Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.
For a power-collecting Dyson sphere you don’t actually need all that much matter. Most of the sphere’s area can be thin metal foil that just acts as a mirror to concentrate light on power converters, for example. You could build it with asteroidal material.
If you really want to get massive, then Mercury is usually the first target people propose for demolition. Lots of heavy elements and already close in to the Sun. And nobody cares much about Mercury.
Sure, what would be the obstacle? You start by building a single solar energy collector. Then build another. Then another. And so forth.
Actually, it might be worth doing this first. Once you’ve got even a partial Dyson swarm you’ve got ample energy to make interstellar travel a lot easier. You could either use beamed propulsion (lightsails or magsails), or manufacture bulk antimatter to fuel high-efficiency rocketry, or a combination of the two.
The risks of blotting out your only livable planet’s biosphere is too great
If our Dyson sphere project has become large enough that this is a risk, then we’ve got ample energy to spare to artificially light Earth. Assuming we still want to keep it around at that point and not dismantle it for additional raw materials.
not to mention stuff like the dark forest theory.
Dark Forest only works in the context of a cheesy sci-fi story. Under real-world physics it fails utterly.
There are a couple of physically feasable versions, yeah. The sci-fi solid shell with an Earthlike environment magically glued to the interior isn’t possible, but that’s not what any serious physicist or futurist was ever talking about to begin with.
A Dyson swarm in particular is quite easy, as it can be assembled piece by piece is immediately useful from day one. Just start manufacturing solar power satellites, and keep doing that until the orbital space around the Sun is full. There’s plenty of raw materials in the solar system to support building that.
Building a thing is very simple, generally speaking. There’s a stream of uniform parts that come into the factory, each exactly what’s needed, and they are put together in a precisely designed routine. It can be trained for quickly and done with minimal skill, by people who live in a low-wage country.
Repair, on the other hand, is very complicated. You need to deal with all the unknowns of figuring out what’s wrong, you need to find the replacement parts from scratch (if they’re even available), and the steps required to replace bits are made up as you go. You might need to desolder connections or remove rivets that were never meant to be removed. Lots more work.
Frankly, I’m not sure it should be encouraged in all cases. Prices really do reflect the value of things in a lot of cases; it may indeed be better to recycle an old broken item and buy a new one to replace it.
Perhaps in absolute terms.
My main recordings folder is 175 GB, for a little over ten years worth of recordings. That’s not really all that much - consider how much a terabyte hard drive costs these days, it’s a trivial expense. Even when you include the various backups I keep (definitely don’t want a crash to take all that out).
My GPU’s reasonably hefty, an RTX 4090 with 24GB of VRAM. But AI is a rapidly changing technology right now so who knows what the next six months will bring. Someone might come out with an awesome lightweight model, someone might announce they’re going to be selling a cheap AI-specific card. My view has always been “save the data now because you can’t save it later if you didn’t save it now. You can process it any time.”
Not that often, but my search tools aren’t very refined yet so it’s probably a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The technology is advancing rapidly right now so I’m not putting a whole lot of effort into polish yet, since in six months some dramatic new tool might come out that invalidates everything I did so far. Like that potential WhisperX switch.
Most recently, I remember a situation where I didn’t remember the name of some NPCs from a roleplaying game that were only in one or two adventures. I did a little searching and found them in a transcript from 2017. That was fun.
You asked:
Everyone likes to believe they’re thinking independently. That they’ve arrived at their beliefs through logic, self-honesty, and some kind of epistemic discipline. But here’s the problem - that belief itself is suspiciously comforting. So how can you tell it’s true? […] I’m asking: what’s your actual evidence that you think the way you think you do? Not in terms of the content of your beliefs, but the process behind them. What makes you confident you’re reasoning - not just rationalizing?
And I’m answering that. You literally asked for “actual evidence,” and I gave links to the specific research I’m referencing.
I’m not here to argue with you over the meaning of the word “consciousness” when you didn’t even ask about that in your question in the first place. If you think I’m talking about something other than consciousness go ahead and tell me what other word for it suits you.
Loosely, the awareness of our own actions and the reasons why we do them. The introspective stuff that the research I linked to is about.
The specific word doesn’t really matter to me much. Substitute a different one if you prefer. Semantic quibbling is more of what I leave to the philosophers.
You might be referring to the split-brain experiments, where researchers studied patients who had their brain hemispheres separated by cutting the corpus callosum – the “bridge” between the two sides.
Nope, I would have described the split-brain experiments if that’s what I was referring to. I dug around a bit to find a direct reference and I think it was Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans by Desmurget et al. In particular:
the fact that patients experienced a conscious desire to move indicates that stimulation did not merely evoke a mental image of a movement but also the intention to produce a movement, an internal state that resembles what Searle called “intention in action”
I did misremember the fact that they only felt the intention to move, they didn’t actually move their limbs when those brain regions were stimulated.
