fionwe1987

They need some attention dammit. If craziest regime of the month awards keep going to Russia, Israel, Hamas and Iran, it's not good PR.

I watched both episodes. Lots of farewells and partings being foreshadowed, which makes sense, I guess. Doesn't exactly look like this is gonna be a "galaxy-ending" McGuffin. But it might give the Federation a reason to reclaim its strength and expand, if all humanoid species came from the same source. Why they chose to portray this as a threat is beyond me. Like, even if you found the Progenitor's tech, its not like it necessarily needs to have a backdoor that can wipe out all humanoid life. Especially since its unlikely the Progenitors could have foreseen all the ways humanoid life would evolve, let alone the political interactions between those life forms.

Hopefully, a few miles away. Rats are good at returning to alien life forms they have had previous contact with, unless the challenge of traversing the spacetime continuum is too great, and they head to other stars.

This seems the appropriate thread to post this (link should work for 30 days): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/science/space/astronomy-universe-dark-energy.html?ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.iE0.jIVT.KPZKrhwQghDB&smid=url-share Gives a good sense of the scope of the Universe, at the very least. And the video on top is some of the best resolution we can currently achieve, pointed at one tiny fraction of the view of the Universe from Earth. Even plant sized constructs made by an alien species will not show up. And as the article points out, however variably, the Universe is expanding. So far, our galaxy is cohesive, but this restrains us to any attempts at discerning life to just our dinky little, not-so-large galaxy. Entire multi-stellar species could have all-out wars in galaxies far, far away, and we wouldn't know it. This is wonderful for science fiction, because here you have a giant canvas on which you can paint pretty much anything. But when it comes to actual detection of life, even our own Galaxy is frustratingly hard to catalog. For one, the Galactic center is so bright that a ton of stuff on the other side just isn't imageable. And as noted, the Milky Way is statistically nothing special, Universe-wise, but from our own perspective, it might as well be the universe (and for a long time, that's what we thought, in truth).

We don't know? Right now, its in a bit of open space where random collisions are unlikely, and there's no nearby gravity well to pull it in. Over a million years, I don't think anyone has attempted to chart its possible trajectory, but if you want to bet it will survive, have at at. Lets assume we launch a hundred thousand Voyager type craft all around us. They still won't be detectable very far out from us. Voyager 1's current speed is 38210 mph. That's 917040 miles a day, 334,719,600 miles a year. So over a million years, it will go out 3.347196e+14 miles. Seems mighty impressive. But that's a grand total of 57 light years from Earth. That is if it holds its speed steady, but it is actually slowing down. And in those best case 57 light years distance, we're assuming no debris, no gravity well that pulls it away, no flares or ionized gases to harm it. And still, a spacecraft like this would, in a million years, have moved through just 0.05% of the Milky Way's diameter. Let's say we improve on these craft and send a 100,000 out... we'd still be covering a tiny fraction of a percent of the diameter of just our galaxy in a million years, radiating out from our planet, and hoping and assuming nothing destrooys most of them, and still, something just a 100 light years away could be finding oil and thinking about going into space, and we'd never fucking know about it. And still, they wouldn't move very far from where we are. Nor will they be large enough for detection from much farther away. You seem very underappreciative of the scale of just our galaxy, let alone the universe. Fill up a galaxy? Please. The galaxy isn't the size of your back yard. Please go look up some actual numbers before making these kinds of statements. You're going to continue to remain surprised for your life, then. Which, however long it lasts, is a fraction of a rounding error at the spatiotemporal scales the universe operates in. See what above? You addressed nothing about the distances in any coherent way above. Unless they're a couple of stars over and happen to reach their technological peaks in rough sync with us, we never will see others on our own planet. And where would this civilization need to be located for that statement to be true? God no. Please, get your damn facts straight before making such grandiose claims. That is not what anyone here is claiming. However exploratory a species gets, spacetime is vast enough to make contact with another exploratory species hard, unless something like faster than light travel is actually possible. That is all I'm saying. With such precise scientific statements, no wonder you're making so much sense. We have barely the resolution to tell if the spectral shifts we see from planetary shadows in our own backyard of the galaxy indicate certain gasses whose presence in the atmosphere might indicate life. Our current resolution has entire planets fill a few pixels of our sensors. So dinky little structures like Voyager will not be detected, at all, unless they're coming very close to the Solar System. But we can barely see planets, so... We cannot. We don't even know for certain humans can endure a flight to Mars. I think you've swalloed a whole lot of science fiction and forgotten the fiction part of those stories? Sure, but even IF another species figured it out, they'd not be able to "seed the galaxy" unless they can break the speed of light. Because the galaxy is vast, and you seem to think it is tiny.

