gattr

Not necessarily! In "Saturn's Children" by Stross, humanity managed to wipe itself out, but post-humans (evolved from former, ahem, entertainment androids) are doing just fine across the Solar System. There's a plot point where one of them discovers that some corporation back on Earth inherited full property rights to her body due to an old pre-human-extinction EULA, and she'll be recycled for parts if she ever sets foot in their jurisdiction (I'm paraphrasing from memory).

It might take a few more decades, but eventually we'll get to the point when you can fab fast enough general-purpose chips at home (or at local municipal makerspace), based off free designs.

Or, stretching this analogy a bit, anyone can roll out their own cryptographic scheme which they can't break themselves.

Does it, though? What if future AI can do everything from designing the cure to building a self-contained universal surgical medcapsule? "Just lay down and I'll fix your cancer real good, trust me, bruh." If it was shown to work, would you use it?

I think we can all agree that "use humans for raw energy" is a really stupid idea, and sounds exactly like someone dumbed stuff down. FFS, a small Rickover fission reactor the size of a van (1950s tech) produces the same amount of heat as, what, 200 000 human bodies? (And why humans, with all the complex support systems? Why not a heap of compost, if one insists on bio-source?)

Whereas using our brains for compute (in the background, or during REM sleep) makes perfect sense; power efficiency is excellent.

Simplifying from memory, light propagation in medium can be treated on two levels (some phenomena require the 2nd, quantum, level):

- classical (Maxwell): electrons in the medium oscillate out of phase in response to the incident wave; this results in a new wave, propagating somewhat slower

- quantum (QED): incident photon couples to matter excitation (an exciton), producing a pseudo-particle called a polariton; it has a non-zero effective mass, resulting in propagation slower than c

As mentioned above, it absolutely isn't "absorbing and re-emitting". If that was the case, transparent materials would not exist (only milky/clouded ones), as re-emission is in random direction. However, photon propagation in the Sun is just that, a (very long, counting from the core to photosphere) random walk.

I wouldn't say "violence", rather, an opportunity to demolish something on (good) purpose. Same reason children will be glued to the window if workers outside are going at it with jackhammers, or, better yet, an excavator is crushing and scraping off the asphalt. (Yeah, I remember exactly how awesome that was.)

A custom 3D-printed user-matched disposable nozzle, perhaps? One could carry a handful in his pocket and don before the act.

I also loved the video. But I'd think if one wanted to deploy "simple" mechanical projectile weapons at scale, pneumatic launchers would be easier, more compact and more reliable (way less cool-looking and operating, though!).

What a coincidence: just earlier today I noticed that normal search with "Tools/Past month" does not in fact filter by date (last time I used it some weeks ago, it had always worked fine). A temporary bug, I hope.

Oh, I thought it's about AI companies asking people to wear those little head-mounted cameras, in hopes of gathering data to train future robot-electricians.

On a related note, there's an annoying mistake in one of the Fatalities in "Mortal Kombat 1": Liu Kang teleports with his opponent into outer space, summons a black hole with a snap of his fingers, and throws the poor sod in. But the accretion disc is red where it rotates towards camera, and blue where it rotates away!

I watched a related Chris Cappy video the other day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RBY1cY-GF8

> Poland's elite GROM commandos have become legendary (...) in this episode, we explore (...) the covert war between Poland and Russia, and why Polish-speaking commandos are appearing inside Russian territory.

That ship has sailed, no? Plenty of code for voice generation out there already, you'd basically have to ban general computing.

Very similarly, the movie "Screamers" (I liked it more than Dick's original novelette). Hopefully, no one will decide to really seed a continent/planet with autonomous "oh, we can control them just fine" killer bots.

Remember the "Black Mirror" episode "Metalhead"? (If not, check it out, no spoilers here.) I'm afraid we'll see something like this in the not-too-distant future.

Now, a squad of soldiers, or even just one experienced rifleman, would prob. dispatch of such a threat quickly. But against (at most poorly armed) civilians it would be an all too effective terror/area denial weapon.

Good news, amateur astronomy is still done on web forums - they're the place for newcomers to acquire knowledge, and for technical discussions among the more advanced. (Modern social media tend to be rather used for outreach to the lay public.)

Places like Cloudy Nights, Stargazers Lounge, Solarchat, and your country's biggest local-lang forum.

Could a physicist comment on this? I've been reading on the CNO cycle [1], where it says neutrinos produced in the beta-decay steps can have any share of the resulting energy. Does it mean the Sun is shrouded in a rarefied cloud of such low-energy neutrinos which failed to achieve escape velocity?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle

Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.

Nitpick: in Greek mythology it's Artemis and Aphrodite. Diana and Venus are Roman equivalents.

Not that big of a problem, right? Just put a lot of power sockets throughout the workspace. Robot gets to its work station, can be tethered and recharge when it's operating there. Similarly in a household.

And/or provide a baseline free tier, corresponding to how much a typical human user would at most push/clone etc. They have pre-LLM statistics on that.

In other words, just as they did in "Rob Roy": "My factor will contact Your Grace's factor..."

My classmate kept his Amiga 1200 a bit longer! ...eventually he got a PC with Pentium 60 MHz.

I haven't played the game, but I like to have Baldur's Gate 3 soundtrack in the background sometimes (can be found on YT).

Delta-v relative to the Orion is probably not that big, so I guess the waste will also circle the Moon and follow the crew into Earth's atmosphere.

It's Bighetti actually ([1]).

[1] https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Big_Head

Yes, sorry! I like them both a lot.

I don't think it's a best example. MMAcevedo is about running a real human mind on a different substrate (for science, for labor, or to torture it for fun a million times, I guess, by a bored teenager who got the image from torrents).

Scaling up these neuron cultures is rather something like "head cheese" from Greg Egan's "Rifters" novels (artificial "brains" trained to do network filtering, anti-malware combat etc.).

Maybe a more formal "with extreme prejudice" would have worked.