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> and just had a party member or two inside

This is exactly what I imagine and it's as chilling as anything ICE does openly or US insurance companies do to keep their bottom line moving up, because the ramifications are realized in silence. The silence is ensured by the same "regular" people in China.


You're not the only one.

In the book Calculating God, a character notes that this is a common civilization-wide choice. Living in virtual reality, rather than trying to expand into the vast expanses of space, is a common trope as much as it's a logical choice. It neatly explains the Fermi Paradox. In some fiction, like The Matrix, the choice might be forced due to cultural shifts, but the outcome is the same. A relatively sterile low-energy state civilization doing pure processing.

I wonder if it's illogical to think that all civilizations must always pick the most logical of the options

Logical and optimum are not the same.

Those civilisations that make too much illogical choices probably die off.

True. But it's not a binary choice. All it takes is to make one sub-optmial choice for the universe to be filled up with von-neuman probes in all star systems

Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.

It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.

> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.

The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.


Fewer crimes are committed when the weather is bad since criminals avoid going out like everyone else.

It's a fantasy that strongly correlates with facts. Home robberies are not evenly committed throughout the day.

Didn't work out well for the river camp in Santa Ana, CA 8 years ago (or so) that had to be bulldozed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhy3zI3wvAo

The vast majority (that accepted accommodation) destroyed the spaces and eventually fled back to the streets. It is generally not productive to simply rehome all the homeless en mass. There are first order drug abuse and mental illness issues that cannot be ignored.


Most NES games had "cheat" methodologies for game testing purposes, which made it into production cartridges. For Top Gun, you could bypass fighting anything on EVERY level, by flying up and to the left for the duration of the combat. I only knew a few of these tricks. In Parappa the Rappa, there were various patterns that would essentially complete every level with various outcomes, regardless of the actual songs.

Depends on the level, some are better flying up, others are flying down... you don't need to move left/right except to avoid being locked on from behind, unless you need to dodge missiles from the front.

Claude has been miserable for anything Java related, in my experience. Use it maybe as a cross check for ChatGPT, which is far superior. They both make mistakes, but Claude repeatedly changes course, contradicts itself, or makes suggestions that are basically unusable. I don't understand why conversations here are always focusing on a bad LLM.

You likely need to provide it with more direction in your prompts.

I use the same prompts I used for others. Then I rephrased and expanded. This did not improve the quality of responses.

Have you tried prompting the loop? Something like "keep trying until <insert format command here> is happy?"

have you used claude code?

yes. specifically.

I couldn’t quite tell from your comment. Anyway it’s not my experience with CC but everyone seems to have a slightly different take on it.

Saying "working toward a martian colony" is akin to saying "working toward a way to colonize the solar system". Mars is not very interesting once you have a methodology. The Moon is a much more practical place to start the process. Then aim at the asteroid belt.

Mars costs the same as the Moon to reach and return from (delta-V) and is a much easier environment to stay in, even over as short a period as a month. Mars makes much more sense than the Moon, which has little of interest and isn’t a stepping stone to anywhere.

> Mars costs the same as the Moon to reach and return from

0/1

If you stay out of gravity wells, traveling anywhere in space is the same cost, minus the non-trivial life support issues, which only come into play on a trip to Mars and back.

> (Mars) is a much easier environment to stay in, even over as short a period as a month

0/2

> (the moon) isn’t a stepping stone to anywhere.

0/3

Humanity has gotten there before Mars for the precise reason that it is a stepping stone.

None of what you posted is factually true and, in good faith, I have to wonder why you might believe these things.


Mining asteroids is a goal that makes sense. I can picture a future where spacecrafts are regularly sent to the asteroid belt and come back to earth with some minerals. Living on the moon does not make sense. There is nothing to be gained from humans living in a future moon base. Not any more than cities built in Antarctica, or in orbit with a constellation of ISS like satellites.

