XeroxCool

Oh look, it's another me.

First off, forget those self help social media posters. Many are full of shit trying to make money off your purchases of their classes. If they sound batshit, they're not a good fit for you.

I've attempted hundreds of projects. Most don't come through. Many are ongoing. Many are in the forgotten abyss. I used to be sad about all of that. I'd find parts to a project that got superseded by a totally different design. I still find project parts to vehicles I've sold. Games I've forgotten, games where I suddenly stopped 20% through, "worthless" games where I've got hundreds, maybe thousands of hours. I used to be sad about not paying proper respect to great games and instead falling for quick match or battle Royale types.

The root of the sadness is similar to yours: we have finite time. Gotta make the most of it, right? Play the best games, create the art I dream of, build the best version of my car the community has ever seen, ride the most miles on the bike, see the most mountains, try the most beers, have the most nights out.

Not so much anymore. I have finite time to experience things, but I also have a finite rate of consumption. I do not have time to do it all. When I was younger, living with my parents or living in a low maintenance apartment, the world seemed so open. It seemed so devoid of me. Moving into a house of my own was like the dolly zoom moment of my life. Partly because I came face to face with all my incomplete projects and forgotten hobbies as I properly packed them at my parents'. Partly because so many of the "must do" house projects are still not done, not even prioritized, 3 years later.

And yet, the world has not ended. I'm not a failure. I'm still enjoying things. But I have limited time for pleasure and limited money to do so. I cannot do it all, and that's fine. I say yes to what I can. Does it really matter if I don't make a drawing because I gave a new album a full listen-through? Does it really matter if my car isn't the most special build because I took the bike for a dozen rides instead? I'll do what I can when I can. I still have what I consider to be a high productivity drive, but I worked to be more satisfied with what I have done and less critical of what I haven't done. I'm not lacking in these fun things because I'm lazy, I'm lacking because work and sleep take more time of my life than anything while chores/repairs/errands eat so much of the rest of it. It's not my fault, and it's not yours either - especially with you 65hr work weeks.

Actually, let me repeat that: it's not your fault, especially with your 65 hour work weeks. Being bored at your job puts the mental restlessness into overdrive. That does not help you feel accomplished with these other interests because I'm sure you aren't getting into them as deeply with what little time you have left in the day.

It's OK to relax. If you're in a comfortable situation, your life is healthy, your home is secure, and you relationships are maintained, then anything else is a bonus. There's no wrong way to relax. Theres no wrong way to have fun. There's no way to be perfect so sometimes, relaxing is the best way to better yourself.

PS: books sit somewhere between video games and movies, but not in a line. While I certainly struggle to read at times I'm not trapped in a plane, there's a good chance you haven't tried the right book. You don't have to read the great dramas or the cleverest mysteries. My gateway was Revelation Space, largely because my visualizations and feelings were rooted in 1,000 hours of the game Elite Dangerous. The quasi-personal experiences in the game had some decent overlap with the voids of space and desolate planets, devoid of life. Not that close, but close enough when a plot less game gets paired with the excellent descriptions of an author.

"Unfortunately, AI models are neither smarter nor more sympathetic than the average 4chan user. They're about as susceptible to astroturfing operations, too"

Yeah, because of the Albanians in Paris featured in the documentary Taken

I can't believe this product, modeled after humans, would lie and cheat like humans

Love and familial attachment is forbidden by the jedi, so loving him like a brother says his opinion of Anakin is that he's garbage

Every time I look away from dark mode Lemmy and it's excess of text, I see stripes. Maybe it's not the way

Born too early to die in the crusades

Born too late to die in the crusades

Born just in time to die in the crusades

I somehow didn't expect this to turn into a Christian Armageddon ploy. I thought we all agreed all that matters is oil

I've played D&D and can't follow half the BG3 conversations either. Names of places and characters have no intrinsic meaning. I find it to be a major pain in the ass to manage my own character's abilities, let alone ~8 in total. Yes, there's auto/suggested builds so you don't have to choose everything, but it's still difficult to remember how to utilize everyone. Plus, all that freedom of choice means freedom to pigeon hole yourself into some situation - unintended consequences, missed opportunities, that sort of thing. Yes, that's great for roleplay, depth of game, replayability, and all that, but I just don't have the time to get into that anymore.

