I mean, we could do it again. There’s kind of no reason not to, we could put more advanced instruments on them, we could send larger probes with more instruments, more experiments longer lived power sources…

Well, I said there’s no reason, but actually there are a few reasons we aren’t doing it currently. First, everything costs money, NASA’s budget keeps getting cut, and we have other important missions already planned. I certainly don’t want any new projects to jeopardise missions like dragonfly for instance. Also, we’re running out of available nuclear fuels… I believe the Voyager probes used plutonium 238 for their RTGs, but we have these nuclear proliferation treaties with Russia and long story short, we haven’t been making that stuff for the last 70 years and there’s not much left.

There are also a huge number of minorities and immigrants, especially if you’re including CNAs.

“Free speech”

I’ve always found this interesting. Human beings (or any vertebrates I suppose) are really more of a colony than a single being. And it’s not just a technicality, it’s meaningful. Much of that colony interacts with your nervous system and affects your moods and behavior. You think you have total control of your mind, but you would think and act differently with a different balance of gut bacteria. Chew on that for a while…

Yeah, the CIA is a constant problem. They spend a lot of money to spy on a lot of people in extraordinarily dumb and inefficient ways, including a lot of Americans (which to be clear, is both illegal and not their fucking job). They meddle in the affairs of foreign countries in ways that to my knowledge, have only ever worked in the best interest of dictators or terrorists. They actively subvert the separation of powers within the US government by wasting absurd amounts of funding to duplicate the capabilities that other agencies are supposed to be providing them…

Side note here, you know the fastest airplane ever made, the SR-71 blackbird? Well the CIA wanted some, but only the air force had them. There was a way for the CIA to officially request intel from the air force, but they didn’t want to do that, so they got lockheed to make them their own special version called the A-12. Now the Blackbird was also one of the most expensive planes to operate in history, the A-12 was not really any different in that regard. But in general, the air force had much more infrastructure to help keep costs to a minimum. Basically, the air force is good with planes. The CIA, they’re good at burning money and ignoring civil rights.

Don’t even get me started on the prism program. Fuck the CIA. Fuck mass surveillance. Get real jobs.

This appears to be my local stadium!

I don’t understand your gripe here. What’s wrong with those terms?

The picture isn’t great, but I’ll bet the framerate is amazing!

Yeah, that’s pretty great. I really want to believe that’s 100% true and not an exaggeration in any way. Tuffy for the win.

I’m going to go ahead and say those are different goals.

Also, we’ve had underwater bases, we just haven’t continued to man them, there just wasn’t the will to continue funding it. Sealab

We could conquer the oceans, we just aren’t interested enough. We could conquer space too, we just aren’t interested enough. We are humans, the ultimate badasses of this galaxy; as soon as enough of us are in favor of doing something, i.e. willing to pay for something, we can do it. No exceptions.

the lagrange point isn’t a stable orbit.

That’s totally true, but to be fair, it’s still more stable and requires less maneuvering than low earth orbit. So if we’re comparing the two orbits…

We just need another massive once a millennium volcano eruption. Throw the world into chaos and starve half the population to death while the earth is half covered in atmospheric ash for a year. The slow Thanos snap.

I gotta be honest, that sounds like a less-than-optimal solution. But I like that you’re thinking outside the box!

Usually when people talk about this kind of thing, they suggest making a sun shade and delivering it to the Lagrange point between the earth and sun. It certainly feels more reasonable to do it that way. But I wonder which method really is more feasible. (Obviously both methods aren’t realistic right now)

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is called Sagittarius a. It’s about 26000 light years away, so if an event like that happened it would take 26000 years for us to notice. (But who’s to say that an event like that didn’t happen 25999 years ago? Perhaps we’ll see it tomorrow.)

I honestly have no idea where it would fall on the coolness scale. Somewhere between “an astronomer noticed an abnormally bright star” and “my God… so this is how it ends…” So… somewhere between “meh” and “shit”?

Sure but if ”just the cost of doing business" becomes their official policy on this variety of traffic incident, they could end up paying $1000 a dozen times a day. That ads up pretty quickly.

Wow, way to completely ignore the content of the comment you’re replying to. Clearly, some are better than others… so, how do the others perform? It’s worth knowing before we make assertions.

The excerpt they quoted said:

“Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.”

So that implies that “the other assistants” performed more than twice as well, so presumably that means encountering serious issues less than 38% of the time (still not great, but better). But they said “more than double the other assistants”, does that mean double the rate of one of the others or double the average of the others? If it’s an average it would mean that some models probably performed better, while others performed worse.

This was the point, what was reported was insufficient information.

I think a lot of us empathize with the protesters. I don’t actually see any posts saying “this is dumb”.

I am still confused though. I mean I understand protesting Trump, ICE, and the government in general. I can’t control that, so protest is one of my only courses of action. But with technology… we can just not use it. I think I haven’t used Facebook in over 15 years, I’ve never used Twitter. And I’m happier for it, they’re right, that works. I use a smartphone, but I limit the kind of apps I want to put on it. If I find that something, a phone, app, website, whatever, is impacting my life, keeping me from dealing with daily responsibilities, I know it’s a problem, so I’ll stop using it. My point is, I do have control over my tech use, so why rally about it? After all, all the protests in the world won’t give you better self control, that’s a skill you need to build.

If home improvement and DIY were actual categories for the Nobel Prize, i’d be running out of places to put all my Nobel prizes.

I’d probably have to put in a new shelf. Maybe use some nice cherry planks…

A reminder that all packets are delivered on a “best effort” basis, and some packets will be simply dropped en route.

Uh, I think it’s called the World Wide Web.

I mean, I’m joking, but I do remember buying games directly from a developers website, that’s a thing that used to happen.

So… I think we’re all on the same page that it’s clearly unethical for the feds to be doing this to people. Taking people out of their homes in the night, even not fully dressed, that horrible. And to be clear, it’s ICE doing that under Trump’s orders.

That said, what you wrote above, that all sounds pretty unhinged. I mean, u-haul is not doing this, they rent vehicles. You might as well be angry at Ford, for making the vehicles. You might as well get angry at Walmart or Amazon fire selling them zip ties.