Project sundial was a cold war American project to build a bomb so big it wouldn’t matter where it was detonated It was a true doomsday weapon

There is alot of things the government does for you that most people likely have never thought about. Take invasive species for instance; There are huge efforts to contain and eradicate a variety of invasive species. You’ve probably never heard about these efforts. But they are needed to maintain and protect both farmland and the ecology of the United States. If those efforts are defunded and those species are allowed to run rampant it’ll be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.

I’d love be as optimistic as you but unless Trump changes his mind the US will get a brainwormed fanatical anti-vaccier in charge of deciding which vaccines are safe to use. Even if the states don’t cooperate with trump’s agenda there are so many long standing federal institutions which till now you’ve never needed to think about that are about to get wrecked.

Multiple regulatory bodies are going to get disbanded. The EPA is unlikely to survive, whole departments of the FDA are about to get gutted. Anything involving industrial safety is going to get its funding cut. Unconstitutional crackdowns on free and independent media is almost certain. Large scale damage to the functions of many government institutions can be expected. Massive economic damage due to reckless deregulation ( that’s even before they start putting tariffs on everything and wind up in multiple simultaneous trade wars). Funding for education and infrastructure maintenance will be reduced to allow tax cuts for the already wealthy. Massive loss of global influence and a massive gain in influence by hostile autocratic nations is also something you can expect.

I could go on and on but even if you were to assume they weren’t serious about project 2025 (if you haven’t read that you should) it’s real bad.

Space is big. It’s so big that our tiny ape brains have a hard time conceiving of how big it is. The sun is actually (despite it’s size) a relatively small target and is very very far away. Now the more delta-V you burn to slow the trash down the smaller its orbit around the sun will be. But that orbit starts enormous. So to get that purple line near the sun you do need to slow down almost the whole way, just to get it close.

The removal of view counts could empower fringe content. Even the most gullible are far less likely to take a video of an extremist nut job seriously when they have 100 views. Part of how radicalisation works is by convincing people that the radical ideology is far more mainstream than it actually is. It’s already easy to inflate view counts but removing them entirely makes it much much simpler for crazies to sell the idea that their ideas are popular.

Did you know that the Gazan bomb disposal teams are some of the most skilled in the world? The reason for this is so they can disarm and disassemble unexploded Israeli bombs so that the explosives can be repurposed and fired back. So a surprisingly large portion of the explosives that Hamas used were supplied by Israel via their long-term sporadic bombing of Gaza and anything resembling major infrastructure.

There’s a massive gulf between what progressives say and do and what the alt-right online influencers claim they do. Perhaps the reason you haven’t heard of anything productive progressives have done is that you get all your news from people who do not want them to appear reasonable and so leave out anything reasonable that they do. These days woke is a word used only by those trying to denigrate the progressive left. Because Woke is a strawman. An empty vessel for you to fill with hate. A totem to represent all the ways in which society is changing that you don’t like.

I can think of nothing less productive than putting down a hollow strawman.

21 hours versus 24 minutes. The screenshot was taken right after it was posted. It’s probably got very different numbers now.

This question right here perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with LLMs right now. They could be good tools but the people pushing them have no idea what they even are. LLMs do not make decisions. All the decisions an LLM appears to make were made in the dataset. All those things that an LLM does that make it seem intelligent were done or said by a human somewhere on the internet. It is a statistical model that determines what output is mostly likely to come next. That is it. It is nothing else. It is not smart. It does not and cannot make decisions. It is an algorithm that searches a dataset and when it can’t find something it’ll provide convincing-looking gibberish instead.

Listen think of it like this; a man decides to take exams to become a doctor in France, but for some reason he doesn’t learn either french or medicine. No, no instead he studies every former exam and all the answers to them. He gets very good at regurgitating those answers so much so that he can even pass the exam. But at no point does he understand what any of it means and when asked new and novel questions he provides utter nonsense answers. No matter how good he gets at memorising those answers he will never get any better at medicine. LLMs are as likely to gain sentience as my excel spreadsheets are.

