Zonetrooper @ Zonetrooper @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Y'know, I was just browsing earlier and thinking that there wasn't even any technology stuff in my feed anymore, it'd all been subsumed by the political churn...

Anyhow, to answer properly: I like Star Wars' aesthetic better, but Star Trek also had some incredible stuff. I've also been increasingly burned out on Star Wars since the Disney takeover, to the point I barely follow it anymore. Back in the day I was neck-deep in the community of nerds who loved analyzing how the technology in the setting worked!

But the real love of my science-fiction life is Babylon 5. Something about how they planned the show's myth arc out over multiple seasons leading to huge payoffs for both characters and the overall story.

This entire "glitch" is posited on the idea that altering your subjective past does not alter your absolute present.

And you're right - that's ridiculous. Why wouldn't taking away something from the past alter the present? This is called causality and thermodynamics, and it's one of the reasons physics, as we understand it presently, doesn't really allow for time travel as it is popularly conceived. It's not about gold coins, exactly, but the idea that you can't end up with more energy than you started out with (or the mass equivalent of energy).

But OP started with the idea that a time machine which break causality and thermodymnamics exists, so I just pointed out how massively broken such a machine would be.

Assuming the following conditions:

• Energy is not conserved - that is, you expend less energy traveling to the past than the net energy value of something you send to or bring from the past.
• It takes approximately 1 minute for the time machine to recharge and target a new time and location after use.
• The time machine can transport any object that can be contained in a space, but the space is fairly easy to expand. Think, "setting up a tent".

All of this, I should emphasize, horribly breaks physics. But it's not a stupid question. The answer is, essentially, "the economy, as we know it, collapses."

A lot of people are going to point out that you can duplicate energy sources, items, etc... by bringing them from the past. Yes, that's true. But what people are missing is that this enables exponential growth as well:

• I buy a gold coin. I put it in a large space.
• 2 minutes later, I set my time machine to go 1 minute back in time, collect the coin from myself, bring it to the present. Now I have 2 gold coins.
• 2 minutes later, I do this again - collecting the 2 gold coins and bringing them to the (new) present. Now I have 4 gold coins.
• An hour later of doing this, I have over 536 million gold coins.

This works for any reasonably sized object, by the way. A hamburger. A tank of oil. That sweet RTX 5090 for your new gaming rig. A nuclear warhead.

Society, as we know it, isn't to survive this. The Earth probably isn't going to survive this. The universe may very well not, although we've already broken so many laws of physics getting to this point that it's a wash anyway.

tl;dr - time machines as popular culture imagines them are a cheat code.

I'm sorry I came to this late, but this one's really the best answer.

We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc... but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can't comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.

And while there's lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.

Yep. Apparently I'm blind. Nevermind me.

This. There was something vaguely ritualistic about getting out a box to open all the little plastic packages into, then spreading out the instructions and getting to work.

For a while there the instructions sometimes even had little comics at the bottom of the pages, and so you could read the comic and then go back and actually build the thing.

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but... how is this related to Reddit?

In first grade? There was this little Hot Wheels style car that could transform into a robot man. I loved that little thing. Top favorite toy in the classroom.

Took it home one day. I was too afraid to play with it, so I just stuffed it into the box with the other toy cars. I was also too afraid to return it after a while. I still have it, and the guilt over taking this thing lives rent-free in my head.

I'm honestly surprised you can even connect to an MMO with an out-of-date client. On the few I've played, at least, a version mismatch is an automatic refusal to connect.

There's always something extra adorable about cats accepting aggressive kid cuddles.

The first time you heard that sssssSSSSSSBOOM right behind branded every player with an eternal fear.

Also, shoutout to the moment they added fire spread. Way back in ye olde alpha days, you'd just randomly set stuff on fire to keep monsters out. Then fire spread suddenly made this dangerous and the world feel a whole lot more risky.

Technically you don’t need it, but it makes it a little easier for the developers and the users.

For that matter, if you poke around in some games' files, you can find the actual game.exe and launch it directly from there, bypassing the launcher. You just bypass the authentication and compatibility checking as well.

This is /c/nostupidquestions, not /c/jokessobadthey'rewarcrimes.

If I had to guess, at least a good fraction of them are communities people duplicated after the initial Reddit exodus. At that point there was a lot of people trying to establish communities directly carried over, but if they failed to launch then they've probably been left to rot.

Imperial Guard. Generally speaking, I like stories of mundane people facing down superhuman/supernatural threats through the power of technology and skill. So the idea of good ol' fashioned regular humans facing down cybernetic supersoldiers, undying robots, literal demons, and the rest of 40k's menagerie of horrors via overwhelming artillery, tanks, and fortifications is one I enjoy.

Sadly, after a brief time in the limelight, it feels like they've gone back to being "those guys who die so we can see how cool the Astartes are". But there was a time where, both lore- and crunch-wise, IG were the undisuputed masters of large-scale armored warfare.

After them, it's a tossup of Orks, Necrons, and Mechanicus (do they count as a distinct 'faction' now?).

Engineer here, so I'm aware of the fundamentals of "how not to kill yourself with electricity". Anything tying into the grid I'm definitely calling a professional for.

But no, I'm not in a financial or property situation to install a grid-connected system, so I was imagining a "balcony solar" kit that'd just charge a small battery bank I could run some lights, a fan, or some similar low-load devices off of. I don't know if such a thing exists (or if it's a smart idea), but I'd like to look into it and find out.

I was going to say. I'm sure this will be great... for all 25 new homes built in CA that year!

"In the middle of my backswing?!"

Not my favorite, but it's certainly a good one.

Mostly because I am not in a place, financially or home-wise, to install a full grid-connected system. I'm just looking for something that I can use to charge enough battery to run a lamp, fan, charge devices, or other such similar light loads on a daily basis. It won't bring my power bill to zero, but it will chip away at it.

Is there a good place to ask about independent (non-grid-connected) solar for an otherwise grid-connected structure? I'd love to set something like this up, but can't find any systems which don't require wiring into the gird.