We won’t build a city on the Moon, nor Mars, nor any of Jupiter’s moons, nor anywhere outside of Earth, and we won‘t do this even if engineeringly possible, for the exact same reason we won’t build a bubble city inside the Mariana Trench.


Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically. The numbers for even the most basic solutions just don't work, and anything cleverer - like adding thrusters to chunks of metal and firing them at the Earth - has one or two rather obvious issues.

The Moon is interesting because it's there, it's fairly close, it's a test bed for off-world construction, manufacturing, and life support, and there are experiments you can do on the dark side that aren't possible elsewhere.

Especially big telescopes.

It has many of the same life support issues as Mars, and any Moon solutions are likely to work on Mars and the asteroids, more quickly and successfully than trying to do the same R&D far, far away.

Will it pay for itself? Not for a long, long time. But frontier projects rarely do.

The benefit comes from the investment, the R&D, the new science and engineering, and the jobs created.

It's also handy if you need a remote off-site backup.


Mining asteroids wouldn’t be for Earth - it would be for satellites or LEO or possibly even Mars, which is a lot closer to the Asteroids than Earth and may need some extra raw materials we don’t want to spend the horrendous cost of lifting out of Earth’s gravity.

The Moon has nothing to offer Mars explorers as everything will be different and solutions for the unique lunar conditions (two weeks of darkness, temperature extremes, moon dust, vacuum) do not apply to Mars at all. It’like saying living under the ocean is good practice for living in the Artic, but we should start under the ocean because it’s closer.


> Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically.

With current tech, it's practical enough to extract rocks from a rock. We've already done this on a comet, which I think is much harder to do. With current economics, not practical to fund such an endeavor, even if it was to haul back an asteroid made of solid gold. Regardless, we're discussing the far future, rather than current state.

If raw materials (again, an unknown) continue to become more scarce, it's hard to say what economics might support extra-planetary resource collection. What's for sure, is mining Mars will be harder than mining asteroids for water or metals, et al.


Mining asteroids makes no sense in the current economy with our current technology. But working towards engineering solutions which makes mining asteroids make sense makes sense (if that makes sense).

However, it is much easier to see us send robots to mine these asteroids, or send robots to the moon to build a giant telescope on the dark side (if that makes sense), then it is to see us build cities on the moon to build said telescope, and to mine those asteroids.

You see the difference here is that the end goal of mining asteroids are resources being sent to earth and exploited, while the goal of space settlements are the settlements them selves, that is some hypothetical space expansion is the goal, and that makes no sense, nobodies lives will improve from space expansion (except for the grifters’ during the grift).


> nobodies lives will improve from space expansion (except for the grifters’ during the grift).

Aspiring to goals and accomplishing them makes life worth living to a lot of people. Furthermore, humanity seems to have an innate drive to explore and learn.

Even to those left at home, it's inspirational to think that there are people who are taking steps to explore the universe.

Maybe it won't help anyone live but it will give a lot of people something to live for.


How do you discriminate between 2 different things that ostensibly have similar features, but do it in different ways without getting very large names? What if you modify software or just part of it to make it something distinctively new, should it keep the name or add to it? What if I revert that non-trivial feature and add a different non-trivial one. Now what is it?

I would hope the author realizes the core counterpoint when re-reading "We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue" - because the real names, are the roles the tools play. The implementation name is incidental and amorphous, since you can make wild changes to software, rendering the name without much utility beyond a project label. Project labels are necessarily opaque, for the same good reasons software is. The ideals are more important than the details. They are a conflux of interests and plans, not a market label. If market labels were fixed to functionality, the world would be worse off for obvious reasons of practicality and marketability. Ironically, Stallman is completely comfortable with PostgreSQL which is semantic context adjacent, charitably. It describes a small element of the project (a synthetic SQL syntax), not the project itself.


> proscribed orgnanization

That doesn't change the context. A different justification doesn't change the practical effect. The curtailing of speech is discussed as problematic by many of the residents openly. I certainly have had an earful touring across the entirety of the isles.


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