The tracking on the lasers for CDs is pretty crazy, since at those scales even well balanced CDs wobble like crazy. If it had to be super flat for it to work, each disc would be much too expensive. And as soon as it got dirty or warped in the sun, it wouldn’t work anymore. In reality CDs are pretty rugged and can take a lot of abusive before they can’t be easily read in even a cheap reader. It’s amazing technology really. It’s kinda crazy to think about how many holes per sec the laser can track and read for something like a blu-ray disc running at multiple times playback speed for data transfer.

Good point, however I don’t know if I agree actually. That’s looking at a human in a very simplistic way, which probably means it isn’t fully true.

For example humans live (and always have lived) to a relative old age, well past their prime and past the point where they can produce offspring. Even back when the average life expectancy was low, people still easily lived to 50 years old. It’s just that a high infant mortality and death due to accidents and illness pushed the number down, a single human could easily live to be 50. At this age they don’t work as hard, can’t produce offspring and can’t really compete, so why keep them around? Many other species don’t live that long or are even actively killed off. The theory is with humans being very social creatures, always working together to outcompete everything else, keeping the older ones around must serve some kind of benefit. It is thought they could no longer work hard in terms of hunting and gathering, they could still look after offspring whilst the rest does those tasks. They could also do smaller, less demanding tasks and so still contribute. This made them earn their keep so to speak, providing more benefits than the extra resources they consume. This meant a group which had elders around had a better chance of survival than a group which didn’t or had less of them. Thus there was an evolutionary gain to living into old age and it was selected for, giving humans (and other hominids who we are related to) a much longer lifespan than one would otherwise expect.

This means being lazy to conserve energy isn’t the full story, there’s also the social aspect. Someone contributing to a tribe not only helps boost the survival of that tribe and therefor themselves, it also helps them not be ousted from the tribe and thus significantly decreasing survival odds. This means going the extra mile for the tribe, even self-sacrifice, would be selected for in terms of evolution.

Another side would be I expect a modern human to be slightly more advanced than our hominid cousins and not be driven purely by instinct. We live in a society with rules and expectations and it’s a conscience choice whether to adhere to them or ignore them. It is generally accepted that in normal circumstances a person is fully responsible for every action they do or do not undertake.

But the theme I’ve noticed is people are caring less and less about society and more and more about their own bubble, so in that sense they might not be malicious. They might be driven by this general trend and the causes for them, which I’m unable to speak of with any kind of expertise. I shared my personal experience, which might or might not be reflected by reality.

But thank you for shining your light on this, I agree the term assholes implies it’s malicious.

Normally you need to put a coin in shopping trollies around here to take them out. When you properly return them you get the coin back. It’s not a lot of money, usually 50 cents. And if you don’t happen to have a coin on hand most shops will give you a key chain with a properly sized round bit of metal. It being so common, most people have one of those key chains anyways. I’d always thought it was a fine system, but people were pretty decent anyways.

Then during corona because of hygiene reasons shops could only reopen if they cleaned the trollies after every use and that meant not using the coin system. Later the cleaning part was delegated to customers using facilities from the shop and then got rid of entirely. But the coin system wasn’t put back due to hygiene.

To my surprise people would just dump the trollies everywhere. They would not care one bit where they put them. Some people put them away neatly, some just shove them sort of in the right place. Others would just leave them on the parking lot or shove them aside to end up in a ditch.

As soon as possible the coin system was put back into place. Later some shops got rid of it again, because it’s easier for customers. But only in select places where people are decent I guess, or the shop puts in the effort to monitor and handle the carts. You would think it’d be the crowded inner city parts where the coin system was needed. But near me in a rich part of town they use the coin system because rich folk just leave the carts in the parking lot, feeling like putting it back is beneath them or something. In a more crowded normal part of town one shop I go to doesn’t use the coin system and I’m surprised every time. The carts there are always perfectly placed. Although that shop has an issue with people using the disabled parking spaces if they need to run in and out quickly, which is a terrible thing to do.

This whole experience changed my view of humanity. I used to think almost all or at least most people were decent. Trying to do the right thing, with only a few assholes spoiling stuff for the rest of us. It showed me that a tiny little coin, not really worth anything is all that stands between a functioning neat system and total chaos. And it’s not just a couple of people, it’s more like half of them. A lot of people are lazy and inconsiderate, caring only about themselves. If it costs them money, no matter how little, they will do what’s required (because money is everything in this fucked up capitalist world). But if it doesn’t cost them money, they will just do whatever and not care.

