GeoAtreides

"Of course it is a work of fiction, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" - Dumbledore, paraphrased

it's slate, bacteria and free oxygen won't do anything to stone...

>so am constantly context switching

a recipe for omni-disaster

no, but that's how normal distributions work

Do you know that if I own a house and can't pay property taxes, it gets repossessed and sold? this is common. Let's apply it to stocks and billionaires too.

yes, they're called sadists

>you get changes on timescales of minutes to a few hours but not on timescales of days.

again, correct. That's how they're supposed to work. If the air is very slowly getting worse, MOx sensors might not catch it.

That being said, what "very slowly" means depends on the sensor. For example, for Bosch BME680 (very good with 'organics'), you can set the tracking interval between 4 and 28 days (i use 28). Sensirion SEN66 (very good with 'chemicals') can have a tracking interval of up to 1000 hours.

Open-weights models that need closed markets hardware... (as in the markets are closed because you can't afford it)

The Culture is Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, not TESCREAL. Musk picked the cool gadgets and the funny ship names, but missed or ignored the ideology

>you can’t really use it to characterize the chemical content of the air

correct, that's not VOC sensors do. you need specific sensors for different gases for that. All VOC sensors are metal-oxide (MOx) sensors, i suggest reading on their supposed applications and uses.

I know. I find it very... peculiar not reading the Culture books, some of the best SF books ever written, just because Musk also read them. Not to mention they're a very direct critique of his (stated) ideology

>More of a Musk thing, by association, surely? Totally out of the cultural frame.

the things i read on HN...

What sensor, exactly, are you describing here? Different VOC sensors have different gas sensibilities, as well as different algorithms to interpret the gas sensor raw data.

You would think this place would instead discuss The Culture more, but that's not happening either.

Yes, it's democratic. But there's a reason we're not electing doctors and engineers.

having judges and prosecutor elected sure is an american experiment that i'm too european to understand

strange, meat on its own is pretty bland.

> As a mathematician, I had trouble understanding how banks calculate it (as they would obviously not point me at the derivation of the formula)

This is not true? The formula is well known:

A = P*e^(rt)

where"

A = Final amount

P = Principal (initial investment/loan)

r = Annual interest rate (as a decimal)

t = Time in years

e = Euler's number

>It is rather tricky to distill liquor and NOT poison whoever drinks it

sure is news for all the east europeans out there distilling their own rakija

>An economy can keep running even if most people are cut out of it. Production would just reorient to who owns capital, the state, and other AI systems buying from each other.

it's comments like this that make me wish ecology (and trophic chains) was taught in school. It teaches a valuable lessons on systems, energy flows, consumers and producers.

>The system is arcane and arbitrary, and also worked correctly to weed me out of the process. It impressed upon me the importance of following the rules and making a contribution, which honestly impacted how I behaved and thought thereafter. When I was absolutely committed, I was able to get through the process.

The most kafkian thing I have read in my life. With a tinge of orwell: "But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

jesus fucking christ, what a nightmare culture for individuality.

Nothing edgy about existentialism, which the Culture always forces us to confront up close.

>struggle [...] hardwired into living beings, without which they wither away

The reason Sisyphus is happy (or so we imagine) is not because he's struggling for all eternity

Oh, i'm not saying always believe what the author say, far for from it. I personally read authors that said they write one thing when in fact they did not. That's not the case with Iain M Banks, his published Culture books support his declarations made elsewhere.

ah, you now understand: we live in an meaningless universe. Your mistake is thinking struggle, or suffering, gives it meaning.

It doesn't.

Sure, you can just ignore the source text and the author explicit statements that it's a true utopia[1].

They're an anarchistic society, no one has power to overrule any one else.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/comments/kbtylt/ysk_the_...

If I take my parents on trips, buy them nice things, visit often and generally make sure they are happy and fulfilled, are they my pampered pets?

Observe how the response hasn't addressed the safety point at all, just went in for more EU bashing.

you don't know half of it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/reddit-will-block-ol...