tspike

> Further, what things are we doing now that future generations will ask the same question about us?

Lawns seem a good candidate. We take a piece of land that could provide most of the sustenance we need along with a host of positive externalities, then douse it in poison, expend enormous effort to remove natural fertilizers from it, pay to import industrially produced nitrogen to spread over it, and burn fossil fuels to cut it.

How a reasonable culture could view this practice as anything but stupidity or madness is anyone’s guess.

I’ve been surprised how much my time spent as a 12 year old in Elanthia (I played DragonRealms, a spin-off) has served me.

Most notably, it made me a very fast typist from trying to escape dying.

We have. They’re on the “entity list” which bars US corps from supplying them. It’d be politically… difficult to say the least to sanction Israel.

He mentions that as the inspiration for the video

If you’re asking about consumer facing products, I’m aware of eBay using it to help sellers write product descriptions. But, I think the bigger immediate use case is making daily work easier inside these companies.

I’ve used it extensively to speed up the process of making presentations, drafting emails, naming things, rubber-ducking for coding, etc.

This is equivalent to people fretting over using plastic drinking straws when certain industrial uses are exempt from environmental laws. The vast, vast majority of aquifer depletion is for impractical crops that should never be grown where they are and wouldn’t be if our water rights laws made any sense.

You tapping in one of these wells means very little in the context of this important topic.

My mistake, I think the option goes away after a fixed amount of time.

Seems to me that the demand would still be there, it’s just that AI would replace/augment whatever rules engine is mapping the UI into running code.

You can edit it. Please do.

Oh man.. I miss Air Warrior and Cyberstrike.

This undifferentiated trend of “screen time” as a catch-all can’t die soon enough. There’s a massive qualitative difference between letting your kid tap on whatever the YouTube algorithm recommends for hours unsupervised and other, beneficial use cases. My son’s major motivation for learning to read came from watching us play Breath of the Wild and getting tired of not knowing what was going on. Lately we’ve been playing the remake of The Oregon Trail and using it as a springboard to discuss the history of westward expansion in the US.

We are adamant that he not watch advertising or make heavy use of recommendation algorithms and have explained why and what they are and what the difference is, but he’s welcome to watch as many pre-downloaded Dr Binocs videos as he likes (for example).

All that said, his daily chores include getting the eggs from the chicken coop, weeding the garden and the heavy “screen time” season is winter when our days are very short and wet.

My house has asphalt, my garage has metal. I prefer the metal overall, but it’s very difficult to walk on to sweep the chimney, and it’s a hazard during winter when sheets of ice and snow slide off of it.

I'd buy that if the app stores weren't proactively rejecting apps for the same reasons they fail to enforce on others.

Why is there not even lip service paid to consistent enforcement?

I'd rather live in a world that preserves the fundamental right to privacy than one that can automatically organize my housewarming party.

This is fantastic! Just downloaded an iOS client and really having fun going down the rabbit hole.

It gets a lot more expensive when you factor in what the lawyers get paid

The idea is less that we can or cannot develop unlimited sources of energy, and more that we have no idea how to use that amount of energy in ways that aren’t destructive.

> when the last red dwarfs are burning out and all the black holes have evaporated

An odd timeline to consider, given the speed with which this chapter in existence seems to be unfolding.

This quote from Wendell Berry often occurs to me in these contexts:

"One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely.

This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on.

This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.

We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for.

And we cannot restrain ourselves.

Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy."

They didn’t provide procedures for a no power landing. They also failed to update the conversion documentation.

Unsurprisingly, this seems to be a matter of debate:

> In a 2014 interview in the Washington Post of University of Miami climatologist Larry Kalkstein, who has published numerous research papers on weather-related mortality, weighed in on the matter: “Comparing apples to apples, which would be to evaluate acute or short-term responses to weather, I would always give the nod to heat-related deaths. However, if you are considering the seasonal differences in daily mortality, rather than just the “spikes” that we find with acute deaths, I can see why one can argue that winter (or cold-related) mortality is greater.”

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Which-Kills-More-People-Ex...

Edit: I see we are citing the same article :)

I see. So this comes from a temperate climate perspective, where it's historically been the case that everyone _needs_ heat but cooling is an optional luxury. This perspective would seem to need revisiting with a changing climate and in a global context.

Isn't excessive heat is the leading cause of death in many areas?

This is something I’ve been confused about. In common discourse, it seems that “heat pump” has positive associations with efficiency while “A/C” is associated with gluttony and waste. Aren’t they the same device? Why the difference?

The point is that this solution works without access to electricity and is resilient to the loss of industrial supply chains

My uncles spent a summer working tours near Aspen in the 80s. They worked tirelessly to educate the tourist population about the dangers of the Rocky Mountain Alpine Shark.

Don’t forget that if you don’t saturate your lawn with poison, coat it with industrial fertilizer, water it from depleted aquifers and burn that gasoline to cut it, you run the risk of getting fined or being foreclosed upon.

Maidenless?