smpritchard.bsky.social
Aspiring Astronaut | Hard SF Writer | Space Artist | Amateur (hopefully one day professional) Astronomer | They/Them | Opinions my own
777 posts
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Intellectually I understand why beamed sails (either laser or particle beam) are just generally better for interstellar travel, but giant-ass nuclear rockets are just an entire vibe. They feel right and proper, a true interstellar vehicle.
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ah, well. nevertheless
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He sounds like if someone put an LLM inside a flesh suit.
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This kind of violence is inevitable when the far right is allowed to spread blatant lies and misinformation without consequence. I fully consider the GOP and their media outlets to be domestic terrorists. I fear this is going to be our new normal as the US devolves into a fascist police state.
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I mean it this point they may have also just been a cop, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
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If all 5 catch a signal, how accurately can they pin it on the sky?
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A perfect message for Pride from our canonically trans king
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lmao they blocked me
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...I will grant that it is in principle possible based on the fact that nature can produce them (general intelligences), but there is nothing to support the conjecture that an artificial one would magically become rapidly self-improving and initiate the mythical "hard takeoff".
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Exponential curves do not approach infinity in nature though. In practice they always become S-curves as whatever process is growing inevitably bumps up against constraints. This can continue in cycles as new resources are discovered up until fundamental limits are reached. As for AGI...
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we have enough for everyone and the reason we don't just give people what they need is that these people who have made themselves into monsters value having power to abuse over the well-being of everyone on earth including themselves
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Huh, I guess you really can just publish any old nonsense these days.
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I think we're centuries away from that at best. I also think that if you wanted to design an "intelligent" machine, using an LLM is like trying to paint with a toaster. Entirely the wrong tool to use. But of course these techbros don't actually care about "AGI", they just want to get obscenely rich.
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People have the right to protest. This kind of dramatic escalation is meant to incite a response they can use as an excuse to hurt and even kill people. Deploying the military against citizens is the action of cowards that know their power is illegitimate.
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Remainder*
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Cut the "defense" budget in half, triple the NSF, and dump the reminder into housing, universal healthcare, and free college
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📌
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The average reporter (let alone the average internet poster) has no idea other launch providers and human-crewed spacecraft exist.
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Doesn't Gwynne Shotwell actually run things at SpaceX? I don't think he can actually do that.
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I was gonna say, I don't think Musk actually has the authority to do that. I'd also pay good money to watch Shotwell toss him out an airlock.
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He can't actually do that though, right? Like surely Gwynne and the other actual adults in charge of SpaceX would just laugh at him and tell him to fuck off?
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the centaurs are all furries. I will not be taking questions at this time.
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not a single one.
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Personally I'm seriously considering going to another country for my master's (and hopefully later PhD)
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gotta watch for those Titanian tholinworms
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One day someone will walk those dunes, I hope.
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He's truly the used-car salesman of space exploration, and no-one in recent memory has tarnished the image of it more than him.
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Don't get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with Artemis and the SLS/Orion architecture, but this is clearly them trying to dump federal money directly into Starship, which is to say, just grifting the government to enrich SpaceX and therefore Musk.
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welp
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AND they have to demonstrate an uncrewed Lunar landing with it, and also get the thing human rated, somehow. All before 2027. That's just not happening.
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The "publish or perish" paradigm is slowly destroying science and academia more broadly. Number of publications and number of citations is not the sole factor for determining good science.
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At this point I'm convinced the only way starship got selected was some kind of corruption or political dealing. That it was apparently the only one deemed ready enough for A3 is dire.