I love how you can post an article from one of the most rabidly pro Ukrainian publications here and libs will swarm in with downvotes because it doesn’t conform to their fantasies.

libs and engaging with reality challenge impossible

They talk about how Israel wants to break up Syria to to keep it weak. Even if Syria doesn’t break up into separate states, the sectarian tensions will likely keep it internally divided for the foreseeable future.

18th package is gonna be the one

Europe is headed for some dark times.

Finally Trump is doing something positive for the world.

Also, it’s incredible how the author acknowledges that Ukraine’s situation has steadily deteriorated over the past three years, then proceeds advocating more of the same. The article ignores the fact that the west has already tried applying maximum pressure on Russia, and tries to drum up the whole triumph of the will thing.

it’s just gatekeeping and elitism for the most part

science reporting continues to be garbage

Pretty sure the only people servicing Donnie are the ones running around calling him daddy.

The fact that Russia will win has been the expert consensus throughout the war, and at this point it’s becoming obvious that it’s the only possible outcome.

The question here is what makes art, is it the effort that goes into the process of producing it or the vision the artist has that matters. I’d argue that what matters is in the eye of the beholder. If you look at an image and it evokes an emotion or a feeling within you, then it’s meaningful to you. How the image was produced hardly matter in my opinion.

Petit Jupiter strikes again.

Burial at Sea/Hymn to the Immortal Wind by MONO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEvpqR6B8ns

Given the reactionary position people in tech are increasingly taking with AI, I think we know the answer to that.

The only thing surprising here is that people thought it worked any other way to begin with. Given that it’s a reinforcement mechanism then it makes sense that it would be both spatially and temporally discrete.

Js is indeed painful. I find the right approach is to simply treat it as a compile target. I’ve worked with ClojureScript when I had to do front end work, and I find it’s a huge improvement because it has sane language semantics. You have things like proper equality, comparison by value, immutable data structures, and so on. It’s not perfect because you still have to deal with stuff like source maps to get errors out of minified bundles, and you have to interop when you deal with Js libraries, but it’s a huge improvement overall I’ve found.

Indeed, and another point to consider is that it’s highly unlikely we’d observe a civilization at our level of development. Life on Earth appears around 4.5 billion years ago. Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago. Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago. Writing is invented around 5500 years ago.

Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.

So, after millions of years of life on Earth no technological development happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.

Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise. Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.

So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small. The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.

I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space, we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space. Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be might we consider to be geological scales. Such beings might consider what we view as real time akin to the way we look at continental drift. We’re aware that it’s happening, but it’s of little interest to use on day to day basis. It’s quite possible that advanced civilizations become solipsistic and care little for the outside universe.

For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.

Chances that there is other intelligent life somewhere out there are pretty high, but the chances of us meeting it are slim to none.

Don’t forget overuse of antibiotics in commercial animal farming.