A related bit of research I dug up on this reference hunt that I’d forgotten about but is also neat; Libet in the 1980s, who used observation of the timing of brain activity to measure when a person formed an intention to do something compared to when they became consciously aware that they had formed an intention to do something. There was a significant delay between those two events, with the intention coming first and only later with the conscious mind “catching up” and deciding that it was going to do the thing that the brain was already in the process of doing.
As for consciousness, I think you might be using the term a bit differently from how it’s typically used in philosophical discussions.
Probably, I’m less interested in philosophy than I am in actual measurable neurology. The whole point of all this is that human introspection appears to be flawed, and a lot of philosophy relies heavily on introspection. So I’d rather read about people measuring brain activity than about people merely thinking about brain activity.
This, I (and many others) would argue, is the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion.
You can argue it all you like, but in the end science requires evidence to back it up.
It’s funny. I’ve seen research about LLMs “reasoning” and “introspecting” that has shown that they make up stories when you ask them why they answered questions in certain ways that don’t match how their neurons actually fired, and a common response in the comments is to triumphantly crow about how this shows they’re not “self aware” or “actually thinking” or whatever.
But it may be the same with humans. There’s been fun experiments where people would have neurons artificially stimulated in their brains that cause them to take some action, such as reaching out with their hand, and then when you ask them why they did that they’ll say - and believe - that they did it for some made-up reason like they were just stretching or that they wanted to pick something up. Even knowing full well that they’re in an experiment that’s going to use artificial stimulus to make them do that.
I suspect that much of what we call “consciousness” is just made up after-the-fact to explain to ourselves why we do the things that we do. Maybe even all of it, for all we currently know. It’s a fun shower thought to ponder, if nothing else. And perhaps now that we’ve got AI to experiment with in addition to just our messy organic brains we’ll be able to figure it all out with more rigor. Interesting times ahead.
I’m not terribly concerned about it, though. If it turns out that this is how we’ve been operating all along, well, it’s how we’ve been operating all along. I’ve liked being me so far, why should that change when the curtain’s pulled back and I can see the hamster in the wheel that’s been making me work like that all along? It doesn’t really change anything, and I’d like to know.
Yes, though not a “traditional” one. I’ve got a voice recorder, I use it when I’m walking my dog to ramble on about whatever’s on my mind. The day’s events, my personal thoughts, to-do lists and notes, whatever. When I get home I dump the recording into a folder where some scripts I’ve written process the audio to produce a transcript (using the Whisper model from OpenAI) and then an LLM to create summaries and subject tags and so forth from it (currently Qwen3), entirely local on my computer. I’ve got an index for searching through them based on those AI-generated tags and summaries so I can more easily find old stuff if I need them or am curious for whatever reason.
I use entirely local AI because I am completely open and honest in there. Probably a bunch of blackmail material to be found if you dug deeply enough. I’m very careful with data security, none of this ever leaves my local systems.
I’ve been doing this for over ten years now, almost daily. I’ve always had a vague plan that someday I’d feed it all into an AI, it;s only just the past two years where that’s actually started to become a reality. This weekend I’m going to experiment with upgrading my transcription AI to WhisperX, if it does a significantly better job I may have to rerun the whole dang thing through it all. Could take weeks, maybe months. I’m almost hoping it doesn’t work. :)
For example, there’s this class that military helicopter pilots take as part of training for surviving water landings.
This is nothing remotely like the scenario OP is talking about.
If they’ve read enough about the subject then they’ll realize that they’re not drowning. You don’t drown simply from being in water, the actions required to let you float with your face in the air is almost trivial. Knowing what those actions are is enough to get you to the “okay, now how do I go somewhere?” Step.
The point of this post is to ask whether reading about techniques is enough to “at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning.”
And yes, yes it is. It’s not going to make you a good swimmer but it will certainly allow you to accomplish that.
Someone who is able to walk around and control their breathing already has those prerequisite motor skills.
All these “absolutely not” responses are silly, IMO. I speak as someone who’s quite a good swimmer. Practical experience is important to get good, certainly. But if your main objective is simply to not sink and to have a basic ability to propel yourself, I think that’s stuff you can manage quite easily starting from pure book learning. The “not sink” part is key, because that will give you the time to actually experience what it’s like moving around in the water and clarify what that book learning told you.
You probably don’t need 6 months of study, at that point your time would be better spent finding an actual pool. The sorts of basics I’m talking about here that would be useful is stuff like how to float with your face in the air so you can breathe, and once you’ve got that part down how to efficiently kick your legs to propel you rather than just flailing around uselessly. Learn those key tidbits, drill on just that, and then if you find yourself unexpectedly tossed in water you’ll know what to do to not die and get yourself back to the edge.
No, there’s ways to do this without damaging Earth. You could arrange the sphere so that there’s a gap that allows light through specifically to keep Earth lit, or you could use mirrors or straight up artificial light sources to maintain Earth’s sunlight levels.
Or you get over the obsession with maintaining Earth exactly as it always was and carry on without it. Once we’re talking about Dyson spheres a planet like Earth would be a very minor population center. Probably more valuable as a source of additional building material than as a place to live in its own right.