Are we even allowed to discuss this topic? On the assumption that we are... I agree, the model has shit training data, and very little guarantee that the right features have been selected for training, or that the model is correctly getting updated based on results, with the "fog of war" preventing a lot of useful inputs from being gathered. This is very much a use of "AI" where it serves more as an excuse to allow humans to do what they want, and point their finger at a model that can be a convenient scapegoat.

Define "a whole lot longer". In cosmological timescales, they do not. Nor are they detectable by us yet, beyond a fairly small radius surrounding Earth. For ever while they continue to exist, right? Even their creations that outlast them won't last for "ever". If the Romans were a civilization 3000 light years away, we wouldn't know they existed. Its not time alone, it is time coupled with the distance. There's nothing wrong with this "way of thinking". Its basic reality. We do not have the resolution to detect "anything" beyond "blurry spheroid that dims the light of a star, with the following spectral changes to the light of the star when this happens" for an overwhelming majority of planets outside our solar system. So how exactly are we supposed to detect these things? I'm certain too, that we're not unique, though its more of a faith, bolstered by the fact of the spatiotemporal scope of the Universe. I'm just not certain we'll necessarily detect this life. Sparseness of life is a definite possibility. And even if the universe is teeming with life, we don't really have much ability to detect it currently. And we don't have any guarantees we'll be around long enough to do a high resolution search of the entire Universe, or that when/if we get to it, we'll find life that is current. The worst thing is, the further out life is, the longer the gap between our detection of it and its existence. And if that existence is relatively brief, like 50-100,000 years, the further away it is, the less likely any signals of its existence will reach us with sufficient coherence to offer proof. SciFi gets around all this with FTL/Wormholes/jumpgates. But the stark reality is, if the speed of light is indeed the absolute we currently think it is, the Universe evolves in a way that makes it very hard for life from two different biospheres to interact. Its fucking diabolical. The good thing is, I doubt we're even the best Earth can offer. Long after we fuck up, other species may come that do better. Or maybe, just maybe, we get better someday too.

I agree with JGP. More space may mean more chance of intelligent life evolving, but contact requires two intelligent species evolving to the point of sending out signals that will reach each other at the same time. That means they need to be close enough to each other that they develop these technologies and remain extant for enough time that the limitation of the speed of light is overcome enough to allow signals from one to reach the other. Space is so vast that we cannot guarantee the lack of life in our own neighborhood of the Milky Way, and the rate at which we’re going, we may not be around long enough disseminating/receiving signals for anything more than a 100-200 light years away to make contact. As for actual physical contact, barring faster than light travel, it’s hard to imagine enough members of any species being able to traverse interstellar space in large enough numbers for that to happen. Maybe cryostasis or genetic modification allow us to overcome how hostile space is to life, but the evidence for that is currently very thin, and even granting these seeming impossibilities, Earth isn’t been giving signals to make it an attractive spot to visit for long enough. It’s very possible our locality hosted intelligent life at other time points, though, when nothing on Earth could receive such signals.

