media player that plays almost everything

What doesn’t it play?

Also: monoculture.
Also: monoculture of conifers which can “poison” the surrounding area due to the overload of needles falling to the ground and acidifying it. Especially problematic in vicinity to rivers, brooks or other water bodies as this can lead to “toxic flushes”. Learned that from Mossy Earth: https://www.mossy.earth/projects/riparian-restoration-glassie-farm

Where is the “mah freedum” and “they are taking away our democracy” crowd now?

I wonder how you’re breathing. /j

The position with the vegan cats is basically indefensible.

What do all organisms, including animals, need to properly maintain their metabolism?
Nutrients.
What are nutrients?
A bunch of different chemicals.

Depending on the specific organism, another set of nutrients is required, also varying in amount of course.

All required nutrients for humans at least can be obtained or synthesized from non-animal compounds.

From that simplified perspective, it’s absolutely rational to explore how we could feed animals like cats on a purely vegan diet.
But it’s certainly nothing which should be left to do for the layman alone, as veterinarian care is advisable if harming the animal should be avoided.

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This again?

If we’re speaking of transformer models like ChatGPT, BERT or whatever: They don’t have memory at all.

The closest thing that resembles memory is the accepted length of the input sequence combined with the attention mechanism. (If left unmodified though, this will lead to a quadratic increase in computation time the longer that sequence becomes.) And since the attention weights are a learned property, it is in practise probable that earlier tokens of the input sequence get basically ignored the further they lie “in the past”, as they usually do not contribute much to the current context.

“In the past”: Transformers technically “see” the whole input sequence at once. But they are equipped with positional encoding which incorporates spatial and/or temporal ordering into the input sequence (e.g., position of words in a sentence). That way they can model sequential relationships as those found in natural language (sentences), videos, movement trajectories and other kinds of contextually coherent sequences.

I wonder how it must have been like to be the one who thought one day, “I’ll pick coffee beans out of monkey shit and drink that shit!”

NEVER consume media legally

Given our current economic system and supposing that you can’t change it for now, how would you support a living for media creators (movies, shows, games, art, music, whatever)?

Genuine question. I find myself on the fence about this. Currently, I consume media legally due to several reasons:

• Supporting the creators and thereby incentivising them to produce more of stuff which I enjoyed.
• I can afford it.
• I would like to keep it legal.

Stuff like this (although not affected since I don’t live in a country with that shitty laws), but also the decline of quality products as a result of companies trying to maximize their profit margins by producing a lot of cheap trash, as well as the criminalization of consumers and the fact that the profits are not shared equally among the creators but rather a few get the most while the rest gets some pennies (an issue present in virtually every business), make me really favour the idea of getting a pirate hat.

However:
If everyone would do this, this would lead to the death of the media industry, since no one would be able to pay for the productions and everyone involved anymore.
How would get those productions then?

Really, I think the only way to change this is to impose much better laws on the one hand and switch to a different, better, economic system on the other hand. But I don’t see these things coming soon. Which leaves me with staying legal.

I would like to read your thoughts on that. (And those of everyone else who wants to chime in.)

There is a lot more to it than rise of sea levels on the one hand and some places being too hot.

TL;DR: Climate change causes mass extinctions, ecosystem collapse, extreme weather, and life-threatening heat. Technology alone won’t save us; prevention is crucial. Ignoring climate action risks severe economic damage, comparable to a permanent Great Depression.

(Prepare for a great wall of fuck.)

In short (list is not exhaustive, there’s surely more which I also don’t know of or don’t think of right now):

