Most sensible comment in the thread, thread shoulda probably ended here.

So an interesting thing I’ve noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the “real evil”, right. “Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!” or “Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!”. You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.

The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it’s not so much that they’re funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they’ve successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn’t the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when “we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted” right, as part of this “emergency mode” is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.

Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That’s dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be “correct” in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn’t matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can’t as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can’t exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they’re not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.

These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we’re just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what’s possible, probable, or what’s the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.

If you wanna have a top-down take on what’s the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

I mean the government pretty much already has a death note, of a kind. If you’re not Gary Webb, then they could always just slip some shit in your water main or whatever, or otherwise just kinda kill you however they want. So it’s not all that useful for them to have, other than being cheaper and maybe making some political assassinations much easier.

You know I do kinda wonder what effect that would have culturally, especially if that became a kind of trend or mainstay. Like, obviously a big investigation would take place as to the cause of death. Doubt they would come up with anything, but obviously, huge scandal. After that, do the successors keep getting killed since they’d probably be the same or worse, or what happens? What would happen in response to that? Would they rename the party, launch further investigations, would they attempt to dissolve the party? Would they attempt to believe in different ideals out of a kind of fear or natural selection, or what? Would they all just devolve into extremely conspiratorial thought as they desperately tried to ward it off?

I mean, if they figured it out, then they might even just start putting them out under aliases or fake names or something.

I dunno I’m just gonna drop a 50 minute video link on this one and bounce, 'cause if I chronically post my dogshit opinions every time one of these boomer ass articles gets posted here and gets upvoted a million times by the masturbatory elder millennial ex-redditor linux userbase, then I’m gonna be here for a fuckin eternity

I mean I guess my main point is just that I find these robotic humans to be kind of interesting and cool, but also totally unambitious and cynical, precisely because they don’t require things to be redesigned in any way. You could have floors and bathrooms designed so that they rinse themselves out and are steam sanitized with the press of a button, and not that much of a change in infrastructure compared to the norm, it’s just a different way to doing things that requires more thought out design for more discrete applications. Most fast food bathrooms already have a floor drain. Same with food delivery. There’s conveyor belt restaurants, we already have drive thrus with windows, restaurants already need to be navigable by foot in order for people to be able to sit down. These seem like maybe more efficient solutions long term than replacing people with humanoid robots.

Are the numbers working out that these are actually more efficient, economically, or something? Is it just that the tech sector is what has all the money lately, so they’re prescribing these as kind of a blanket solution to every other use-case? Is it just that human shaped robots are kind of cool? I dunno, but I do wonder about the versatility being more efficient. It works if the versatility itself, in a human environment, is kind of the end-goal here, but as a good in itself, I dunno.

Okay somebody probably knows better than me, but what is the advantage of humanoid robots? Why are people kinda, on this, now? It feels very 20th century, as an idea. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t understand why this would be necessary compared to just like, specialized normal robots that do specialized normal tasks. It seems more efficient, if you wanted a robot to, say, do the dishes, to make a robot that just does the dishes, instead of making a robot in the shape of a person that does the dishes. The one that’s in the shape of a person is maybe more broadly applicable to human contexts, software notwithstanding (which does seem like a major hiccup). But it’s not as though there’s like, an upper limit on the amount of robots which we can have, in total. You could just make more robots, and make them specialized for certain tasks, like stocking shelves or whatever, and that would probably be easier, I would think, than making one robot to rule them all. Like, one robot, with ostensibly an on-board computer and on-board batteries so it’s as universal as possible.

It gives me self-driving car vibes, where we could’ve had them in the 50’s if everyone was willing to install metal spikes in the ground every however many feet ahead, but then that maybe doesn’t make any sense, because it’s just kind of a shitty train or tram. Basically, that nobody’s willing to front the cost of infrastructure for anything anymore, so we have to make like, a universal device, and end up quintupling the total cost while making a solution that is either less efficient or doesn’t exist.

