actual chemical weapon
Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.
I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’
People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you
Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.
The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.
It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…
Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it
What is happening?
Yeah it’s frightening that there’s literally a cult developing of home schooled zealots brought up on the wackiest conspiracies on YouTube. I was friends with a guy that was brought up by intese Jehovah’s witnesses and even though he stopped participating and believing it took a long time for him to understand the stuff they’d taught him was crazy - like he was shocked that I believed in evolution because as far as he knew it was long since disproven.
The real problem was critical reasoning skills and learning skills, he had no idea how to verify information or seek out out from reasonable sources. I think we’re going to get a lot of people in the same boat, except a lot more violent and terrified of the world.
Everyone says I’m dumb when I simp for a shitty corporation that exists on hype alone
It must be because I’m so superior to every tech community on the web and they’re circlejetking
Lol
The problem is that’s kinda true of pretty much everywhere so your choices are to isolate and only get lied to by your own politicians and corporate overlords or to accept the complexity of the world and try to work on moving forward where possible.
I do agree that this entirely greed based approach from the company is wrong but honestly I prefer it to your extreme xenophobia towards them. Yes there are issues with China just like all our countries have issues, they’re not the devil though not by a long shot.
You’re making up a lot of stuff, Xerox had a gui UI for a whole decade before apple and they certainly weren’t the only ones.
The MP3 player they made was literally just a feature limited version of already popular devices. I got my arcos a year before the first apple device was released and it had every single feature that apple would slowly add in every new expensive version over the next decade
Apple does hype and marketing, that’s their innovation - taking a feature restricted version of a technology and getting celebrities and media idiots to pretend it’s the best thing in the world and actively ignore or discount the many better options.
It’s a rare edge case that slipped through because the circumstances to cause it are obscure, from the description it was a minor bump and the software was updated to try and ensure it doesn’t happen again - and it probably won’t.
Testing for things like this is difficult but looking at the numbers from these projects testing is going incredibly well and we’re likely to see moves towards legal acceptance soon
Probably in the UK things like them murdering people with radioactive poison and just dumping it where civilians are affected, among other things
The capitalist mindset really is a weird one, rent seeking is out of control. We’re talking about a tool that allows independent creators and hobby users to improve the quality of their projects but all you can think about is the possibility of getting a couple of dollars in royalties.
Regular users being able to use advanced noise reduction allows regular people to better compete with corporations, it’s the sort of technology which can help displace the monopolies which rule the world. But you’re against it because they didn’t give you 6 cents for listening to your cover version of country roads
Maybe, it’s so hard to guess which way things will go. I would place a safe bet though that a rich person will buy a bit of jewelry or a watch that was made in space from space mined metals within in the next ten years.
Oh I had totally missed the 3d printing in space that’s really cool, just watching their video about it and wow is it painful with the marvel tie ins and stuff but looks very cool
Seems like the ability to control temperature dissipation without convection could be really useful especially with metals like platinum, might be even sooner that it’s commercialised at scale if they can gather raw platinum and make high quality parts especially something like premium bike or boat parts, the corrosion resistance would make it perfect for tidal generation components too.
That could be a possible first strong business, if the space platinum to earth pipeline is already in progress then it should be relatively cheap to divert some for manufacturing then parachuting them in splash down zones would make sense for tidal generator parts.
Of course with progress on fusion it’s possible there won’t be a huge market for reliable cheap energy but we’ll see. I suspect the first thing made will be jewelry that’s sold in small amounts for absurd prices.
What year do you think we’ll get the first product mined and manufacturered in space? And how about the first space grown food sold commercially?
I would guess 2040 and 2050 respectively, we’ll have the automation tools to get started by 2030 with government science projects then a decade for it to mature into something a company can try to create a market with, probably something that can only be made in low gravity like solve form of novelty such as space glass spheres or a special use material.
I think food will be fast behind because people will pay a lot for it and there’s already a lot of research into it for use in space based living facilities.
That’s ridiculous, if I think that one apple plus one apple is going to result in three apples then I try it and find it’s actually two I’m not going to blame the universe I’m going to know my understanding of arithmetic is flawed.
It’s not the math of the human made model that controls the universe that would be silly. The model is the current best approximation of the actual math that defines the universe.
An accurate model allows you to predict the outcome of events, like we can predict how many apples will be in the bag. With some things it gets very complicated because there’s lots of things and various possible states but we can model that with statistics and calculous and stuff. We can even make a set of all possibile results and use that as a map to tell us if something is possible, how likely it is and what we can do to make it more or less likely - nothing the guy said was controversial, we can map cellar interactions even if that requires using complex multidimensional math (mathematics have had to get used to doing this sort of math a lot recently so I’m sure they’ll manage)
Yeah its weird tech is moving so absurdly fast at that moment that people seem to have gotten used to huge breakthroughs and want one ever week, like with ai how astonishing developments aren’t even implemented yet but people are saying it’s not impressive or development has stalled.
There’s a lot of really good stuff that’s coming to market slowly, the main problem is lithium is so cheap and easy at the moment that it’s not really worth it for anyone to take a risk on something new. It is happening but it’ll take a while for the special use cases to filter though and it to reach a more general market.
Another good example is wave power, there are now working commercial devices and very successful test projects but because it’s complex and still has high planning and development costs associated with it everyone is sticking to wind and solar. There will be a point soon where tidal generation sneaks into common use just like desalination did
Hardly anyone is even aware how many of the areas we got told would have water wars now have desalination partnerships and plenty of water to go round. They can even extract lithium in the same process and we’re starting to see that getting built too.
I think the real thing is going to be when the various strands of ai combine with the incredibly good robotics we have developed over the last few decades, people are going to be shocked how much it’ll speed up every physical industry. Being able to show the robot ‘this surface here needs to be sanded smooth ready for spraying’ and it can understand the request, evolve a movement solution and continually check it’s work as it goes.
The problem is everyone knows that’s coming and it’s a game changer so no one is really interested in the amazing advances we keep making or the more basic tools. Companies aren’t going to invest five years researching and developing the sort of product we can make now when they know other companies as already investing big in general purposes tools that’ll ruin all those markets.
You’re using odd ways of describing things to try and win a pointless argument, even if everything you say is correct then it changes literally nothing about anything so whatever yeah use words like a weirdo if you like
F35 went over budget and behind schedule but it’s an incredibly effective combat aircraft
Yes that’s a model, I’m not saying the model magically controls reality but that the underpinning reality is math - the reason you always have two apples in a bag when you start with one and add another is because of math, the human model of that isn’t controlling it but if we want two apples in a bag and we currently only have one then we can use our model to determine how many apples we need to add into the bag.
The same is true of more complex systems, if we can accurately model the cellar interactions then we can derive solutions in the same way
Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.
Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.
The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.
And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.