111–120 of 125 posts
I’m reminded of this big red sign I saw in a men’s room, just above a big red button: “ATTENTION DO NOT PUSH RED BUTTON UNLESS IT IS AN EMERGENCY” It took every ounce of my will power not to push the damn button. https://i.imgur.com/xnfVpOh.jpg
I went looking for this page to confirm the exact quote for a story I'm writing. The original link on HN where I found it was dead, so I had to go to the wayback machine. Hopefully no one has to do that again... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871
Couldn't you have used https://urbigenous.net/library/WIPP/ or https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi... which turn up if you google any of it?
I always imagined a concept such that instead of trying to deter people from entering was designed to convey that it was trying to keep something dangerous from escaping. Someone trying to keep you out of an ancient tomb? Clearly there are valuables in there. An ancient tomb that's locked from the outside? That's creepy.
Isn’t that exactly what an psychopath/despot/arch-villain would want? To unleash destruction on the world... and be the one to find, conquer and control it. I think perhaps the Finland approach of complete obscurity may be better.
I always imagined a concept such that instead of trying to deter people from entering was designed to convey that it was trying to keep something dangerous from escaping. Someone trying to keep you out of an ancient tomb? Clearly there are valuables in there. An ancient tomb that's locked from the outside? That's creepy.
IIRC the Egyptian tombs / pyramids all had warnings similar to "trespassers will be cursed"; didn't stop the tomb robberies, and didn't stop Tutankhamun's sealed tomb from being unsealed and opened. The parallels to this are pretty clear; supposedly, there was a mold in there that ended up killing a few of the archeologists. Re: the article, and I'm sure I've mentioned this in the previous discussions, they should tr…
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I'm not Mormon, but I was married to one. I got that I was safe as long as I never believed. But that once you believe and then renounce, you're at least at risk. Or maybe that was belief as documented by baptism.
and here I was thinking Roco's Basilisk was the original
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Yeah, pretty sure any advanced civilization will quickly figure out "hey this place is pretty radioactive; we shouldn't stick around", while any primitive civilization will quickly figure out "hey this place is definitely cursed; we shouldn't stick around". Having a visual cue there (I like the jagged pointy structures) would certainly help reinforce that and/or delineate exactly where the radioactive/cursed place ac…
> while any primitive civilization will quickly figure out "hey this place is definitely cursed; we shouldn't stick around". After a while, when quite a few people have died, and maybe their whole village and all their farmland is contaminated. This is exactly what we are trying to avoid. See for example the Goiânia accident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
Soon enough, the Curse of the Jagged Land will become part of the local folklore/religion, at which point Mission Accomplished. Worst-case, you might see an uptick in animal and/or human sacrifice at the site to appease the God of Plutonium.
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and here I was thinking Roco's Basilisk was the original
Roko's Basilisk is just a technology-flavored reinvention of Pascal's wager: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
It is a bit strange to worry about the safety of (a small subset of) people several hundred generations down while at the same time ignoring the possibility that Earth may not be hospitable to humans within two generations.
from the "Personal thoughts" section of the document: > An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system. i'm curious re: where you're coming from with "ignoring the possibility that Earth may not be hospitable to humans within two generations" – I feel like that's outside the scope of this doc…
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Mormon belief is that baptism is one of the few strict requirement for entry into Heaven, but that it can also be performed for the dead by volunteer proxies. Even the most obstinate sinners and nonbelievers will gain entry into the lowest-but-still-pleasant level of Heaven if they haven't committed the unpardonable sin[1]... so long as they've been baptized, in person or by proxy. Combine those premises and it becom…
The unpardonable sin seems quite... vaguely specified, and open to endless debate. What sin is a sin against the Holy Ghost? What sin is not?
I feel like there's something to think about here since we couldn't even keep the page with this information active for a decade and the goal is to keep the actual warning around for 10,000 years.