ZephrC

Authoritarianism is all about concentrating power around fewer people. That what authoritarianism IS. Giving more power to the least powerful people is always anti-authoritarian. Yes, there are always trade-offs, no they’re not always as obvious as this one, but more power to more people is never authoritarian.

The short simple version is that if galaxies happen to be close enough to each other they fall toward each other faster than the space between them expands. That’s what “gravitationally bound” means.

Oh, also, it’s a common misconception that publicly-traded companies are required to maximize profits. They can have whatever goals their shareholders want. It’s just that the way modern publicly-traded companies work, most of their shareholders are people quickly buying and trading shares based on who they think will earn them the most money this month, so that sort of inevitably becomes the goal of any publicly-traded company.

It’s not really direct cause and effect, but yeah. The incentives for a publicly-traded company make enshitification far more appealing then it would be for most other organizations.

You could read the text next to it. They have an official specification, and they’re occasionally used as cells in larger battery packs, but they never got adopted in consumer products, so you can’t just buy an off the shelf A battery. Nobody has bothered to get a picture of one, because nobody actually cares that much.

I mean technically yes? There’s kind of a post pandemic return to normal still going on, and before that there were consistent record low crime rates for the first half of the 10s, so they’re not that low, but they’re still pretty low. Nowhere near as bad as the terrifying dark ages of the 90s.

Yeah, and none of them can actually design bridges. Some of them can be useful tools for engineers to use while designing bridges, but this isn’t tech bro fantasy land. You’re gonna need some engineers. That’s gonna take more than a day.

Engineers using a specialized AI to make a design slightly lighter and then using a 3D printer to print that design isn’t a 3D printer using AI.

Did you actually even read the article you linked? It’s about a type of generative AI that’s slightly better than humans at finding the most efficient way of providing structural strength with minimal material. If you think that’s all there is to designing a bridge I can only hope you aren’t allowed anywhere near a bridge I need to drive across.

So uh… how exactly does a 3D printer use AI? Is the AI running the stepper motors? Or is this person actually suggesting that an AI could design a bridge? Because, uh, no. No it can’t. Maybe someday in the distant future, but large language models aren’t structural engineers. Those aren’t even remotely the same thing.

The point was never that any group of people should always be perfect. The point is that you have to search out and get rid of the bad apples to prevent spoiling.

A finite number of monkeys would almost certainly just destroy their finite number of typewriters long before they randomly bashed out anything coherent, let alone Shakespeare. Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters don’t have that problem though. As long as it doesnt break the laws of physics it would eventually happen, no matter how unlikely it is. That’s the whole point.

Well it’s a good thing no one is doing that then, isn’t it? Why does everyone feel the need to make up problems to whine about?

For crying out loud I live in a small town and need a car. Do you think I don’t deserve access to decent public transportation?

Honestly, I’m part of that 15%, and I feel more excluded by people pretending we can’t have mass transit just because my neighbors like big trucks than I am by people in cities not bringing me and my concerns up every time cars are mention.

Rural communities got along just fine before the invention of the automobile. In fact, most of the people who have ever lived have been rural people without cars. The idea that we can’t have small walkable towns connected to decent mass transit is just incredibly stupid, and it pisses me off when everybody just assumes it’s unsolvable, moreso when it’s people who actually live here and should know better.

So no one should ever be able to have a conversation without patting you on the head for being a special boy at the end of every sentence?

Imagine how much cheaper cities could be if 2/3rds of the real estate wasn’t parking? Also, moving doesn’t necessarily mean going to New York. It can also just mean moving closer to your job in a small town. Which would also be easier if you could turn all the parking lots into homes.

Short term EVs aren’t making a lot of difference due to the higher energy costs of manufacturing them. Long term cars are just a terrible transportation method, especially within cities, and we really need alternatives so that we can get rid of most of them.

On the other hand as renewable energy sources take over the grid the energy costs of manufacturing EVs will be less relevant to climate change, and it’s just going to be faster to switch power plants and new car manufacturing over than it will be to rebuild the entire transportation infrastructure on all of Earth, especially North America. That time difference will have a large effect on how bad things will get by the end of this century. EVs are dumb, but also a necessary stopgap.

Okay. I see the problem here. Shell doesn’t mean shotgun round. Bullet and shell are technical terms for the bit of a round that comes out of the business end of a weapon at high velocity. A bullet is a single, simple solid mass that follows a ballistic trajectory and just imparts kinetic force into whatever it hits. A shell is anything more complicated than that. Shotguns are just the small arms weapons that are most likely to use shells, but anything can, and it doesn’t have to be buckshot to be a shell. Even something as simple as a tracer round is technically a shell.

Uh, no. No it’s not. You can have a cartridge that fires a shell instead of a bullet. That is totally a thing.

I guess, it just seems odd to me to correct a meme for using a term in way that’s absolutely vital for both the rhyme and the pun to actually happen and not even really wrong, just weird if you over-analyze it.