arseneau

I'm not old enough to remember the early internet, but I do feel like there's been a shift in how I interact with the internet in the last 6 months or so. Prior to that, most of my interaction was sanitized through the channels laid out by large corporations: twitter, instagram, etc.

While I still use those platforms to an extent, it feels as if it's become easier and easier to find interesting people and ideas that float below the broader internet waterline. They've certainly always been there, but I think it's indicative of some degree of rejection of oligarchic centralized platforms in favor of more democratic systems of interaction. It's early days, but the large platforms are showing their cracks and I think it's possible that more traffic could be diverted from them to places like Lemmy.

Personally, my problem with the more centralized platforms are that their adoption is so widespread that it becomes overwhelming to break in. So many opinions are flying around that it's impossible to engage in a meaningful way. The advantage of smaller platforms like Lemmy or kbin is that it's easier to engage and build community. As they grow, they'll have to figure out how to preserve that aspect, but I think their engineering provides an inherent advantage that other platforms lack.

When I was younger, I watched Star Trek for the lasers and technobabble and I really enjoyed it. Then I got my first job interning at a government aerospace engineering lab. One of my bosses was an ex-Navy engineer, and we got to talking about AI drones and all that.

He told me that he was opposed to anything that made war less bloody because it would make going to war easier and easier, less and less costly. He made that argument through the lens of this Star Trek episode, wherein two planets go to virtual war with one another in a bid to preserve their culture and wind up in a centuries-long forever war. It was a short anecdotal conversation, but one that stuck with me and I still think about it today. Probably one of the first times that I realized that science fiction wasn't just there to entertain me with cool characters and settings, but to really make an argument about what society should be.

I haven't seen the new series yet. Hopefully they carry on that legacy well.

This is awesome. Thank god for EU legislation that directly benefits me as an American consumer. Now I can microwave lithium ion batteries in peace!

This is great to begin with, but eventually it would be absolutely fantastic to have some sort of a map of the entire space, to the extent that that's possible. As a new user, it's taken me some time to start to understand where all the people are, what communities can talk to what, etc. Looking forward to learning though.

Lobbying by big orca

Relevant link.

This seems like it should be taken with a pretty massive grain of salt. The authors' supposed mechanism for this are magnetohydrodynamic interactions between the Earth's dynamo and cosmic rays. I wouldn't believe that without very strong evidence because even very powerful cosmic rays don't penetrate particularly deep into the aesthenosphere. That's why we build dark matter detection facilities in abandoned salt mines: to insulate them from the effects of cosmic rays.

The authors of this study seem to have gotten this by just sifting through datasets searching for correlations. If you look through any large dataset for long enough you're sure to find some 6 sigma correlation in there somewhere.