DennisP

28 ms·

511.
by DennisP 2y ago
Expansion makes us less vulnerable to a dark forest scenario. As long as we're on one planet, a single relativistic missile can take us out.
512.
by DennisP 2y ago
You could just as well say that killing someone is not bad, because after you kill them they will not experience any lack of positive experience.
513.
by DennisP 2y ago
Nor can they make a judgement about whether the good outweighs the bad. So that's up to us. I'm saying it makes no sense to make that decision solely based on the bad while ignoring all that's good; if you do, then of course
514.
by DennisP 2y ago
But that wasn't the statement. The statement was that "absent pleasures are not bad." Whether something is good or bad is a value judgement, just like "procreation is bad" (or good). I countered with another value j
515.
by DennisP 2y ago
But it sounds like you might be filling your emails with actual facts, rather than the sort of fluff that an LLM could do for you.
516.
by DennisP 2y ago
And if that's not an option, another solution is to use AI to summarize those long emails. In the end both parties will be writing and reading terse little emails, with the verbose text in the middle as the world's most ridiculous
517.
by DennisP 2y ago
> 3. Data records, once written, are never updated or deleted? This is not a requirement for any blockchain with smart contracts.
518.
by DennisP 2y ago
If reasoning is based on verifiable facts and logic, sure. But in this case, the starting point for his reasoning appears to be our own intuitions and feelings: "The reason why we do not lament our failure to bring somebody into existe
519.
by DennisP 2y ago
Do you think fish should not have expanded to dry land? Even that analogy understates things because as far as we know, the rest of the known universe is lifeless rock. Personally I'll admit to being a chauvinist who favors life over n
520.
by DennisP 2y ago
It used to be a "long form" every ten years, now it's the ACS every year.[1] I didn't realize until now that they'd continued the long form in another, um, form. Technically you're required to respond, with a f
521.
by DennisP 2y ago
US rural people tend to trust the government less, so I could definitely see them getting undercounted. The census should really have an option for refusers that collects an absolute minimum of information. The Constitution only asks that p
522.
by DennisP 2y ago
Indeed, when Finland actually joined NATO, Russia did nothing at all, despite Finland having a longer border with Russia than Ukraine has.
523.
by DennisP 2y ago
Fortunately, unlike the US, Russia does not give a single person the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Putin would need one of those other psychopaths to go along with him. https://www.ucs.org/resources/whose-finger-
524.
by DennisP 2y ago
The average Americans went to war and defeated the Nazis.
525.
by DennisP 2y ago
Well, yeah, but they also started a giant war of conquest and killed nine million civilians in gas chambers, so I'm still gonna say they were on the evil side even if they used similar narratives themselves. There's a point where
526.
by DennisP 2y ago
Aside from the lack of convenient ring I'd say that sometimes it's quite a useful framing. To avoid derailing into politics I'll use Nazi Germany as another example.
527.
by DennisP 2y ago
Also, Hogfather is another one. The Hogfather is a god, essentially Discworld's Santa Claus, and the whole story is about a plot to kill him off.
528.
by DennisP 2y ago
Exactly. Here for example, the author's point seems to just be "don't be Sauron." > What I have a problem with is people trying to live forever as part of a Chosen One script which involves them trying to carve up all
529.
by DennisP 2y ago
As a rule, people are not all that wise. Various prominent AI researchers have warned that a superintelligence that has both the desire and the means to kill us all is a likely outcome of AI development. This includes two of the three who s
530.
by DennisP 2y ago
They are not overwhelming the Ukrainian side. They are making very slow, grinding advances, and taking massive casualties in the process. Between five and ten times as many as the Ukrainian casualties, because this has turned into a war tha
531.
by DennisP 2y ago
This is beside the point but they actually might. Take out the electric grid, and most other stuff stops working, including gas pumps and refineries.
532.
by DennisP 2y ago
That's the view Bitcoin took, after they gave up on the kind of scaling they'd need to be a practical payment system. Ethereum is working hard on scaling beyond 100K tx/sec: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general&#x
533.
by DennisP 2y ago
What I mean is that attackers from either side will take a lot more casualties than defenders.
534.
by DennisP 2y ago
Ukraine isn't likely to recover much territory. But Russia will have a hard time taking more territory. At this point the war favors the defenders in either direction. Both sides are dug in and attackers get hammered by drones.
535.
by DennisP 2y ago
And that will cost Russia a great deal. This has turned into a war that heavily favors defenders. Both sides are dug in, with a wide no-mans-land between the front lines, where anyone who enters is likely to get killed by a drone.
536.
by DennisP 2y ago
I don't think the West ever threatened a nuclear response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia, however, repeatedly threatened a nuclear response to the West's military assistance to Ukraine. Those were the bluffs that got
537.
by DennisP 2y ago
It's worse than you think. Here's a really interesting article on what it would take to get Epstein drive performance: https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr... This thing would pro
538.
by DennisP 2y ago
I don't know if this is what GP was talking about but Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics has wave functions moving both forward and backward in time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans
539.
by DennisP 2y ago
It's so weird how so many people on HN think fusion is magic technology at the level of antigravity.
540.
by DennisP 2y ago
To extract thermal energy you need a temperature difference. The way to do it for ocean thermal is with OTEC, which pumps cold water from deep down up to a large heat exchanger at the surface. It's usable for stationary power but I don

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