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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • At this point we’re not even sure if fully autonomous vehicles are possible.

    Yes that one guy has been saying it’ll be ready next year for the passed 10 years, but no self driving company has been able to get an autonomous car from point A to point B in all road conditions that a competent human can manage.

    Even aircraft autopilot is not as autonomous as what people want out of self driving cars. Pilots are still required to be at their seats the entire flight in case something unexpected happens. And there are a lot more unexpected things on a road than in the middle of the sky. Even discounting human drivers being in the way, a self driving car needs to be able to recognize everything a human can and react to it better than a human would. I’m not sure that’s possible, even with “AI”. The human brain is insanely good at pattern matching, and it took millions of years of trial and error evolution to luck our way into that. How can someone guarantee an AI is going to be better?









  • The secret service was just starting to use AR-15 pattern rifles, chambered in .223.

    You can see an agent with an AR-15 falling over when the motorcade accelerated, around the time JFK’s head exploded.

    The only wound that jfk had that had bullet fragmentation was the headshot, despite the .30 caliber carcano rounds that Oswald was firing being very capable of punching straight through a head, and in fact passed cleanly through jfk’s spine and ribs without deforming or splintering.

    The Autopsy report mentions how the bullet entered from the occipital lobe at the back of the skull, and fragmented, causing an exit wound by the ear.

    .223 rounds commonly splinter when impacting bones, as they are fairly small and don’t maintain much momentum when they hit hard surfaces.




  • Thank you. I feel like I’m talking crazy pills reading this thread.

    The world wasn’t a terribly different place ten years ago. Sure, some things are more messed up now, and we have some neat new widgets. But i seriously doubt Apple Pay, the steam deck, and fancy autocorrect I mean chatGPT, have really shifted the world that much.

    More people having smart phones has lead to a societal change where they’re becoming more and more necessary for everyday life, but I could still love my life without one just fine, and many of my older family members are doing just that. I think I’ve used Apple Pay like once in my life when I forgot my wallet at home, and chatGPT reminds me of talking to a dementia patient more than Skynet.

    Now if the question was what the year 2053 would be like, that would be way more interesting. Back in 1993, I don’t think anyone would have accurately guessed what was going on now. Being able to browse the internet on your phone would have seemed nearly pointless and infinitely painful. The internet and internet advertising being a deciding factor in national elections would sound crazy. Electric cars being somewhat affordable and practical would sound like we live in the jetsons.

    I think 2053 is gonna be wild. Hopefully I don’t die of dehydration or catastrophic weather before we get there.


  • Wikipedia has an endowment that can pay for their servers for the rest of civilization. Meaning they have such a huge pile of stocks, that just the interest generated off of it can pay for everything.

    From what I remember, their parent company also has a fat stack of liquid cash that it’s just sitting on, so even if the economy implodes tomorrow and their endowment stops paying out enough, they can still run the servers as long as there’s electricity.

    Don’t bother donating money to already rich organizations. Wikipedia asking me for money is like if one of the Rockefeller kids started panhandling after getting choppered to the street corner. They have enough money to last them practically forever. While I value their contribution to knowledge, i also know my money can better help other organizations like the internet archive, who don’t have the benefit of an obscene endowment and are currently facing very serious lawsuits.


  • I still don’t get how it’s at all safe or practical to have what amounts to a smart watch embedded into your brain.

    The surgery they want to do literally involves removing a piece of your skull. Falling and hitting your head without a piece of your skull removed is bad enough, this is going to seriously compromise the strength of people skulls. Which is especially bad when you consider it’s meant to solve problems like paralysis. I have a feeling that people who are just learning to walk again may be at a high risk of falling. Now they’re at a high risk of falling and cracking their skull open like an egg.

    It’s also charged with a wireless charger, which would need to placed on the device every night when you sleep. How many people remain completely still the entire night and don’t move their heads at all?

    This is a cool and valuable first step for brain augmentations that can probably help thousands of patients, but the implementation has so many glaring problems that it makes me wonder how well the actual product even functions.