Also, what’s the point of the legs? Is it supposed to go outside, or go up stairs better? We already have pretty efficient wheeled vehicles capable of doing that in most public spaces, or, we’re supposed to, anyways, they’re called wheelchairs. What do we need this guy to walk around for?

Edit: So far, what I’ve gotten is ladders, and the scalability of a humanoid design vs other kinds of designs.

For ladders, I think you could probably tackle that with a similar set of constraints what you might need for a stair climbing robot, maybe just with a couple heavyweight anchors inside of it and some gearing or something. Use the robot’s big arms, the manipulators, to climb like normal, and then use the bottom wheels to sort of ratchet the robot up. Probably that could work on most ladders with some clever engineering. Could maybe also run a cable from the top of the ladder to the bottom and then have a system where the robot rappels up and down for lots of ladders, but yeah.

I don’t think you end up spending all that much on a robot that has wheels vs legs, and I think probably the increased efficiency would be worth it if you want like a generalized robot here. Might be wrong, maybe a roboticist can tell me no, but I dunno. As far as engineering goes it doesn’t seem any more complicated than legs. Legs seem better for, offroading, basically. Which are why lots of animals use them, cause animals don’t have roads.

For the versatility and scalability thing, I dunno whether or not it’s more or less efficient still. While a steam cleaning room does require some amount of consideration to build, I would think that you could really get the price down from the tens of thousands of dollars required for this kind of robot to perform a similar job. Especially if you built it that way up front, retrofits might be much more expensive considering how many bathrooms aren’t built correctly. Or you could go with a kind of hybrid approach, which I totally forgot about, but would seem to make some amount of sense, especially for a larger building.

Maybe those savings build up over time, and you could just have a McDonald’s staffed by like three of these at once and only spend like 500,000 on it, which does seem like quite a bit to add on top of a McDonald’s opening costs. I’m assuming you gotta buy multiple to staff it as a whole and also that you have to buy multiple to have more battery capacity, but maybe one of these will come out with the clever innovation of a swappable battery if/when they come to market. I would definitely hope that’d be the case.

I’m not sure it works out economically. I’m not sure of anything here. These are just suggestions because I haven’t seen a lot of FUD on these human robots, except of the Terminator variety, which seems dumb.

I suppose my biggest difference here is just one of philosophy, mostly because I’ve seen it reflected in self-driving cars. You can make something that’s capable in any context. Wind, snow, rain, shine, heavy traffic, pedestrian traffic, intermodal traffic, different kinds of roads not created to a set standard by the state’s DOT. You can make a Swiss army knife, right. Maybe there are some economic and QoL savings there if you can do rideshares or do like, johnnycabs, right, if you can eliminate the desire for car ownership and status from the American mind. Maybe you can get all those cars out of parking lots as much as possible, and onto the road, doubling, maybe even tripling the amount of traffic as cars now move from one person going from one place to another place. Maybe you can also solve traffic, if you can get all the human driven cars off the road and totally automate everything so none of the cars ever hit each other or anyone, maybe you could try to do this piecemeal with autonomous vehicle only zones and surmount the nimbys with venture capital to buy a whole local municipality. Maybe you can balance the speed with the safety so we don’t have heavy traffic and we get places on time, but when a disaster strikes from ice buildup on the road in a random place, or leaves flying around your car, it doesn’t kill everyone. Maybe, you can get all this to not computationally require an energy cost collectively that rivals a medium sized European country. Maybe you can also solve the wireless communication issues that would plague this system, and maybe that allows you to simplify it instead of having every car be self-driving and predictable even though probably a bunch of different companies will be trying to get in on this and will be mingling in traffic, with different softwares.

Maybe you could also make a tram, though. Maybe you could have an electric folding bike you take on the tram. That’s also an option. That’s just infrastructural cost, and we could do that right now.

