81–90 of 557 posts
But he could have said we were lucky to not have gotten hit by a different virus that kills 80% and travels asymptomatically. The real nightmare virus. It’s totally possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He'll block you on twitter for politely quibbling with his presentation of facts.
I'm not a twitter user, but this is the equivalent of "I'm not interested in being notified if this person contacts me again" right? Like me putting a Gmail rule in place to move messages from a specific source, say a specific mailing list thread that I'm not interested in out of my inbox. Is this considered taboo on Twitter?
I block them then even if people I follow retweet I never see them.
For me, it makes twitter infinitely more pleasant.
Regarding spacex in this, my starlink terminal recently hit a milestone of 0.00% ICMP loss to terrestrial ISP things in the pacific northwest. Averaged over 5, 6 hour periods. 20 icmp pings every 60s, basically a default smokeping install set to once a minute. Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a noisy/oversubscribed coaxial c…
Last time I checked, there were dozens of commercial satellite ISPs ramping up their launches. Do these companies have a plan to deal with potential collisions and the potential space debris that would cause?
(RIP Douglas Adams)
“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…
Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…
Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
That wasn’t possible in the 90s.
“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…
Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…
Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast? Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones. Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is…
I wrote Accelerando from 1998-2004. That's a third of a lifetime ago. It's normal to slow down as you grow older!
Its going to be a wild ride! Hopefully it doesn't result in anything too crazy going on, I'd hate to involuntarily grow a new limb.
Related, your books, and others in the genre, helped bring about my own acceptance of people's differences. I realized that if I had no objection to a future where people modified their own DNA, then it followed that I should have no objection to people dying their hair, getting crazy tattoos, or making any alterations to their body that they so choose. Transhumanist literature was the final stepping stone that let me step back from the preconceived notions of ethics and morals that society had placed upon me and do a thorough analyze and decide what I wanted to keep versus discard.
Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast? Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones. Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is…
I wrote Accelerando from 1998-2004. That's a third of a lifetime ago. It's normal to slow down as you grow older!
“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…
Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
It is the quantity and quality of psychological manipulation.
What happened to Germans in 1930s won't repeat again, people are more knowledgeable and less susceptible to mass hypnosis in the 21st century, right?
And bang, all of a sudden there is a menace which didn't exist before. By mere redefinition of what a menace is.