> you'd have to decide when to stop binge-watching, because the show would always go on.
I would argue that this is already the case. I'd hazard a guess that almost any concept one is interested in, that can be synthesized in a few words (e.g. "deep-ocean human habitats", or "ethics and techniques for this niche psychological framework"), has an infinite rabbithole available online: usually, starting from Wikipedia, there are countless pages and videos about and around the topic.
So the ability to stop binging, i.e. sufficient self-awareness, is already a pretty useful skill, and it will be increasingly necessary.
Yes, I fully agree. I was hesitating while pressing the submit button, but there was this thought of a never ending show in my head which felt uncanny.
It could evolve to a point where the my version of Breaking Bad would be a completely parallel universe to the one you would be offered. Suddenly one variant could become more interesting and so popular that it would become the official version. There's a lot that can be thought and discussed about such a capability.
But in essence you're right, unlimited binge-watching is already a reality.
No.
Please don't do that.
It's called Pick-Up Artistry, and it is toxic.
You will benefit more if you try to be a considerate human being, and not treat women like prizes, or prey to be captured. This way, you actually have a chance to healthy relationships.
Meh, honestly you can do it. It's more so a cultural thing. It also has nothing to do with treating people like prizes or prey, in a chill environment people are okay conversing with total strangers, but its very location dependent.
I met my last girlfriend this way. I know friends who found partners randomly chatting on the train, in ubers (pool when that was a thing), at bus stops etc.
Just dont be an asshole or a creep/creepy looking, and youd be surprised how receptive people can be
> your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk
Citation needed for the above.
Maybe their standard of living largely comes from the high taxes imposed on the rich. Or maybe it comes from decades of free education, or maybe from the oil reserves of some scandinavian states.
Or maybe we just don't know; and that's ok too. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so sure that the protestant work ethic is the necessary and sufficient thing for a good standard of living.
Soviet had all of those, but didn't allow risk taking founders. So far not a single country which doesn't enable risk taking founders to create big companies has succeeded in creating a good economy. So the data is really in the risk taking founders favor.
Virtually all improvements in living standards occur from the creation of new, more efficient products. Virtually all new products are created by risk-taking entrepreneurs, or very close equivalents inside larger corporations.
I haven't done any research, but my set of anecdata (3 Internet providers from Romania, 2 national and one regional) says that providers do have ways of bypassing their router at Layer3. These ways are not advertised, sometimes not even documented. But they should be just a phone-call away.
If the router is also used as a media-convertor (upstream is Fiber or DSL or coax), they should be able to set it to "bridging mode", where it will function as a Layer2 device (switch), thus allowing the customer to use their own Layer3 device (router).
IMAP is not an email provider, it's just another protocol for reading your mail. It is the successor of POP3, having several key improvements. Somewhat like HTTP2 is to HTTP.
If both your email provider and your client (aka mail reading software) support it, there really is no reason to use POP instead of IMAP.
Yes, I'm aware of IMAP as a protocol. My point has to do with the location and trust. I need to be able to trust the server as a point of mail storage.
While I agree that POP still uses the server as a go-between, at least the mail doesn't reside on POP servers forever. Whereas with IMAP, if I have 25+ years of email I'd like to be able to view and archive and search, all of that has to sit at the server rather than at the client.
I'm not at all educated on POP/IMAP but I always thought the deletion thing with POP was just by convention and there's nothing in IMAP preventing you from doing the same there.
getmail supports deletion as an IMAP client, for example.
In the grand scheme, the "tons" (or rather, gigajoules) of energy wasted by the Proof-of-Work are nothing. The Sun radiation that hits Earth every second dwarfs this consumption.
Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death ever so slightly.
I guess my point is, some uses of energy are acceptable, even desirable. And every use of energy accelerates the heat death of the universe, but we humans are insignificant on this scale; there is really nothing that we can do to even accelerate our Sun's death. We're not even Kardashev-1 :)
I was going to point that the universe is not relevant here, only humans, the energy we produce and how we produce it matters. But then I realized that either your comment must be tongue in cheek or you are trying to hard to rationalize this than there is no point on try to convince you.
Okay, I admit my comment was a bit rushed, and I apologize for that. It's not tongue-in-cheek, and I don't feel that I'm rationalizing things (but then, I guess I wouldn't feel it even if I were).
I was trying to view things in a bigger picture. Ofcourse we are using too much fossil fuels at this time. Ofcourse our functioning is pretty unsustainable.
What I am trying to say, is that sometimes high energy usage is acceptable. Should we stop launching things in orbit? Should we stop the LHC?
I think that for _some_ people, having a thing such as bitcoin is worth the energy expenditure. It is perfectly okay that for you, it _isn't_ acceptable. I am not trying to convince you of anything. Just affirming that there exists a subset of humans that find value in it, and therefore are willing to allocate resources -- be that electrical energy, fiat money, or mindshare.
> Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death ever so slightly.
The discussion about energy use of Bitcoin is within the context of the effectively closed system of Earth.
Until such a time that solar generated electricity is too plentiful to meter and ubiquitous, Bitcoin mining will cause huge demand for fossil fuel based energy, with the associated consequences for climate change.
All the plants, algae, and everything with chlorophyll would beg to differ. I really think we cannot consider Earth a closed system, because we're not a rogue planet in the insterstellar void.
Our solar _system_ would be a better approximation of a "closed system".
Solar radiation is the only significant exogenous input to the otherwise closed system of earth, and I directly addressed it in the context of solar electricity production needing to grow by a huge amount to offset the carbon footprint of BTC mining.
> Our solar _system_ would be a better approximation of a "closed system".
That's both pedantic and irrelevant. The rest of the solar system (other than the Sun) have practically zero bearing in any way on the energy consumption of BTC mining, or the damage to the climate it causes when powered by fossil fuels.
>In the grand scheme, the "tons" (or rather, gigajoules) of energy wasted by the Proof-of-Work are nothing.
>but we humans are insignificant on this scale; there is really nothing that we can do to even accelerate our Sun's death. We're not even Kardashev-1 :)
I am shocked that you are brave enough to write these things in the same comment. The problem with Bitcoin and proof of work is that it's literally capable of consuming our sun and all energy in the universe.
Just a playful joke. He's a US politician who ran for president in 2016 as a third-party (i.e. no chance of victory) candidate.
At one point he was asked about his long term view on global warming, and he said "In billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right? So global warming is in our future."
Gary's response was obviously tongue-in-cheek, even somewhat flippant. My comment wasn't trying to be ironic, though I now see that it could be interpreted so.
I feel like i've been in your shoes, in a past life. I've come to believe that happiness is like the horizon, or the sunset. It's a fuzzy concept, which disappears if you go too close to it.
The horizon is not a place, and the sunset is not a moment. They are aggregate phenomena. You can't set them as targets, because they don't exist physically. You can observe them as composite entities, emerging in the right context.
Such is happiness. You can't set it as an objective, because it doesn't exist. And chasing it directly will only cause you suffering. Instead, try to set smaller goals, and let it emerge on its own.
Take care of your physical health. Take care of your relationships. Allocate time, not much, but regularly, for activities that you like (hobbies). Widen your intellectual horizons, e.g. by reading or listening to diverse people. Get better at what you do professionally. Try to find some form of meditation that works for you.
Occasionally, try writing long, thoughtful comments on forums :)
Try to do these without looking too far into it; just trust the process. And at some point, you'll have the revelation "man, it's been quite some time since i felt unhappy!"
AFAIK, there is no canonical time in relativity. There is the "local time", which is what your wristwatch shows, and the "time in place X", where X can be Earth, Mars, or some spaceship. These times might not be in sync, and they might even be distorted. Because, if place X is moving relative to you at a significant percentage of lightspeed, their seconds will be longer. Also, the further X is, the blurrier the concept of simultaneity becomes. Which makes the question "what time is it _now_ in place X" moot :)
If relativity don’t allow time travel doesn’t it make time canonical? A clock on Earth from telescope might look jumpy but only in forward direction after compensating for distance I think
Looking at a clock from Earth through a telescope isn't as straightforward as you'd think.
The image you see of that clock is actually light (photons) emitted from Earth, which will take a while to reach you - like, 1 year, if you're 1 lightyear away. During that year, Earth has moved on, maybe blew itself apart. But you can't even tell, because information can't reach you faster than light :)
So you can only see Earth's past, not Earth's "now". The further you are, the more "now" loses meaning.
Yeah but can it ever go back, other than by backing off faster than the speed of light? If it can’t then it’s at least monotonic, even if it’s not rate constant
All observers observer all clocks to advance monotonically forward in time, regardless of their location or relative speed, unless the clock is moving at the speed of light. But the rate that each clock is observed to advance at depends on things like relative speed, acceleration, and the curvature of spacetime.
... unless it's the system clock in Linux, with the hardware RTC set to be interpreted as local time, and one is watching a system boot on a machine that is set up as east of the Prime Meridian (i.e. the hardware RTC is ahead of UTC). (-:
That's not how orbital dynamics work; a slight push in any direction won't change the orbit enough for that thing to not be a problem anymore.
To make something fall into the sun, one needs quite a bit of delta-vee, which means energy. However, if the thing isn't in any hurry (and I imagine waste isn't), one can simply attach a solar sail with a tiny computer for steering it, and let it brake for the next few thousand years.
(Kerbal Space Program should be part of school curricula)
