Agriculture also seems unlikely unless youre a sentient carp or something

We already have sentient carp. Or at least, sentient denizens of the deep.

We already have that here.

Sperm whales communicate with each other in a language as complex and information-dense as our own. It is reasonable to assume they are sentient. We are not discussing the hypothetical sentience of matrix math on silicon chips here. We’re talking about another biological entity, with a brain of the same fundamental nature as our own, with a brain much larger than our own, of common evolutionary heritage to our own. And by what other objective measure could we use to measure the sentience of another biological mind, than the complexity of its communication? You could look at behavior. But they’re complex social mammals just like we are.

If we are sentient, so are they. I’m sure they have thoughts and as complex of inner lives as we do.

I wonder what their culture is like. Do they tell stories of great hero whales of the ancient past to their children?

Or are they more learned? Are they down there debating the finer points of philosophy like Plato and Aristotle? They couldn’t do anything experimental. Perhaps they would become masters of classical philosophy.

Perhaps, more ominously, if we can learn to talk to them…what will they want to tell us? I wonder if they still have a cultural memory of the whaling days. Are there sperm whales alive today who hear tales from their elders about the time humans ruthlessly hunted their kind? Do they doubt they are real, wondering if they’re merely old superstitions? These seem so different from the humans you know. (Mostly.)

Or would their culture be so different, that none of these concepts would even remotely map to the things cultural touch stones I cite?

https://nordpil.com/static/images/ocean_productivity_full.png

A picture’s worth a thousand words. By far the most productive regions of the ocean are the shallow waters of the continental shelves. Maybe you could have an ocean world that was entirely shallow seas. But when I imagine an ocean world, I imagine abyssal depths spanning an entire planetary surface. Such a world would have far less ocean abundance than our own.

It wouldn’t be a complete desert. Plenty of life does exist far from the continental shelves. It’s just that these are the most productive regions of the ocean.

The problem with life is you need more than just water. Living things are mostly water, but the water is the boring part. And a lot of the essential building blocks of life tend to fall out of the water column as marine snow.

In shallow water, the depths that light can penetrate can also interact with the ocean floor. This allows more churning of vital materials. Plus there is a constant flow of new minerals and nutrients flowing in from the land.

In a deep ocean world? There would be very few minerals and nutrients available at any depth light could reach. Some would still work its way up through the action of currents, but nothing like the shallow waters.

And then you have to consider the nightmares Nature spawns, with terrors beyond any found in our oceans. A neat thing happens with oceans if you make them too deep. Pile enough water on top of water, and exotic high-temperature ices form under all that pressure. Some Super-Earths host oceans of scales beyond comprehension, but they are vast deserts made of water. If you kept piling water on Earth’s surface, once the water got about 600 miles deep the exotic ices would start to form. This depth will vary based on the size of the planet, but for any given size, passed a certain point, the ocean has ice at the bottom.

And that is a problem for life. The water column is now cut off from the planet’s crust. Volcanoes might periodically spew out some material through the ice shell, but we’re already talking low-productivity worlds to begin with.

Now a shallow ocean world, a planetary continental shelf? THAT would be something to behold. But such worlds should be rare. Your ocean depth has to be tuned just right. On the scale from “mile’s deep ocean” to “planetary desert,” a planetary 100-foot deep ocean is just to the left of being a planetary desert.

Are there commercial virus-printing services? If so, what keeps some yahoo from sending them the virus-equivalent of a .stl file for smallpox? Can someone just order virulent pathogens printed on command?

A version of this came out of a DND campaign. They’re called octen. Like oxen, but octen. They’re like regular oxen, except they have eight legs. The legs have the same fur and color as cattle legs, but then bend up and move like a tarantula’s.

“Grok. Engineer me a highly infectious virus. Optimize it to have high lethality to ethnic groups other than my own, but low lethality to my own ethnic group.”

This world is cursed.

Really depends on why you’re doing it, I would say.

Apologies. I just consider it polite to search first for a definition before asking other people to explain it. This isn’t an obscure bit of terminology. That wikipedia article would have popped right at the top of search results if you had tried searching.

