vertexFarm

It looks like Cyberpunk is winning the most accurate dystopia genre.

Just wish a bit more of the punk aspect had survived.

The shamelessness though. It's fucking disgusting. Yet again we gotta watch this awful corporate PR tropism.

...You think google is going to do that?

Yeah, it's insultingly obvious and pandering and condescending. Like who do they think isn't going to see through this?

Assholes still think they're saving the world somehow.

I definitely agree with you. It also just seems like such disingenuous crocodile tears from google.

Like don't act as if we don't see through this--you see how angry people are getting about facebook and all the other manipulative technologies tuned to be as addictive as possible for their advertiser's sake. You see the outrage and you know you've been doing the same thing so you're trying to get ahead of the PR disaster. All of a sudden google's all about disconnecting and not distracting you with AI-tailored bullshit and ads 24/7.

And yeah. Adding an AI assistant to your home and car isn't going in the right direction. Like how do they figure that's going to help you disconnect? I see the justifications but they feel really contrived. Just another way for them to soak up all your data and target you for more and more manipulative and addictive content.

I personally think that letting AI assistants into your life is yet another terrible idea. Why are we doing it? Is it really that great? Is a little bit of convenience really worth it? I think people will do literally anything for a slight increase in convenience, no matter how small. Anything. It's crazy.

Huh. I've never had that happen once out of literally thousands of screws from all kinds of different sources, including HD. Should be impossible for it to cam because the walls of the cavity are perpendicular. There's no thrust force being generated.

Maybe it was just a really bad batch?

Fair enough, You're probably right.

How do you figure?

He's correct about this. Phillips was an early attempt at a one-way fastener. Doesn't mean the manufacturer isn't a dick for using them.

If you're working on something really important, like auto mechanics or the like, consider buying new fasteners when you reach re-assembly. Those old stretched bolts probably need to be freshened up anyway.

Ah, I must be using the wrong driver then. Oh wait, nope, it's stripping because it's just inherently inferior. Sorry, you always see people pointing out the existence of Pozidriv, but it really makes little difference. They both strip like you've tucked a hundred in their thong.

Ah yes I prefer my screws to be made of a hard cheese myself, something along the lines of parmesan.

If you design a feature and it doesn't work, you don't get credit for the design. Who wants a screw that will self-destruct when it is correctly torqued? Which, by the way, is a value that widely varies and you can't just design one screw head to limit torque for every situation.

I've had Phillips over-torque and eat threads. I've had them strip to a raw steel crater long before the head even meets the surface it's being screwed into.

Definitely agree that Phillips is obsolete. God I hate them. I may have a problem. I've worked on a lot of old engines in my life and seeing a torn-out cross is like a big middle finger from the previous person who worked on it, usually the manufacturer. An engine is something that deserves an easily removed fastener that is applied with a torque wrench. Who knows how many newton-meters a Phillips head takes before it cams? Does anybody? Probably a huge range.

Furniture-making often uses them as well. We're slowly coming around to the light.

Ha I just finished banging out an impassioned comment about how much I appreciate Robertsons compared to terrible, stripped-out Phillips. And don't tell me they were Pozidriv. I've known about that difference for a long time. They're still trash.

I have half a mind that they invented Pozidriv just to have a defense for how terrible the Phillips fastener is.

Phillips isn't properly designed for power or hand tools. If it strips with a screwdriver, it's definitely going to strip with a drill. I've rarely seen power-driven Phillips screws that didn't have some sign of stripping, even using torque limiters and even on things fresh from the factory.

At least flat head takes uneven torque from hand tools well. It also allows improvised tools to be used in the field. If I'm working on say an off-road vehicle like a dirt bike, I'm going to tend to use just one size of hex bolt (usually 10mm) and flat heads for the screws.

Ugh, except Pozidriv will still cam and tear up their own screws, and same with Phillips. That's the secret to this tidbit of information that is never included. They're both trash fasteners when used with a slightly different driver, but they're also trash even when used correctly.

Robertson for life. When I was young I had a job assembling furniture and that, along with a couple Allen socket fasteners, was the only thing we used. Phillips fasteners that came with assemblies went straight into metal recycling to hopefully get born again as something worthwhile. You can practically drive a Robertson head straight through the center of the Earth with the amount of torque it handles. Never have to waste time drilling pilot holes.

If I was made dictator for a day, I'd immediately outlaw Phillips and Pozidriv. Even flat head is better than those pieces of junk.

