• 33 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2024

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  • Well, that and the companies doing it are also a litigious scourge on traditional farmers, and are responsible for causing cancer in conventional farm workers, and are suspected to be the ones responsible for the increase in food allergies.

    A hammer is just a tool. They can be used to do a lot of good, potentially. But, if in practice the only thing that hammers ever really got used for is assaulting people, then it might be reasonable for people to give hammers & their manufacturers a bit of side eye.




















  • Sorry to disappoint, but exploding something at GEO would make things worse.

    All satellites in orbit of Earth will experience atmospheric drag. Even the Moon is bumping into gas atoms.

    Geostationary satellites will eventually fall. It might take millions of years, but eventually the thin atmosphere will slow those satellites down enough that their orbit will fall into the thick, lower atmosphere where they’ll burn up or crash into the Earth’s surface.

    Exploding a satellite up there will just make a shotgun spray of projectiles that will still take millions of years to fall. Assuming the projectiles shoot off in all directions fairly evenly, then the ones that get shot backwards relative to the motion of the satellite will end up in a lower orbit that will decay faster. The pieces that get shot forward might actually escape Earth orbit all together and become little asteroids orbiting the Sun.

    The thing that’s special about geostationary orbit isn’t that the orbit of things at that altitude does not decay. That altitude is special because at that altitude, orbital speed is equal to the Earth’s rotational speed. A satellite at that altitude over the equator will remain over that same longitude - it won’t rise and set like the Moon, it will remain in the same spot overhead both night and day.








  • There’s a lot to unpack here.

    Lets start with the attempt to define “usefulness” as the degree to which connection to humans happens. Human connection on the internet has always been illusory. Yet we still find utility in it.

    “Trusted sources” have always been 100% biased in favor of whoever owns them. We all have equal free speech rights, but some of us are more free than others because the ability to purchase a bigger megaphone scales with access to capital.

    Organized, capitalized propaganda farms existed before LLMs and have been engaged in the same kind of destructive information warfare. LLMs seem to be more persuasive than the wage-slave humans employed by troll farms and other mass media outlets, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if it manufactures a more rational public opinion.

    LLMs lower the capital requirement to begin competing in the propaganda war. The biggest players who could afford to buy enormous media empires and fund human-generated influence operations are going to have to compete against the rest of us.

    This planet has been a soulless hellscape longer than any of us have been alive, and LLMs are more likely to improve the situation than make it worse.