crapwittyname
@crapwittyname@feddit.uk
- Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible 3 days ago:
100% agree. I hope to be alive to see it. Popsci would have me believe it’s coming any day now.
I kind of get the no waste framing, since the nuance is too technical for most people to bother with. If we say anything more complex than three words about waste, then we will lose public support for fusion. It’s still not right, but I see a greater cause in that lie than the increase in clicks which is the driver for the lie that it’ll be ready tomorrow. - Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible 3 days ago:
Recycling is definitely an important aspect of developing the technology to a maturity where it forms part of a power grid. But it’s not beyond the wit of man. If we can crack Q>5 for nuclear fusion, surely we can crack economically viable recycling for LLW. I don’t think it’s worth abandoning research on fusion over this issue.
- Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible 3 days ago:
I understand there’s no waste with a half life >100 years, and the activated steel can be recycled a few decades after commissioning?
www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/…/El-Guebaly SESE-KN-2.pdf - Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 3 days ago:
Wait wait wait… Islam is more protected by the state? Can you go into detail a bit there please?
- Comment on Give me some good ones 6 days ago:
I would agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.
- Comment on China calls for Maduro’s immediate release, accuses US of breaching international law 1 week ago:
It’s absolutely not pure delusion. That’s absolutely hyperbole.
There’s no definitive metric for “who is the better country”, because the number of different methods of measuring that are on a similar order of magnitude as the number of crimes committed.
We could go back and forth all day, all week, all year, shouting ‘Tiananmen Square’ and ‘MKUltra’ at each other and prove absolutely nothing, and in the end we would just look like USA and China stans, which I’m not. In this case, China does not have any moral high ground from which to decry the US’s current imperialism, so they can fuck off. I’d be saying the same thing if a US senator complained about China’s genocide of the Uyghurs. They are no better and can fuck off with that. - Comment on China calls for Maduro’s immediate release, accuses US of breaching international law 1 week ago:
100%. A big party of growing up and taking responsibility is recognising and unlearning the propaganda you were subjected to as a child, if that’s even possible.
- Comment on China calls for Maduro’s immediate release, accuses US of breaching international law 1 week ago:
I don’t think you can get a cigarette paper between them, morally. Tibet, Hong Kong, Uighurs, Taiwan are all things that spring to mind and that’s without having to think about it or do any research.
- Comment on China calls for Maduro’s immediate release, accuses US of breaching international law 1 week ago:
Yeah, I am disappointed that the USA is now no better than China, but it was always very marginal.
- Comment on China calls for Maduro’s immediate release, accuses US of breaching international law 1 week ago:
‘International norms’ like freedom from torture and genocide? Freedom of speech?
Fuck off China, you’re no better than the USA. - Comment on Starlink VP confirms ‘dangerously close’ Chinese launch incident — close call saw satellite pass within 200 meters of Starlink travelling at over 17,400mph 4 weeks ago:
This is a problem as well. As the satellites deorbit they vaporise, leaving aluminium oxide nanoparticles (and other metallic gases, volatiles etc) in the atmosphere, destroying ozone and building up over decades.
So it’s not just the light pollution, or the ruining of ground based astronomy. Or even the dangerous amount of clutter polluting LEO, making spaceflight even more risky. Starlink is bad news for the environment, but it’s to be expected since we’ve seen how carelessly spacex have destroyed the ecosystem in Texas. - Comment on Why does every commercial depiction of honey involve one of this things? Literally nobody has ever seen one of these in real life 4 weeks ago:
How are you that certain? Do you live in a hermetically sealed clean room?
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 4 weeks ago:
It’þ bigoted if you aþk me. Not my fault I have a þpeech impediment.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 5 weeks ago:
Oh do fuck off. That’s the gist of what you said. I didn’t put it in quotes because I was paraphrasing.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 5 weeks ago:
Meh, your guess is as good as mine.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 1 month ago:
Science grad with 10 years engineering experience. I had to turn down a lot of jobs before I found one that didn’t involve killing people. It took two years. I’m paid about half of what I could get if I sold my morals. Totally worth it.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 1 month ago:
For what it’s worth, I believe at the moment of death, people can no longer lie to themselves and have to face what they’ve done through the eyes of their inner child. Some people have these realisations at some earlier point, too. But I don’t believe anyone gets away with it.
