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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2024

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  • I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

    Astronauts aren’t superhumans and there is nothing “special” about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren’t many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and “boring” space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won’t be for a century at least). And there isn’t anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our “evolution”. So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for “national pride” or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.

    Also I don’t think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It’s simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).
















  • Same with Compose even though it’s ironically considered native in the Android dev community.

    The easiest way to tell that the app is not native is tooltips (those that appear when you long press on a button in a toolbar). For some reason UI frameworks just can’t agree to display them in the same way, even if they use material design. Compose’s ones are especially bad (some apps like Play store actually have different kinds of tooltips on different screens, meaning they use multiple UI frameworks in the same app).




  • There are many uses for AI that governments are interested in. Deepfakes, cheaper and more subtle ways to influence public opinions on the internet (by being able to instantly deploy thousands or millions of fully automated bots that are able to express their “opinions” in a way that is indistinguishable from humans), accurate and automated analysis of public discourse on the large scale, etc. And if you have an edge over other countries then you are able to influence their public opinions and detect (and possible counteract) when they try to influence you.

    AI is very good at analysing human-generated data, as well as generating data that looks human-created. Any entity that deals with (and desires to control) a large number of people (of which governments are prime examples) will find many uses for it.



  • No, but there are many obstacles. Besides usual ones common to migration in general, due to sanctions people who want to emigrate won’t be able to easily access their money left in Russia. Also if they speak up against Putin everything they left in Russia will be confiscated and returning back (for any reason including possible deportation) will be dangerous (Russia is smart enough to not charge dissenters living abroad so that they won’t be able to claim asylum, but when they return they can be arrested. This strategy was used since USSR times). This makes emigration a risky proposition unless you already have a high-paying job lined up for you, and can receive foreign citizenship in a short time.