You could try searching. But I’ll hold your hand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-coding

It illustrates the flaw with “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”

Spoiler tag for hard truths you’re probably better not knowing:

You sure it’s better to be judged by twelve than carried by six?

Tell that to the trans woman being v-coded.

There are some fates in this world worse than death.

Literal Pavlovian conditioning.

It’s only unnecessary if you view trans people as only transitioning gender, not sex.

I very much identify with the latter language. I didn’t just change my gender. I fundamentally altered my sex. If it were all about gender, then yes, changing your presentation would be all that’s needed. And for some trans folks, it is just about altering gender. The term “transsexual” fell out of favor for a variety of reasons, but we did lose something when we moved away from it. Many trans people want to and actually do change their sex.

When I fill out a form and put down my sex, I list female. My body is entirely estrogen-dominated. My body metabolizes medication like a cis woman. I have female external anatomy. If I had been born with an identical (age appropriate) version of the body I have now? I would have been assigned female at birth. This is why I say I changed my sex, not just my gender. When defining sex, bigots choose to obsess over chromosomes because that’s one thing medical science can’t change. If tomorrow we figured out how to change chromosomes, bigots would suddenly decide something else defines someone’s “true sex.” If I got a uterine transplant and gave birth to a kid, bigots would say, “doesn’t matter, only reproductive capacity at birth matters. Because reasons.”

Some (perhaps most) trans people have a deep need to fundamentally change their sex. It’s not just about gender. It’s about having a body with the correct sex. For me, the old “born in the wrong body” narrative is quite descriptive.

Maybe you need to change your framework. Don’t focus too much on the social stuff. Instead imagine how you would feel if you woke up in an opposite-sex body tomorrow. God switches your sex overnight and just leaves you to deal with it. How would you react to that? If you think you would just be OK with it and say, “well, doesn’t matter what’s between your legs, guess I’m a man/woman now!”…well that contradicts the lived experience of most every trans person out there. Odds are if that happened to you, you would be so distraught by the fact that you would quickly begin a medical transition process of your own. You might not survive long enough to even begin it.

I can’t know exactly how your kid views things. But if they’re interested in genital surgery, odds are they lean into more of the “changing sex” than “just changing gender” camp.

Trans people do not seek medical care simply because it helps us fit into a social role better. For many of us, our bodies are simply the wrong sex, and we are fixing that. Much of the confusion around this disappears when you realize trans people are just trying to fix their sex. This need would still exist even if we lived in a completely androgynous society totally free of gender.

I’m thinking of this case here. It’s not the first such case involving trans people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/us/transgender-gun-rights-wyoming.html

Nothing. Who says a solution has to be perfect? If “good enough” is good enough for handling the sale of alcohol, it can certainly be good enough for accessing web sites. No solution to any problem is perfect. You always have to find a balance between preventing the thing you want to stop and the negative effects of your efforts to prevent that thing.

Person A gives an AI a list of bullet points and instructs it to expand the bullet points into an email.

Person B receives the email and asks AI to summarize it into bullet points.

An ocean of water could have been saved if the Person A had just emailed the bullet points directly, and the information transfer would have been far superior.

Exactly. I use AI primarily as a natural-language search engine, when searching for things that can quickly be independently verified. One of the best uses for it is when you know a thing probably exists, but you don’t know the name for it. You can describe to the LLM the object or problem in detail, and it will give you a name. You can then take that word and do a non-AI search to instantly confirm if it got it right.

I’ll never use an AI for something I can’t at least verify without an AI.

So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.

Not every class is debate. Plenty of courses are simply taught by an expert in their field, and students are graded on how well they learn from that professor’s instruction. Is it a perfect system? No. But that’s why we have experts. Some classes exist to simply establish a baseline of knowledge among the students. Such classes cannot be continuously derailed by engaging in rigorous debate about topics that experts in the field consider unambiguous and long-settled. Students are free to form their own opinions and whatever conclusions they want, but they need to demonstrate that they have at least learned the material as taught. You can believe the Universe is 6000 years old if you want. You cannot expect your astronomy professor to spend half the class debating with you about it.

