gbrown

Are you seriously suggesting that every mention of a negative issue needs to be a self contained and cited polemic piece? Stop being absurd. If you want to talk specifics, make a specific objection, or at least narrow in on an issue you want to get into in more depth.

Congratulations, you've discovered that I'm commenting on an internet forum rather than submitting something for publication. My assessment is based on my own reading, and on being involved in conservation efforts and trying to stay educated generally. Sorry I didn't prepare a set of bullet points for you, and instead went with an informal an easily intelligible lay summary.

To the best of my knowledge, my language (while imprecise) is completely and totally uncontroversial in the scientific community.

That's some excellent wishful thinking, and I hope you're right. Meanwhile, I've read plenty of articles suggesting that we're likely in for unavoidable and hugely disruptive warming, at the very least, and I don't currently see us globally acting quickly enough.

I've also taken an amateur interest in ecology and the natural sciences, and once you actually learn a bit about the species around you, the loss of habitat and biodiversity we're undergoing becomes a staggeringly obvious fact that most people are just completely oblivious to.

I'm not 100% sure what you're getting at, but I don't think it really addresses my point. Much of what you've said could be read as just a descriptive reason why the human world is the way it is - no objection there, except to note that I'd hope for better from an "advanced civilization", regardless of what mechanisms were at play. Preferably, a super-majority would be aware of the issues and willing to coordinate extensively to mitigate them for the greater good, but I don't think anyone would argue that we're there yet.

As a stylistic choice, I also have an aversion to dressing up human decision-making in such abstract and flowery terminology. We've invented lots of cool tools for thinking and doing, but we're still simply advanced primates with lots of baggage.

More cynical take: because most societies have to go through this experience, most societies don't make it to "advanced". That's one of the ideas behind the "Great Filter" hypothesis.

Pick an area of science which intersects with human development and I'll find you something - the underlying truth is that we can't hope to disrupt such a huge percentage of our biosphere without nasty consequences, and we can't hope to have remediation efforts compete with the global engine of human development. We've essentially organized an entire global society around the injection of carbon into the atmosphere, while turning habitat into development at astonishing rates. To make things worse, humans are really good at adapting, so we're (by and large) comfortable while the world burns.

Press releases and pop-science articles tend to try to strike a more hopeful tone, because it's extremely tiring and depressing just hearing "we're screwed" all day. I try to stay hopeful, but my faith that enough people will care soon enough is basically gone.

> you are expecting too much.

The universe doesn’t grade on a curve.

> Exploitation is key for scientific advancement in capitalism

What a weird objection. It’s our science that tells us we need to radically reform how we consume resources. I’m not worried we’re going to waste all our resources in scientific endeavors, I’m concerned that we’re destroying the environment on which we depend for frivolous short term gains.

No

The near universal consensus of people who study natural systems is that we’re way, way, way behind. Unfortunately the science is pretty bleak.

> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal?

In a word, sustainable. An advanced civilization should be able to develop in a coordinated and self sustaining way, rather than as a grand experiment in tragedy of the commons. Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them.

This isn’t an issue of fashion, it’s an issue of cognitive load. Bad audio is distracting, and requires more mental work to process. It’s fatiguing, and as someone who spends an absurd amount of time doing video conferencing, it makes a huge difference.

I’m also a teacher, so I bought a nice microphone and some acoustic panels to help my students focus on the material.

But what if we drop the word comprehension, and we just go with “functional approximation X -> Y, computed from a finite dataset, which minimizes a predictive risk “?

It’s unclear why compression is necessary there, except as a practical benefit.

It’s not binary is the point.

What’s the issue with newer EdgeOS? I thought the cloud crap could be disabled.

Religion isn't a genetically inherited.

I think you're missing the bitterness that comes from growing up with a set of coping mechanisms and losing them. Moderate Christianity, taught by moral and good people, nevertheless can lead one to use the thought of eternal life as a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the reality of death and suffering in the world. If you eventually lose your ability to believe in that (which is involuntary for many), it can be quite painful.

It also just seems sooooo slow. I also drop to the terminal for these tasks 100% of the time - including search. I’ll Google for software, and then dnf search to find the specific package if it’s offered.

Astrophotography is less like photography and more like scientific data acquisition.

To specifically answer your question though, this is "1250 hours of exposures" and not "a 1250 hour exposure".

> if you photograph stars with an exposure time that is too long, then you get star trails in the image

He was using a tracking mount. At 200mm you can't image for more than a few seconds without trailing.

This is true, but it's also true that making faint features visible (like the dark, dusty regions) often requires the use of local contrast, sharpening, and masks.

Also, in the case of this specific image, I think it's important to note just how deep the images are - they're processed for high resolution in the individual components, so the mosaic has an absolutely huge resolution. When downscaled to look at the whole thing zoomed out, that might give some of the impression of over-sharpness.

In astrophotography there's (almost) no such thing as "natural". It's definitely an aesthetic, but it's based on "real" data.

I use it with Fedora happily, and for work I have to use Zoom daily. I did have to replace a fan with one from Aliexpress due to rattle, but haven’t had issues since.

To be more pedantic, you are incorrect that this is only true for Andromeda. Several other galaxies are visible with the naked eye under excellent conditions, though they can certainly be challenging. These include M81 and M33.

That misses the point - jets are one mechanism whereby the matter can lose some energy and fall in, but they occur due to the high energy of accreting matter, and their existance does not solve the problem of the growth rate of these things. We are able to detect and characterize this object in part thanks to the jets, but the problem of mass remains.

Mirror size is the issue - until we can easily manufacture huge, incredibly precise mirrors in-situ, space based will never replace ground based astronomy.

Not starless, surely. Stars like Sirius and Betelgeuse should be visible just about anywhere, and that gets you 8-500ish years back at least.

No, it means what it says - the growth rate is too high for known mechanisms, so they’re looking for explanations. The mass in the universe isn’t the issue, it’s that there are limits on the growth rate of black holes which grow through accreting matter.

Well anyone can see a few million years back in time just by going outside on a dark night and looking at one of the nearby visible galaxies with their eyes. Knowing that this is what is happening is indeed a great achievement.

Yes

That sounds terrifying