Ok, that’s a pretty different idea…

I wonder how feasible it is to run current through a whole chunk of drying concrete on a build site… It does sound potentially difficult, but on the other hand, carbon negative concrete might just be worth the added difficulty.

Now the trick will be to convince anyone to use a material that is even slightly more expensive, sometimes achievable, but always a challenge.

That’s what you have to do for sharing!?

Someone definitely told me that there was library sharing for jellyfin… Is this the only option?

There’s a simple answer to that. When many people first got started with Plex, it was awesome! Way better than xbmc! Also, jellyfin didn’t exist.

Once you’ve had things up and running smoothly for years, changing everything is a hard sell. You could spend hours setting it up, fixing little inconsistencies, manually matching titles that had weird names, etc. or you could just… not.

I hope I’ve cleared things up for you! The answer is laziness!

In my experience, as you increase the quality level of a jpeg, the compression level drops significantly, much more than with some other formats, notably PNG. I’d be curious to see comparisons with png and gif. I wouldn’t be surprised if the new jpeg compresses better at some resolutions, but not all, or with only some kind of images.

Would you rather fight a horse sized duck or a horse’s weight in normal sized ducks?

Honestly, It’s a pretty major fuck up. It makes the headline inaccurate by 2 orders of magnitude…

Cause a million bees is what… A dozen hives? I just googled it and it’s literally my body weight in bees. Which now that I’ve said it out loud, is sort of terrifying, but you know what I mean.

Again, the argument I’m trying to make is that, by the time one can settle Mars without supplies from Earth

Well, that’s not exactly the goal. No nation is really self-sufficient in modern society. Everyone engages in trade. So the question is really, when will a space colony become profitable or maintainable? And that’s trickier to answer, because it isn’t “not for hundreds of years”, but it also isn’t now, it’s somewhere in between.

Cheaper access to space would change the equation immensely. Being cheaper to resupply would mean the colony wouldn’t have to be as profitable to be sustainable. In-situ resource utilisation (using water found off of earth for drinking, oxygen and fuel) will also make an enormous difference as it would reduce the amount of supplies needed from earth. (This is incidentally one of the main goals of NASA’s Artemis program, to figure out how to utilize water resources on the moon)

It was the same situation when Europeans settled the Americas, at first it was just a money suck. Entire colonies were lost, lots of people died, they weren’t really prepared. But then they started to figure out what crops worked there, how to survive harsh winters, etc. Once they figured out how to make the most of this new land, they thrived. Unfortunately, the way they treated the locals was pretty horrific. Fortunately, we’re pretty certain there aren’t any locals on the moon or Mars.

Truth be told, I think a Mars colony won’t happen for quite some time, but I believe a moon colony will certainly happen before 2100. And if we’re lucky, maybe since orbital colonies. That’s where the future really lies, orbital colonies.

Actually, they have launched deep space NASA missions. The Europa clipper went to Jupiter on a falcon heavy just last year.

An easy copout, I could have predicted that…

Well I’m happy to be done with this exchange.

Oh my God… In that whole post, you’ve said absolutely nothing of substance! That was astonishing! I mean, actually impressive in a way…

In my post I had essentially only asked one question (and that question was “what are you actually suggesting?”) and you managed to not even address it. Instead, you went on a meandering tangent about Dr Strangelove. You continue to make assertions about military doctrine, that actual decisions about actual, tangible weapons are incorrect, but instead of explaining how they were incorrect or suggesting what specific alternative choices should have been made, you instead talk about vague philosophical misunderstandings… That’s bullshit.

Honestly, as useless as it is, I feel like I have to ask at this point, are you an LLM? (I can’t really expect any useful response to this whether you are an LLM or not, but it still feels right to ask)

That’s a great description!

To be able to force a surrender, you’re asking this drone to do a whole lot…

It needs to be large enough to carry tank killing munitions, and it needs to be either fast, tough or stealthy enough to survive to make it into close range, then it also needs an antipersonnel weapon to prevent it from simply being shot down once it’s in close range, and finally it needs loud speakers that can be used to actually make surrender orders. (Adding speakers may sound trivial, but it’s an additional system that draws power and adds weight and volume, both of which are at a premium with aircraft of any kind). Oh, it also needs to be able to sustain a very long flight time, because it needs to hover there in place until troops arrive to escort the captured soldiers… (Which could take a while in a warzone)

At this point, you’re talking about a $20 million drone that requires at least two people to operate.