Neither of these solutions is necessarily better, right. I mean, in this case specifically it’s pretty apparent to anyone with half a brain that the trams are better quite obviously but like, as an analogue about humanoid robots, especially with the point taken about a variety of contexts as opposed to a single high friction context like cars, neither of these solutions are necessarily better. They entail different philosophies. One created a world around the thing, one creates the thing. One changes the world to suit the people, one changes the people to suit the world.

Is what I’m saying making sense, did I get my point across?

I can probably do that too if I dislocate my hip bones

Mostly just because it’s kind of seen as a higher profile example of mobile phone manufacturers colluding and creating totally unnecessary changes in the market because they’re incapable of actual innovation. The reason people are mad, basically, is because there was no reason to remove the headphone jack. I haven’t seen a reasonable argument for it’s removal, really, or the removal of most of the other used-to-be-standard features on smartphones.

dopamine pump goes brrrr.

But also, I think to some degree, “building meaningful platforms with an abundance of excellent communication options” is kind of just. Investor speak. It’s kind of impossible. Systems are brittle, communication needs to be flexible, to some degree.

Speaking more specifically, right, if we’re looking at reddit and lemmy as examples, we have to think about the kinds of content that these systems are incentivizing. Upvotes float a post to the top of the front page, top of the comments section, right, and then that kind of lends itself to platforms where the top posts are snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely agree with, while the most downvoted posts are going to be snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely disagree with. And then you’re getting the full range in-between, with really no way to kind of properly find things based on what their substance is. The organization structure, basically, is arranged based on the kind of collective idea of quality, which isn’t really a specific enough kind of organization to be useful to most people.

So, that has drawbacks. What if we just went at it like a classic forum, right? People make accounts, people make posts, maybe you even have a membership fee. Well, now post quality has maybe gone up, but we’ve also created a large barrier to entry, which is a really bad strategy for growth. That’s maybe not a problem, as people tend to kind of, stupidly prioritize rapid expansion over steady growth and the quality of their core product, right, without really understanding the value they are actually looking to create.

Realistically though the biggest problem is just that the insularity of the forum is kind of going to be a snowballing thing, especially depending on subject matter. Jargon and in-jokes can develop that make it basically impossible to interface with as a newcomer, and that’s going to lead to a kind of inertial collapse where forums just slowly come up and then slowly go back down. Also contributing to this is kind of a point at which every discussion has been had before on the server archives, so any time you make a new post, refer to post 1224. If they don’t just die from inflation of basic goods, and can’t afford to keep up hosting costs, which is also a major killer of classic forums.

So, conventional forums also have drawbacks. So maybe we get rid of the accounts, now it’s anonymous, and everything is still going to be organized chronologically, right? Nope, that sucks, because now there’s not really any incentive to keep up post quality and your forum is going to get spammed to death with the maximum amount of possible noise, meaning you need to take on bot filters, which means you need to create more brittle systems to try and sort quality posts away from chaff. You could also just, not do this, and let chaff kind of swim around on your platform, but, that might not be a great idea, I dunno.

If you do end up somehow making a platform that can be, at the very least, popular and desirable for communication, then you’ve basically just ended up making a public good that you’re probably not massively paid for. Queue the platform getting bought out and ruined by an idiot stooge. Not just elon, but also, every other platform on the internet ever.

I think it’s pretty reasonable to look at all that and just think. Man. I want some more dopamine! Turn on the dopamine pump! And then the corporation says, yes sir, here is your dopamine pump, “free” of charge, of course, go to town.

Basically the cynicism is from two ends, is what I’m saying. It’s from the fact that the internet is kind of constantly undergoing a kind of expansion and contraction, where the systems work at the low end, and then rise, and then collapse under their own weight once noise starts to accumulate, right, so an ideal system is somewhat impossible, at least, under the current kind of economic constraints, maybe, but maybe also in general. So there’s a cynicism to that, right. There’s also the cynicism of being conscious of that. And then there’s also the cynicism of like, people just not really wanting communication, and wanting dopamine pumps. Though, I think people might really want both, if they were pressed on it.

