I for sure have 20+ household items that are potentially just as dangerous. Top of mind: hammers, screwdrivers, crowbar, kitchen knives, fireplace poker, brooms, walking stick, various gardening tools,...

"Jeez, you have a broom,... You are a danger to society..."

I made the calculation in another reply to the original post: about 1km in diameter.

Such visuals are striking but somewhat misleading because the human mind has difficulties processing any large data, notably linear to surface to volume ratios.

For reference, if you would have a sphere of all humans on earth, say for ease 10 billion humans, weighing on average 65kg (about 65l or about 0.065m3), how big would the sphere be?

Volume of a sphere V=4/3*π*r^3

V=10*10^9 * 0.065=650000000m3

r=3√(V*3/(4π))=537m radius, so about just 1km in diameter 🤔

Putin is quite old (71) and reportedly ill. He will be dead before this is over, one way or the other.

Like washing hands at the restroom 😬

It is just mind boggling. A galaxy is so immense that the human mind cannot comprehend its size as it contains 100's of millions of stars. If you would count one such star each second, 24/7, it would take you in excess of 1000 days to count all the stars in just one galaxy.

And such a galaxy is a mere grain of dust in the observable universe, itself containing 100's of millions of galaxies.

But what moves me most when I look at such a picture is the realisation that I look at places where life must exist, lots of it, part of it intelligent. And the realisation that at any time there is very probably intelligent creatures thinking about our galaxy like we do about theirs.

Not a chance anything significant happens.

Politicians are pathetic and power hungry with a focus on the next election term. In front of the catastrophy hitting us, they keep stuttering the same old mantra: "bbbbut jooobs, bbbbut ekkkonomy, bbbbut grooowth". The industrial and carbon lobby put all their weight in maintaining this message and status quo. And the general population is woefully unwilling to change its own habits: it's always the others who are the big polluters and must make the effort. "Not me, the industry must... China must... The rich must... Africa must not..."

Avoiding a +2°C average increase? Forget it, that ship has long sailed and cannot be stopped.

With no one doing anything significant, the fact is that the +5°C scenario that climatologists *know* is likely but they dare not communicate too much about will happen. Say bye to ice caps, say bye to low-level coastal lines. Consequences will be a slow cataclysm, still faster than people think, unrolling it's dramatic consequences over the next 50 years, costing a billion humans an early death.

Forget about altering the course of global warming, just prepare for it and make choices to enable you and your loved ones to live a happy life in that coming new world.

One step closer to a world parted in 2 blocks.

One step closer to WW3.

Money as a means of exchange is by definition not meant to be stored. Money as a store of value does not make much sense actually unless money is deflationary, what is not the case with fiat money.

There are tons of options to invest one's money and the inability of people to do it by themselves illustrates the crass level of education of the general population in household budget management, personal finance and investments.

Not much will change until these are taught in lower or middle school. Guess why it's not happening now ? Best to keep the general population in financial serfdom.

A great essay by Ploum illustrating the developpin divide or chasm between a corporate internet and an internet for geeks and people wanting to steer away from that dystopian surveillance economy.

https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html

When your company tells you that your salary cannot be increased because of the salary policy, remember that they wrote the policy: judge and party.

Have you ever explored gopherspace, the predecessor of www?

Exploring the gopherspace is a unique experience to find some unusual texts and documents, notably some archives from the early computer/Unix days.

Gopher is a very light text-based protocol.

Some geeks still keep the gopherspace alive in terms of clients and content.

There is at least one goid Android gopher client: DiggieDog.

There is also a useful gopher extension for Firefox: Overbite (computer versions, not for Android).

Maybe a gopher protocol could be built on top of nostr 🤔.

It is a rare type of rare steak.

He is not Algerian; he is 100% French. 2nd or 3rd generation, but 100% French nonetheless.

As if infighting within the crypto community helps... Divisions and pissing on the ones we like less empowers the existing fiat system.

Empires die, civilizations never fully do.

People think that civilizations are characterized by, a.o, their culture and political and physical reach (aka empire). They are actually defined by their perception of what humanity is, their language, their economic system and the way they perceive the natural universe in scientific or religious terms.

The empire of a declining civilizations may disappear, but the civilization's conceptual constructs remain as strata and foundations for the next social construct to be built on top.

Every gym should have the freedom of enforcing it's preferred filming policy. Every user has the right of choosing a gym according to its preferred policies.

Note: I don't do gym, only outside sports, where there is no camera, in general.

Thanks Dave, you're lovely.

So AI will destroy everyone equally and without feelings?

Be nice to the poor fellows feeding the data models. Otherwise they may introduce a bias into the model such that the AI hates their abusers.