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Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

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Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#431

It's great to see NASA livestreaming in similar quality/fashion to spacex. It reminds me of watching the NASA feeds on public television in the 90's but much more nicely produced.

On space shuttle launch days, my parents would let me stay home from school to watch TV. At the time I was an ungrateful idiot but now I realize my parents understood me better than I understood them.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are reading something into my comment that wasn't there in order to pick a boring fight. There is of course no such thing as no accent a priori, but there is such a thing as "accents understood by (vastly) more people" and "accents closer to the mean accent of native speakers". When I learn Russian, my English accent is not on the same footing as a Muscovite's; the intended notion of "de-accenting" the English ac…

> accents closer to the mean accent of native speakers Notice that, for the case of English, most speakers are not native, by a huge margin! Native English speakers are a biased minority, and with a lot of variation within. Not sure that an "average native" accent is a useful concept at all. I, for one, tend to find most non-native English speakers vastly easier to understand than many native speakers.

This is a dumb fight to pick. Dude just wants some ML software to figure out how to change accents.

Maybe he wants to change the accent to a Texas accent, or the Queen's english, who cares, it's the ML part that's interesting.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#433
Please donate ethereum to this address as I am being kept hostage by a psychopath called Satoshi Nakamoto. He has scattered all of my personal information and economical research all over youtube, cnbc, techcrunch, the local mainstream media in the netherlands. https://ibb.co/74qYknK

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "refine" really means "melt at temperatures ranging from 500 to 4000 degrees celsisu and then extract via various mechanical processes and/or using various reactants which often require gigantic plants to produce and are highly unstable". Basically all of the history of science until 200 years ago was figuring out "mine and extract" and the course of civilization is very much linked with the price & quality o…

We don't have to be efficient, just small and reliable, no matter how slow... if there were enough small machines to turn out enough materials to build new ones faster than the failure rate, then geometric growth wins, and you can build whatever you want, eventually.

I don't think you're getting my point, consider reading again. There's a fundamental limit you will hit here, you can't just "make it slower" or "make it worst" to lower that limit.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#436
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it extremely hard to believe you could kill every human being on earth at this point. We’ve reached critical mass, we aren’t going anywhere. When we had that few thousand individuals population bottleneck in the past was when it was dicey. What sort of event could kill every human and end our species? I can only think of planet-wide extinction events like massive asteroid impacts that sterilized the whole eart…

I wonder what a huge Carrington solar storm would do to humanity. If electricity went out everywhere, transformers burned up all over, electronics fried. If this caused transport failures, mass starvation could follow. I really hope a severe solar storm would not be as bad as that and hopefully someone could enlighten me on this.

>I wonder what a huge Carrington solar storm would do to humanity

Worst case it sets us back to 1870ish, maybe. Depends on how fast things go to crap vs how fast things can be rebuilt.

Likely case you'd basically get a "purge" because society as we know it can't keep on rolling with the kind of economic breakdown something like that would cause so there's be a lot of dying in the interim but if you don't starve or get shot in the first 6mo you're probably good with the very old, very young and unproductive bearing the brunt of it (same as every other disaster) It would be like the black death, but global and all at once. Balance of power globally would definitely be altered in unforeseeable ways but the overall net result is things would bounce back hard.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just say "they". (Not trying to be judgy. People just seem to forget about the gender neutral use of "they".)

I'm not a native speaker but the problem I have with it is that it has the wrong numerus. Although I have done so in papers recently, because it seems to be a trend, sentences like "If a person chose option B, they were categorized as a cautious assessor" seem ungrammatical to me. (In this case it's easy to reformulate the sentence in plural and simpler, but that's not always the case and I hope you get the point.)

If the person is hypothetical or not fleshed-out and without a gender, like your example, they is fine and I don't even notice. But if the person is known, the use of they catches me off guard every time. I recently read a book by Brandon Sanderson that had aliens on another planet with a different gender system, so Sanderson just used they to refer to those aliens even though the characters were obviously either feminine or masculine. It completely broke the illusion of the story and was a complete turn-off. I always notice in such cases, but for some reason some people say it's totally standard English.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#438
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter. See the errors caused in the past by using the imperial system. The metric system has a number of advantages.

The errors were not caused by the imperial system. The errors were caused by using the imperial system and the metric system. Specifically in expecting one system and getting the other.

>The errors were caused by using the imperial system and the metric system

Using one universally accepted system is core idea behind metric system. Now, it looks like it is competition between two equal systems, but historically it is competition between ideas 'we should have one universal system' and 'every country/area can stay on their local systems'. Just all other legacy local systems (outside u.s. customary) disappeared.

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great video! I am also surprised by the fact that they bring that much mass just to jettison. In theory they could mounted some of the useful mass on a slider/rail system to achieve the necessary adjustment to the mass distribution without dropping mass overall, but apparently it wasn't worth the complexity/volume cost. I'm sort of surprised we don't yet have ML powered "de-accent-ization". His french accent isn't ha…

I, for one, would be uncomfortable with AI removing my accent. I understand it's for other people to understand me better - and I am fine with AI-generated subtitles - but altering the way I speak would reduce the amount of "me" in ways I'm not fully ok with.

Interesting, are you uncomfortable with the current option to increase or decrease playback speed?

Re: Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> used to refer to a person of unspecified gender. How is this offensive to anyone??

For the same reason referring to anyone with the wrong pronouns is, I would assume. Isn't that offensive? I didn't realize this was up for debate in 2021.

But you're not referring to someone with the wrong pronoun, but using a gender neutral one.
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