zifnab25 [he/him, any]

It’s a shame we never invented a Space-Time machine

Diploma mills gonna mill diplomas

Republicans. Would. Be. Worse.

We will be more like China

We won’t be like China. We’ll be more insulated and divorced from Chinese media, culture, and conversation.

That’s the stated end goal. Bringing up sharp walls between nationalities in order to control the flow of information between people.

If we keep TikTok open, we risk exposing American young people to Chinese norms, ideals, and social standards. We might even be exposed directly to Chinese mass media (ie, propaganda).

This is a real security risk, as it raises a possibility that younger Americans won’t accept American mass media at face value.

Nintendo gets to do this (the Yuzu shit) because so many other developers have stopped making anything except slot machines.

Behold, the unlimited power of a fully nationalized war time economy.

No Poor Muslims Allowed

Me: “Mom, can we have New Star Trek?”

Dune Mom: “You have Old Star Trek at home”

Old Star Trek At Home

Its called a bumblebee because its got three left feet.

More than 122 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the war.

America deserves a President Kamala Harris

TrashFuture has hit on a few new attempts at Killer App firms, but it’s all Mindfulness this and AI that.

I think the last app I downloaded was an AI art app, which I used maybe twice.

Oh man, what do Boeing and Astrobotics have in common?

Can’t seem to keep all their lids shut.

I mean, the joke is going to be in the enforcement, as a battalion of Australia’s largest and roundest uniformed fascist shitheads march through the streets breaking windows and swinging at the heads of anyone sporting a Palestinian flag.

You’re going to have folks with swastika face tattoos explaining why these anti-Zionist activists just need to obey the law.

given the age of the Universe and the relatively short time it would take for an advanced civilization to spread across the Milky Way Galaxy (650,000 years, by Hart’s estimate), Earth should have been visited by an extraterrestrial civilization (ETC) by now.

It took humans 30,000 years to cross the Atlantic. Using modem propolsion systems, it takes us two years to get to Mars and 40 to reach the edge of the solar system. This seems like an extremely generous estimate considering the Milky Way has a 50,000 light year radius.

I’m as bullish about extraterrestrial life as anyone, and I think a fuller survey of even just the current Solar System has potential. But I have no idea how you get a full galactic survey in so short a time, given what we know about the soft limits on speed of travel and communication.

By Tipler’s refined estimate, an ETC would be able to explore the entire galaxy in “less than 300 million years.”

That definitely feels like it’s more in the ballpark. But, again, it presumes a certain amount of steady cartography by the hypothetical fleet of Von Neuman probes.

There’s a Sci-fi series called The Bobverse that explores the idea of a sentiment fleet of Von Neumans exploring the galaxy, and the various trial and tribulations involved. One point it discusses is that even with a saturation of probes, you don’t get real time communication. So even in a hypothetical universe where alien life did exist and survey earth, what are they odds they’d be watching us at the moment of our development. What would an alien AI be looking for and what would it do when it was discovered?

We could still be too primitive to bare noticing. Or we could be living in between blinks of an alien camera that only reports back every 1000 years.

As we look out at the cosmos, we could be looking at things we don’t understand. After all, what does a star surrounded by a Dyson Sphere look like to a telescope that is searching for glimmers of light, heat, and gravity? SETI is operating purely on conjecture. That’s assuming alien civilizations are even capable of creating these hypothetical superstructures. Or that the structures would function as we intuit.

At some level, I have to question if we know what we’re looking for. Because so much of this feels like we’re searching for humans deep in space. Perhaps the reason we can’t find aliens is that they are simply… too alien.

Picard was already bordering on elder abuse.

Ah shit. Have the Tamil Tigers entered the chat?

M.I.A. is going to have to make a new music video about this one.

Certainly possible that elements were AI generated. However, this image feels like it had someone putting polish on it. The symmetry - both in the setting and in the focal point of the image - plus the sharper color contrast particularly between the red of Mt. Doom and the blue of the mountains and the way that you get a real sense of light coming directly from the volcano and radiating out into the rest of the image. Someone definitely had their hands on this in a material way, even if it was just moving clip-art onto a canvas and tweaking the colors a bit.

Paul Erdos is in many obscure books.

John Nash will forever be known as the guy who looked at a gaggle of cute girls and invented a mathematical model for getting the most guys laid.