The ISS is primarily designed to research the effects of microgravity and other space environment issues. Hard to study zero g manufacturing when your station has artificial gravity.

Diesel still catches fire. It’s not as bad as gasoline, but it’s still flammable.

I remember reading this when it came out. It’s truly a gem. My favorite is probably the studio apartment with a pool in it.

You can still buy those expensive appliances. The brands exist. Just be prepared to pay the prices your grandparents paid.

Eh. It made more sense hundreds of years ago for people to build houses that lasted for centuries. That kind of construction makes sense in periods of slow technological and social change.

But think of how differently people live now vs just a hundred years ago. Imagine buying a house without running water, electric wiring, or insulation. Sure, old homes can be renovated to have these. But that requires tearing the thing down to the bare stone or wood walls and starting from scratch. You have to gut the entire building. The only thing that remains is the shell, a shell which represents only 20% of the cost of the building, if that. Most of the cost of a building is not in the structure itself, yet that’s the only part that gets saved in a complete gutting and renovation.

If you build a house today that lasts centuries, the only way that house will still be occupied 300 years from now is if it’s been gutted down to the studs multiple times over the generations. And at that point, why build an ultra-durable house in the first place? Why not build something lighter that requires fewer resources up front, and can simply be torn down and recycled once it’s become obsolete?

Here’s a blacksmith starting their fire with a hammer.

That’s why they have radiators.

I approve of this.

Well, you see, the gravity is very strong in Denmark. This causes a high amount of time dilation. This causes clocks in Denmark to move substantially slower than those in the rest of the world. He’s experienced 20 years. She’s only experienced about 2.

Are you a Boeing executive, by any chance?

No sea lioning.

FUUUUCK.

I can feel this one.

Yeah, and I think that anyone knowledgeable enough to model nuclear winter accurately would refuse to participate in that kind of military planning. If you go to a climate researcher, put a gun to their head and said, “help us calculate just the amount of nuked cities needed to cancel out the temperature increases of climate change or we’ll shoot you,” I think most would just say, “fine. Do it.”

Mater tua.

ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant

Intrusive thought of the day:

Simulations suggest that evenly a relatively modest India/Pakistan exchange (modest by the standards of a full nuclear exchange between Russia and the US, you’re still talking millions dead) would produce enough dust and soot into the air to seriously affect the climate of the planet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Recent_modeling

But that also implies nuclear winter exists on a scale. Even one H-bomb will have some affect. In principle, it would be possible to determine the precise level of nuclear winter required to combat global warming. Then, if the target country doesn’t have nukes of their own to retaliate with, a nuclear power could drop just enough nukes to cause just enough nuclear winter to cancel out global warming. As long as they’re the only one releasing any nukes, they could precisely control the scale of the resulting nuclear winter effect. Literally designing an act of mass genocide as a means of combating climate change.

:/

You do understand that evil people can do multiple evil things for multiple independent evil reasons, don’t you? This “everything is a distraction from Epstein” is cringe.

My husband and I don’t have a TV in our bedroom. We’ll go to bed at different times, and a TV going is just too much light and noise. If one of us wants to fall asleep to a TV show, there’s a very comfortable couch in the living room.

I think it might be different if we had kids. In that case, having a TV in the bedroom can be useful, in case you want to watch something kids aren’t old enough for yet. But it’s just the two of us, so we keep a TV out of the bedroom. The bedroom is for sleeping and other activities.

I approve of this.

Seriously. What happens if it hallucinates and decides that I said I was planning to harm myself or others? Could I end up being committed because an LLM thought I said something I didn’t?

Or more realistic, how does this affect something like body language? When taking notes, a therapist does more than just write down the words you say. They also take note on any body language or behavior that might be relevant to your case. If AI is replacing all the note taking, then this leaves two possibilities. One possibility is the therapist simply won’t ever have records of nonverbal communication. The second is even worse - you try to get an AI to create this record by feeding it a video of the session. Now you have even more subjectivity brought in.