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Dracula's Biggest Mistake

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Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#41

Post by exolymph »

gwern wrote: post #37

OP is echoing, with a Catholic-centric viewpoint, a point that's been made in much greater depth by others: I suggest https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2014-robbins.pdf and then more briefly, https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/turning-back-the-economic-c... https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/br... I read _Dracula_ afterwards, and I think this perspective is 100% correct, and perhaps the single larg…

Out of sheer nerdy curiosity, have you read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and if so what did you think?

I didn't realize Dracula lore was among your many sidelines :P

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#42

Post by at_a_remove »

aidenn0 wrote: post #35
at_a_remove wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging,…

> Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same. Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble. They can communic…

If you can get from A to B faster than a photon in a vacuum could, I'm counting it as FTL.

They've been really inconsistent about it. For a while, communicating through subspace was not quite as long as travel, but it was still a non-zero amount of time. Now, communication seems to be via ansible, and the less said about the wildly varying rates of travel, the better.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#43

Post by dgacmu »

_upoi wrote: post #11
pvg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39528000

I'm not sure if you flagged my comment too, but I'm a real person with a posting history. psnehanshu also has a posting history and contact information on their profile, so I doubt this person is a bot or a person who wrote an AI-generated comment. I manually highlighted the key parts of the article in my comment to encourage discussion, for people who read the comments first. I'm not sure what psnehanshu posted as i…

psnehanshu's comment literally begins with "TL;DR by Gemini"

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#44

Post by mrec »

at_a_remove wrote: post #32
jfengel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling communications. That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories. Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytel…

I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging,…

> Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners

Surely this one was much more about those "reasons of budget and convenience"? Star Trek couldn't afford non-styrofoam rocks, I can't see them stretching to filming all bridge scenes on the Vomit Comet or building a 2001-style rotational set.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#45

Post by caseysoftware »

at_a_remove wrote: post #32
jfengel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling communications. That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories. Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytel…

I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging,…

> Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on.

I'm more interested in how it would rewrite the rules of war. If you can transport a nuke (or even a strike team) directly into your enemy's headquarters, wars end faster with less widespread destruction.

Until you develop no-transport fields but now you've just created massive dead zones which - in themselves - highlight key points of interest to investigate and/or target.

Then you have to deploy LARGE scale (think city wide or bigger) no-transport fields or lots of smaller fields to obfuscate the high value targets.

But regardless, you still need normal shields because teleporting a nuke just outside the zone and letting it drop in is just as effective.

And all of that still ignores conservation of mass.. the physical material has to come from somewhere.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#46

Post by pvg »

dgacmu wrote: post #43
_upoi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you flagged my comment too, but I'm a real person with a posting history. psnehanshu also has a posting history and contact information on their profile, so I doubt this person is a bot or a person who wrote an AI-generated comment. I manually highlighted the key parts of the article in my comment to encourage discussion, for people who read the comments first. I'm not sure what psnehanshu posted as i…

psnehanshu's comment literally begins with "TL;DR by Gemini"

Lots of people have showdead off by default and don't know it's there/what it does.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#47

Post by falcor84 »

kstrauser wrote: post #40
RheingoldRiver wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really interesting to me how precisely you can date modern tv shows. - Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way? Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artisti…

I can see the complete absence as being more realistic than a partial or limited presence. If there were a Dune-style Butlerian Jihad, AI could be banned altogether.

I can't imagine any of the factions in The Expanse upholding the ban on AI while researching in secret an actually alien substance.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#48

Post by dang »

_upoi wrote: post #16
dang wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that your post was well-intentioned! But on HN, please don't post comments that are just a summary of the article or paste bits from it. The thread doesn't need to repeat the article—users can find it easily enough. This might make more sense if you remember that the purpose of HN threads is curious conversation. When you have an interesting conversation with friends or colleagues, the idea is not to repeat thi…

That is fair point, I'll follow this guideline from now on. Apologies, I wasn't aware of this before.

Appreciated!

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#49

Post by wiml »

082349872349872 wrote: post #10
runeofdoom wrote: post #8

The author thinks that Helsing & company killed Dracula... and that is certainly the narrator's desperate belief. But as Fred Saberhagen pointed out in his more modern telling of the tale, Van Helsing himself maintains Dracula must be staked, decapitated and have his mouth stuffed with garlic to perish. And yet, despite this and despite knowing that Dracula can turn himself to mist, the heroes are content with victor…

If you've ever wondered why staking or decapitation specifically, see the mechanisms proposed in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/715512.Vampires_Burial_a...

I also recommend that book for anyone interested in the subject!

GP neglects to mention that it might also be necessary to bury the decapitated, garlic-stuffed, staked corpse at a crossroads.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#50

Post by Terr_ »

at_a_remove wrote: post #32
jfengel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling communications. That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories. Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytel…

I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging,…

That makes me think of the "teraport" invention from Schlock Mercenary, which is basically faster than light teleportation powered by a very small/evenly-spread amount of mass-to-energy conversion of whatever you're sending. (So basically three magics rolled into one.)

Large portions of the web comic are involved with how it completely rewrites the rules of politics and war, with and without review techniques designed to create interdiction zones.

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