That all depends on where the data set comes from. The code you’ll get out of an LLM is the average code of the data set. If it’s scraped from the internet (which is very likely) the code you’ll get will be an amalgam of concise examples from one website, incorrect examples from another, bits from blogs with all the typos and all the gunk and garbage that’s out there.

Getting LLM code to work well takes an understanding of what the code it gives you actually does and why it’s bad. It will always be bad because it cannot be better than the dataset and in order for a dataset to be big enough to train an LLM it’ll have to have everything they can get including all the trash. But it can be good for providing you a framework to start with. It is however never going to replace actual programming and understanding of programming. The talk of LLMs completely replacing programers is mostly coming from people who do not understand coding or LLMs at all.

I recommend Scavenger SV4 It’s a very unique game where you send a rover down to a planet to grab what alien artifacts you can before your radiation exposure gets past the point it can be treated. You can bolt some of them onto your rover to make it better and send it down again. It also has several hundred different endings that are decided by how much radiation you absorbed and how much loot and what loot you brought back.

The sexual abuse of young boys has been going on for a very, very long time but for most of that time, the church and all its institutions were unassailable and infallible. So most of it went unreported at the time. The attitude that the church and by extension, the priest could do no wrong was especially prevalent here where I grew up. Which is why some truly horrible things were allowed to happen. The church committed some vile acts and they weren’t all sexual abuse and enjoyed the protection of the government all the while. Here have some fun reading.

Allow me to address a question the pro-Russian guy keeps dodging; Wagner is no longer participating in the Ukraine war. I don’t know the full details but after their mutiny, they were sent back to Africa and other foreign countries far from Russia and have been working to shore up Russian-friendly dictatorships and regimes. But they have been kept well away from Ukraine and Russia ever since. Part of what they’ve been doing is selling and advertising their services as consultants and support to keep people in power. This helps Russia build influence which is something it desperately needs right now. Wagner being in Venezuela would not be strange. It would mean the guy who is yelling about the CIA trying to overthrow him has accepted Russian help. In fact considering how active Wagner has been in involving themselves anywhere where they can get a foothold it’d be weird if Wagner weren’t in Venezuela.

Yes going outside in the first week is a very bad idea. However not because the radiation outside will instantly drop you. Much of the radiation will be coming from radioactive dust, known as fallout that’ll be comprised of all kinds of isotopes. The isotopes that decay quickly release a lot of radiation over a short period and if you go outside you will come back covered in them. This will bring radiation into wherever you are using as your shelter. This would not just harm the person who went outside but everyone else sheltering with them. So do not go outside for any reason. You can make do without power for a while.

On a related note; keep water and food covered. Skin is a surprisingly good defense against radiation but breathing in this dust or letting it get into the food you eat or the water you drink is very dangerous. After a week has passed you should for your own safety keep the time spent outside your shelter as low as possible. Short trips outside will become safer as time goes on but activities that kick up dust will still be dangerous for a long time.

One of the stories I heard of someone who detransitioned was that they were in collage when they decided to transition. They lived in the dorms and well word very quickly got around. A group was organised including all of their friends and classmates who would take turns standing outside their dormroom door louding praying for them to detransition. The collage staff were no help, they’d helped organise the effort in the first place. After several months of this they gave in and went back into the closet.

I have seen so many talks by and interviews with people who claim to have deconverted from evolution. They all claim pretty similar stuff. Sometimes eeriely similar. Often they talk about being angry. Then they’ll go on to claim that they directed that anger at god, that that was why they bought into the ‘lie’ of evolution and that all atheiests are just like they were, angry at god. It’s funny how closely what they talk about resembles the strawman young earth creationists believe about atheiests and secularists and all those things those people wish where true about us.

I find this very strange because with such large numbers involved on both sides there should , purely statisticly speaking, be a reasonably decent pool of converts each way just down to chance and circumstance. Yet they keep resorting to pushing people who don’t remotely understand the mindset of the groups they claimed they once were part of. Despite that they keep troting them out like they’re a prized bull.