There are a lot of Phillips fasteners that will also fit a Robertson bit. Just try both with the same screw. It's ludicrous how instantly you'll realize the Robertson is better.

That's why I specified orbit-to-orbit systems. The advantages there are immense.

When we finally do it, that's probably how it'll happen.

Definitely. Music obviously predates our species entirely. I mean birds? I guess it depends on how you want to define music, like if it needs intent of some kind. Which would be impossible to prove in that case.

Man I really wish we would get nuclear propulsion going again one of these days. Fine, fine, not as a launch system, just orbit to orbit... but we could move much larger, more dependable payloads so much further and not have to fiddle with little tweaks like these to surf the tiny margins of chemical propulsion.

It could have been a very mature technology by now. I feel like we created all the nightmares and quit the technology before we got to the actually good uses.

That's just oversimplified and not true. Sending men into space in the sixties and seventies got so much more done than automated missions to the moon because it forced us to work harder and solve more important problems. We're still reaping the rewards gained from technology developed to solve those problems.

Sending probes to learn trivia about the universe is not as important as developing better ways to support and transport human life. At all.

We've already waited fifty years. It's starting to get sad.

You can be safety-obsessed and still have accidents when you're doing something as risky as space travel I think.

Wanna know why it's fifty years of safety standards, not sixty and not forty?

Because fifty years is how long it has been since we have done anything meaningful with manned space flight. We went back to the shallow end of the pool.

It's time for a change.

Our minds are largely associative computers. Virtually all human thought consists of comparing something to something else. It can be meaningless, but it can signify an important concept as well.

I don't see this drift you're speaking of. I actually really want to see cryptocurrency become a real thing, it has this amazing promise of computers maintaining a sense of absolute truth that resists all falsification. We desperately need to build a new decentralized system as the internet is brought under the control of fewer people each day.

But it's not looking good so far. People need to be more mindful of how bubbles have played out in history. Realistic valuation is more healthy for a fledgeling industry than enormous, uncontrolled, and ultimately false sensationalist growth.

I think anything has value so long as there's a group consensus of value. I'm not debating that. You say a fledgeling industry is exactly what bitcoin is, but I don't think we have strong enough evidence of that. I'm hopeful but skeptical. I'm allowed to be both. And if somebody calls me a concern troll I'm going to lose my mind. I hate that term. Eliminates any sort of realistic self-evaluation within a group. Sometimes it pays to examine yourself in a negative light.

People gotta understand the possibility of it being a false promise as well as the possibility of it playing out well, but right now there seems to be two distinct and fanatical camps with no middle ground.

Yeah, but that still involves an existing industry. Just because that specific power plant doesn't exist yet doesn't mean there isn't a market yet.

It gets kind of chicken-and-the-egg, but currency didn't come before services. Currency came as a response to services, and investment came as a way to enable people to get large amounts of capital for large projects. Bitcoin isn't looking like that. It can be used for services, but waaaayyy too large of a percentage is being used to entice more investors to come and pump up the value for yet more investors.

It's pretty difficult for laypeople to tell the difference between legit investment and what Warren Buffet is referring to, where you just hope the next guy comes along and pays more. Which is why these scams keep coming back. So far, not nearly enough of cryptocurrency's value is being used to create that power plant.

Can it become a real economy? Yeah, sure. Tulips could have become a real economy too, technically.

Thing is, that aluminum industry in your example existed before the investment and independent from the investment. People need aluminum and are going to buy it.

If you have a signal to purchase more currency, and that currency's value only goes up if more people show up to buy it at a higher price, and those people can only get a payout if another tier of people show up and pay a higher price... See the shape of that structure? Vaguely... triangular?

Legitimate investment takes advantages of inefficiencies in pricing. It's not possible to always sell a commodity at the absolute ideal and correct price at the correct time, especially for an industry just getting its start. So people with a lot of assets can take some commodity, hold it for a period of time, then sell it wisely to take advantage of an existing industry. Or nurture it and reap the rewards when it is successful. See how cryptocurrency is potentially different? Most of the price of crypto is not supported by any industry. It's people buying more in hopes of getting rich quick. It's absolutely a bubble in its current incarnation, although hopefully it develops a more diverse underpinning as time goes on.

If it develops that foundation then it will be like investing in a fledgeling industry, nurturing it until it can become self-sustaining and profitable. If those applications don't come through, it's just another scheme.