Still playing tho. Took me like 20 hours to get into the swing of things. That's also about how long it took me to get comfortable with Elite Dangerous, actually. But the 1200hrs in THAT game certainly paints a different picture about enjoyment

Have you seen others to compare? I've seen both the Blue Angels (F/A-18s) and Thunderbird (F-16s) and both feel the same when #6 sneaks away to shock and awe you from behind at Mach 0.8 while the noob does a near-stall smile and wave routine in the main stage

F-/15/E = Female/15/Epsteins Island

I don't agree universally, from a societal standpoint, because Dolly Parton sang about the 9-5. While standard time keeps my noon within 20 minutes of zenith, my temperate zone winter solstice sun rises at 7am (I get up at 8) and sets at 4pm (I leave work at 5pm). I drive in with plenty of light but leave in nearly full night time. Living in DST with zenith around 1pm would let me at least drive home at sunset. Would it really make winter life acceptable, though? Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure the temperature is a major factor as I can't remember the last time summer sunset ended the day for me.

Still, I get it for when you had to manually set clocks based on the sun, but we have time zones and automatic syncs now. With rigid time zones, everybody has some inaccuracy at some point to the zenith anyway. Even if you're dead center for the winter solstice, the true zenith location slides East for the spring equinox, returns for the summer solstice (though will be 1pm with DST), and then slides west for the fall equinox. The variation is more extreme nearer the poles. Then you have extreme cases with places like China and India, with single time zones across the countries and 70-80 minutes of zenith variation across the majority of the population (excluding China's western half).

One of the proposed ideas in a Discord-based thread was to use OS-level age authentication to prevent you from having to provide IDs to a thousand other parties. One place, one time. So that's one reason for an OS to need it, in a world hellbent on increasing age restrictions. I don't know enough about that idea to argue it, though I'm certain it could be spoofed in 0.2 seconds after release.

It sounded like the EU solution is a dedicated, non-identifying birth date tag in their passports.

But what do I know. I assume all age restrictions can be circumvented, so I see no point in all this theater. And it's theater because it never really seems to truly be about protecting children. At least, to me, I'd be more concerned about SFW manosphere bullshit than NSFW porn when it comes to protecting kids (yes, I'm well aware a great deal of porn is misogynistic, degrading, abusive, etc)

It started by realizing other users, the government, AI scrapers, and the internet have potential to be far too creepy and/or investigative to continue using any personal details, namely my name or date of birth. I definitely scrubbed my birth year from everything, haven't quite replaced all my accounts using my m/d though since my name is far from unique. So I have a vaguely techy pun of a movie reference. Zero Cool was the young alias of the main character of Hackers (1995)

(editing to fix exponents as the carats disappeared) I'm digging into the pure math here because I'm suspicious of whoever came up with that estimate. Not in a malicious way, but in plain theoretically inaccurate way. 2 million years does not sound reasonable. If total distance wasn't involved, it sounds reasonable just from a self-duplication standpoint. For the number of self-duplication cycles, 2(to the 37) is approx 140 billion and 2(to the 39) is approx 550 billion, which covers our galaxy's estimated 100-400 billion stars. Add an iteration for the initial launch and you figure the range is 35-40 iterations. That allows 50,000-57,000 years average per cycle to travel to the next star. Then, you figure if we can build one self-replicating probe, we can build 4 or even 8 to start. 8 (to the 13) is 550 billion, same as 2(to the 39) right. So now, we're talking up to 150,000 years per interstellar trip. Voyager 1's steady interstellar speed would cover the ~4ly gap to Proxima Centauri in ~40,000 years. As it sits now, though, it still hasn't even reached 1 light-day from Sol. While we should have better thrust tech now, it's probably still within an order of magnitude due to Voyager's excellent use of gravitational slingshots in a rare planetary arrangement. Smells OK so far.

But hold on. The galaxy is not linear, it's circular (for the most part), which means we have to consider 2D area, not a 1D line. Even though we're squaring the probes, the area covered is going up by a square as well. As far as distance goes, the squares cancel each other proportionately. So we do have to look at one linear consideration: distance to the other side. At about 105,000ly across and Earth sitting approve 26kly from both the nearest edge and the galactic center, it's about 87,000ly to the other side. Covering that distance in 2 million years would take a speed of 0.0435c - 29,000,000mph, or 700x that of Voyager. But I guess no thing's wrong with 20 million years of exploration or 200 million years, in the grand scheme of the universe, dropping the required interstellar speed to just 7x that of voyage. Make it 2 billion years and ti's attainable with current technology, with 0.7x Voyager being about 28,000mph.

