Agreed. At a bare minimum it's a hedge against terrestrial existential risks. And if Mars itself sucks, then, well, rotating space stations with simulated G, same principle.
One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we should have an interest in.
Sorry, I'd love to hear exactly how a mars habitat with a half dozen people or a space station are "hedges against terrestrial existential risks"? Those are both "unfriendly" environments that lack the resources required to sustain themselves for any appreciable amount of time. And certainly don't have the number of people required to repopulate.
I'd love to see you make more of an effort to try and understand the idea you're engaging in than just engaging in an emotionally charged dismissal. I try to profess the principle of charity here from time to time, which means tackling the version of an idea that credits it with making the most sense.
So if the version of the idea that you're engaging with is one that doomed to fail, doesn't have the resources or technology or population to succeed... maybe assume that's not the version I'm talking about?
There are contexts where I love to get into these kinds of details (there was an amazing conversation on HN from a few months ago [1] about what would be involved in sending a bunch of voyager-style space probes to alpha centauri), but you have to want to try.
If I’m to believe the experts, LLMs are a panacea to all problems to have ever existed, like Blockchain before it.
Therefore it is a non-issue as given that LLMs have only gotten exponentially more impressive, in [current_year+n] you will be able to prompt Claude to materialize a fast terraforming machine and FTL it over to mars.
Currently reading Blue Mars, the third and final book in the trilogy. It's amazingly fascinating but also exhausting. I say with full seriousness it may be best to read this with a very specific high resolution full color map of Mars on your wall somewhere.
If anything KSR is not giving himself as much credit as he deserves, as personal AIs show up in ways that are remarkably salient and similar to what we're currently seeing. And he talks about advances in genetics that parallel what we're figuring out with CRISPR at least to some degrees. The biggest "error" is the preoccupation with a Paul Ehrlich-style population boom, but by the same token it reveals that the book is a window into the time it was made.
If any ambitious and aspiring science novelists are reading this, I would love for someone to be the Kim Stanley Robinson of Venus and tell the story of colonization there, aspiring to the same bar of technical specificity that KSR had for Red Mars.
Good on you, exhausting is the right word I’d think. Red Mars was the book that killed my enthusiasm for reading for nearly a year. Something about it bored me to tears and yet, I kept reading (my fault) I think I gave up at 60%.
I feel like I should like it, I’ve read everything my Neal Stephenson so I’m not averse to hefty books
I think I was in a similar boat and where in doubt, I think I powered through for completionist sake. But it's possible you paused right before some of the most interesting stuff in the whole book.
It's not a spoiler to note that the it begins with a flash forward that talks about the fate of a major character. Some of the most interesting stuff starts happening to them and it comes full circle in a way that leads up to that flash forward. And mercifully the constant mentions of regolith lessen the deeper into the series you get.
True enough, but it's still incumbent on us to understand what other biochemistries are plausible based on what we know. We look for things like organic molecules and planets in habitable zones because we know a lot about the mechanisms that allow them to support life.
And we are curious about alternative biochemistries, I think that drives a huge amount of curiosity toward Jupiter's Galilean moons especially Europa. My worry is that people say "well there might be other biochemistries" as a deepity that kind of checks out from looking at any specifics, unfocusing conversations that were actually more focused prior to the emergence of the deepity.
Is the snow melting? Do you hear birds? Must be chat control season.
Someone should sell calendars based on when this typically gets proposed as well as dates throughout the year when past instances of check control came up against key procedural hurdles.
I don't mind that part, but I do mind resentment based reflexes completely detached from any analysis of any particular wrong.
It's perfectly fair game to call it overreactions, and even in this thread, no one seems to be disputing that that's what they are, the main concern is the analogy to Wiki's fundraising practices is an example of normal.
Life as an open source developer is often nasty, brutal, and in some cases short if they get pushed out of the game by hostile users who make it feel like a thankless task. They've been trying to sound the alarm on this, and I for one want to be part of what makes these developers thankful for the communities they have rather than frustrated.
