FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It does, but a thick layer of matter is actually a pretty good radiation shield. Material is rated based on its "halving distance" - how many centimeters of stuff it takes for the radiation passing through it to be reduced by half. It never quite blocks all of it, but if you keep piling on additional halvings you can get the radiation levels down as small as you want.

This article has a table of values for how well various types of material blocks gamma rays, for example. Sand has a halving distance of 2.9 inches, and solid stone is 2.2 inches, so a couple of feet thickness will provide thousand-fold reduction in radiation.

Other kinds of radiation penetrate heavy elements better, but those kinds of radiation actually get blocked by light elements instead, such as the hydrogen in water. Mars has a relative abundance of water so you can incorporate that into your shielding too.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I can't recall the last time I pirated anything executable (games and other software). There are legitimate free options for everything I've wanted, and executable code is just too risky.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Using your metaphor the thing you're proposing to "treat the symptoms" has side effects which worsen the disease thus causing more real damage and worsening symptoms.

What side effects, specifically? Some approaches to geoengineering may have negative side effects, but others don't appear to. There's no guarantee that an approach without side effects won't be found.

You aren't saving "millions of people from starving to death"

Yes, you are. Climate change would cause famine, ameliorating the effects of climate change would prevent that famine.

This whole comment is exactly the kind of argument that I'm objecting to. You've got some sort of a priori conviction that "no, geoengineering must make the situation work somehow" and therefore it's not worth studying. If it's not studied how can you possibly know?

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Be specific. Which ones?

No. You are the one who said "Using your metaphor the thing you're proposing to "treat the symptoms" has side effects which worsen the disease thus causing more real damage and worsening symptoms."

I then asked you to be specific. You tell me which ones have side effects that "worsen the disease." You don't get to Uno-reverse at me until you answer the question first.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Ah, tucked away down at the bottom. mBin hides the full content of long responses and I was admittedly getting quite frustrated talking with you after you responded to my "be specific" request with a "be specific" of your own.

The article appears to have two main criticisms:

• Kelp might outcompete phytoplankton
• Kelp might not actually grow well enough to work

Those are basically "it might work too well" and "it might not work." I don't see anything in there that would make climate change worse.

Personally, I'm not terribly interested in the carbon sequestration approaches. They seem unlikely to be able to be scaled well enough to have an impact in an economically realistic way. Solar radiation modification is IMO the most likely class of approaches to geoengineering to help.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Because that's the whole point of the fediverse, to be interoperable with other instances using an open protocol.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Do we count those as negative numbers when the implants help them recover?

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

This article is projecting 76 years forward, that's not the near future any more.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

76 years ago was 13 years before Yuri Gagarin would become the first human in space. It was 4 years after the V2 rocket became the first artificial object to enter space. This is plenty of time for multiple technological revolutions to happen. We're already on the verge of one with fully reusable superheavy lift rockets, most people don't grasp just how big a change will come from having that sort of cheap bulk cargo access to space.

it'd probably be a few hundred years until we could actually make nation-sized space colonies

There's no need to make nation-sized space colonies, just make lots of smaller ones.

There were a few interesting astrophysics papers estimating that near-lightspeed and FTL travel tech is like 8000 years away lol.

I would like to see those papers. Making technological estimates on that scale, especially for something like FTL that has no physics backing it at all, is highly dubious.

"Future technology" can't solve all of our problems. It's not magic.

There's no need for magic, this is really just a question of economics.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Massive downside to that: photos will exist of Trump shirtless.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

No, the goal posts of "AI is evil and should be fought until <insert new criteria here> are resolved."

The question of whether training an AI even violates copyright in the first place is still unanswered, BTW, the various court cases addressing it are still in progress. This current target is about "ethics", which are vague enough that anyone can claim that they're being violated without having to go to the hassle of proving it.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

None of this is AI-specific. Youtube wants you to label your videos if you use "altered or synthetic content" that could mislead people about real people or events. 99% of what Corridor Crew puts out would probably need to be labeled, for example, and they mostly use traditional digital effects.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Most fun I can recall recently was pointing out how Meta is actually one of the main driving forces behind the availability and development of open-source large language models. Meta's pytorch framework is one of the foundation pieces of many LLMs industry-wide. Meta has released a bunch of major open-source libraries and frameworks. Their open LLaMA model weights are the starting point for many fine-tuned models floating around out there.

But no, Mark Zuckerberg is an evil lizard man, so can't mention anything nice he might be responsible for.

Doesn't help that AI is a hot-button topic in its own right.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

More likely you're getting downvotes for the fallacious "I'm obviously being the logical one, everyone disagreeing with me must be illogical" form your comment takes.

And deservedly so.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Nuclear weapons, perhaps. But I still hold out hope that someday nuclear pulse propulsion will find some application. It's far enough out that current-day treaties probably won't impact it, but there's some chicken-and-egg issues - nobody will spend time working on it while treaties forbid it, and treaties won't be updated to allow it if nobody's done any work on it.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

This really just shines a light on a more significant underlying problem with scientific publication in general, that being that there's just way too much of it. "Publish or perish" is resulting in enormous pressure to churn out papers whether they're good or not.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It's okay, Starlink is in a low enough orbit that it's basically Kessler-proof.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Kessler syndrome is only a threat to satellites that are orbiting within the debris, it's not really a danger if you're only passing through (as a ballistic missile would).

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Those steeply elliptical orbits would probably deorbit even quicker since a random impulse that boosts the apogee is likely to lower the perigee even more.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I mean, yeah, in a court of law you should probably have some kind of evidence for stuff instead of just believing in it.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Hang on, is it actually called the "Women of Distinction" award? The article body calls it the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award”, which doesn't sound gender-specific. If there's nothing about the award that requires it specifically to be given to women, other than just being named after a woman and being given to one the first few times, what's the problem?

The article is laden with snarky comments and obviously biased opinions, and the article it links to as its source is paywalled, so it's not really clear what's going on here.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Maybe something got stuck in the nozzle, partly clogging it. Try cleaning it. A trick I often use is to start the nozzle preheating and then yank the filament out of it as soon as it becomes warm enough for that to be possible, that usually pulls whatever crud was stuck in the nozzle out along with it.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I won't consider any plans "serious" until they admit the SLS isn't going to be part of them.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

No wonder it didn't make it very deep, it looks like it settled into a butt-first orientation.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

There's always a big unstated question in posts like this.

Which jurisdiction?