Back when computers were nowhere near capable of teaching kids, one can handwave away issues with the tech by saying “when the tech is ready to do this, it will be great” essentially. When the tech is at the point where it can sort of do something, but not do it well, one instead imagines how badly things might go if one tried the notion right now instead of at whatever point in the future the technology is good enough to actually do a good job.

I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.

While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I’ve played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There’s something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It’s not a problem at all if I’m feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn’t take that long, but if I’m recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.

My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it’s probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.

Aslan from the Narnia series is basically a feral fan-made fursona for Jesus

“hey Google, download Firefox for me please.”

-“Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that…”

I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.

why doesnt it make sense for a natural system? What do you expect a natural system to look like? As far as I can imagine, a universe that can be observed must display some consistent sent of mathematical rules (because any universe that did not, would be too chaotic to allow an ordered system like life to exist within it, and therefore all observers will find themselves existing within the limited ones), and a simulation is itself just executing a bunch of mathematical rules, and so any universe you can exist in will appear indistinguishable from a simulated one from the inside (unless the simulators do something specifically to reveal it).

I mean I guess hypothetically, if we ever manage to contact some aliens, and manage to establish friendly communications with them, cultural information is probably the easiest thing to trade (since information can be sent at light speed with relative ease whereas any mass takes much more energy to move much slower, since there probably aren’t any material resources that are particularly unique between star systems to necessitate trade, and since whoever has more advanced technology might be a bit wary with sharing that particular information lest it be used against them if relations sour in the future), so it’s not completely absurd to imagine us sending something like a video game that had come to be seen as a particularly important cultural work, to aliens, if we meet some at some point.

Is there a reason that you use some character (I’m afraid I don’t know the name of it) wherever you would otherwise use “th”? I can’t guess if it’s some kind of technical issue with federated text, something from a different language you’re incorporating, or one of those “I think we should add x symbol to the language so I’ll use it to draw attention to the effort” deals, like with the people that use the combined !? symbols whenever both are relevant at once.

Might not be much meat to some of the skeleton jokes, but at least they have good bones.

if they were randomly placed, then couldnt you have a sponsor-block type system where instead of the ad segments being marked and skipped, information about the video is externally stored somewhere (like perhaps a really low res screenshot of the video every couple seconds, or some number generated algorithmically by a frame of video), and the results should be the same for all users for the actual video part, but if the ads are placed randomly, the ad section will suddenly not match the data other users had, prompting the video to skip until it matches again (with a buffer included if they remove the ability to move forward)

To be fair, regardless of one’s stance on the utility of current AI or the wisdom of developing it, it is an extremely difficult and potentially world changing technical achievement, and given there isn’t a computer science prize, physics is probably the most relevant category to it

Honestly, a car collector is probably the best kind of person to have one I’d bet, given that they now exist out there. They don’t seem terribly safe for pedestrians and others to have around, so it they’re going to be out there in individuals hands, them being kept parked in some guys garage as some weird curiosity vehicle of the 2020s is probably better than being driven around on the daily as a pointy oversized commute vehicle

its a scene from the muppet movie (the original one) The man talking to Kermit (same guy in all the panels) was physically thrown out of the bar, and Kermit suggests that he complain to the bar’s owner, but the man in question reveals that he is said owner, who has been thrown out by the bar’s violent patrons.

Tbh, If I’m feeling sick especially if it involves sinus congestion, I’m generally feeling far too icky to want to do that

dont forget star trek

I’m not really convinced that this would change their behavior much tbh, given that corporations are already prone to sacrificing their own financial future for short term profit increases, despite existing for nothing but financial gain.

I assume that the whole “Stalin starved his people” thing isn’t talking about the average conditions of the Soviet Union during more “normal” times, but rather specific events of mass starvation like the Holodomor. That being said, famine caused by accidental or malicious management of agriculture is something hardly unique to any single economic system (I imagine a comparison could be made to the Irish potato famine there, for an example of a similar type of disaster under a different economic system), so I’m not sure if it reflects entirely on the kind of system the Soviets were going for as much as it does mistakes in the process of transitioning to that system, and malfeasance on the part of those in charge in pushing the consequences of those mistakes upon disfavored groups.

And that’d be reasonable for you to do. However, having a network choose to remove something, or cut ties with servers in the network that don’t in an attempt to persuade them to remove that thing, isn’t exactly the same as a government ordering a thing be removed. The former doesn’t give much avenue for a malicious actor to suppress something that isn’t in their interest, because they can hardly control the collective actions of users on the network, but the latter does by creating a single point of decision making on the network’s content from the outside. Not that the motivations in wanting that video gone were bad, but there is an element of risk to making it possible for a government entity to remove something from a social network, even if the thing they want gone this time is something that really shouldn’t be there.

Can’t forget the three day challenge