This experience, along with many other during the past 10 years have spoiled my view on humanity. I tend to assume everyone is a total asshole in some way or another, which is honestly kind of a sad way to live. So I make an active effort to give people the benefit of the doubt, but it can be hard and a lot of people shortly prove they are indeed assholes.

I once went down the rabbit hole of thinking about how the targeting works on the TNG kind of transporter. Like they need to know to the molecule where your body ends and the rest of the universe begins. And you want it to identify clothing, because you don’t want to end up nude on the other side. Plus it needs to identify what creepy crawlies are a part of you and which were just randomly wandering by. We don’t want any of those pesky Fly problems now do we? This might sound easy, but is actually extremely hard. The human body is very complex and like a ship of Theseus what is part of the body is a bit nebulous and can change. All of the microbiome in our gut is essential for us to stay alive. And more importantly we don’t want to leave behind a puddle of crap every time we transport. Plus what happens if we come out the other end, do our intestines just implode? Or does the transporter fill them with air, leaving you to fart uncontrollably until you die?

And how does it know what clothes are? If I’m wearing shoes, does it know where the shoes end and the floor starts? What if I’m wearing skies? What if I’m barefoot on a carpet? What if it’s a leather carpet? What if I’m wearing shoes made by folding carpet around my feet?

The only thing that makes sense is a super powerful AI system that can real-time scan every molecule and figure out what’s what. And it doesn’t only need to be smart, it also needs a lot of real world knowledge. It needs to know what is “logical” to include in every situation. This means it has to be an AGI, has to be superintelligent (at a minimum speed wise) and would most likely be sentient. Them being used for this one and only purpose is really cruel.

This leads me to the conclusion TNG style transporters are basically slavery and put a whole different spin on the morality of the people in that universe. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

That’s not how orbital mechanics work

I’m goin’ down to South Park, gonna have myself a time

Maybelline

Akshually cheetahs don’t live in the jungle, they live on the plains. It would be pretty hard for them to run super fast in the jungle. Like a lot of cats they prefer to be in a more open terrain with not a lot of trees like plains, hills, deserts and mountains.

They strip away everything that actually helps people, so in that way it’s really small.

I’ve had great experience with Axis in the past. However in the past they used to have planned obsolescence where the flash they used had a very limited number of write cycles. With the Linux based OS they run it writes to the flash all the time. This would cause the thing to start dropping writes and misbehave. When ran 24/7 they usually died after about 4 years. The place I worked at just threw them away and replaced them whenever that happened, to not have downtime for cameras. Once I asked if I could have a couple to diagnose the fault and I found out the flash was out of write cycles on all of them. Maybe they are better nowadays, but it was pretty fucked up to see such expensive cameras be destroyed because of a few cents of flash.

Worf worked in security and got to be first officer of the Enterprise. After that became Strategic Operations Officer on DS9, which is command even though it’s still ops related. As a bonus he became first officer on the Defiant as well.

It’s one banana Michael. What could it cost, $10?

And the name of that bus? Albert Einstein

Also you fart too. So there’s that…

So you’re saying to solve climate change we need to remove the humans? You might be on to something there.

Sounds like the perfect plan to have Trump change the law so no woman can hold a high office ever again. It’ll blend in nicely with their proposal to not let women vote ever again.

0 emissions? Methane from cattle is a large contributer to climate change. If we had as much horses as we have cars, the amount of methane would be too much to handle.

I don’t think this has anything to do with YouTube really. They would love to show you all the content all the time. But the strict copyright laws and agreements they’ve made with some parties, such as FOM, requires them to gatekeep some content. YT figured out a long time ago it was better for them to have the content and gatekeep it, than not have the content at all.

It sucks, but the whole world of regioned licensing sucks. And it’s a complicated subject, made more complicated by decades of large companies maximizing their profits and lobbying for complex laws and regulations.

This also clearly isn’t enshittification. It’s kinda sad how that word has just become “I don’t like this”, instead of the narrow definition it originally had.

No, Mars lost 99.999% of all of it’s water. The part that remained is stored frozen inside. As soon as you take it out, it will be gone forever.

You can try and use and recycle it as much as you can, but once you lose it, it’s lost.

Holy shit, new nightmare unlocked.

I’ve had some horrific shit done to me for medical purposes. What got me through it was remembering two things. First of all, this is all to fix something else, it may get bad but it will get better. Second of all, pain is only temporary and exists only in my body/mind, it holds no power over me and it will pass.

Hope you had have fixed whatever was wrong, that makes something like that worth it.

Stitches that desolve are excellent. I hate the kind that needs to be monitored and removed manually. But I hate it even more when they use the staple kind, there is something just not right in using staples on a human being.