That calcium-loving one that eats your bones if you touch it?

It really depends actually. It certainly can be those things and often is, it can also be a strange comfort thing (it often doesn’t follow biology much at all, so it needn’t be realistically harmful and sometimes gets treated as like very unconventional hugs), or just a power fantasy if done from the predator’s perspective

Does niche fetish stuff that isnt exactly designed to offend but which would seem scary or disturbing to most people who’s brains don’t happen to be wired to enjoy it count as transgressive? If so, (a subset of) vore art

Wasn’t there a thing recently where Trump was suspending enforcement of the Jones act? Or did he flip-flop on that already

Ive already done most of the obvious things I can think of for my current living situation (I dont own a car for one thing, and I’ve quit using the gas kitchen appliances that came with my apartment in favor of an electric hotplate and toaster oven, which are big enough for my purpose, and Ive stopped eating meat, which isn’t a direct reason to personally buy fossil fuels but given it’s less efficient for the calories gained it’d use more fuel to make than plant’s Id think).

The biggest use I have left is heat, that’s gas in my current place, moving somewhere newer is probably out of my price range if I still want to be able to walk to work, and I cant exactly remodel a property I don’t own to change the heating system. Ive looked into window unit heat pumps before, and they seemed too expensive for me to do easily at the time, but I suppose it has been a couple years so there’s a chance cheaper ones have come to market.

I’d really love to try some of that balcony solar I’ve seen talked about recently, if weren’t for the fact that I don’t have a balcony to mount it on in the first place and that I’ve heard it poses some risk of overloading wiring, which given the age of my apartment I’m not sure I trust.

I work somewhere that makes measuring/inspection/imaging sort of equipment that has a rather wide variety of uses, so I get somewhat mixed feelings when it comes to pride. Sometimes it’ll get announced that NASA is buying our stuff to inspect their space probe for defects and I’ll be proud of it, and other times it’ll be like a coal mine ordering it and I’ll feel disappointment. On the whole I think its generally a net positive, but it’s not something truly crucial for society and more a thing that makes a whole lot of different stuff slightly easier or more efficient.

Im beginning to think that, as annoying for users and difficult to build a userbase for as it may be, the answer might ultimately have to be for future social sites to charge people for use in some way, be it to create accounts or as a subscription or just for the ability to post/comment/vote or whatever. If it’s no longer going to be feasible to keep bots out, and there’s a financial gain for their use, then they’re going to get used, so at that point it has to be somehow more expensive to run a bot than that bot can be expected to bring in as a result of it’s contribution to an advertising or manipulation campaign, to deter them. On the bright side, I guess it might lead to a shift away from advertising everywhere. Either you charge people and therefore dont need ads, or you dont, and have most of your ads being “seen” by bots, which advertisers probably don’t want to spend money to reach anyway.

I believe that space exploration and development is of such high potential future utility as to become a moral imperative, but I suspect that view will be unpopular given that in recent decades some of the most infamous tech billionaires have stuck their hands and toxic branding in that area.

Ive seen this said a lot here lately, but like, cloud computing still requires computer hardware, so shouldnt an increase in hardware prices make that more expensive as well?

I mean, while that sounds like it makes things more expensive, I’m not entirely sure that it does, given that:

It doesn’t really make sense to run ads unless the average person watching the ad will ultimately buy enough that they wouldn’t otherwise from the company the ad is for that the extra profit exceeds the ad cost, thus still making watching ads have a cost that just isnt visible

Or, ads might be run to simply get people to switch what product in a category they buy without increasing the amount, in which case, they become a required cost to stay competitive, and because suppliers must now all pay that extra cost, the cost to buy products in that category must be increased, again making the ads cost the viewer in a non-visible way

Or, we could be seeing things like political ads that dont ask one to buy things, just support a politician or policy. However even here, the policies most likely to get ad spending are those most beneficial to people that already have money (since they’re the ones that can most easily afford to run ads) and in general, benefiting those people means giving them a bigger share of the economies wealth, which means the average person has a smaller share when the ads are effective, again costing the viewer in an roundabout way.

If people are going to end up paying for the use of these things in some way anyway, doing it directly seems more honest to me.

