baltakatei

Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.

After reading The Age of Em (2016) by Robin Hanson, I wish there were stories about races that went the other way, lifespan-wise: extremely small people who lived only 1 year, even smaller people who lived only 1 month, some very extremely small but very powerful ones that lived only a day, etc. The idea is that artificial people (emulated people, or Ems) could have subjectively similar characteristics and experiences to the larger physical entities (e.g. humans, but perhaps even dwarves, elves, and etc., since theyʼre just emulated minds), but their artificial emulated substrate allows their minds to develop and age orders of magnitude faster; they also could solve certain problems orders of magnitude faster but practical limitations on delays between thought and physical interactions (your mind would waste away if you had to wait a whole subjective hour between each physical step during a walk with a standard 1.5 meter body) require their bodies to be very small.

To ems that are smaller and faster, sunlight seems dimmer and shows more noticeable diffraction patterns. Magnets, waveguides, and electrostatic motors are less useful. Surface tension makes it harder to escape from water. Friction is more often an obstacle, lubrication is harder to achieve, and random thermal disruptions to the speed of objects become more noticeable. It becomes easier to dissipate excess body heat, but harder to insulate against nearby heat or cold (Haldane 1926; Drexler 1992).

A crude calculation using a simple conservative nano-computer design suggests that a matching faster-em brain might plausibly fit inside an android body 256 times smaller and faster than an ordinary human body (Hanson 1995).

Compared with ordinary humans, to a fast em with a small body the Earth seems much larger, and takes much longer to travel around. To a kilo-em, for example, the Earth’s surface area seems a million times larger, a subway ride that takes 15 minutes in real time takes 10 subjective days, an 8-hour plane ride takes a subjective year, and a 1-month flight to Mars takes a subjective century. Sending a radio signal to the planet Saturn and back takes a subjective 4 months. Even super-sonic missiles seem slow. However, over modest distances lasers and directed energy weapons continue to seem very fast to a kilo-em.

Call them speedlings, or some variant of sprite, but I think its an interesting world-building concept.

Or authors could preëmptively declare their works to be in the public domain upon their death.

I wish Creative Commons had a license like that. Something like CC PDD (Public-Domain-on-Death) which would activate upon the creator’s death, allowing them and publishers to freely monetize their work while they’re alive, but which would release the work into the public domain immediately after.

It might even incentivize music and book publishers to get their artists health insurance. 😃

deleted by creator

“That all life beyond this planet never existed, no matter how irrationally improbable that may be.”

don’t let them slowly re-consolidate in the following 20 years

I too remember how AT&T was broken up only for most of its Baby Bells to remerge back into Ma Bell.

To prevent this for future breakups, I say the content and services sold by big tech should be made competitively compatible and interoperable via nullification of DRM laws; people buy music and movies and cloud storage; let them legally move their purchases to any competitor and big tech companies will break up naturally as local competitors emerge from people who dislike big tech for their own reasons. Monopolies cannot be trusted to lower prices for content and services. Legally nullifying DRM is like the FCC telling customers in 1968 that it was finally okay to ignore the “Bell equipment only” legal warning that had kept them locked into leasing their telephone sets for usurious amounts from AT&T for decades. A few years later, in 1982, AT&T was broken up. AT&T is almost a total monopoly again, but phones remain interoperable.

Can’t wait for the day when Uncle Sam to turns brown.

I used to think “chaos” had the same “ch” as “church” when I was a kid.

The chao of Sonic Adventure (1998)?

The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.

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Just, buy a new iPhone and Mac every two years.

Termux, rsync and SSH.

Worked okay until I got overzealous and killed my battery from leaving Termux on for convenience.

The USB Type-C is useful for sharing files offline between smartphones while the USB Type-A is useful when you want to backup files to a PC at some point.

Expected behavior: The file is not composed of null bytes.

Actual behavior; The file is composed entirely of null bytes.

If he doesnʼt die from COVID.

Synology is a NAS Iʼd recommend. However, after you become more familiar with the command line and if you are building your own Debian machine with a motherboard that supports many hard drives, I would recommend something like this procedure; this applies especially if you are the only one who will be accessing the files and are just wanting a way to combine the storage capacities of multiple hard drives.

I landed at Domodedovo in Moscow in 2013. Ready to see this incredible new place I’ve never experienced before, I walked out into the main arrivals area, and right there was a Cinnabon.

Reminds me of the penultimate verse of the Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris (2010) by Pig With The Face Of A Boy.

And now the wall is down, the Marxists frown
There’s foreign shops all over town
When in Red Square, well don’t despair
There’s Levi’s and McDonald’s there
The US gave us crystal meth
And Yeltsin drank himself to death
But now that Putin’s put the boot in,
Who’ll get in our way?

Yours!

Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.

Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).

Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.

See List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet for the graveyard list. Sorting by Price helps. Some other notable companies that Google acquired rather than compete with:

• Nest Labs (home automation)
• DropCam (home automation)
• DoubleClick (advertisement)
• FitBit (wearables)
• Waze (GPS navigation)
• Skybox Imaging (satellite mapping)
• Like.com (shopping)
• Meebo (social network)
• GrandCentral (VOIP)
• Picasa (photographry)
• Tenor (GIF search)
• PhotoMath (LLM; became Bard)