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Oh, 2022

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Re: Oh, 2022

#361

Post by stickfigure »

admash wrote: post #226
stickfigure wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't just one satellite zone. Starlink satellites are about 4 times closer to earth than than they are to the geosynchronous Hughesnet satellites. The starlink satellites are close enough that even after full Gravity -style Kessler syndrome, you could just wait several years and start over from scratch. Obviously that is something to avoid, but it's not like we're filling up a non-renewable resource in low ear…

Note: Starlink orbits at an altitude of 340-350 miles . Hughesnet’s geosynchronous orbit has an altitude of 22,000 miles. That is over 62 times higher, not 4. FWIW.

I apologize, you are quite correct! Not quite sure what my brain was doing there, I was looking at those same numbers and somehow typed 4.

Re: Oh, 2022

#362

Post by dragonwriter »

rektide wrote: post #314
ninkendo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does anyone owe you their eyes and ears? If somebody doesn’t want to read what you have to say, it’s fine that they block you. It’s fine. Stop worrying about it, it’s not “cancel culture”, it’s just human beings being overwhelmed by the number of people that piss them off.

It's pathetic beyond words that there's no other moderation systems available. To take remorseless, infinite action against someone who may be having a bad day, or who may feel strongly against something: it's a drastic drastic overreaction. But we have literally no choice; on most sites blocking/muting are the only options available to us to de-espouse incoming comments. This is a technical fault, heartlessness is b…

> To take remorseless, infinite action against someone who may be having a bad day, or who may feel strongly against something: it's a drastic drastic overreaction. But we have literally no choice; on most sites blocking/muting are the only options available to us to de-espouse incoming comments.

Even if they were, they aren't inherently infinite or remorseless; they aren't permanent and irrevocable. (And, on some platforms, they aren't even total when in place.)

And, as most algorithms require a certain level of positive engagement to retain the baseline visibility even of something you aren't actively following, most platforms have at least one more, less extreme, negative signal—don’t positively engage with the content you don't like.

Re: Oh, 2022

#363

Post by muzani »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #254
jaybrendansmith wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When…

> We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air. Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will…

Most likely outcome seems like the COVID vaccines. The damage is already severe. And while it can (drastically) reduce damage in the future, it will be there.

Someone had a theory that covid won't be the apocalyptic plague. Instead we'll be hit with another deadlier one that ends up poorly controlled with all the covid fatigue. Something like MERS or Ebola, that the old world managed to control.

I expect this to be the case of climate change. Gov has burned their political capital trying to control covid that there's none left to handle climate change.

Re: Oh, 2022

#364

Post by Uhhrrr »

bigiain wrote: post #103
toyg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people also have a quixotic definition of "facts", and figuring out if that's the case can be exhausting for popular users with thousands of followers.

And you know, from random strangers, who gives a fuck even if their facts are correct? You owe them precisely nothing for their “contribution” to your discussion. If you block them, it means you don’t want to hear from them any more. They can go butt into someone else’s discussion and see if they are more receptive to “corrections”.

I think it's nice to thank strangers who offer corrections. I'd rather be corrected than have a false feeling that I'm always correct.

Re: Oh, 2022

#365

Post by eloff »

cstross wrote: post #78
gmuslera wrote: post #19

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!

It's amazing to come to the comments and find the author himself here. Thanks for writing Accelerando, I enjoyed the book. It really made me think about the future differently.

Re: Oh, 2022

#366

Post by nameistaken »

Go on Google maps and find any random middle of nowhere, small town USA, and I mean small. 3k-5k, 10k max. Go 20-30 mile radius out, pick a house.

Then shop for internet. It's a travesty. I don't know where you live, or what kind of bubble you're surrounded by, but the situation out here is hot garbage.

I'm currently on a 5g wisp, but $100/mo gets me 24/3 speeds. Which wouldn't be stable enough for 4k, and on the off chance it was, nobody else in the house could do anything. (I'm currently on a 12/3 plan for $60)

I have to plan a day in advance if I want to play a new game with friends. A fresh backup takes months. When I was on DSL, 3/768k my phone's photo auto backup would basically render our connection useless.

It was unfathomable for me to think about moving to some family gifted farmland to build on. Or a house even more remote to our current one. My wife and I thought about buying a large plot in Utah for retirement, after taking a trip there. We laughed because we couldn't survive without internet. But now, we have options.

It is a game changer for stuff like this. To think otherwise is complete folly.

Re: Oh, 2022

#367

Post by tptacek »

rektide wrote: post #168
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people should block on Twitter. Blocking is far preferable, in an environment like Twitter, to pointless hostile misunderstanding. It's a bad look to dunk on someone for blocking you; just let them block and get on with your life. Pay it forward when someone pokes you on Twitter with a question you can tell is going to pull you into a time-wasting cortisol spike.

Its a shit rubbish reality that the only moderation option is infinite, is forever. Sever ties. End it. Write someone off as garbage. Your comment is way way too cancel culture for me. It hurts a lot having one bad exchange & having the door slammed in your face. Especially if it's some topic you feel strongly about, that you were trying to engage in. You may be right that it's a better tact than engaging. It's a shi…

I don't think it's at all healthy to equate being blocked on Twitter to being "written off as garbage".

Re: Oh, 2022

#368

Post by vincentmarle »

jaybrendansmith wrote: post #186
walrus01 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and…

Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When…

> As a society, we must intelligently react to these dangers as we've done in the past with threats like the ozone layer. We must plan as if a comet was going to hit the planet, starting now.

Have you seen the movie Don’t Look Up? It’s not gonna happen.

Re: Oh, 2022

#369

Post by winrid »

jhgb wrote: post #319
winrid wrote: post #243

If you move your comment threads off of being rendered by the server, that old Athlon will handle this traffic no issues: https://wordpress.org/plugins/fastcomments/ (Shameless plug - I created fastcomments) We have a SSR solution coming this week, too, so JS won't be required. Just reach out if you sign up and I'll give you a custom package between the two tiers we have today (the ability to do this yourself is comi…

Wouldn't a Raspberry Pi 4 be faster than the old Athlon box anyway? I know that "Reuse, reduce, recycle" is a thing, but still... Reusing an old Athlon for example certainly does not reduce the amount of electricity consumed.

It may be an effort thing... or just fun reusing old hardware. I know I enjoyed running PIIIs up until 2012 or so as servers, and that was nowhere near energy efficient.

Re: Oh, 2022

#370

Post by ansible »

halostatue wrote: post #337
tessierashpool wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lots of people were predicting a pandemic yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.” for that matter, Obama predicted it too, setting up a pandemics office, and he did that because as (again) Stross himself says in this blog post, this pandemic came along after two prior coronavirus pandemics. (I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on…

Would anyone have predicted that a sizeable minority of people would simply deny the existence of the pandemic and/or refuse to do the most basic precautions to protect society? Not ten years ago.

Yeah, that one has really thrown me for a loop. Just how willing a large segment of the population can be to "score points" against the other side... by killing themselves.

It is kind of funny, the pandemic could have been politicized the other way as well: "wear a mask to protect yourself from ethnic group's disease", and such.

But as it turned out, the primary concern was with just one man's ego, and trying to pretend that everything is fine... until it clearly wasn't.

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