I wasn’t sure if a flywheel would be good for something like this given just how much mass needs to move and how fast it needs to move to produce close to 1G of force. If it can manage something like that, that would be a super good solve for this.

That said, even if it wasn’t a good solution for the actual ring, it might be a perfect solution for the core’s movement. Given that it can be much less mass as it’s pretty much exclusively used for docking, it could basically just be a pressurized tunnel with attachment points for the ring. Spinning that up and down with a flywheel seems super reasonable.

This is already quite a bit beyond where I have any definite knowledge, but I guess if you had a core completely separated by magnets that might work, but you’d still need points of connection for people who docked to join the actual ring from.

If you did that, the core would also need its own propulsion system to spin down and spin up so that anyone docking could actually go out into the ring.

It’s worth noting here, too, that the inner core would need to spin like crazy fast for a small station to have anywhere close to 1G in the ring, so that would be its own fun thing in the core.

For clarity: I don’t know for certain. I am not involved in the community, not an engineer.

Opinion: It’s incredibly difficult to do. A spinning station needs to be designed to do such a thing. It needs to be balanced and have thrusters positioned in such a way to both spin up and maintain the rotation as it goes. The ISS has been built and expanded over decades by tons of new science modules over time as new breakthroughs happened.

Spinning objects can behave in strange ways and having a regularly shifting center of mass can be a challenge by itself, and that’s before you start planning for yet uncertain experiments to bring aboard.

In addition to this, it would be an ENORMOUS challenge to dock with a station that is spinning, and the added danger to do this (or increased fuel consumption of spinning down and then spinning back up) just isn’t worth it. The alternative of maintaining a central core that is static relative to the spin wastes power and creates a massive risk (more moving parts, especially those which might create friction against metal aren’t easy to maintain in space).

Also, a small spinning station is much harder than a massive spinning station because it would have extremely noticeable differences from normal gravity to the people on board. Your head and feet would likely be moving at noticeably different speeds, which by itself is disorienting, but moving either towards or away from the direction of the spin would feel different (dropping an object would mean it falls away from the direction of spin).

Lastly, maintenance would mean that every single EVA either wastes a tremendous amount of fuel to spin down/up again, or risking flinging a person into space every time they exit.

Realistically, on a much larger station, artificial gravity via spinning might be a fantastic idea, especially for longer-term living aboard, but for the ISS, given its history, its goals, and especially where it’s at, it’s just not a great idea.

The full idiom of “speak of the devil and he doth appear” seems like it would be chaotic and bizarre.

I hare them so much I can’t even type right

Holy shit, I used to think like… nothing about this community when I lived in the US. I had a car, I drove an hour and a half for work, and I walked like… maybe a few kilometers a week (outside of work where I was on my feet most of the day).

When I moved to Europe, but Sweden in particular, I walked EVERYWHERE. Paths were accessible, there were so many parks and greenery, basically anything short of 6km one way was on the table for a little stroll.

I got healthier, happier, and generally enjoyed going places more. I didn’t have to deal with traffic or parking or maintenance. And honestly, the transition from one to another was like… a week of getting used to it.

Now I live in a city that’s pretty car orientated now (still in Europe) and I cannot fucking stand it. It’s been months and I still dream of walking through parks to go visit my friends or do my grocery shopping. I can’t even open my apartment windows at night because people will just idle their cars beneath my window and exhaust fills my apartment. Fuck I hare cars.

Seems pretty reasonable to use it as a grammar checker. As long as it’s not changing content, just form or readability, that seems like a pretty decent use for it, at least with a purely educational resource like Wikipedia.

I think I’m following what you mean. To me, though, (using your house analogy) it isn’t that your ex has a key, it’s that the government is demanding that your door remain open. Sure, it’s already off the hinges, but it’s a whole lot easier to put a door back on than to fight the government about it. It’s not currently illegal to protect your data through extreme measures, but this is the beginning of laws that make it illegal. That is why this is worth fighting over to me. What’s more, I can hate and fight against more than one thing, so it’s not a huge issue to be against this.

And sure, all this data is out there, but that isn’t true for future generations. Old data becomes stale. It just seems like such a defeatist attitude to me to cede ground on this, especially when the laws you mentioned actually being worried about would use this as precedent. It’s certainly easier to argue for an ID requirement when you have the data on millions of users lying about their age and use it as justification for a more controlled implementation.

But either way, I think I need to step away here. I feel like I understand you, I just disagree and to continue beyond this without doing more reading on the topic, laws, and trends won’t really help, I think (the last I saw for the New York law was that determining what was an adequate attempt to verify age was fell on the AG, who seemed to be leaning towards third party verification. I’m already out of date with developments there).

I… didn’t say that? Not sure if you replied to the wrong person? But I’ll try to respond to what I can?

Oh whoops, if I did, my bad. That’s what I was understanding your comment about “it’s literally the same check we already have” to be. You’re saying there are already age checks for certain sites (and analysis of your web traffic and associated data being sold) and that this is no different, if I understand correctly. It is worth pointing out that while the California law requires no verification, the New York law potentially requires more than just a declaration of age. It’s worse elsewhere in the world.

All of that is the same thing. It is about building profiles…

Right, but you see how this is also a bad thing right? Given that the FBI has now spoken about buying this data and uses it to target people, I would think that we would all want better privacy protections, not fewer.

1. This is not exclusive to the US.

I don’t see how that should sway opinion about this being a good or a bad thing. It’s a bad thing for everyone, right?

2. I never said this is “the first step towards something >worse”.

No, I am saying that. I was saying that calling this a slippery slope doesn’t feel like it is based in the history of privacy erosion. I’d love to learn more about the original sin in all of this, but just because it isn’t the first step doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight against consolidated, government-mandated privacy violations, right?

