Oh, those were cassette tapes of My Book of Bible Stories. Barr had a very grandfatherly voice, so they had him narrate.

Let’s clear some terms. Intelligence and consciousness are separate things that our language tends to conflate. Consciousness is the interpretation of sensory input. Hallucinations are what happen when your consciousness is misinterpreting that data.

You actually hallucinate to a minor degree all the time. For instance, pareidolia often takes the form of seeing human faces in rocks and clouds. Our consciousness is really tuned to patterns that look like human faces, and it sometimes gets it wrong.

We can actually do this to image recognition models. A model was tuned to finding dogs in movies. It could then modify the movie to show what it thought was there. It was then deliberately overtrained, and it output a movie with dogs all over the place.

The models definitely have some level of consciousness. Maybe not a lot, but some.

This is what I like about AI research. We learn about our own minds while studying it. But capitalism isn’t using it in ways that are net helpful to humanity.

I presume that you, too, had to go to sleep listening to Barr’s voice on this one.

DnD tends to be balanced between the levels of 5 through 12. Most modules sit in there.

But I’m not saying anything controversial when I note that 5e CR is a bad way to do encounters.

China has a working prototype today. There weren’t any theoretical issues, someone just needed to put the money down.

Same thing with fusion, really.

It removes the “hope intelligent life evolves fast enough”.

If it was only Uraniam, then you need U-235. That has a half life of about 700M years. Cut in half 2 more times, and there’s almost none left. So if intelligent life took another 1.5B years to develop on Earth (which it easily could have), then that path is cut off.

With Thorium, the sun would probably expand to a red giant first.

Thorium-232 has an extremely long half life (longer than the age of the universe) and it’s reasonably abundant. That’s the isotope useful for the thorium fuel cycle.

So it’s not quite that bad for threading this needle. The fuel cycle is a little more complicated than uranium–it’s not fertile as it is–and that could slow down R&D of a new nuclear program by getting stuck at some step.

Thanks. There’s way too many people who don’t see the problems with rooftop residential solar. Commercial/industrial rooftop can work out, but fields are the cheapest electricity you can get.

They fight amongst themselves, too.

They’re all sociopaths. You can use that fact to predict how they function.

Yes, that’s probably correct. It’ll be late in the race, because both of them are pig headed and want the other one to do it. That will only drag down whomever does end up staying in. It’ll be a glorious game of political chicken. I’m ordering all the popcorn now.

How data driven are cartels, anyway? Seems like they should be getting stats on loss rate to busts and calculating that in. They run as a business and want real numbers.

They’re a group that builds their own autonomous submarines. They gotta be calculating this.

The general election won’t have ranked choice. Adams and Cuomo may end up splitting the “willing to vote for corrupt dirtbag” ticket and let Mamdani cruise to victory.

We can dream.

Like a Bafang? Because those controllers are completely customizable with open source tools. That’s how I built my ebike, and it can set custom assist limits.

And they’ll be fucked when the company involved stops updating their app. It will happen sooner or later.

Why would you say “individual families maybe” but stop there? What’s stopping a larger social unit than a family from existing?

Just a note on the timeline. Reagan’s policies were already in full swing by the time Hillary wrote that book. The Clintons were political nobodies from Arkansas when Reagan was in office. Bill was governor, but can you name the governor of Arkansas today without looking it up? I’m guessing most people outside the state can’t.

My numbers were wrong:

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost

Hardware costs (module, inverters, etc.) are about half the price of the installed residential cost. The rest is “soft costs”, and labor is included in it, but it’s a pretty small fraction of it. The “other” soft costs are the big thing–stuff like permitting and planning and sales taxes. Better efficiency might somewhat lower it, but not a lot.

Notice that when things get to utility-scale, those soft costs shrink a lot. The best way to do solar is in large fields of racks, and it isn’t even close. The solution to this is community solar, where you and your neighbors go in on a field. Some states ban this, and that should change.

At least it’s a testable hypothesis. That’s way farther than most pseudoscience does.

If HR people unionized, I might just toss them in the same category as police unions. They are mobilized against the working class, and we don’t need to show solidarity with them.

IIRC, this sort of thing has been floated before. The issue is that you can’t just focus that much light on the solar cell. It’ll burn out.