HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

Edge of tomorrow.

A remarkably good film, considering how badly it was advertised.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won’t need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don’t do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

One of Sir Issac Newton’s famous phrases is

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”

This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!

Interestingly, electron flow is only a few mm/minute, on average. The field propagation travels at around 2/3 the speed of light (200,000,000m/s).

Wasn’t he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.

It’s fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The “head with arms and legs” stage seems universal, and amusing.

The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.

Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren’t actually that bad.

The problem is, we can’t detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won’t recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.

Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.

A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn’t just luck out with the moon’s large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.

I don’t think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to “specialised generalists” would be a major hurdle.

Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.

Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.

I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.

All the fun, none of the long term responsibilities!

I’m a parent, and we made the conscious decision to become parents. That said, I can fully understand people who don’t want to have that responsibility. It can be exhausting and thankless, changing almost everything with your life, hobbies and habits.

On the other side of the coin, the depth of love you feel as a parent is impossible to describe. With that comes a set of incredible feelings, watching your children experience, learn and grow.

Basically, parenthood is almost completely thankless, but I wouldn’t give it up for the world.

The key point is that LLMs don’t process information, as we see it. The knowledge they have is predigested, and embedded into the text they were trained on.

Don’t get me wrong, they are a big step towards a true AI, but they cannot do some things that seem fundamental to intelligence. The best analogy is that they are a lobotomized speech centre. They can put on a veneer of being intelligent and self aware, but it’s a veneer.

I personally suspect they will be a critical component to a future AI, but are a dead end path on their own.

Caucasian is the closest to “white”, and even that is fairly arbitrary.

In practice, it’s in group Vs out group behaviour. If you’re different, someone will take offence to that. The line of difference varies, but the effect is often the same.

Interestingly, “the left” could well be described as an in-group of out-groups. Those who are pushed out, in 1 way or another, gathered together for mutual support. Plus those who empathize with that position.

The best bet is to let your local aviation authority know. They are generally the ones with the actual powers, as well as the knowledge to apply them.

At least in the UK, the laws cover anything that leaves the ground under an open sky. There are exceptions for RC toys and drones, but they have limits. One of the limits is you cannot fly within a certain distance of anyone or anything not under your control.

Basically, most places require your permission to fly over, or near to your land. If they are overflying, they are breaking the rules.

It’s worth noting, depending on the size of the system, it can be difficult to judge distances. The ones I work with are large. We regularly have officials insisting we are massively out of our flight area. GPS logs show that it was well within the entire time.

Training, lots of training. It also applies to you as well!

I think our dog got past 2 years old before we had eaten more pork chops than he had stolen.

He’ll still swipe my daughter’s dinner, if it’s left unattended. At least he will no longer steal it while she’s sat in front of it.

In almost all cases the point is to keep things reversible. The problem is puberty. Once the hormone cascades hit, it’s far harder to transition. At the same time, fully transitioning is not something many children are equipped to cope with.

Luckily there is a 3rd option. Puberty can be delayed without permanent issues. This gives the patient and doctors time to figure out what to do long term. If they were confused, they stop the drugs, and puberty happens normally. If they truly want to transition, they are in a far better position to change than if they experienced puberty as the “wrong” gender.

By delaying the changes, it allows time for them to process what they want. It also lets them experience living as the other gender, in a reversible manner.

They generally stop being toddlers when they come out of nappies, and can walk properly.

A 5 year old is over 25% of the way to being an adult!

Nothing is destined, the past is fixed, the present is happening, but the future is still ours to define.

Don’t get me wrong, it fucking hard to even start clawing your way out. Even worse, you won’t see any benefits at first. Even just taking the first steps seem terrifying and hopeless.

I’ve been in that hole, I still have that voice in the back of my head. There are 2 ways out, only 1 offers the possibility of happy moments.

I personally decided (eventually) to say fuck it, and plough forward till I made it or it killed me. I had to go way past where I thought my limits were. But the voice was wrong, I was (and am) far more capable than it told me.

If you want some advice on mental control techniques, I’ve a few that might help. I’d be happy to share if you want.