When I was a kid: basic printer paper. Drawing is probably part of the intended usecase for a sheet of paper, but I’d also do a bunch of origami and use it to try to make models of airplanes

Maybe Im not saying this right: Im wasnt arguing for the virtues of echo chambers with that, Im saying, with how fedi is designed, there is no means to prevent someone that wants to make an echo chamber from doing so, so suggesting that one should not allow an echo chamber to exist is a fool’s errand. In a more general sense, it seems to me that, either you let people decide what kind of content to see, in which case many if not most will naturally create echo chambers simply because they dont want to see views too different from their own, or you have some means to force people to see stuff they dont want to, which requires some difficult-to-escape authority have power over their media feed and as such is incompatible with decentralized federation (and of course risks that authority pushing everyone into their echo chamber). Both of those things lead to serious issues in my view, so its a bit of a “pick your poison” situation when it comes to social media design. Beyond that though, it does have to be acknowledged that there is simply more content, more messages and people wanting to spread their word, out there than any given person has the time or attention or mental capacity to process. That means that some system must exist that determines what fraction of it all you actually see (even if its just as simple as “the things most recently posted on a given platform when you looked at it”). I can see no way to do this that doesnt introduce biases.

I mean, allowing echo chambers doesnt really seem avoidable on fedi tho? Like, only one side has to defederate to break two way communication, so if someone wants to avoid you, you cant really stop them, and the whole concept of moderation in a decentralized system relies on each instance being able to selectively view or block content from other instances based on the values of that instance. You cant really say “what works is challenging people” if the people you want to challenge have an “ignore” button for when you get too loud for their taste.

Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn’t that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially “grandfathered in”, but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?

It does say “as a baseline” so presumably its just there for comparison’s sake

It’s already possible in a “does it violate the laws of physics or not” sense, the real question is, will anyone that has the requisite resources to do it actually want to.

It would take such an incredibly long time (as in, millions of years or longer for the very closest galaxies) that anyone and any organization sending out such an expedition isn’t going to get any meaningful return on their investment, so it would only bring a benefit to whoever was on the “ship” when it arrived. As such, to even have a motive for doing this, you either need a society that does things for the benefit of extremely distant descends, or which is extremely long lived and patient.

As to how you would actually do it, my guess (obviously though, the guess of someone from a society that lacks the technology to do a thing is likely to be wrong about how it later is done) would be that one would use a hypothetical type of structure called a stellar engine These are similar to the “dyson spheres” that science fiction sometimes likes to talk about (usually inaccurately to the actual concept but still), except that they would use the energy emitted by a star, or its mass, to do some particular task, like propel the star in a given direction.

Doing this, your “ship” is actually an entire solar system. Getting that up to speed could take millions of years even for the most efficient designs, and obviously requires an economy capable of building stuff at incredible scales, and having an entire star spare to use for the trip. However, you’re going to be taking that kind of time anyway, and so you’re probably going to need an entire self contained civilization to have a hope of keeping things running that long, and literal worlds worth of raw materials. There’s not much else that even theoretically has enough fuel to move all that to notable fractions of lightspeed. Since there’s little point to going to live in another galaxy if there are still unclaimed places to go within your own, a whole star system is probably a relatively small expense for the implied size of civilization that would even want to try to sebd such an expedition. Galaxies contain a huge number of them after all.

While this is all obviously far beyond us now, both in technology and sheer economic scale, there’s nothing physically impossible about it, and at least some logical motive (the future resources of a galaxy for one’s descendants, if alien life is rare enough for uninhabited galaxies to exist). Given that and just how huge the universe is, I’d actually be willing to bet that somewhere there is someone or something doing this, and that if humans last long enough and keep advancing our technology and infrastructure all the while, some descendant of our species might, though they’d probably seem pretty alien to us by the time it took to reach that point.

Iguanas are plenty interesting to me, though I imagine a tegu probably is more sociable. My personal experience with lizards has been with geckos, but I hear that tegus tend to be very friendly, for a lizard of their size.

I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.

Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.

Lizards. Alternatively, fish and other sea creatures, hypothetical space megastructures, or nuclear rocketry.