TheOtherHobbes
5.5 Sol would anticipate what I wanted and get it right more than often than not. 5.6 Sol kept anticipating, but would do things that made no sense in context. 6.1 Sol seems to like that but even more so. It spends a lot of time thinking, but the quality of the decisions isn't outstanding.
In Polish '...ski' is masculine and '...ska' is feminine. The prefix stays the same, so a brother and sister have slightly different surnames. (Like 'Wolski' vs 'Wolska.')
In the US some immigrants forgot this, so you get American women with a '...ski' surname.
The crater shows the road was destroyed. Aircraft skins are much thinner and less robust than road coverings.
Be realistic - we've gone from "You, yes you, will be able to do an incredibly new and fun thing with Shiny New Technology™" to "You probably won't have a job or drinking water, your TV and phone are tracking you, all creative work is now worthless, the planet is on fire, AI may kill us all, but buy into our IPO anyway" in less than ten years.
TNG is very, very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve. Picard never struggles with existential moral ambiguity. Even when he (rarely) fails, he's always The Good Man.
The utopian slant is appealing and we can't help cheering for him, but DS9 revealed there was some sleight of hand behind the narrative.
Of the series since, I think only Battlestar Galactica approached similar complexity. Maybe Westworld, which got quite abstract and interesting towards the end.
The Expanse is more by the numbers. It's basically class war in space, with the military, the aristocracy, and the peasants slugging it out, while a dragon rolls in and threatens to eat everything. The writing is very challenge -> response -> partial solution over and over, and for me it just doesn't have the depth or the emotional reach. (Or the acting chops.)
Getting agents to deal with their own versions of these issues is an interesting experiment.
Systems can have goal-seeking agency with zero self-awareness. Very simple systems can do this surprisingly well. There's an entire branch of engineering called control theory which has mathematical tools for modelling and building these systems.
Systems can have abstract self-awareness through introspection loops, but no subjective human-like consciousness.
We don't know if a mechanical system can have a subjective human-like consciousness. We likely never will, because there is no objective measurement device for human-like consciousness.
We tend to assume humans have subjective awareness by default, because life would get very complicated it we didn't. But really all we see are behaviours.
Intelligence - which pretty much reduces to pattern recognition and abstraction, and effective modelling of future outcomes from past inputs - is orthogonal to all of these.
Time keeping is a solved problem. Why would anyone spend varying shades of fortune on something that is functionally inferior, but explicitly labels itself a "superlative chronometer"?
It's an actor's job to dramatise our projections, so from that POV he did a legendary job with TNG.
But there's a certain amount of learned skill involved. I know someone who used to work backstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She said that she'd all these famous names playing cards backstage, they'd get their call, turn on the juice, stride on stage, say their lines with the appropriate presence and gravitas, then turn the juice off again after the scene and pick up the card game where they left off.
Stewart's choice of roles and support for causes suggests there was more than that involved for him.
He wasn't Picard in real life, but he wasn't just acting either.
Different people may be on top, with different aims (...arguable, but let's pretend.)
But there will always be a government of some sort making the big decisions for the benefit of its ruling clique.
The case for a college education as a product has become less and less convincing as the job market value of credentials has dropped and costs have risen.
I would not assume college in its current form is going to be a thing 20 years from now, except - possibly - as a legacy finishing school for the extremely rich.
Everyone else is going to be scrabbling for income in an economy where a lot of what used to be white collar work is done by AI, and a lot of what used to be blue collar work is done by robots.
The critical skills will be creative independence, improvisation, and systems thinking - the ability to hack the social and financial economy to invent paid work instead of applying for it.
It's much less easy to convert it to something you can actually spend. Even if you can get it to a buyer, they'll always offer you less than you expect/want.
Reputable dealers have KYC reporting duties of their own. Disreputable dealers... may have other ideas.
It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.
Medical emergency cover is 24 hours already. Some factories run 24 hours. So do some transport networks.
There would be huge benefits for commuting because traffic would be spread out.
The practical issues have more to do with noise and energy use, not the "social contract."
So a lot of people are blindsided by the reality of either, and both together can be unimaginably difficult.
Aside from cash and life stability issues - both very real - I suspect that one of the reasons for the drop in birth rates is that because of the Internet, more people are seeing what parenting involves before they start.
Previously it was more of a rosy and aspirational "Let's have kids!", now it's "You mean I'll be severely sleep deprived for years?!"
Robots could help with all of this just by doing basic chores and automating daily bureaucracy.
In the best of all possible worlds that would free up more time for personal relationships, which can get very stressed by unavoidable demands that are basically a full-time job.
Th policy has just been struck down, but we'll see whether that makes a practical difference.
IME ICE are simply a death squad. Immigration is a pretext.
The goal is political terror against regime opponents, not a rational and proportional response to people without paperwork.
If you wanted to get rid of the assholes - incredibly difficult, because they take many forms - you'd have to reinvent corporate culture in the US to make it less extractive and performative and more substance-based and cooperative.
He owns the company and all of its decisions. He is literally accountable to no one, from the board down.
The only viable action here is to do what the Brazilian government are going to do - document the abuses, and fine the company into oblivion and/or ban it if it doesn't behave itself.
If the US ever recovers democracy itself, pass the documentation on to the new US government.
That's not his fault specifically, and it's possible someone else would have invented the same tech eventually.
But he had a gift for sawing the hard edges off tech and making it palatable. Adtech and social media both took full advantage of that, and there's no evidence he saw that as a problem.
Let's look at some real numbers instead of a folksy parable about grandma. Here are recent stats about rent arrears:
https://www.baselane.com/resources/unpaid-rent-debt-statisti...
And rental affordability:
In 2026, a full-time worker needs to earn $34.73 per hour to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home in the U.S. and $29.19 to afford a modest one-bedroom rental.
And mortgage affordability:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco...
None of these are heading in the right direction.
The UK signed an agreement with the US to supply research for the Manhattan Project, in the naive belief the results would be shared.
The US said "Nuh uh - that's classified" and the UK had to develop its own program from scratch.
Then the US lobbied to have that thrown away so the UK would be locked into Polaris and then Trident.
And so on. NATO has very much been a showroom for US arms sales, and competition has been discouraged - not always effectively, but the implied pressure has always been there.
Our monkey minds evolved to throw rocks at birds, and our metaphors are based on concepts like position, velocity, and temperature. We added first-level abstractions like energy and cause-and-effect, then built higher level abstractions on those basic concepts.
QM clearly doesn't work like that. It's probabilistic, possibly non-local, possibly subjective, possibly a holographic projection of some underlying reality that is nothing like this one, and its relationship with causality is slippery.
We have a mathematical UI for it, but that's not at all the same thing as understanding the machinery on the other side of the UI.
"Weird" is underselling it.