And forget warships, you can’t force a warship to surrender with a drone any more than you can with a missile.

So again, to be clear, is your argument that the US should be using lower cost off-the-shelf or lower tech weapons? Presumably, with the ability to field more of these much lower cost weapons for superior ultimate effectiveness?

I mean, the example you have with the f-16 vs f-35, is a bit of a false dichotomy. The f-35 isn’t intended to totally replace the f-16. The two planes have a different set of capabilities and can be used in different ways. Ideally, they should be used in tandem, with the 35’s stealth, superior electronics, and sensor suite, it can fly deeper into contested territory and designate targets for other planes to safely engage from further away. So maximizing the value of weapons like the f-35 is in fact dependent on combining them with other (usually much cheaper) weapons already on the field. But when done this way, adding just a few of these new top of the line planes can increase the effectiveness of entire fighter groups.

All that is to say, the f-35 is in fact a bit of a complicated case to use as an example.

Also, this is sort of how the entire US military is designed to work, with each element making other elements around it more effective. For example an aircraft carrier alone is extremely vulnerable, so it has a whole “carrier group” with destroyers, cruisers, and subs all supporting each other against different threats. As a group each part is more powerful that it would have been alone.

I brought all that up to point out that providing “X” weapon to a foreign nation is always likely to be an inefficient use of that weapon. By providing just one specific weapon, it makes it likely that those forces won’t have all the supporting tools to make it most effective.

The tech you’d need to make living on Mars independent of Earth, like consciousness uploading, self sufficient friendly AI, extensive human/plant bioengineering, terraforming… Well, they’re better at solving our problems on Earth anyway.

That sounds like an argument for a Mars colony, not against it.

Not that I think continuousness uploading or AI have anything to do with a Mars colony… Even terraforming is totally unnecessary.

Honestly, I don’t think Mars is a great candidate for a space colony, though probably not for the same reasons you’re thinking. But I think it is in fact vital that we start colonizing space soon, and I think the technologies developed in pursuit of that goal will absolutely aid us here on earth.

You’re not being terribly specific about what you think America is doing wrong. So, we can’t derive what “doing it right” might look like. This is great for you, because it makes your statements difficult to refute, it’s not great because it makes your statements mostly meaningless.

So, what should America be doing differently?

They do more Linux and Mac porting than any other company I know. Back in the day I believe they were actually game developer, but they seem to have become specialized in porting games specifically.

You really think that?

I mean, people are people. We do some stupid and shitty things.

Well I mean, if anyone needs to know, it’s him, right?

the issue is not only the Brave browser itself, but the owners of it.

I mean, that an issue, sure. But I gotta be honest with you, I care far more about the practicalities of the technology than the personalities behind them. So I guess that’s where we see things differently. Don’t let me get in your way on that front, if that’s what really matters to you.

I see browsers as being problematic in general right now and new solutions are needed. If you’re happy with tracking and spying at the browser level, then fine, but I’m interested in how we can put an end to that.

“Rolling your own” cryptographic system is rarely a good idea. There are countless examples of companies and governments deciding to ignore existing tested and verified standard industry tools on the basis they’re more vulnerable because they’re more well known, but that decision tends to bite them in the end because the solution they come up with has some critical vulnerabilities they didn’t notice in time. These things are easy to miss when there isn’t a whole global community of security professionals looking at the code.

Now I’ll admit that the US government could absolutely create a comparable or even superior solution if they put the right people and enough funding behind the project, no doubt. There is the question of whether or not it’s worth doing, worth the investment. If budgets are tight (because conservatives are so concerned about govt spending 🙄), I’d certainly rather they use signal than they decide to dedicate almost enough funding and develop something that almost works; that could also be disastrous.

Honestly, the best move for the government is probably to make their own app utilizing existing standards. The signal protocol is perfectly open and free, they just need their own clients. Well, that and some identity verification in the account creation process. But yeah, If they had their own app, they could design it to do some useful things, like verify all members in a group have appropriate security clearance. That might have come in handy…

So yeah, I don’t really disagree with you, they should probably be using their own system. But I think it’s easy to think that any bespoke system would inherently be superior, and that very much isn’t the case. And with that in mind I’d say it’s truly not a crazy or negligent choice to use the existing best-of-class systems off the shelf. It’s maybe not the best choice, but it’s not a bad one.