I know sometimes I suffer from "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome, and I try and proactively balance out that part of my personality with lots of upvotes on good things (like the people in this thread noting that they donate to the project), and by being supportive of developers and people sharing their hobby projects.
The small size of Valve is simultaneously mind boggling but also not, given its very intentional independence. I would have to imagine that they must contract out or have partners at least for their hardware relationships if not for their massively multiplayer online games. At just 350 people that's enough annual revenue to make everyone there a millionaire several times over. Simultaneously plausible but mind boggling.
They contract out all the time, they've admitted to it in lots of interviews. So I think through the amount of contracting they're able to keep their core hires down.
Right. I think one way to think of your relationship to customers is you grow up with them. Trying to be intergenerational can be really hard because you have to keep winning over a new generation for the first time.
One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.
This being microsoft, my expectation UX wise is that similar to those Xbox ROG devices you'll have to drop to the windows desktop to install updates, and they'll probably also throw in some copilot to help you through the process. I don't think they have it in them to innovate here and make it pleasant in any meaningful way
Yeah, I agree. There are certainly engineers at Microsoft who are skilled/talented enough to do something cool. But it doesn't matter if the business people will just saddle them with bad requirements that drag the experience down.
My guess is it doesn't go well -- with Gamepass they've taught Xbox gamers not to buy games, and with Steam integration they've given Xbox gamers a competing place to buy games (where Microsoft will pay a percentage to steam!)
It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
Right and itch.io and much besides. However, these integrations are janky and not built in as first class console experiences. Not that they need to be necessarily, I think having the steam store is enough in many respects. But for me, the dream is being able to browse and install games from itch.io with the same convenience as steam itself. So there's at least notionally and unclaimed lane for providing that kind of experience. It's the only available Lane that I can think of for out-Steaming Steam.
You're not wrong, at this hour success is as much about picking up the pieces from one of the singularly worst disasters of brand confusion we've ever seen. Even this attempted recovery is a bid to get into the lane now owned by Steam.
The SteamOS is capable of getting out of the way, which is something Microsoft is pathologically incapable of designing Windows to do. And these days I think Linux and the Linux desktop are just objectively better than Windows, and the days where Windows embodied what it meant to have when anything goes PC are long gone.
So you're left with limited options. I think a first class console experience for a wide range of storefronts is the best bet to out-steam Steam but it assumes a degree of execution capability that I don't trust Microsoft to have.
Speaking as a non-expert, my understanding is that the absence of fortifying data from the LHC was a major blow that demoted string theory because at least some of its major predictions in the heartland of its prediction space should have been accessible.
But that said, if string theory never makes an inch of progress on any question ever again, it will still have paid for itself in spades with AdS/CFT correspondence which has done real things, such as led to better predicted properties in quark-gluon plasma physics than alternatives, and of course, serving as the basis for black hole holography and from there, as a potential road map to holographic universe. People grew a little too comfortable waving away string theory as completely untestable and I just don't think it's fair to say that anymore.
And now, and most importantly, string theory is at least the grandparent of the current New Big Thing, which is generalized flat space holography, taking holography from black holes and seeing if there's a version of it that applies to the rest of spacetime. There is real excitement there, and it's a topic that, baffingly to me at least, still awaits it's Brian Greene style public champion. If generalized holography ever ends up being worked out into a theory and validated, it would qualify as a major conceptual revolution in physics. We're not anywhere there but even in the absence of string theory as a great unifier, there seem to be tantalizing convergences between quantum error correction and holography that suggest some big important thing they might share in common.
Again I'm not an expert and barely know what I'm talking about, just curious enough to read about it, but I feel like a lot of the string theory excitement from yesteryear should be transferring over to holography right about now.
>This data was acquired by collecting and analyzing AI adoption trends automatically captured by the Larridin platform across all clients over the past eight weeks
No link is provided to their data but Larridin looks to be a company that tracks workplace AI usage. I don't necessarily have any reason to believe they are wrong but no way to independently vet those #'s.
One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we should have an interest in.
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