I work somewhere that makes measuring/inspection/imaging sort of equipment that has a rather wide variety of uses, so I get somewhat mixed feelings when it comes to pride. Sometimes it’ll get announced that NASA is buying our stuff to inspect their space probe for defects and I’ll be proud of it, and other times it’ll be like a coal mine ordering it and I’ll feel disappointment. On the whole I think its generally a net positive, but it’s not something truly crucial for society and more a thing that makes a whole lot of different stuff slightly easier or more efficient.

Im beginning to think that, as annoying for users and difficult to build a userbase for as it may be, the answer might ultimately have to be for future social sites to charge people for use in some way, be it to create accounts or as a subscription or just for the ability to post/comment/vote or whatever. If it’s no longer going to be feasible to keep bots out, and there’s a financial gain for their use, then they’re going to get used, so at that point it has to be somehow more expensive to run a bot than that bot can be expected to bring in as a result of it’s contribution to an advertising or manipulation campaign, to deter them. On the bright side, I guess it might lead to a shift away from advertising everywhere. Either you charge people and therefore dont need ads, or you dont, and have most of your ads being “seen” by bots, which advertisers probably don’t want to spend money to reach anyway.

Hadn’t considered that you can just glue fabric together, I suppose that might be something to try if I start feeling crafty at some point. As for matching the hat material, it’s just what I’m picturing in my head, not convincing ears but just some ear shaped stylized part of the hat, like from that same grey zigzag patterned material seen here for example, whatever that’s called.

I don’t mean like to give the illusion of being real ears, just as a stylistic element. And for whatever reason, Id like ones that look like they fit as part of the hat, like maybe that same grey patterned material but with some pink triangles in the front to suggest the inner part without going too detailed

Would take some sewing knowledge I’d figure, especially to make it structurally work so that they stand up, and finding ears the same material as the hat so that they look like they fit might be difficult

I dont wear hats generally, but I got it into my head a few months ago that a cool hat to wear, for my weirdo taste in fashion, would be that style of cap, but with cat/animal ears integrated into it. Tried looking for one because I figured with the internet being what it is it surely must be out there, but no, couldn’t find it. Only could find a different style of cap done up that way that I don’t think looks nearly as nice as the style here.

I believe that space exploration and development is of such high potential future utility as to become a moral imperative, but I suspect that view will be unpopular given that in recent decades some of the most infamous tech billionaires have stuck their hands and toxic branding in that area.

Ive seen this said a lot here lately, but like, cloud computing still requires computer hardware, so shouldnt an increase in hardware prices make that more expensive as well?

I mean, they did say “most people didnt own a car” rather than “road vehicles don’t exist”. That removes the more serious of those concerns I think, because the existence of delivery vehicles, freight trucks, moving vans, or even vehicle rental services for the occasional road trip doesn’t depend on a majority of people owning a car personally.

There are apparently people out there that take “Roko’s basilisk” and such seriously, they might come close to that i guess.

They’re expensive for the same kind of reasons that getting a tailor to custom make a normal suit from scratch would be expensive. Takes a lot of labor and only a relatively small pool of people have the relevant skills, plus some of the material costs add up.

I mean, while that sounds like it makes things more expensive, I’m not entirely sure that it does, given that:

It doesn’t really make sense to run ads unless the average person watching the ad will ultimately buy enough that they wouldn’t otherwise from the company the ad is for that the extra profit exceeds the ad cost, thus still making watching ads have a cost that just isnt visible

Or, ads might be run to simply get people to switch what product in a category they buy without increasing the amount, in which case, they become a required cost to stay competitive, and because suppliers must now all pay that extra cost, the cost to buy products in that category must be increased, again making the ads cost the viewer in a non-visible way

Or, we could be seeing things like political ads that dont ask one to buy things, just support a politician or policy. However even here, the policies most likely to get ad spending are those most beneficial to people that already have money (since they’re the ones that can most easily afford to run ads) and in general, benefiting those people means giving them a bigger share of the economies wealth, which means the average person has a smaller share when the ads are effective, again costing the viewer in an roundabout way.

If people are going to end up paying for the use of these things in some way anyway, doing it directly seems more honest to me.

When I was a kid: basic printer paper. Drawing is probably part of the intended usecase for a sheet of paper, but I’d also do a bunch of origami and use it to try to make models of airplanes

Winter ending and it not being so cold out so I can enjoy going into the city again.

Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn’t that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially “grandfathered in”, but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?

It does say “as a baseline” so presumably its just there for comparison’s sake

Cucumbers? I tend to cut extra ones into sticks, and dip the sticks in hummus as a side.

It’s already possible in a “does it violate the laws of physics or not” sense, the real question is, will anyone that has the requisite resources to do it actually want to.

It would take such an incredibly long time (as in, millions of years or longer for the very closest galaxies) that anyone and any organization sending out such an expedition isn’t going to get any meaningful return on their investment, so it would only bring a benefit to whoever was on the “ship” when it arrived. As such, to even have a motive for doing this, you either need a society that does things for the benefit of extremely distant descends, or which is extremely long lived and patient.

As to how you would actually do it, my guess (obviously though, the guess of someone from a society that lacks the technology to do a thing is likely to be wrong about how it later is done) would be that one would use a hypothetical type of structure called a stellar engine These are similar to the “dyson spheres” that science fiction sometimes likes to talk about (usually inaccurately to the actual concept but still), except that they would use the energy emitted by a star, or its mass, to do some particular task, like propel the star in a given direction.

Doing this, your “ship” is actually an entire solar system. Getting that up to speed could take millions of years even for the most efficient designs, and obviously requires an economy capable of building stuff at incredible scales, and having an entire star spare to use for the trip. However, you’re going to be taking that kind of time anyway, and so you’re probably going to need an entire self contained civilization to have a hope of keeping things running that long, and literal worlds worth of raw materials. There’s not much else that even theoretically has enough fuel to move all that to notable fractions of lightspeed. Since there’s little point to going to live in another galaxy if there are still unclaimed places to go within your own, a whole star system is probably a relatively small expense for the implied size of civilization that would even want to try to sebd such an expedition. Galaxies contain a huge number of them after all.

While this is all obviously far beyond us now, both in technology and sheer economic scale, there’s nothing physically impossible about it, and at least some logical motive (the future resources of a galaxy for one’s descendants, if alien life is rare enough for uninhabited galaxies to exist). Given that and just how huge the universe is, I’d actually be willing to bet that somewhere there is someone or something doing this, and that if humans last long enough and keep advancing our technology and infrastructure all the while, some descendant of our species might, though they’d probably seem pretty alien to us by the time it took to reach that point.

Iguanas are plenty interesting to me, though I imagine a tegu probably is more sociable. My personal experience with lizards has been with geckos, but I hear that tegus tend to be very friendly, for a lizard of their size.

I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.