I have seen incel channels full of interviews with random people on the street where they were pushing a narrative of rampent misandry. Interview after interview of women chippily admiting to very hateful stuff about men on camera without an ounce of shame. But of course they wouldn’t have shame they were answering very carefully crafted hypotheticals that they thought were asked in good faith. A few decptive edits to remove their reasonable response’s context and all of a sudden the incels have justification for their anger. The interviews get shared around and around by people who have already decided where they stand but want vindication for their bigotry. ‘Look how common that hate for men is’ they cry, clearly showing how rarely they talk to other people.

I have listened to talks by people who have claimed to have seen the edge of the world or have claimed to have the alien corpses kept at Roswell. I have read statements by someone claiming that they went to a cancer ward, convinced the doctors to inject all the patients with their essential oils which cured everyone of their cancer. I have listened to interviews with anti vaxers claiming to have personally seen wards full of ‘vaccine causalties’ that’s being covered up somehow.

Have some people switched from accepting evolution to young earth creationism? It has to have happened at some point. Are their some misandrists out there? There has to be. Are they anywhere near as prevelant as either of those two groups pretend? Absolutely not. They have a vested interest in pushing the idea that both those things are far more common than they are. Interviews are just ancedotes and no matter how many ancedotes you horde they will never coalesce into evidence.

Do some transgender people regret transitioning? It has to have happened at least once just based off numbers alone Are there a lot? No there aren’t. To an actually surprising degree. But that surprising degree shouldn’t actually be that surprsining; You see before all the irreversible medical procedures there is a bunch of indepth psychological evaluations aimed at filtering out people who would regret it later. We’ve actually gotten pretty good at that. Not that it’s that hard there tends to be some strong and obvious indicators. So I will pose a hypothetical of my own; Even if there was a lot of regretful trangender folk is the answer to ban trans health care altogether or invest in better evaluations and better understanding of it?

Christianity exists. Religions don’t tend to spring up from nowhere. Every myth has its nugget of truth. Was there a preacher back then whose followers later spread around the world? Almost certainly. Where else could Christianity have come from?

Was he the son of god though? Was he capable of all the miracles the bible claims? Is the god he preached even real? There is no evidence that the answer to these three questions is anything but no I’m afraid.

It is counterintuitive but it does make sense. You see the initial plan the Nazis used to try to get rid of the Jews was to expel them from Germany. They had no problem if the Jews all grouped together and settled their own country so long as it was somewhere else. Far away from them. (And when they didn’t leave they made conditions horrible for them). That’s why antisemites love Zionism; it’s a way to get rid of the Jewish population in their country without dirtying their hands with ethnic cleansing. Which is how we get to conspiracy nutjobs who rant about Jewish space lasers setting forest fires in the US for some reason, turning around and enthusiastically supporting Israel and defence aid for Israel.

Typically the major threats from canniblism are bacteria, viruses, fungus, parasites and prions. The bacteria, viruses, fungus and parasites shouldn’t exist under properly maintained lab conditions. But prions are just misfolded proteins. They happen rarely and typically they are quarantined in the cell they were produced in. A number of things have to go very, very wrong for them to get out into your body from your own cells. However, eating and digesting cells can let out the prions they contain. Once they get out they’ll start triggering other proteins to misfold but only if the right materials are present and if the prion came from human tissue you can be sure they are.

The human immune system is incredible, it has impressive countermeasures for almost anything you could think of. Heck it’ll even attack solid objects that get stuck inside you. If you get shot by a bullet and don’t get it removed (not recommended) your body will layer by layer eat that bullet. Slowly dissolving it and passing it into your blood so your kidneys can filter it and you can piss out that bullet over the course of decades. (Though having a bunch more metal in your blood causes its own problems). Your body has a response to just about everything including cancer which to get anywhere has to have some mutations to deceive your immune system.

Your body has no answer to prions whatsoever. Your body puts up no fight. If you are infected by a prion disease you are going to die. There is no vaccine, no cure, no treatment.

Once symptoms appear you’ll have at most a few years if your very lucky but more likely a few months. Most prion diseases attack the brain. (side note; don’t eat the brains of any animal regardless of circumstances)

Will perfectly sterile lab conditions eliminate prions as a concern? No If anything it might be possible that growing the meat artificially might result in more misfolded proteins. I’d still happily eat lab-grown animal meat. But lab-grown human meat? No thank you