• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: April 24th, 2024

help-circle

  • Dear sweet christ, I’ve been the manager of a medium sized non profits databases (everything other than finance because they’re special, as in using an overpriced wacky proprietary tool because they are used to it, oh and probably commiting fraud) and, as the author references, I have actually had one of the members of the board get a bunch of other people with 0 technical competence to try to get me to ‘implement blockchain technology’ on postgres.

    Non of those fucking morons could ever provide an actual project outline. None of these fucking morons even knew their own teams processes, and they would all change depending on team member asked and date.

    Not relevant to this story, but basically I am now disabled and living off of SSDI after being assaulted and seriously injured.

    I am 99% sure, after years of working with completely technically incompetent managers, I am never going to work in tech again.

    I would literally rather be poor, do uber eats delivery when I feel like it, and slowly build a video game, by myself, not even to make money, just to give my tech brain something to sate it.

    I am too autistic to be able to handle the constant stream of bullshit and social manipulation/pressure from everywhere I have ever worked.


  • Ive been calling this the reverse turing test:

    Can you tell that a known human being is not an ‘AI’ chatbot, based on text correspondence?

    Apparently we are now just going to have AI simulacra of ourselves date each other on dating apps and meet with each other on zoom.

    The meeting thing in particular is so fucking insane.

    Problem: Meetings waste time and accomplish nothing!

    Solution: Don’t hire or train competent people, instead, automate meetings, the transcripts of which will presumably still have to be read, and will likely not make any sense, thus necessitating more meetings.

    The goal of technological civilization apparently truly is to create maximum misery via maximizing meetings.




  • I saw the prequel trilogy as basically a middle schooler and thought wow, is this a movie series for babies?

    Then I went back to playing SWG and Rogue Squadron as I had already beaten the old X Wing and Tie Fighter MSDOS/early Windows games. I had many more experiences that to me felt like actual Star Wars in those games.

    I still think the prequels largely suck, and good dear god the new trilogy.

    I wish they had just taken some of the better stuff from the EU and made a new trilogy out of that. You know like a new non prequel trilogy based around taking on Thrawn, in a very fragmented, very politically complex environment? With complex, multi faceted characters?

    I guess we have Thrawn now kind of but bleck.

    I would say make a mini series around Boba Fett or Dash Rendar or Mara Jade. But seeing as how similar series have actually turned out, at this point I am just going back to 1998 and saying that nothing Star Wars since then is actually canon, in my mind fortress or whatever.

    They even managed to fuck up Mando.

    Christ, at least its not as embarrassing as the Master Cheeks show.

    People tell me Andor is good but I am as used to a new Star Wars movie or show being bad as I am to a new Assassins Creed game being hokey, boring, time wasting and overpriced.



  • It was not really what we would know as science, as it does not revolve around strictly constructed experimentation, hypothesis, or reproduceablility or predictivity, so much as it was the concepts of logic itself, of arguing about things with rationality and rhetoric.

    A whole lot of Greek philosophy uses what seem like decent arguments to lead to decent sounding explanations that do not actually work if explored further or tested, though there are genuine examples of actual experimentation that still hold up fairly well, like Eratosthenes approximating the size of the Earth based on geometry and shadows.

    Theyre basically just known for formally getting the ball rolling of inquisitive discourse on the nature of the world.


  • Basically, Empedocles came up with the 4 ‘roots’ of air (smoke), water, earth and fire, Plato expanded on how they ‘worked’ and interacted, as well as naming them ‘elements’, and Aristotle expanded further on this and added the concept of aether, which is what stuff in the heavens must be made of.

    Probably the most popularly read material on this both in ancient times and today is Aristotle and Plato. Plato also associated the first four elements with Platonic solids.

    Atomic theory of today is really only named such because Atom is roughly the Greek word for ‘indivisible’. Their indivisible atoms were of the four or five elements as they had no understanding of Chemistry.

    Chemistry also linguistically does come from Alchemy, which comes from Al Khemia, which roughly in context means the study of the wisdom of Egypt.

    This is because basically after Rome broke apart, many of the remaining scholarly texts of all kinds of philosophers largely only remained intact in Egypt.

    So you had the Greek or Coptic texts translated into Arabic, studied and preserved in Arab speaking areas, which were then reacquired by various Europeans and translated into Latin or other local language. Roughly, the texts of this period which attempted to further philosophize more detailed understanding of elements, mixed with a huge amount of religious and superstitious content, became Alchemy.

    When modern science began roughly with the Renaissance, well a lot of those guys were studied in Alchemy and attempting to apply more rigorous and testable logic to it, and we end up with the word Chemistry.

    Thats a really long way to say that basically Atom as a word in modern parlance basically is just Greek for something that cannot be further divided, and is named such to basically honor the tradition of it all getting kicked off by the ancient Greeks.

    Actual ancient Greek Elemental theory has basically nothing in common with modern Chemistry, and of course we now know that Atoms are actually divisible into Protons Neutrons and Electrons, and Protons and Neutrons are further divisible into various Quarks.


  • … by an astounding margin.

    The paper is paywalled and I am too lazy to look for a free/open link, but the shown graphs indicate many squared meters of energy concentrations of 1 - 10 * 10^39 joules.

    The entire energy output of the Sun, in a year, is around 10^34 joules. 6.6 * 10^39 joules is apparently the estimated total mass energy of the Moon, if you basically perfectly E = mc^2 transformed it into pure energy.

    In 2010 the estimated total energy consumption of humans on Earth was 5 * 10^20 joules.

    So we just need something around ten billion * ten billion more joules than that, presumably generated by something i dont know, naval frigate sized?

    Yeah. Faaaaaar off indeed.