i disagree strongly about your housekeeper. an employee can be upgraded to more important jobs if they are responsible and have good work ethic. your house keeper could be easily retrained to work in a parts fabrication facility. cutting, welding, and grinding robots are generally not self cleaning. surely if she can clean your bathroom she could adapt to clean those?

i live near a gigantic paper goods production facility

the whole move towards banning plastic containers has increased their output 10 fold, they used to just churn out some paper, now plastic straws are illegal so they make millions of straws etc

they must run several heavy duty vehicles similar to a front end loader

their job is to constantly rotate their massive pile of exposed wood chips and they do so 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since the size of the pile has also increased exponentially

one day they received a mandate to put very high decibel beepers on their equipment that operate when in reverse

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

oh your house has a humming noise? cry me a river

dos, a mediocre (even for its time) old operating system that was cheaply made, well marketed, built with no vision towards the natural progression of computer hardware, helped bump start the personal computer revolution. used by home users that were unable to acquire better equipment. was almost immediately surpassed and obsoleted. nobody ever looks and says 'we should do it this way, because that's how dos did it and it worked great' (this something you could say about literally any operating system except dos).

einstein's contributions to physics continue to amaze and challenge our perceptions of reality to this day, and are referenced in every damn text book regarding physics ever written. they have become a solid benchmark both what we should know and for what we do not know, and surpassing those theories on the quantum level, which is still not done the better part of a century later, is a holy grail that when we find it will completely transform our society.

mhmm

another crazy thing is i just bought my first NVME drive (i know, i am old) and the tiny thing has like 2 major functional chips on it, and it holds 1TB.

that means we already have the storage density to fit 16tb of storage (way way way more than an entire household should ever need) in *quadruple* redundancy and around 100 GPS of read speed in a device the size of a deck of cards

the progression in speed and capacity of processors and memory both volatile and non-volatile in all its forms, including mechanical hole filled paper things, transducers in tubes of mercury, magnetic tapes of all sizes and speeds, both massive and tiny spinning magnetic disks, lasers burning and reading things onto various spinning things of various sizes and speeds, and varieties of transistors baked onto things of incredibly small scale, often dominates my thoughts and brings me straight up awe.

fuck cds. think of this -- we've gone from around 80 byte punch cards at around 6,000 bps read only to over 1,000,000,000,000 byte NVME and 24,000,000,000 bps writeable in around 50 years

ive never seen the movie, not much of a movie guy

possibly dumb thought from someone who isn't involved in microbiology, space flight, or nuclear science

if this thing uses an RTG....

lets say it lands and, although unlikely, finds smoking gun evidence of bacteria or something else "alive"

is it possible to shield the rtg enough to prevent radiation contamination of this environment?

i thought rtgs were kinda leaky devices and it would suck if we killed or mutated or poisoned the first alien life that the human race ever encountered

i live in BC.

i know this is anecdotal evidence but i am my own god damn self driving autopilot.

my subconscious mind is capable of operating a vehicle

i have been practically unconscious, in a state near sleep, and arrived at my destination a great many times

furthermore i have driven hundreds of times so drunk and high i have the conscious mental capacity of a ferret (not proud of that) and arrived safely at my destination

the decisions i make while even driving subconsciously are more empathetic and reasonable than any damn binary algorithm. high speed towards a boulder, a bird, a rat, a child? driving is often intertwined with some very involved morality.

i love computers and control systems, but my personal rule is to never place my fragile body in a vessel controlled by anything but a biological intelligence.

when we have proven that artificial consciousness both exists and is equivalent or greater than human consciousness, i would gladly replace my steering wheel.

my main laptop has 8gb of ram. old thinkpad
i use google chrome as my browser
i develop bloated qt software with qts bloated IDE
i work with audio editing and processing
i use photoshop and other pro software almost daily
never had an issue with ram. i could probably live with 4gb
only difference i can think of is when im done with a browser tab i close the fucking thing, and when im done browsing i close the browser

I am not a vegetarian

I am god damn red blooded red necked murderous carnivore

But I have passionate love and connection with all animals. I look into their eyes and feel what they feel

I eat dead animals and fish and other organisms and feel intense pleasure when i get a delicious one, from game steaks to fine steak tartare to sushi

I feel a guilt but my carnivore nature prevails because hunger and delicious

If you feed me eel or cow or pig and it came from a lab and it gives my taste buds that feeling, for a similar price, you have my loyalty and my money, and I will never eat a real animal

Same goes for beef, pork, chicken, deer, salmon, tuna, etc.