Regardless, I still have major doubts about this theoretical probe's ability to slow at the next star, find suitable solid resources, stop to mine them, distribute its payload, manufacture 2 new probes (or 1 new and prepare itself), and be able to launch 2 probes with enough speed to escape the current system. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have escaped the heliosphere as of 2012 and 2018, respectively.That is all we've sent so far. That's all we have in motion so far. Escaping our planet is such a major hurdle that of the ~200 probes sent beyond Earth's gravitational dominance, only 2 have left the solar system. And while 28kmph sure sounds a lot like escape velocity from Earth, the peak speed was achieved at the time it left - over 90,000mph. That is a substantially greater amount of thrust to leave. That's not the velocity needed to leave Earth, that's the velocity needed to make sure it leaves the sun. After that is where the probes used slingshots to gain meaningful speed to reach the heliopause within our lifetimes instead of stalling in some Plutonian orbit.

So, as to why we're not flush with probes, I think it comes down to the basic concept that such a trip far exceeds not only a life time, but all human concepts of time. The oldest known hominin tool is about 3 million years old. The oldest wooden structure, about 500,000 years. Jewelry, 150k years, cave paintings, 65k, and written history is just 5,000 years old. To complete this expedition in 2 million years means it'd exceed the the existence of our species in its entirety. At 2 billion years, it'd exceed the time that Earth has had multicellular life.

Even with all that said, it's be a one-way trip, a one-way message. The first few iterations of replication would likely exceed any type of life as we know it on Earth. It may not even remain in any kind of historical record. Humans may be gone. Surviving life likely will not be sentient/intelligent enough to receive any kind of return message, if they even had the technology and the knowledge to know what to listen for. Just a message from the core would take 26,000 years to reach Earth - and we're back to the law of squares where the message beam will be expanding, and weakening, with a squared ratio to distance traveled. We're struggling to communicate with Voyager as it is.

So, the question is: why bother? Conceptually easy task with no tangible payback. It'd only satisfy some manifest destiny, likely of religious or nationalist origin. That doesn't exactly resonate with the general science community and it'd be extraordinarily difficult to get governmental funding to support a life-spreading probe with their little, universally-meaningless flag attached.

Yeah. It's a fun little mystery to reveal at cleanings, especially when there's an x-ray.

Oh, so you have my 4th?

Is that lighter or heavier than "slammed"

Feels like they're asking for a decapitation strike to catalyze the next phase

I don't recall special EV fear at that time. I recall insanely cheap gas prices in the summer of 2020 and a drastic reduction in commute demand. Once the excess oil was depleted and production hadn't come back up to speed by like summer of 2021, gas prices shot up. I'm deep in a sub/urban mix, so that affects my experience, I'm sure. While all cars had their market value increase at that point, used EVs and Hybrids had an additional 50%+ markup, comparatively. I was shopping for them and ended up passing on the idea due to excess price. I vaguely remember prices being about $12k for ~2010 Priuses and $5k for 1st gen Leafs with deteoriated 50-mile batteries. I don't recall Volt/Bolt prices and was already disinterested in Teslas.

I would have assumed you'd be searched and stripped of any potential weapons.

XeroxCool

@ XeroxCool @lemmy.world

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XeroxCool

What balance do you find between constantly bettering yourself, vs just chilling?

Google's AI Sent an Armed Man to Steal a Robot Body for It to Inhabit, Then Encouraged Him to Kill Himself, Lawsuit Alleges. Google said in response that "unfortunately AI models are not perfect."

Have you ever traveled solo? How was your experience?

LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy

Just don't...

We make a Lemmy user union that's entire purpose is to downvote all posts that feature black text on a white background instead of white text on a black background.

Military Leaders Say Iran War Is So Trump Can Bring About “Armageddon”

Videogames you always wanted to play but they did disappointed you?

‘Several’ US fighter jets crash over Kuwait, military confirms

‘Several’ US fighter jets crash over Kuwait, military confirms

What should be done and over with by now?

California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup

How did you choose your username?

Either the aliens have listed Earth as a no-contact planet or we are probably alone in the universe.

Humans Have a Third Set of Teeth. New Medicine May Help Them Grow.

Humans Have a Third Set of Teeth. New Medicine May Help Them Grow.

Trump bashed for using Mar-a-Lago 'blanket fort' to monitor Iran strikes

The reason Trump hyperfocuses on decapitation strikes as the sole instrument of regime change is to him only strongmen make things happen and governments are illegitimate illusions

Anyone have some good electric cars?

Biden takes selfies with passengers as he takes commercial flight

trying to remember how to draw // remembering I never figured out how to draw people

Watching "They Live!" has opened my eyes to how often the movie is referenced, as if I put on the same sunglasses