That kinda sucks. I would expect more of your mainline 3D modelling things to be on top of this, or there to maybe be some sort of blender modification, some blender fork, that gets it to work in VR. Seems like kind of an obviously much better use case, to me, compared to memorizing a shit ton of hotkeys, and having to maybe buy one of those space mice they sell for the same price as a whole ass VR headset.

damn, I didn’t really know it was that intense, that serious. I guess I have, once again, underestimated the furries, my greatest rivals on this god forsaken planet.

nah but fr that makes a lot of sense. I would’ve just kind of thought, you know, stereotype of wealthy furries in IT shelling out for fursuits and shit, and furries in VR, put 2 and 2 together and blam, wow, the math checks out, but yeah, I do believe there’s probably a good proportion of people for whom it’s important enough to kind of get on top of it asap.

also VR headsets are getting cheaper than I thought, so that’s another factor.

So, is VR actually good, or is it mostly just for wealthy silicon valley furries to hang out with each other in VRchat, like everyone used to do in second life? The only game that really comes to mind as being something that’s even close to a killer app is beatsaber, and that’s basically just DDR with your upper body. I really haven’t seen much support, both in the way of games, and more importantly, in the way of, say, 3d modelling apps, or something to that effect. Utility software, stuff that’s useful, but is specifically more convenient in virtual reality, stuff that might be benefited by the platform. But then, it’s not really something I’ve looked into much.

This strikes me as correct, it’s kind of more complicated than just the blanket statement of “oh, everyone will have too calloused of a mind to believe anything ever again”. People will just try to intuit truth from surrounding context in a vacuum, much like how they do with our current every day reality where I’m really just a brain in a vat or whatever.

You know, on one hand, I do want to like. I have been looking into some cool space stuff more recently, and it seems like spaceX and starlink have been doing pretty well, relative to musk’s other business ventures, like X (no relation to spaceX, of course, which is great branding), and maybe tesla, which I kind of hate on the basis that they suck. But on the other hand, I wonder about how much of that is due to musk’s involvement, or if it’s just a factor of right place right time. I don’t think venture capital capture and attention capture from the balding manlet CEO of tesla, channeled towards reusable rockets, I don’t think any of that hurt, it was probably an advantage to those organizations, even if only like, by a small amount. But then, I dunno how much his mismanagement of these projects, and of most of his business ventures, have ended up hamstringing them in the long run, with unreasonable demands of his employees, and over-promising, and higher turnover rates than would probably be necessary. You know, I’m posting this from starlink internet, because I live in a rural place. Would that have happened without his idiocy? I’m inclined to say probably, but I’m also inclined to thank that guy that invented fertilizer, maybe even if he also invented mustard gas or whatever that story was. Which isn’t really to say that musk invented anything, or what have you.

Basically what I’m saying, is that I think it is probably a good thing, if you have gotten to a point where you can look at someone who’s “fucked up” history, and you can spin that into a good thing, even not by their intention, or even if it’s removed a causal step or two, it’s a good thing if you can spin their shit into gold. Probably. I dunno, it’s reassuring to me somehow, among the sea of situations that are the exact opposite where some guy’s cool idea gets taken by a soulless venture capital firm and drained like a vampire for investor hype before it’s discarded as useless vaporware. Mistakes into miracles.

I’ve kind of been of the opinion for a while that there are maybe a couple different ideas of “free speech”. If you have total “free speech”, right, everyone is allowed to talk and say whatever they want, much like the public square yadda yadda. You won’t get nazis, you’ll get spam, something which is obviously bad to anyone with half a brain (increasingly a smaller and smaller amount of the population). Spam is “free speech”, technically, as, someone is making the most of their ability to scream at the top of their lungs, maximum volume, they’re taking up all of the airwaves as much as is possible, and since these are usually the people with the most resources, it generally falls into the same kind of capitalist maximum usage of a resource in the most efficient way possible, with the minor caveat that nobody sane ever wanted that resource to be used in that way. Everyone needed a little bit of inefficiency in order to grease the wheels of conversation.

