Shouldn’t Spanish have the same problem? I’ve seen them abbreviate it to EEUU though, which I assume must help prevent confusion?

Then if we want fission in 2035, we’ll have to start now. If we want fusion by 2035, we’re probably out of luck because we haven’t even got the tech to the point where we can produce net electricity with it yet (net energy from the reaction yes, but that’s not good enough for a power plant), and once we get that we need to refine it enough to produce enough energy to be worth the cost, and then we have to actually build the power plants. If we want neither, then we’ll probably still be using fossil fuels for a significant percentage of power generation by then, because while solar is cheap and should probably be the bulk of our future energy mix, is isn’t good for some use cases

While I do agree that we should research fusion, it doesn’t really address all the issues of fission. It still has some nuclear waste generation; not from spent fuel but from the reactor walls being bombarded with neutrons, causing some of that material to become radioactive, and it will likely require even more complex facilities and so have the “you need to spend a massive amount of time and money to get a reactor online” economic issues fission has, but possibly even worse. The physics technically give you more energy per amount of fuel and the fuel is more abundant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting electricity will be cheaper, especially when both systems use so little fuel anyway.

It does avoid the possibility of a runaway reaction/meltdown I guess, but modern reactors are pretty good about avoiding that anyway. For that matter, newer (relatively speaking) fission reactor designs exist that can process waste into more fuel (not forever obviously, the fuel can’t be infinite, but enough to greatly extend the fuel supply and deal with much of the waste issue at the same time). The fission waste issue is also a bit overblown; the actual volume is very low, so just digging a handful of very deep storage facilities to stick it in is a viable option for an extremely long time.

The biggest issue for fission, imho, is that we simply don’t build very much of it. The less of it we make, the smaller the pool of people and facilities that are equipped to run it, maintain it, build the components etc, and the more expensive running it or building more becomes.

Hmm, that is fair. I would suggest making votes not federate at all in that case, except doing that would make single person or very small instances effectively be limited to sorting by new

thats fair I suppose, though in practice id assume that making a whole bunch of individual instances is probably more difficult than making a much of accounts on one instance that you control, and thus vote manipulation in this manner should have a higher barrier to entry?

If one wanted to ensure that external content is still easily visible, one could always have things set up so that posts on local communities only appears in local and subscribed, and only posts from outside appear in all (though it might need to be renamed to better fit such a layout I suppose)

Honestly, I’ve begun to think the upvote/downvote model is a bad fit for the fediverse in general:

*Different instances have different rules around it, and in some cases (for example, an instance disabling downvoting) this might give a modest advantage in the sorting for content on that instance

*Instances have to trust votes by other instances, and while an obvious manipulation could be defederated, that has to be noticed first

*Votes are more publicly visible than on a place like reddit, potentially leading to something like a downvote being a catalyst for incivility towards the downvoter by whoever posted something

Honestly what I would do with Lemmy voting is just make vote counts mostly not federate. Have instances send a single up, down, or neither vote depending on if the net number on their insurance passes a certain up or downvote threshold, just so people on private instances have something to sort by, and have the score of a post or comment otherwise just go off of whatever the users within an instance vote. Then, an individual instance could have whatever rules or restrictions on voting it wanted, without worry over if that gets its votes drowned out by the wider network or seen as vote manipulation.

Most of the solid bodies in the solar system are literally a bunch of airless, irradiated, toxic rocks, with either no life at all or potentially some rare bacteria-like stuff hidden somewhere we haven’t been able to conclusively examine yet. They already are in a more “fucked up” state than even the most polluted wasteland we’ve created on earth. What could we possibly do to them to mess them up further?

Depends on the time frame. In the period immediately following such a venture, sure, but if you actually properly establish settlement off earth, the total resource base and thus carrying capacity of civilization as a whole increases and continues to increase until we either hit the limits of that part of the universe one can theoretically reach (which is so big as to make the entire earth less than a speck of dust by comparison), you decide to just stop space colonization (which gets more difficult the further on you go, because the number of potential polities to launch a new mission increases the more space is populated), or you find yourself boxed in by alien civilizations in all directions (since we haven’t seen any, they’re most likely far enough apart on average for this to still leave an extremely vast chunk of space). A hypothetical spacefairing civilization should be able to reach sizes so vast that it would be physically impossible to create enough jobs on just one planet to equal it, even with just this solar system even.

Job creation by itself is not exactly the best motivation to pursue this though, since the jobs created will after the initial period be generally far away and therefore not likely to be worked by anyone except the people that end up in those colonies, who wouldn’t even exist otherwise.

As an asexual atheist with both grandmothers still alive, I can’t say I ever have, no. Were those things not the case, I’d say anything they saw would be down to them using their ghost powers to violate my privacy anyway.

Once used to the warmth of the water the anxiety that it’ll be uncomfortably cold when it stops sets in.

Well no, but I was more referring to the general statement than the notion that it applies to musk. Having the self awareness to see the harm in what he’s done and those he’s supported doesn’t seem particularly in character for him in any event.

I’m not particularly fond of the field and roast brand sausages in particular because the texture seems too gummy for my taste, but yeah, my general experience has been that the more processed a meat is and the more it relies on being infused with spices or served with something else, the better the replacement works. Like, replacing a burger works great, replacing a steak is virtually a non starter. For something like ground and spiced taco meat, I actually started preferring the alternatives well before I stopped eating meat just because tvp doesn’t have gristle the way ground beef does.

I mean, if someone was to argue about that topic they could probably examine like, Oskar Schindler or John Rabe or such, but that’s besides the point I suppose.

after years and many billions of dollars of technological development, we have finally invented a machine that can be scammed

There’s a common trope that worms like to live in apples, between that and blocking doctors, maybe rfk is secretly a giant weird looking apple.

We technically wouldnt have to in the sense that its not physically impossible for us to “stumble into it” while trying to mimic the basic brain architecture that we do know, but yes, this is one of the reasons I tend to be a bit skeptical of AI claims, we’re trying to mimic something without even knowing how the thing we’re trying to mimic works very well. Clearly we havent had zero success just given that we can make something that can talk well enough to sometimes fool people into thinking its a human, but we also clearly havent gotten all the way there. If the tech we’ve built will work with enough scaling or tweaking, or if we need something fundamentally different, I dont know.

My guess, though it is just a guess, is that we’ve probably got something that could serve as a component of some future agi system but that there’s probably more to it we havent figured out that we need to add to get there beyond just making the thing bigger and feeding it more data. Humans do learn from experience after all, and I would imagine the total data input of all one’s senses constantly working adds up to a lot, but we also clearly dont need to be fed all the information to be found on the internet just to learn how to think and talk, the fact these AI models need so much training data makes me suspect that either we’re missing something fundamental and trying to compensate with more training, or else we’ve devised a way to doing this that is really inefficient compared to however our brains do it.

If you define it in a “artificial person/as smart as a human/can do anything a human can do” sort of way like I usually see, then yes, we know that it is possible, because if it were impossible for a system with human-equivalent capabilities to exist, than humans couldn’t exist, and well, we clearly do. That being said, that doesn’t mean that all we need to do to make one is to just feed more and more data into our existing AI tech.

“saving children’s lives? we can’t have that!” -maga, apparently

Executing someone for being delusional or heavily propagandized strikes me as morally dubious, removing a politician from power achieves a similar effect without having to embrace capital punishment.