• Mass extinction of several species, which can’t keep up with the pace of climate change. You might have heard already how insect popluations dramatically declined in the past decades.
• Extinction or even significant deaths and lack of offspring in various species leads to imbalance and collapse of entire eco systems.
• Humans are part of and relying on functioning and healthy eco systems. Without them our very basis of life starts collapsing, leading to numerous human deaths and a lot of misery.
• The occurence of extreme weather conditions as well as catastophes in consequence of climate change increases. The occasional summer storm might become less occasional, which is less of a problem. But so do floodings, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or forest fires increase. And those cost lives and do a lot of damage. We experience weather conditions in places today, which most common people would’ve deemed impossible or extremely unlikely at least. (Not every extreme weather condition is the result of climate change though. But a lot are. An entire field of attribution science has emerged to elaborate which catastrophe has been a direct cause of climate change.)
• Increased temperatures, but especially heatwaves, are already now costing more and more lives and that’s not just some particular places with extremely hot temperatures, but it’s also occuring in entire nations known for more temperate conditions. For example in the EU.
• Being “too hot” is only one side. You can survive 40°C or higher, if the air humidity is low. But due to global warming we can also observe time frames in regions where the air humidity plus temperature reaches such levels that people are exposed to life-threatening health risks already at 31°C. (See also “wet bulb temperature” in general.) Higher humidity makes it harder to cool ourselves by sweating, i.e., evaporative cooling. This is being observed more and more often in south-east asia and the middle east but also started to affect the USA in some regions (Texas, last year in 2023).

You might now understand a bit better why even a few degrees more around the globe incur existential threats.

Human beings are remarkably creative when they need to be. […] if the need arose […] some smart ones […] plan it all, and the rest […] build it

(Sorry for quoting you a bit more freely here.)
Technology can do much, but it is not magic. (I’m an engineering scientist, because I realised at some point that I can’t become a magician.) Entropy is a bitch and current solutions or attempts I know of regarding carbon capture are a nice idea at best, but in practise currently not feasibe and therefore a money-pit at worst. “Building higher and cooler” seems a naive approach given the scale and complexity of human lives and disregards the problems we’re facing due to climate change. I don’t mean that condescendingly, rather to highlight how massively impractical that approach would be on the one hand and no solution for most problems caused by climate change on the other hand.
I absolutely think that it’s necessary to continue research in that area, but until we have developed solutions which can tackle the problems we’ve caused in a significant way (which can still take decades until we’ve got large-scale applicable solutions), I think it’s best to practise prevention. Avoid contributing factors to climate change at allmost all costs.
Don’t put all your money on the “technology will save us”-horse.

By the way:
The people who think that climate and environmental protection are damaging the economy are short-sighted, as climate change is projected to cause a tremendous amount financial damage world-wide in the long-term. One of many many sources on this puts it like this:

when the researchers added in the possibility of a moderate 2 degrees of warming before the end of the century, this led to a decline in future GDP of between 30 and 50 percent by 210 […] In the U.S. alone […] A 50 percent decline in 2100 GDP relative to baseline means a loss of $56 trillion each year, which exceeds the current GDP. Such declines would leave individuals with “a 31 percent drop in purchasing power relative to a world without climate change,” Bilal adds. Such losses are “comparable to living in the 1929 Great Depression, forever,” he says.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/09/harvard-economic-impact-climate-change

Environmental protection is economical protection. They go hand-in-hand.

Uranium is extremely common on Earth.

I wouldn’t be so uncritical about this. Depending on rate of consumption (and data source) the world’s Uranium supplies will last for about 50 to 200 years. (The latter a low demand scenario based on current consumption rates.)

Technological advancements may push these limits. Possibly even into 10.000 to 60.000 years, when filtering active substances from seawater, which is currently quite a timeframe to consider it long-term sustainable even for a limited resource. However, we’re not there yet.

Aren’t climate scientists also measuring atmospheric composition levels around the world to track this, usivg satellites and whatnot? I.e., do they really rely that much on self reported data?

And thereby eliminating a whole bunch of other species than just humans as well.

Although I’m totally in for the occasional misanthropy, I don’t like seeing it as “just a fever” anymore as too many species will go down. Life will probably persevere in the end, but so will probably a bunch of rich shitpieces, who are significantly responsible for this fever in the first place.

Good that you got that diagnose and know what you’re dealing with. I’m probably the wrong one to talk to about this and you probably know the following already, but just to make sure: apparently medication can hugely help. There are different agents so it might take a while to find the right one and its dose. So if you want to, it won’t hurt to talk to a neurologist or psychiatrist about this.

Have you considered to get yourself checked for ADHD?

He doesn’t mean anything.

Progress takes time. Overton window and shit like that. Babysteps. Slow, but steady.

Tramp stamps are out?
Trump stamps are in?

How do the authors know what a dragon speaks like? Were speaking dragons a common thing back then or…?