baltakatei

Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.

After reading The Age of Em (2016) by Robin Hanson, I wish there were stories about races that went the other way, lifespan-wise: extremely small people who lived only 1 year, even smaller people who lived only 1 month, some very extremely small but very powerful ones that lived only a day, etc. The idea is that artificial people (emulated people, or Ems) could have subjectively similar characteristics and experiences to the larger physical entities (e.g. humans, but perhaps even dwarves, elves, and etc., since theyʼre just emulated minds), but their artificial emulated substrate allows their minds to develop and age orders of magnitude faster; they also could solve certain problems orders of magnitude faster but practical limitations on delays between thought and physical interactions (your mind would waste away if you had to wait a whole subjective hour between each physical step during a walk with a standard 1.5 meter body) require their bodies to be very small.

To ems that are smaller and faster, sunlight seems dimmer and shows more noticeable diffraction patterns. Magnets, waveguides, and electrostatic motors are less useful. Surface tension makes it harder to escape from water. Friction is more often an obstacle, lubrication is harder to achieve, and random thermal disruptions to the speed of objects become more noticeable. It becomes easier to dissipate excess body heat, but harder to insulate against nearby heat or cold (Haldane 1926; Drexler 1992).

A crude calculation using a simple conservative nano-computer design suggests that a matching faster-em brain might plausibly fit inside an android body 256 times smaller and faster than an ordinary human body (Hanson 1995).

Compared with ordinary humans, to a fast em with a small body the Earth seems much larger, and takes much longer to travel around. To a kilo-em, for example, the Earth’s surface area seems a million times larger, a subway ride that takes 15 minutes in real time takes 10 subjective days, an 8-hour plane ride takes a subjective year, and a 1-month flight to Mars takes a subjective century. Sending a radio signal to the planet Saturn and back takes a subjective 4 months. Even super-sonic missiles seem slow. However, over modest distances lasers and directed energy weapons continue to seem very fast to a kilo-em.

Call them speedlings, or some variant of sprite, but I think its an interesting world-building concept.

PLATO: An automobile is craft with an internal combustion engine, crankshaft, and wheels.

DIOGENES wheels in a HONDA GX630 PRESSURE WASHER

DIOGENES: Behold! An automobile!

“Create a python script to count the number of r characters are present in the string strawberry.”

The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2

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If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google’s YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don’t like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.

Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.

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Expected behavior: The file is not composed of null bytes.

Actual behavior; The file is composed entirely of null bytes.

Synology is a NAS Iʼd recommend. However, after you become more familiar with the command line and if you are building your own Debian machine with a motherboard that supports many hard drives, I would recommend something like this procedure; this applies especially if you are the only one who will be accessing the files and are just wanting a way to combine the storage capacities of multiple hard drives.

    GNU
    Linux

And for some reason some software developers decided to base their MMORPG company there.

God, I wish I could have read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld-themed take on LLMs and how they’re an elf plot to use L-Space to zombify techbros and their money-making schemes.

Also, ISO 8601 has some handy rules for expressing time lengths and periodicities.

Week numbers are convenient for projects in which key delivery dates are often expressed in his many weeks out they are.

I am fond of a partial shuffle algorithm I wrote in Bash for my music playlists that often preserves neighbors of the input list in the output list.

• Blue: input sequence.
• Red: complete shuffle.
• Green: partial shuffle.

The result is like skipping through my media library in order but occasionally randomly enabling shuffle to jump to a new place. Since the input list clumps albums together and since albums often have a similar vibe, if I want several similar songs of a particular feel to play one after another, I just have to manually advance through the outputted playlist until I hit a song that has what I’m looking for; then I can let the playlist continue automatically since each subsequent song is likely to be similar to the previous song (until another random jump occurs).

Gross.

I hope she’s a good distance runner since there’s no mass transit in much of Utah. It also explains why Japanese internment camps were located there and modern juvenile detention centers can often be found in places like Blanding, Utah: it’s difficult to physically and anonymously escape.

If they had the vocabulary, they probably would say that they live by heavyweight axioms like “Joseph Smith was a prophet of God” and “The Book of Mormon is true”. From my experience, it is possible to exercise logic with flawed axioms so long as you steer clear of a liberal arts education (my mistake, lol).

Wouldn’t a loophole be to relist something to include some extra trinket with the main product (e.g. lens cleaner with a camera) and argue the “new” listing is something completely different than before?

Rent extraction: Passive cash flow from doing nothing but owning something without actually producing anything. Such income can be used to buy more such cash flows until monopolies form. Unless monopolies are broken up by government, monopoly owners collude to maximize rent extraction until heads roll during the next revolution.

No, Jerry, we’re not going to implement The Purge to bring back Malthusian population cycles. We’ve already got the Demographic Transition at home.