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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I’m convinced that much of, if not most of, society sees technology in our personal lives as a way to (ideally) not have to learn anything or put in one bit of extra effort.

    I’ve been getting my hands dirty and doing more things myself over the past few years, and ya know sometimes the journey is more impactful on you as a person than the destination is. Learning things and interacting with the world around you is good.


  • I’d argue that the rate of decay per atom is actually random, except that the probability per unit time is scaled according to how long the half life is.

    You need a shitton of atoms so that you can average out all that randomness and find the emergent property that is half life.

    Fortunately, any amount of radioactive material large enough for us to do anything with it does indeed have a shitton of atoms! Avogadro’s number is one of my favorite scientific constants because it reveals the crazy scale of the atoms we take for granted.

    Like with U238 and its 4 billion year half life, one mole of just that atom would weigh 238 grams and have 6.022x10^23 atoms. A half-pound or quarter-kilo chunk of very heavy metal that fits in the palm of your hand contains over 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

    Some of those atoms are going to decay today, and some of them will still be radioactive in 100 billion years.









  • Are they really such amazing actors

    Unfortunately I don’t think they need to be good actors in the first place.

    One of the lessons of the last decade of the shit show that we call human society has been that awful and/or stupid people rise to positions of power and influence every day by acting confident and promising things they can’t deliver.

    The modern confidence man isn’t the thief of the street but the legitimate executive.



  • AI will replace workers. AI will replace people who make art and music, and write things.

    This part made me think how I’ve commented recently that AI does the thing it was designed to do, but that the thing it was designed to do is generate something you could believe somebody wrote on the internet.

    That doesn’t mean the answer is correct, of course. It’s often confidently wrong, just like real people online!

    But when it comes to artistic expression, there is no clear right or wrong. Music, art, and the written word are some of the most human things we have, but you are absolutely right that they will be replaced. If a marketing director can pay Google a few dollars to generate a hundred concept drawings so they can do “I’ll know it when I see it” design, that’s a human artist job they won’t budget for.


  • Yep. My disdain for the combination of fascist government where everything is surveillance, and sociopathic corporations and billionaires where everything is a cynical cash grab, overcame me excitement for tech “products” a long time ago. I’m in the US so it’s especially bad.

    I still have a smart phone that’s 4-5 years old, and I do of course use it every day, but I consciously avoid using it every hour. I love when I misplace it in my own house, to then not look for it for hours. The only person who is going to message me anything urgent is my wife and she knows where to find me.

    Constant phone addiction is one of those situations where when you remove yourself from it you can more easily see it in others. It’s like there’s a new form of body language where when you see that slight forward tilt of the head you know they are in the Phone Zone without even seeing the rest of their body.






  • That’s the neat part when you blur the lines between the government and the private sector. So-called leaders who are interested in power, control, and “winning” more than upholding their oaths of office can just use the private sector to do the things the government is restricted from doing. Then when their businesses can’t compete on their own, they can lean on the legal + force options the government has.

    I’m starting to think this habit we have of electing selfish sociopathic bad-faith actors to powerful positions of service is less than optimal.