Have you seen the average griefer or troll in any multiplayer game?

I just want to leave a couple excerpts from they thought they were free by Milton Mayer

It’s a short read, and I highly recommend it if you’ve never had the chance to read it.

…”Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”…

…”Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”…

…””But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.”…

This is how fascism works. It’s an unrelenting deluge of controversies, changes, and bullshit. This deluge is what empowers the fascist. One step leads to the next, but people say it’s all just talk. The people are kept busy with things meant to look like they’re important, while the real important changes are carried out away from prying eyes. And most importantly, it’s a steady march to hell. No one thinks the dictator is actually going to do those things, until he does one. But then it was only the one thing after all.

If trump says he’s going to invade Mexico, I fully expect him to attempt it. But it’s not going to be on day one. No, it’s going to be after a year or 2 of mass deportations and ICE raids. And most people won’t say a damn thing about those. And then if news keeps saying that we tried deporting and it’s not working, well then we have to invade, I’d bet a decent amount of people will support it, probably a vocal group of Latino republicans who “did it right”.

We’re so very close to a dictatorship, all of the groundwork is already laid out, the plan is out for anyone read. I just hope people will actually resist when the changes start coming.

I remember a few career changes ago, I was a back room kid working for an MSP.

One day I get an email to build a computer for the company, cheap as hell. Basically just enough to boot Windows 7.

I was to build it, put it online long enough to get all of the drivers installed, and then set it up in the server room, as physically far away from any network ports as possible. IIRC I was even given an IO shield that physically covered the network port for after it updated.

It was our air-gapped encryption key backup.

I feel like that shitty company was somehow prepared for this better than some of these companies today. In fact, I wonder if that computer is still running somewhere and just saved someone’s ass.

There’s a shocking number of people who will just go off into the woods with their clothes and a phone.

I went hiking with a date once who expected to be fine walking a ten mile trail with no water bottle. Some people have no real world experience of how much water you need when you’re exerting yourself for hours on end.

No phones, no distractions, just a man living in the moment, getting stalked by a large cat just like his ancestors.

Right now nothing is leaking.

The leaks are only present when the fuel system is open or ready to fire

It’s having problems with its RCS system

The thrusters that turn the craft around and allow precise movement aren’t working properly, they barely got the thing to dock with the ISS.

Despite what nasa says publicly, I’m sure there’s a lot of internal debate about if it’s even safe to undock the thing from the station. If it loses orientation control while still close to the ISS, it could easily damage the station and kill people. That’s if some of the damaged thrusters aren’t the ones that allow the craft to go backwards, kind of important if you want to leave the station.

DeltaV is the amount you can change your velocity in space.

To put it another way, if a semi truck company says it’s new truck can haul 20 tons of cargo 500 miles on one tank/charge, and then during the press release with an empty trailer, it has to pull to side of the road at 400 miles driven because it’s out of gas, do you think it can get to 500 miles when it has 20 tons in the back? And the previous 2 press releases had the vehicle spontaneously detonate just after leaving the driveway.

That’s what starship did, it ran out of gas at almost the finish line while completely empty. There’s no way it can get itself + 100 tons to orbit if it can’t even get itself to orbit.

No, that’s a card that’s been standard in Google searches for years. It basically copy pastes an excerpt from an article written by someone else.

The AI card is an entirely new feature that is being rolled out where an LLM attempts to fill the same roll without deliberately copying a third party source.

While completely empty.

An empty vehicle does not have the same performance as one with cargo.

Ignoring this point make you seem either uneducated on space flight or just someone blinded by the tech bro philosophy of “trust me bro it’ll work next time”

It is a significant difference. When it comes to orbit, there is no close enough, either you’re going fast enough or you’re not. They have not shown this thing can do what they say it can.

IFT-3 was completely empty and the tanks were full. Where is the weight of the crew decks, the solar panels and batteries, life support equipment, docking mechanism, food, water, and cargo? These are not trivial things, and they weigh a lot. Proving an empty shell can achieve a suborbital flight and be just barely not be in orbit is not proof of anything useful.

If they had shown there was a significant amount of delta-v left with this empty test article, then that’s one thing. But those tanks had a whisper of fuel left in them. I don’t believe for a second that it would have gotten that close when it was full of over a hundred tons of additional equipment.

Making it to space and making it to orbit are 2 different things.

It has not made orbit.

It has done a suborbital flight.

The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is well, an orbit.

Starship did not achieve the speed needed to maintain an orbit around the earth, if it can do so has not been proven.

Getting something that big off the ground is impressive, but we did it 50 years ago with slide rules and pencils. Getting something off the ground should not be a success for a company that already has an orbital rocket in frequent use. Having 3 vehicles fail to achieve orbit, fail to demonstrate critical features like fuel transfer and engine relight, and fail to re enter the atmosphere while under control, is not a success. I do not buy the SpaceX corporate spin that “everything after clearing the pad is icing on the cake” that’s not good enough for a critical piece of hardware that is supposed to take humans to the moon and land them there.

