Lugh

He perpetually over-promises. I'm more amazed they've let him lead America's space efforts for going back to the Moon. There's no way his stated timeline with StarShip will be achieved.

Many people will have heard of 'Havana Syndrome' - a medical condition reported primarily by U.S. diplomatic, intelligence, and military officials stationed in overseas locations. Most of the affected individuals reported an acute onset of symptoms associated with a perceived localized loud sound, followed by chronic symptoms that lasted for months, such as balance and cognitive problems, insomnia, and headaches. Some people disputed if 'Havana Syndrome' was real. However here we see the perfect mechanism for making something similar happen.

There's probably upsides to this. Medicines like Ozempic seem to profoundly change human behavior for positive outcomes. This could have the same potential.

Even more insane is the price. 10c per 1 km. Wow. If they were that cheap in the west who would want to spend the several hundreds of dollars/euros per month it costs to own a car.

Thanks, I subscribed to them.

Google logins and similar?

I've never seen that done, but I'm going to look into it, as it would be good.

trick for ordinary users is getting here with minimum clicks.

Yes, added to that the clunkiness of finding and subscribing to other instances is a huge turn off. I wish we could have "special" accounts for new users, that were already subscribed to a top 50-100 curated instances. Sadly, AFAIK You can't do that.

There's 2 issues here.

1. We want to be very selective with our use of automod & pinned posts/comments. It can easily move to accusations of spam.

2. We've tried emphasizing the open-source, no-tracking aspect before. It doesn't seem to attract much interest.

Most Redditors are casual users there for content. Only a small minority care about the issues that motivate the fediverse. What we'd like to do is bring some of the large group here; but they will have to be motivated by something else.

We have regular posting here now, often with topics not on the sub-reddit. My hunch is that an approach like - "Like r/futurology? - come to our other site for extra content" - might work better.

Science fiction has given us the idea of super-advanced android robots like those in 'Westworld', 'Megan', or 'Humans'. But long before that point is reached, much simpler robots will be widespread and very useful. It feels like we are on the verge of that happening. There are almost twenty humanoid robot start-ups around the world. Here we can see how many of them may soon be successful.

Multimodal AI is already here. The robot start-ups don't have to build it, they just have to integrate it into their existing products. These robots can be cheap or expensive, but that doesn't matter so much. The real power is in the AI.

Declining living standards, stagnant wages and Inflation is already leading to political instability around the world. The rise in support for fascism and the far right are directly linked to these factors. It seems climate change is already making these problems worse.

There's another knock-on effect from this. One of the traditional central bank responses to inflation is higher interest rates. America has so much government debt it's spending more money on the interest payments than it is on the military. Those annual interest payments are now at $1 trillion. It seems climate change will make them bigger by pushing up interest rates.

There are some interesting lessons to be learned here. It seems having lots of near-empty space is driving this. Solar is being built in poorer rural areas with low planning and permitting requirements. More densely populated places can't always take such an approach easily, but it points to the fact that planning authorization may be placing a bottleneck on reducing climate change damage.

The AI Investor hype bubble always seemed ultimately doomed. AI will be profoundly deflationary, and will likely lead us to end up dominated by a very different economic system than today, with a far smaller role for capitalism, stock markets, and investors.

This article is interesting as it neatly illustrates the schizophrenia at the heart of the AI investor worldview. On the one hand, it berates people who made claims that 300 million jobs would be automated - because they've failed to live up to that "promise" to AI investors fast enough.

What you never see is anyone joining the dots, and asking what sort of economic model society will evolve to when job automation is at that scale. (Hint: It probably won't have much room for high stock market or property prices, or prosperous investors).

I'm fascinated by people's tendencies to anthropomorphize AI & robotics; it's hard to see how this is truly analogous to the human mind and depression.

Yes. I don't think enough people realise the significances of this fact. Unlike us, AI will never peak; it will always relentlessly get better.