That’s what “live each day like it’s going to be your last” means to me. Face up to the decisions you made as if you’re your own jury, because eventually you will be. - Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 1 month ago:
Did you intend this to be paradoxical?
A bit, yes. There an inherent paradox in the argument about necessity. Put it another way, if the next technology turns all of your enemies into steam, but as a side effect, also does the same to their families, are you forced to develop it, because the people on the other side of the world will just get there first if you don’t? What if the one after that is super low resource yet it also kills anyone who has ever shaken hands with your enemy? I would argue that creating a new weapon, or developing existing ones further is not made more or less moral on the basis that your enemy might be doing it, because if you know your enemy’s mind that well, you could easily defeat them using a slingshot.
This is likely wrong…Some of us would brutally murder each other with sticks and stones if they had nothing better.
Not sure I follow, this seems to be what I was saying. Read it back. The difference is that now we have technology capable of remotely erasing huge populations, and no means to keep it out of the hands of the freaks that take power. It’s therefore immoral to develop weapons because if you are clever enough to know how to do that, you should be clever enough to know how the resulting products will end up being used.
most defense work is not creating the atomic bomb. Most of it is incremental improvements
So the difference between them then is just one of scale. Oppenheimer probably never got a good night’s sleep again in his life, but it’s easy to persuade a thousand people to each do a thousandth of what he did. Then each person is only a thousandth as responsible as Oppenheimer. But each increment is still an evil deed, just a smaller one.
“Concern for man himself and his fate must always constitute the chief objective of all technological endeavors…in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.” People working on weapons are ignoring, forgetting or equivocating over this simple fact. Good people don’t make bombs and sleep well at night. Find another job, where you can look back at your life’s work and honestly believe you made the world a better place.Anyway, we agree that psychopathic megalomaniacs are a feature of the human creature. And whether or not they are flying drones, driving tanks, or a leading a hoard of mounted Visigoths at your village, I think most of us would rather remove them as a threat from a safe distance… Like with a missile.
Most of us would prefer our enemies killed at range, without having to look then in the eye, sure. But look at what you’re mixing up here: the psychopathic megalomaniacs who are sitting barking orders a world away from the lethality radii, and the grunts and (invariably) innocent collateral who are atomised inside them.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 1 month ago:
No, what you said was that it didn’t matter whether it not you took the job, because it would get done anyway. And that is a flawed argument.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 1 month ago:
Yet psychopathic megalomaniacal leaders are a feature of the human race further back than recorded history, where remote mass destruction of estranged populations is a very recent development. Therefore it is immoral to develop, create and deploy weaponry like this and, “we will be the victims of it if we do not”, is a similarly weak moral argument to the one above. Just because we expect someone else to do the immoral thing does not render us any more moral for having done it. I don’t think. Yes, you can argue necessity, but how far does that go? If a pacifist somehow held in their hands a button which would kill every non-pacifist in the world, should they push it? And, in creating any new technology, we do need to ask, “is introducing this worth the risk of it falling into the wrong hands?” . Similar to how anti privacy laws creep in. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear, until the next government gets in and you need to hide being gay, or brown, or a woman. It’s not a question of whether or not “the good guys” get the weapon, it’s a question of what happens when the bad guys do, because they certainly will, because that’s what bad guys do.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 1 month ago:
The flaw is explained in what I just said.
- If you turn them down, that reduces their talent pool.
- If you trimmed them down you are no longer responsible for the suffering caused by their products.
- If enough people turn them down they will have to reassess their approach.
Ultimately, doing something evil just because you decide someone else would do it if you didn’t, so you might as well benefit doesn’t make it any less evil of you to do that thing. In fact, it makes it worse.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 1 month ago:
This argument is deeply flawed, and I’ve heard engineers working on arms projects using it to justify what they’re doing. That, and the “I just build it, it’s not me pulling the trigger” are trotted out to soothe dying moral consciences all the time. There are far too many bright minds being used to create death and suffering.