Yes? I am sorry that protecting your privacy takes effort? I am >sure that if you pay a random sponsor on an LTT video that >they’ll claim to do everything for you? Like… I really don’t know what to tell you?

I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not complaining that it’s difficult. I’m asking why we don’t try and just fix the problem instead of letting something like this slide by because there are other, similar issues.

Can I ask you to explain your point, “age doesn’t matter, your digital footprint carries over?” You mention solutions to protect yourself from the digital footprint carry over, but this law would just make it easier to overcome those solutions.

Now instead of having to figure out the various unique patterns of accessing the internet to determine info about you, you just tell them your age (or that you’re an adult, whatever) on those systems directly.

I also think it’s a bit disingenuous to call ‘this is the first step towards something worse’ a slippery slope when that is exactly how the creeping erosion of privacy has gone in the US historically, but especially the last few decades.

You acknowledge that a lot of people don’t fully understand how to protect themselves (and offer solutions that require more money, time, and education to accomplish) and in the same breath that is why it’s okay that we make data collection easier.

I know this probably comes across as accusatory, but I really don’t mean it that way. I’m genuinely trying to understand what your perspective is.

Huh, okay. I guess I’ll avoid going over that way. I’m hesitant to outright mute anything that I don’t immediately have a huge issue with in case it becomes a source I learn of something through.

I hear a lot of negative talk about those instances, but rarely any specifics. What’s the deal with them?

Exactly! On the a.roomy.place there’s a good, non-technical breakdown on what makes the concept good and what flaws it has, but the core of it is the concept of owning your own identity. The idea of “login with Google/Facebook” significantly reduces internet freedom, this gives you a way to “login as yourself”, beyond the ownership of a company. That’s the big boon here. With the IETF lending some credence to it now, it’s a good sign that self-hosted identity for your public presence will be adopted into the mainstream and a less locked-down internet is on the horizon.

/over-enthusiastic optimism

The thing that I love about it is that you can host your own account. So if Bluesky decides that they are huge fans of fascism, you can take your account and move to a competitor, Redsky, and not lose your posts, messages, follows, etc (assuming those people also move to the new platform)

So, your account can be the same between any number of platforms, you just have to let the platform add it to their list so their crawlers can show your activity.

And, like Lemmy, you can host your own “node” (I forget what they call it. A box that can whitelist, crawl, and display accounts that people want to be visible there, similar to an instance) but you can also just host your “account” and you can bring it to whatever platform you want and people can be confident they’ve found the same person.

Projects like https://a.roomy.space/ are also super interesting. It’s sort of like how Lemmy uses and reformats the content you might see on Mastodon into a traditional forum, except Roomy can use the AT Protocol to format it into a sort of Discord concept. It’s public, but they also are working on private, self-hosted ‘rooms’ as well. There are also other projects that reportedly have managed E2E encryption for private messaging. (Edit: on this topic, ATP is very pointed at public content. Any encrypted messaging solution isn’t likely using ATP for the messaging, just for your web identity. The major thing here is having a consistent presence and login that you and your friends can follow to various platforms without issue and can’t be controlled by another entity).

I’m super not a technical nerd, so I’d have to go reread documents to give you any specifics about it as a whole. And even then, I can only really understand them to the extent that I’m not actually a developer on the protocol, so I don’t have a first-hand understanding of how it works, but the concept of it and what it seems to enable is just really exciting to me.

Oh that’s so amazing! I’ve been smitten with AT Protocol since I learned about it from their paper. I have such high hopes it gets more widespread.

I actually agree with you here. My first thought was the anarchist communities here. Sometimes I agree with the sentiment of a post there, sometimes I don’t. I think we largely agree on a rough framework of the world, though, which is, like you said, different from the complete inability to agree on the fundamentals.

Oh… You know the views.

There was an interview I saw recently with Asmodei where he said that Anthropic aren’t categorically against autonomous weapons, only that they didn’t think they were ready, seemingly implying they would make mistakes similar to how LLMs hallucinate. A lot of the media coverage around them seemed to imply that they had a higher ethical standard than the others, and I mean… maybe? I guess it could be argued that wanting to minimize collateral damage is more ethical, but regardless, I think it’s important to keep perspective when we see how they act in the coming weeks and months.

Puritanism.

For your first question, what you’re describing is a problem with education and staffing, not a problem of the tool itself. I’m not suggesting you keep around ‘one old man who hates AI’, my pitch you bar the use of AI for human-level checks.

For your second, yes I saw the part about how news and media are representing AI in healthcare, but I don’t really see how news or media are relevant here. Could you explain this a bit for me?

I don’t intend to gloss over the issues with Generative AI/LLMs, I tried to be specific in my separation of ML from them in my original comment where I said LLMs in their public facing version (ChatGPT, Claude, whatever) aren’t very useful.

The original comment I replied to asked “is “AI” even useful (etc)” but also mentioned LLMs. I was trying to make the point that LLMs aren’t the only type of AI and that others can be employed to great effect. If that was unclear, that’s my bad but that was my intention.

The reason I don’t want to engage with a hypothetical is because I could just as easily counter with “what if it diagnoses at a 100% success rate? What if fear of losing skills results in doctors never wanting to use AI, resulting in more deaths?” Neither hypothetical argument is really very helpful for the discussion. I promise you I’ve thought about this a lot (but again, I’m not an expert, nor am I in the field), but more importantly I have friends finishing doctorates in the bioinformatics field whom I get some insight from, and I’m, at least at this point, convinced of the benefits.