If ULA can develop a rocket that completes its mission on the first launch, and NASA can do the same, because they take the time to check everything, then why are we giving SpaceX the pass to move fast and break things when it’s clearly not working. They do not have a heavy lift orbital rocket. They have a rocket that can, from all evidence, achieve a suborbital flight while completely empty.

And remember, this is not private money they are burning every time one of these explodes or burns up in the atmosphere. They were given 3 billion American Tax dollars to develop this thing. And now the Government Accountability Office has not even been shown that the Raptor engine is even capable of achieving the mission goals for Artemis. And their test articles are behind schedule and routinely failing in catastrophic ways.

I want to see humans back on the moon in my lifetime. I think we need to go and set up a colony so that we can explore our solar system better and develop technologies for sustaining humanity both off of earth and in the harsh conditions we will face as our climate changes. Anything that threatens the mission of establishing a human presence off of earth needs to be looked at closely and realistically.

Back in the 60’s we knew that the only way to get humans to the moon was to keep the equipment reliable and redundant, anything else was asking for people to die. We seem to have lost that simple insight in recent years, and Starship is the epitome of that hubris. A ridiculously complicated vehicle with a complicated flight plan that has not been shown to work in any capacity. That needs to be pointed out and investigated if for no other reason then it is delaying a major mission.

I didn’t bring up Chinese rooms because it doesn’t matter.

We know how chatGPT works on the inside. It’s not a Chinese room. Attributing intent or understanding is anthropomorphizing a machine.

You can make a basic robot that turns on its wheels when a light sensor detects a certain amount of light. The robot will look like it flees when you shine a light at it. But it does not have any capacity to know what light is or why it should flee light. It will have behavior nearly identical to a cockroach, but have no reason for acting like a cockroach.

A cockroach can adapt its behavior based on its environment, the hypothetical robot can not.

ChatGPT is much like this robot, it has no capacity to adapt in real time or learn.

You’re the one who made this philosophical.

I don’t need to know the details of engine timing, displacement, and mechanical linkages to look at a Honda civic and say “that’s a car, people use them to get from one place to another. They can be expensive to maintain and fuel, but in my country are basically required due to poor urban planning and no public transportation”

ChatGPT doesn’t know any of that about the car. All it “knows” is that when humans talked about cars, they brought up things like wheels, motors or engines, and transporting people. So when it generates its reply, those words are picked because they strongly associate with the word car in its training data.

All ChatGPT is, is really fancy predictive text. You feed it an input and it generates an output that will sound like something a human would write based on the prompt. It has no awareness of the topics it’s talking about. It has no capacity to think or ponder the questions you ask it. It’s a fancy lightbulb, instead of light, it outputs words. You flick the switch, words come out, you walk away, and it just sits there waiting for the next person to flick the switch.

Are you going by “it’s not gay if it’s a three way” rules?

Either all people are of one gender, in which case it’s homosexual. Or there’s some combination of genders. So for someone in a MFF or FFM threesome, there is an element of bisexuality no matter what way you look at it.

Hey, I’ve seen this one

I would make a terrible judge, because I don’t see how this is uncharted territory. Sure, it’s unprecedented, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know what to do.

Our entire government is made up of citizens, that was the whole point in fighting a war to get rid of an unjust monarchy, ruling from afar.

Trump is a citizen, if he broke the law he needs to go to jail. If he breaks the law during the trial, he should receive the same punishment as any other citizen would. Doing anything else just means we have a 2 tier justice system.

The fact that he has fucked up 10 times and is still a free man is ridiculous. All the judge has done is show trump that he can do whatever he wants and face no repercussions. If you did something 10 times, and then someone gets mad the 11th, you wouldn’t say “sorry my bad” you’d say “why are you mad, I do this all the time”

This country is a joke

Vlad took a swig of his “Coffee” at his station. His commander had said something about “make sure you use the drill launch codes during the test”

Vlad pondered the sticky note that had been on his work station since he got there. 2 lines of numbers written haphazardly on aging yellow paper loomed before him. Was it the top one that was real, or the bottom. Surely the drill code would be used more and should be on top. But the real code is more important, so it should be on top.

His radio chirped, and the angry voice of his commander squealed out. It was time.

He took a coin from his pocket and flipped it, tails, bottom code it is. He entered the numbers and hit the worn red button on his console.

As he heard the rumble of rocket engines from deep in the bunker, he knew his luck was as rotten as ever. He swigged his coffee one last time.

All this effort to identify a stealth aircraft first developed in 1996

I don’t know which is more impressive, the tech the US military had 28 years ago, or the amount of engineering time china had spent on spotting a jet that has seen limited use and is being replaced by an even newer stealth jet.