The fact that by partaking in this industry, you form a critical part of the decision and event chain that leads to bad people killing innocent people is important, morally, and completely unchanged by whether it not someone else will do it. So it does matter if you turn that job down, and not just for your own conscience. If enough people turn down these jobs then that will change politics. And those that do choose to take them need to face up to their responsibility in enabling and perpetuating horror. - Comment on This Minecraft map that recreates, [Kowloon Walled City], one of history's most notorious slums made me reconsider what's important in 3D level design 1 month ago:
For me, it didn’t trigger my clickbait alarm. Yes there’s a hook there but I’m already interested in Kowloon City, Minecraft and 3D design so I was happy to read it.
Maybe if the title had put “: people”, at the end then it would have been completely above board, but it’s still a far cry from something like “The New Minecraft Map That Recreates a A Demolished 90’s Era Enclave Has One Super Important Thing Missing!”, followed by pages of ads. - Comment on This Minecraft map that recreates, [Kowloon Walled City], one of history's most notorious slums made me reconsider what's important in 3D level design 1 month ago:
That’s a decent little article which makes a fair point well. Which criteria are you using to define it as clickbait?
- Comment on Do you cheat in video games? 1 month ago:
Masochistic children
- Comment on Do you cheat in video games? 1 month ago:
Yep, I bounced off Don’t Starve so many times after losing everything on a good run. It’s too involved, too long, and there’s too much endgame content to be happy to start again after making a tiny mistake dozens/hundreds of hours in. It’s not like Hades or Balatro where a top tier run lasts like half an hour. If life was as ruthless as Don’t Starve, there would be no time to play Don’t Starve, because we would all be dead.
- Comment on Do you cheat in video games? 1 month ago:
Looking up a guide isn’t cheating.
Would you consider using a mod to get infinite money in Warhammer Total War, thus bypassing the need to build production buildings and allowing you to focus entirely on military infrastructure and creating huge armies all over the map, therefore creating a global Wood Elf hegemony, which would otherwise be completely impossible cheating? So would I. But I’m doing it anyway because it’s fun and I paid for the game. - Comment on Dead mosquito proboscis used for high-resolution 3D printing nozzle 1 month ago:
Yes, the first attempts via the more obvious approach of using a live mosquito were a lot trickier, because the techniques involved in persuading the mosquito to comply were outside of the highly-specialised knowledgebase of the team. That is, until one serendipitous moment when one particularly heavy-handed researcher accidentally killed a mosquito whilst trying to attach it to a printer. The surprise and elation that must have resulted when they realised they could use mosquito husks was, surely a sight to behold. The missing piece of the puzzle had finally fallen into place. Some might even say… by Divine Providence, perhaps?
I daresay some of the project leads were kicking themselves nonetheless: “It’s so simple! Dead mosquito proboscises! Dead! Why didn’t I think of that?!”, etc. But I think we should go easy on them; we could all get a doctorate in the field of hindsight!
In the end, just like many discoveries before it: penicillin, safety glasses, velcro etc., this breakthrough simply owes a lot to blind chance. - Comment on Dead mosquito proboscis used for high-resolution 3D printing nozzle 1 month ago:
Yes, the first attempts via the more obvious approach of using a live mosquito were a lot trickier, because the techniques required in persuading the mosquito to comply were outside of the specialist knowledge base of the team. That is, until one serendipitous moment when a heavy-handed researcher accidentally killed a mosquito whilst trying to attach it to a printer. The surprise and elation that must have resulted when they realised they could use mosquito husks must have been a sight to behold. The missing piece of the puzzle had finally fallen into place; some might say by Divine Providence. I daresay some of the project leads were kicking themselves! “It’s so simple! Dead mosquito proboscises! Dead! Why didn’t I think of that?!”, etc. But I think we should go easy on those people, we could all get a doctorate in the field of hindsight!
In the end, just like many discoveries before, penicillin, safety glasses, velcro etc., this breakthrough owes a lot to blind chance. - Comment on It's the only logical future, captain. 1 month ago:
It’s from a book about modernising socialism by Aaron Bastani.