Make it happen and solve my carnivore conflicts

don't be so sure

just because there are lots of something (solar systems and planets) and something is true of one of them doesn't mean, although i agree it's unlikely, that it's not a unique scenario.

a 'very rare earth' hypothesis is still a very distinct possibility until we find that smoking gun - a living thing outside of our biosphere, and hopefully one which we can judge as very unlikely to have resulted from local panspermia.

look at the other planets here and how drastically different they are, and how even though they're all very ancient, they have tidal forces, resources, incredible energy, water, etc... how we are the only one where life has truly bloomed.

my 'belief' says there is no other life, even simple, in this system.

assuming that is true, we are one in what, 150 moons and planets or something like that, right?

what are the odds so far based on evidence, 0.6% ? (check my math, it's not my specialty)

now lets say we find another solar system of a similar size, explore it, and there's no life.

around 0.3% ?

don't be so sure about anything until we have a bit of data, right now the data actually points towards the unlikely

oh, it's even crazier than that!!

though standard medical insurance isn't a thing in Canada, we're still allowed to get "extended insurance" for medicine, dental, etc

due to my workplace benefits at my totally normal blue collar job, all my medicine is nearly free!

when i get a 4 month supply of antidepressants, blood pressure medication, or antibiotics, i pay like $7.00, pretty much a deductible. i think of it as a tip.

those same types of medications cost my USA friends thousands!

oh, but when i need to see a doctor to alter my prescription, since i am not allocated a family doctor (wait list is hundreds of people), i must arrive at 3pm at the only "walk in" clinic in town that opens at 5pm, to see a doctor at 6-7pm, at a total cost of 3-4 hours of my life, and I have to sit in a line of coughing people and maybe become a different kind of sick

the alternative is hospital emergency room triage, available 24/7, but at a cost of 4 to 24 hours of my life for even severe injuries, like when i stabbed myself accidently with a knife covered in raw shellfish during an oyster shucking accident. that was a 12 hour visit bleeding on the floor.

the doctor i saw in that case was flown in from 3 provinces over and he was a total trainee

canada -- both the best and worse place to live in north americal.

people will give control to any machine if it makes their lives easier. we are absolutely fucking fucked from this point forward. terminator. dune. omens. fuck. tinfoil hat has entered the chat.

i write tuning software for engines.
someone uses my log analyzer and without paying attention, adjusts their throttle table so as soon as you touch the throttle its 100% and then kills a kid
my fault?
hows that different from Google maps in this case?
makes me not want to make software anymore

50%.... that seems about right. because a few times i have tried chatgpt for fun to generate some code. around half the time the code it spit out had an issue.

for example i have asked it to generate c++ functions for bilinear interpolation. it used array indexing with an off-by-one indexing error (quite a human mistake). i also asked it to generate some 68HC11 assembly code that reprogrammed the on-chip EEPROM while checking the results. both of them were great attempts, similar to the attempts i would make (since i am not an excellent coder, just an okay one)

when i tested the code and determined it was wrong, i then found the bug myself for reference, then simply said 'this code contains a bug. do you know what it is?'

most of the time it apologized and corrected the bug. this is pretty much what a human would do when asked to write code without having facilities to actually run and test it. in fact when i write code, it's usually broken on the first run and i have to fix something.

when it was successful in fixing it i ask it to explain what the bug was and determine how it found it.

most of the time the answer it gives to that question is coherent and accurate-ish

THIS is what i find impressive (and actually intelligent) about chatgpt.