Sigh. You might want to read the articles you link. No, you don't need supercomputers to do what this architecture is allowing: In which century does this qualify as a supercomputer? Additionally, 70B parameter models are great, if you're in late 2022 or early 2023. Meanwhile, the new Nvidia GB200 is designed to support 27 trillion parameter models: Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/18/24105157/nvidia-blackwell-gpu-b200-ai The Phison architecture is primarily a way to save on cost. It's really impressive, and there's a heck of a lot of use cases where 70B parameters is more than enough, and a company wanting to retrain Meta or Mistral's open source models with private data would be well advised to go that route than hope to lay their hands on Nvidia chips. But we're very far from the state of the art being challenged. It will happen, of course. Neuromorphic chips and other chip architectures are coming which may totally wipe out Nvidia's current lead. But nothing stops regulation from being adjusted for that. Well, the complete clusterfuck that is the US government being so hapless does, but nothing conceptually prevents state of the art chips, of whatever architecture, from being regulated, especially if the goal is to keep them from China. Individual companies can still get slower, cheaper systems and do plenty of mischief, but that genie got out of the bottle before we knew enough to even think of regulating it. Now we know better, and the focus should be on conditional access to these chips. A 27 trillion parameter model, I think, can start approaching video and audio based training at levels of success that earlier models had with text. And that's truly terrifying, and regulations should focus there to make sure the tech isn't reaching actors who will use it to cause the kind of complete mayhem you can get if you can generate video with the level of quality models can generate text today.

Right that's the thing. I think a possible explanation would be FEM gave rise to proto-consciousness, which was then hacked and evolved in response to the pressures of social living, where minimization is harder, since the value of stimuli is significantly harder to predict. But that's a very convenient explanation, and I don't know that it's falsifiable.

That's a nice piece. However, it's worth noting that while FEM may explain the reason for why consciousness first evolved, it doesn't explain how that evolution has proceeded since. My brain may indeed be on autopilot while driving a familiar route. Yet it often is not on autopilot when I'm stationary in my even more familiar couch, and thinking about writing a story, or picturing the next watercolor I want to work on. I'm surely engaging conscious processes in those moments, but nothing external has changed. My brain is not at the minimal energy consumption rest state, despite no sensory input that would disturb it. I could meditate and take it there, but often, I don't. Nor is this failure goal directed, or optimal strategy, because whether spending time thinking up a story or water color is worth the energy consumed is not something we can predict well, especially if we are not published authors or famed watercolorists (or insert art/skill here that we spend time cogitating on). Yet, this kind of cognition is critical for all the external facing success stories of human beings, at least. I definitely don't think this is unique to us, but we're somehow wired for this kind of hoped for future-state driven non-minimization of energy use in our brains, which must have had different evolutionary drivers than what first evolved consciousness, if FEM is true. It's the "useless" cogitating that we need to explain it we want to figure out consciousness. And AI today doesn't run unprompted. The servers for LLMs do not draw power when no prompts are entered. So whatever argument can be made for their consciousness, that consciousness does not exist when they're on but not given any external prompts.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, till the very rushed end. And there's nothing earlier I'd seriously consider cutting, so they'd have had to make the movie longer. But that was an excellent adaptation, on the whole. There's a lot to quibble about, and I agree with several I read here, but Definitely a movie I want to watch again. And the IMAX experience was truly worth it.

Yeah. It's bonkers, really. I get it from a cost perspective, but you can't just use that to justify any and every mangling of a story. If doing longer and better stories means somewhat less visually stunning shows, I'll take that tradeoff any day.

Rushed, and mostly meh. That's my verdict after finishing the season. It isn't a disaster, and I agree with whoever said it has the potential to recover, but if they cannot understand why this story needs breathing room, side quests, and character centred episodes, it never will. The CGI was nice. Some decent set pieces, some decent action. Utterly unsure why they felt they had to mash up Hei Bai, Koh and the Fog of Lost souls. That's too much packed together. Bumi and Omashu felt weird, also. They were much more successful with Kiyoshi island. Having Azula be the one driving Zhao wasn't the worst idea, but it meant Zhao became a completely useless villain, and the animated version is just far superior.

Korra ain't for 10 year olds! The more I watch this show, the more I feel Netflix fucked up by picking Last Airbender to live-actionize. Korra is much better suited, tonally, and 8 hour long episodes would actually allow them to deepen that story, and the restrictions of the animated medium, which prevented them more than hinting at Korra and Asami's attraction, etc. could be shown more explicitly. For ATLA, I think the cost of making the live action show drove them to tonally change it in ways to attract a broader audience that end up seriously hurting the story. What works so well in the animation is the innocence and genuine childishness of the gaang in the backdrop of a generational war of conquest. It's clear now why Bryke left the show, this just doesn't feel right.