Gold is always used as this pillar of value when talking about currencies (one might even call it a gold standard?) but its scarcity is managed and artificially inflated like anything else and it has no intrinsic value unless you really have a burning need for jewelry, electronic contacts, or I dunno, making Goldwasser? You can't eat gold. If there was some kind of huge financial crash, people would not be lining up to barter with your gold beyond a few gullible folks who think it will bring them security. It's worth something because of scarcity and prior agreement, which is exactly why paper money or cryptocurrency have value. If anything, cryptocurrency has that scarcity embedded into its very nature.

That said, cryptocurrency currently isn't used for much more than speculation and "investment" which is a terrible way for a healthy economy to work. Unless there's a lot of conventional business being done with it, it's only a good investment if lots more investors come by and dump money into it, and those investors will only get a payout if proportionally more investors come after them, and so on... See a resemblance to a certain famous financial scam?

It'll only be legit when people use it for exchange of goods and services in a large enough density to support the investment, which is really just a parasite on a existing economy taking advantage of pricing inefficiencies. You can't have investment and speculation first. A parasite can't live off itself. And so far the only exchange of goods and services is a few people buying psychedelics and a few people making various over-hyped decentralized apps. Oh, and a few people making ransomware. It's not very encouraging.

Hopefully a truly huge decentralized application comes along that makes good, sustainable use of blockchain, but until then--it's starting to look very pyramid-shaped to me.

It's also starting to get really weasel-wordy. There's a billion crypto scams going on these days. It's not the only thing going on, but there's a hell of a lot of old-school cons and then there's a hell of a lot of softer, less malicious scamming that is just based on over-confidence in a very buzzy trend.

I always hear people saying that blockchain is being used for all kinds of interesting things that gives them intrinsic value, but that's not why bitcoin's price has gotten so high (and recently dropped so dramatically, but still very high).

Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrency is almost exclusively used for speculation. People generally buy bitcoin for one reason and one reason only: to get rich from selling it later.

A currency driven in this great a percentage by speculation is a dangerous bubble. Until it lives up to the hype and this blockchain ecosystem actually exists in a density large enough to realistically support the currency's valuation, I would listen to Warren Buffet's advice.

There's a lot of adherents who are reaching fanatical levels of devotion to blockchain, and those types will explain away any unbeliever's lack of faith. The fact remains--cryptocurrency is almost entirely driven by speculation. A sustainable currency doesn't do that. A Ponzi scheme does that.

A lot of the blockchain applications seem really kind of flimsy and hollow, as if they are really there to prop up a crypto fortune in the hopes that some kind of ecosystem develops and prevents the inevitable crash. Those probably aren't going to work. Once again, it points to fact that the primary purpose of the currency is currently just a get rich quick scheme.

Once upon a time, thousands of people died fishing for ambergris. Whale anus wax. People died all the time.

Do we really think people are going to die exploring space? Yeah, they very fucking well are going to be deaths exploring space. We can take precautions as much as practical, but this zero risk tolerance philosophy is not going to work. We haven't done anything of note when it comes to manned space exploration in half a century. Space is so dangerous that the only way to keep risk to a minimum is to not go. And that's basically what we've done.

It's just that now these things are televised and PR is such a disaster when you have somebody die on air. It's not like a plumber is going to be watched by the entire world as he works in some kind of risky situation. People die doing that, too. People die doing anything. But if it's in the limelight like space exploration, it's absolutely unacceptable for anyone to risk death. That's why. Because we're watching and we can bear it only if we don't have to know about it or watch it happen.

We've got to start taking a hell of a lot more risk. We're taking enormous risk by not furthering space exploration. But risk of inaction is a strange thing, psychologically speaking. People don't fret about it, even though it's a real killer. Our climate is about to be the biggest killer of all, and we only feel vaguely uncomfortable about doing absolutely nothing.

And when I talk about taking risk, I'm not talking about go fever by the way--dumb political risk that leads to ignoring engineers. I mean the kind of risk that got us to the moon in the 60s. People died doing that. Mostly Soviet people, but a few Americans, too. But it was important enough. And it got done. We really shouldn't have stopped there.

It's not really NASA's fault, but they haven't gotten shit done with manned spaceflight since then. Haven't done a damn thing. Yet people have still died doing it. I hope private industry at least gets somebody above the Van Allen belt in the coming years. We need to get back on the horse before we lose our chance for good.