Rhaedas

And any other species’ chance. Given the expected lifecycle of the Sun that will affect the habitable zone we’re in, we have just under a billion years to go before the planet becomes unlivable by anything. Is that enough time for life to start over from some point and try again? Presuming minus a hostile period of time while Earth finds a new environmental balance, which always takes a while.

I think for whatever odds there are out there of other planets that can have the right conditions for life to become intelligent and expand further, they get one shot at it. If there were alien observers they’ve probably stopped by now. “That went like usual. Got close, but they did the typical mistakes.”

Sagan always said we had the potential to be better, but he was also concerned it was an uphill climb. Where Carlin got angrier with age, I think Sagan would just have been disappointed in us. Especially in the fall back into ignorance and superstition, something else he warned about in The Demon-Haunted World. Every quote you can find from that book is profound, but this one is eerily hard hitting:

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

There’s a scene in Sagan’s Cosmos where he’s exploring the possibilities of life elsewhere. He’s in the Ship of the Imagination, looking around at various potentials. He runs across one planet teeming with a civilization, from orbit it had even more lights and connections that our own at night. And then the lights suddenly go out. He discusses how even thriving life can suddenly die and speculates on a few reasons why this one might have, like resources or war or whatever. Summary from memory, I have no idea which episode it’s in.

In reality it wouldn’t be a sudden disappearance, but a longer decay. The lights shutting off was just to illustrate how easy it is to lose something assumed to be permanent. I’d also recommend the beginning of Revolution to get that same surreal feeling, although the rest of the series was blah.

Setting a hard limit (true or not) may have hurt more than helped. It introduces the “well, we’re not there yet so have some time to act”. When the news starts using 2.0 as a new limit, everyone will sigh in relief because we have more time to continue. Except we never did have that time.

Correct, in the 1930s, I saw someone post about it recently. I don’t know the motivation then, but the tactic will be used this time to target any group. Maybe even used for “other activities” when deportation becomes logistically difficult.

That’s still the lowest end of RCP8.5. Many are projecting that we could be on RCP4.5 once we reach where the pathways would diverge (2050), the problem with that is it assumes some large scale CCS and a flatlining of emissions (net zero). If those happen, then 3 degrees might be a top end and we’ll only have a small amount of catastrophe(?!).

My disbelief is a number of things - human nature to change is a big one, I can’t see us changing much without a huge motivational reason (read major disasters and/or population decrease from impacts). Another is the physics of CCS, the scale needed for any large effect is just beyond anything we can do, and I think it might be far more than just the energy requirements, so say a fusion breakthrough may not improve the abilities. Lastly, the feedbacks that will be set off as we go into 2 degrees will take over the path the Earth’s environment changes towards, and we can’t stop them.

We need to continue to talk about heavy reductions in emissions, which also means lessening consumption and growth of everything. Not only to reduce the future results, but to prepare for living in a harsher world where that kind of society can’t exist. We’re in an extinction event, and we better pre-adapt before it’s necessary otherwise we’ll be one of the species. That may already be a foregone conclusion, but it will be a certainty if we continue how we’ve been going.

They’re called large language models for a reason, creating patterns of words is exactly what they do. And poetry would be “easier” to do better since a human reading it may try to find meaning where there isn’t. Unlike writing a story or something factual where a mistake is more obvious.

Try Wiby

There’s other types of “small web” out there too.

That was my guess, I can’t get the page to load due to an error. Maybe AI’s fault too?

I believe it means existing links, which many are already gone. Not the ability to link.

Current AI/LLMs are just very complex probability matching with some frills to make it work. Our brains may be something like that too, as chemical and electrical signals can be reduced to math. It’s all math.

What you described before is pathing, and that can be a simple routine or very complicated and breakable, depending on the needs of the game. The really sophisticated ones would even chart the player’s behavior and react or plan a path based on past actions (even on some C-64 games, which is impressive). There was one karate game where (subjectively and not well tested) if you let it run the opening demo or played it a while, the game’s character got better. And it wasn’t just a higher level thing, you could tell (again, just a feeling) that it started to anticipate your usual moves.

There’s more oil. Peak oil is about easy to get oil, not actually running out. We’ll spend whatever it takes to keep this machine turning.