Of course, over time, we realize spam becomes less effective than subtly prodding at the collective consciousness, and running a twitter account with snarky remarks. We basically just have to understand here that it’s still spam, it’s just that the distinction has been moved from maximum volume, to bad faith. Which, is something that isn’t necessarily the role of a corporation, just like spam doesn’t necessarily have to be a corporation. Spam can also be people that are just scammers. Instead of selling products, these sorts of spammers and scammers try to win you over, drive the discourse in a different direction, engage in a bad faith manner. It fills the same role as spam being the maximum volume in the amphitheater, drowning out any other communications, but this is more insidious, harder to catch, and doesn’t necessarily come from a place of malice or like, actual bad faith. If you were an alien listening to the airwaves, you might just hear something resembling a regular discussion, with the distinction that maybe you’d be getting a larger percentage of people getting mad and storming off as they talk to what are basically ideological zombies, or maybe robots.

I can get a bad faith discussion out of taking two people that are temporarily mad, or passionate, invested, about the same thing in different ways, and then controlling the debate in a certain kind of way, say, over a text medium where neither side can communicate effectively. And those are people that should’ve been able to relate over a shared passion, ideally. I can get a bad faith discussion out of two people that do not speak the same language, out of two people that can communicate just well enough that what’s being said sounds sensible, but doesn’t actually translate to either side. And of course, I can get a bad faith discussion out of just simple trolling. I mean, that’s what trolling is, at a basic level, just taking a devil’s advocate nonsense stance super seriously, until other people also do that, basically on the premise that you’re someone to talk to. We sort of approach an event horizon with communication, where the closer two people are to actual communication, the more potential for frustration and misunderstanding there is, sort of like the hedgehog’s dilemma. So of course you get bad actors who lean into that, and who propagate that behavior and their own sorts of separate language and thought terminating cliches, in order to basically be spam, without being spam. They create bad faith conversations.

And then, of course, I kind of fear the role that AI might take in the coming years, with all of this. Especially if analog computing hardware starts taking off again and people have easy access to building their own actually sensible chatbots resembling some mid-level internet discourse, instead of stuff that resembles what are really smart toddler might write. Then we’re gonna see this all play out all over again, with the spam, except in a way that’s much harder to detect, and in a way where you don’t have to recruit human labor to do any of it. Dead internet theory, but real, basically. I dunno of a real way to counteract any of this, en masse.

I think the biggest thing is that people, generally, just have to put more thought into why specifically they want to leave a comment. Who are you doing this for? It can’t really be for the person on the other side of the screen, you know, because the miscommunication is going to be inevitable given enough time, there’s nothing you can do to counteract it. I think, inevitably, we all must realize, that the only reason to post online is, because you wanted to.

And so we all become trolls, in a way. But then, as is the ancient wisdom of the trolls, it becomes boring to just inhabit a shallow perspective, to spout nonsense. It’s like playing a game with all the cheats enabled. It’s fun for a while, probably too long actually, if you’re insecure and have a chip on your shoulder, but it’s not fulfilling long term. You can get plenty of people to do this regularly, clock in and clock out, be passionless, play the game with cheats for 3-4 hours with no real investment and then walk away. But if you’re serious, you have to disable the cheats, to start inhabiting perspectives with real depth, you have to start inhabiting worldviews that aren’t your own, but are still fully internally consistent. Ones that just stem from maybe other starting values. Or maybe they are all the same perspective, just given different easily malleable information landscapes. And if that’s the case, then you’re not really trolling anymore. You’re just doing the socrates shit, where socrates invents a fake guy to challenge himself and others. Was that socrates? I dunno, who gives a fuck.

Tl;dr We are/all must become trolls! Memes are the DNA of the soul!