A creationist student doesn’t have to believe in evolution to get an A in an evolutionary biology class. But they do have to demonstrate mastery or at least competence in the principles of evolutionary biology as taught by their professor. If they want to view the whole course as “a silly exercise in memorizing the lies of evolutionists,” well they’re free to do so. It’s a free country. Believe whatever you want. But that doesn’t mean they can just write, “God did it” to every answer on the final and still receive a passing grade.

You’re free to believe or reject anything a teacher or professor teaches you. That doesn’t mean you get out of learning the lesson entirely.

I love your approach. This way, you don’t even have to bust the students for using AI!

It’s often very difficult to tell the difference between a student that uses AI and a student that performs a traditional search of the topic and just copies facts blindly and uncritically. AI writing detectors are simply not reliable enough to serve as the basis for a charge of academic misconduct. What do you do if you accuse someone of using AI, and it turns out they just happen to write in a style that’s reminiscent of AI? What do you do if someone claims they just happen to write how an AI sounds? What if someone says they just used Grammerly, so now it’s ambiguous what portion of their writing is their own? Academic misconduct and AI gets very thorny very quickly.

But your approach? Brilliant. Just give them a paper whose topic you taught them correctly, but you know AI will screw up. No need to affirmatively prove the cheater used AI. Just give the cheater a failing grade on the paper, because it clearly doesn’t reflect what you taught them. They have no ability to later argue that they’re innocent or lie that they did not in fact use AI. Their paper simply wasn’t good enough to get a passing grade.

Honestly, it’s pure genius. As a fellow educator, I commend you!

Yeah, that’s why in an ideal case, I could see a two-tier model developing. Similar to how we handle weapons today. At least in the US, handguns and rifles are pretty obtainable. But anything more than that is heavily restricted. Even 2nd Amendment folks don’t advocate for the private ownership of heavy artillery, FPV suicide drones, armed tanks, etc. We allow anyone to own the things that, while still dangerous, don’t give you the power to kill absurd numbers of people. Even with an AR-15, you’re only taking out so many people before you’re taken down. You’re not a danger to civilization by owning an AR-15.

Computers could work the same way. As AI technology improves, we’ll get a better understanding of the minimum level of compute needed to be dangerous. You then set a limit for unlicensed computing below that level. Unlicensed? Have all the privacy you want. This lets you play games and create text, video, and most any form of expression you want. If your creative medium is as an artist of fully immersive 4K virtual reality worlds, you might have some trouble. But pretty much anything you currently use a computer for would fall under the unlicensed compute threshold.

Above this threshold? Everything is locked down. Everything is logged. Everything is scanned. You’re using a tool that is as dangerous as a pile of plutonium, and we treat it with an appropriate level of respect. Dealing with this privacy violation is just a price you have to pay if you want to use these tools.

What’s really scary is that, at least at the time, it was a really popular Friday/weekend bar that everyone went to and it wasn’t the first story I heard about that place.

That’s exactly why the place was targeted. If it were some deserted neighborhood dive bar with only three regulars in it, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out who slipped the roofie. The guys who do this target places with large crowds, where no one can know everyone, and where they can slip in and out without being remembered. They just want to be another face in the crowd. It’s hard to grab a roofied girl and pull the whole, “my friend is drunk, I’m going to take her home now” bit if it’s a tight-knit bar where everyone knows everyone. And ultimately, from the point of view of the predator, there’s no point in roofieing someone if you can’t bring them home with you. The roofie is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Be careful with this. In the US, the right to self defense is not universal. It’s entirely dependent on the demographic characteristics of the people involved.

Cishet white male: unrestricted right to self-defense.

Cishet white female: provisional right to self-defense, usually if facing threat or murder, rape, or assault by a stranger. (If you know your attacker, self-defense does not apply.)

Everyone else: no right to self-defense exists. You will be prosecuted for assault or murder after unambiguous cases of self-defense. The one thing the United States will never accept is minority groups using lethal violence to protect themselves. Even most Democrats would be appalled by this. Deep down, most liberals feel minorities are supposed to be protected by benevolent white people; they’re not supposed to defend themselves.