Can I say Luigi

https://lemmy.world/c/luigimangione

Or who’s to say that “Nicole” even exists?
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Well, yeah, but we’ve been able to build a self-driving vehicle like that since the 1950s/1960s.

Better yet. Return it with the trunk filled with gasoline.

“Don’t worry, I went ahead and topped off the tank for you.”

Or

“Damn it! I pressed too hard and the touch screen broke!”

Or if driving a cybertruck:

“I wanted to be a good neighbor, so I went ahead and ran it through the car wash. ‘Car wash mode?’ What the hell is that?”

It’s a great idea actually. People buy vehicles for reasons other than practicality. No one is buying a cybertruck because they’re looking for a practical vehicle. It’s all vibes. If people see Tesla dealerships being picketed, they know that there will be a lot of people who judge them harshly for buying a Tesla. And aside from some right wing asshats, no one really wants that kind of heat on them just for buying a damn car. People buy expensive cars because they want to be seen as cool. Protests serve to make Teslas as uncool as possible.

Bold of you to assume they aren’t already cooking the books. Though, I imagine they use some plausible deniability and have some bullshit AI cook the books for them.

Of course! I’m making a bespoke artisanal AI, with media I carefully curate. Unlike the big companies that just feed in truckloads of slop.

If anyone sues me in the future for pirating media, I’ll claim I’m just gathering training data for future AI training. Of course, I need to review all my training data manually before I can use it for AI training.

Sure, I have a relatively small number of media in my training data collection, but I’m curating it carefully. And I can’t be blamed for not having the resources of OpenAI. I’m doing the same thing they’re doing, just a lot slower.

What’s the easiest way to remove fingerprints from a corpse?

It can be done and has been researched. See Project Plowshare.

People who say we can’t build fusion reactors are only partially correct. (And no, I do not mean that we can build tokamaks that are net energy negative.) We can build energy-positive fusion reactors, and we’ve known how to do so since the 1950s.

The idea was that you would build an enormous underground chamber. Then fill it with salt. Then detonate a small hydrogen bomb inside the chamber, instantly boiling the salt. You then run the salt through turbines to generate electricity. You power a city by setting off a nuke every one and awhile.

The results of this work were that yes, it seems possible to build a power plant that runs off of hydrogen bombs. We do in fact know how to build a fusion reactor today. The problem? Simple economics. This method just isn’t cost-competitive with traditional electricity sources.

This should serve as a cautionary tale for those hopeful for the future of fusion or advanced fission concepts. It doesn’t matter if you manage to build a tokamak that returns net energy. Ultimately it’s just a cool science experiment. What DOES matter is if you can do it cheaply. And this is actually why I’m skeptical of fusion as a power source. Even if we do ever manage to make non-bomb fusion plants produce net energy, they would struggle to be cost competitive with renewables+batteries.

I was hoping someone would quote this. Bravo!

You know what? Fuck it. Let’s finally build Edward Teller’s Doomsday Machine.

Teller, the ‘father of the hydrogen bomb,’ wanted to build something even more mad, Project Sundial, a true Doomsday Device. It relies on the principle that there really is no upper limit to how big a thermonuclear weapon can get. As long as you’re willing to keep chaining stages, you can make them arbitrarily large. However, you do eventually hit a limit where the bomb is too big to deliver to a target.

However, for Project Sundial, this wasn’t a problem. The idea is you would build a single nuclear device so comically powerful that it doesn’t matter where on Earth you set it off. You build the thing in bunker, under a mountain, in the heart of your most closely guarded territory. It can be the size of a large building if need be; it doesn’t have to be movable. In extreme form, imagine a nuclear bomb the size of a stadium.

Once you push the button on this thing, it’s over. No matter where on Earth you set it off, the explosion would be so large that it would launch enough dust and debris into the atmosphere to block substantial sunlight and cool the planet. Instant nuclear winter from a single device that cannot be intercepted or shot down. And you can built it in a bunker buried so deep that no regular nuclear weapon can reach it.

It is the apotheosis of mutually assured destruction. If you threaten our existence, we retain the power to destroy everything. The entire species would be reset to c. 1500 or earlier at the press of a single button.

They did actually design the thing, though it was never built. And the details are still classified as all hell. But it is entirely possible to actually, in the real world, build a Doomsday Machine worthy of any comic book mad scientist. It is possible to build a single device that can destroy the entire world at the press of a button.

Or hell, for all we know, it’s possible someone has already built one…

There isn’t some vast array of technologies that exists but that we’re holding back from employing. We’re employing everything. Are there inefficiencies and manipulations from a capitalist system? Yes. But that has been the case for generations. Food yields per acre were increasing quite regularly for decades prior to 15 years ago or so. This is a relatively new phenomenon. And even in the greediest of corporate systems there’s pressure to develop as efficient a supply chain as possible, and to make use of available land as profitably as possible. Ruthless profit seeking could decrease the total number of acres under production, but it shouldn’t restrain the productivity per acre. Land doesn’t come cheap.

Well I meant more the “parts I like and don’t like.” But I suppose building a big-ass wooden boat would be fun.

Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but don’t kill the messenger. The media does a piss-poor job of really nailing home to people the short and medium term impacts of climate change.

Did you know that in the last 15 years, global farm yields per acre have been flat? This is despite miraculous improvements in farming technology. Genetic engineering, farm automation, finance markets extending industrial agriculture to underdeveloped countries, satellite planning, innumerable tools and techniques.

Our global average farm yield per hectare should be soaring. Instead, it’s been flat. We’re swimming against the current, above a giant waterfall. All our advancements in farming technology are going into keeping us one step ahead of mass famine.

It’s been projected by insurance industry studies that if we hit +3C above preindustrial levels, that would correspond to a halving of the global human population. And with how fast climate change is accelerating beyond our previous overly conservative models, that could easily happen by 2050.

Again, the media has done an absolute shit job of explaining the perils of climate change to people. You think grocery prices are bad now? You haven’t seen ANYTHING. This is NOTHING compared to what is coming. The real danger of climate change isn’t slow sea rise or even wildfires. The real danger is the fact that at any given time, the planet only has a few weeks of food reserves stored up. We need to continuously make enough food to feed 8 billion humans. And if climate change causes multiple simultaneous bread basket failures? If we don’t make enough food for 8 billion humans? Well, quite quickly we will not have 8 billion humans anymore.

If you really want to understand the magnitude of the climate catastrophe, I suggest conceptualizing it in terms of wars. All of the fervent efforts in government and the private sector are trying to address climate change? All of them are trying to constrain the casaulties over the next few decades, to merely WW2-level casualties. We’re already going to face that; that’s already locked in. We’ve already guaranteed a loss of life on the scale of the Second World War. We’re trying to keep the casualties from spiraling up to “global thermonuclear war” levels of destruction.

Because the climate is becoming hotter, wetter, and highly unpredictable.

And we grow our food outside.

Why not use regular library software? Surely there’s a FOSS solution there.

Peak human population will occur within the next ten years. Previously this was driven by falling birth rates. Now it will be driven by rapidly rising death rates. Within the next ten years, I think 300 million - 1 billion dead from starvation due to bread basket collapse is a conservative estimate.

Evangelicals will decide that, despite being nominally Protestant, they’re suddenly OK with sainthood again.

I practice both a radical form of progressive Christianity and agnosticism.

This is basically me.

It’s really a statistics joke. If you assume both observations are independent, then yes, the most average name might be “Mohammad Wong.” But if there are other confounding factors, such as the mapping of names to ethnic groups, then the whole thing falls apart. Obviously Mohammad Wong is not the most common name on the planet.