Uriel238 [all pronouns] @ uriel238 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

Moon dust being heavily toxic for human inhalation is a plot point in Portal 2.

That is a good assessment. Yes.

In fact, the race between capitalist interests to bypass safety and get operational AGI soonest is entirely about getting that power to be able to use it to hold everyone else hostage.

My management tricks (which came from being managed) included calling for a 90 minute meeting if I needed 45 minutes, and bring snacks.

Oh and when someone finishes an all day job in half a day, let them goof off for the rest of the day.

But then I believed that whole happy workers are maximally productive workers thing that, well, every serious management study reports.

Courtesy of XKCD, long before we have to contend with unfriendly AI (we have committees of AI-techs working on this problem already) we'll have to contend with someone like Musk or Bezos determined to own everything and capable of creating an AI-controlled army of killer robots.

We're not sure how rogue AI is going to manifest. We are sure rogue power-seeking humans exist all the time, and positions of power are commonly filled by them. (That's the primary argument for election by sortition, or by lottery.)

Whatever made that crater was an ELE. Bigger than Chicxulub.

We have plenty of great filters to navigate:

We end war, or we die.

We restore the atmosphere and rebuild global ecology, or we die.

We end stratified society and power disparity, or we die.

Where are all the aliens? Fermi asked. The first question is, how do we navigate our way to becoming a space-faring, world colonizing species, ourselves? It's turning out to be pretty difficult for the common hominid.

We may have to revise our education system so that it's not connected to our credential system.

There's a story about Einstein teaching physics and letting the kids who didn't want to be there leave and do something else with the time. The ones who remained were quite attentive.

There are multiple models for teaching that do something similar, let kids approach a subject when they're ready. Yes, they goof off a lot early on, but eventually even STEM and literature call to them, and they pass equivalency exams in their late teens.

In the meantime even when I was in high school in the 1980s, our system was created to sort kids into sports stars that might become college players, STEM kids that might become scientists and engineers, and House Hufflepuff (common laborers).

The education system has only gotten progressively worse since then, as its budget increases have not kept up with inflation. And then there's the whole effort to insert evangelist Christianity (+ American Exceptionalism + Conservativism--Capitalism) into public school.

And to this day, we still use the lecture / lab / test model that excludes a lot of alternative comprehension and learning models. We're not looking to teach kids, rather we're looking to harvest the geniuses, and turn the others into bonded laborers and soldiers for billionaire vanity projects.

What is curious to me is why billionaires don't start massive civil projects that would get their bronze statue in every state park?

Musk had several opportunities, except he then had to figure out a way to monetize it so it profited him.

For me, seeing corruption and inequality lead to major depression, but I figured out early I didn't want to cause harm.

What hit hard is learning deception and exploitation is baked into the system.

The... Crowmistress? Queen of Corvids?

From the witching community, you'd have pretty good luck befriending the local murder of crows with cheap bread. Upgrade the bread as the shinies they bring you improve.

According to the meme, pretty soon you're a Batman villain.

The problem is, it's plausible they are ice, and in the US hoodlums gathering near a van before pulling a heist are rarer than unmarked ICE guys waiting to acquire a target, so if this isn't a movie set, they're most likely ICE.

If they are this obvious, I'd see if I could get a flash mob of civilians with phone cameras.

Either they move, or if action goes down, there's going to be a big protest soon.

Also we'll know who they took.

Someone should meme this up as a bunch of dudes about to get jumped by Spiderman.

There are some pepper sprays that are mixed with red difficult-to-remove dye for the purpose of identifying those involved in an incident.

Legal in California!

Never let the assailant take you to the secondary location.

Urban self defense classes have been teaching this since the 1970s, at least.

Sacramento Police department has a helicopter, Air One, that the department is super proud of. I live in a not-rich neighborhood where Air One likes to hang out and help which sometimes includes shouting inaudibly on the PA. Air One has its own webpage which is sometimes current about what it's doing, but not always.

Air One also likes to fly low enough that we can hear the thumping of the rotors through our apartments. At 11pm on a school night. We know it doesn't have to because the rescue choppers zing by quietly on their way.

And lately Air One has gotten, whinier. This loud screeee! that wasn't their before that makes me think something in the rotors is not sufficiently oiled, or something is about to fall apart. I wonder if Air One is soon going to make an unscheduled landing in my neighborhood.

Well, I needed an example.

So it means we all get to be Spartacus.

I may be thinking of the July Revolution of 1830, in which case you're right. They're not the same, just related.

You're going to have to elaborate on both. I can't imagine a far-right opinion I agree with.

ETA: I'm echoing the sentiments of centuries of COIN theory: brutal state response to protest only multiplies the numbers in the movement. And it's so well known that tyrants and usurpers are fools to ignore the paradigm. And yet they do.