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They read the Three Body Problem but forgot that light exists. For aliens with interferometers looking at Earth there's little question there's some sort of interesting active chemistry (life) here.

Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100 light years they'll be watching the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely to be from random natural processes.

Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see extremely interesting and varied chemistry.

The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground nuclear testing.


Telescopes aren't magic, and space is big. There are 100 billion+ stars in the galaxy. Within a 100 light-year radius, there are 27 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95... ). Nobody's looking at Earth. If any hypothetical civilization were to find our system, it would be by blanketing the entire galaxy in 100 billion drones and checking every single star, in which case the dark forest doesn't matter anyway.

First that's just star systems within 100 lightyears of Earth, systems with one of more gravitationally bound stars in them. There are thousands of stars within 100 light years of Earth. Most are red dwarfs but there's about a thousand F, G, and K class stars.[0]

While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable of not only finding Earth but gathering spectra from it. It's certainly no guarantee Earth would be found but there's no hiding from anyone looking. There's no masking the chemistry of life on Earth and likewise no masting techno-signatures in the atmosphere.

[0] https://chview.nova.org/solcom/stars.htm


If they are at our current tech level, to "see" Earth, then Earth would need to pass in front of the Sun from their point of view. That means they would need to be somewhere in the same pane as the Earth's orbit.

That's a transiting detection, there's other detection methods for exoplanets. Even a coarse grained survey with a ground based traditional telescope can find our solar system thanks to Jupiter's gravitational influence on the Sun. Doppler shift's in the Sun's spectra come from Jupiter tugging at it gravitationally. With interferometry and coronagraphy spectra of planets in our system can be gathered without needing to see our system edge-on. Then of course for aliens on the ecliptic there's transiting spectra of Earth.

The number of techniques for detecting exoplanets makes the Dark Forest concept silly. There's no hiding our solar system from alien observation. For dedicated observers (at the right distances) there's no hiding the existence of life, the Industrial Revolution, or above ground nuclear testing.


If you spend $35k and just idle the machine or just check e-mail you've burnt the money. If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month. Three months at a $50/hr rate.

If you bought the $35k Mac Pro in 2023 when it was released and have a $50/hr rate it's been paid off for about 30 months. So as of today those owners probably aren't too broken hearted. They'll likely get at least another three years out of them.

People buying $35k Mac Pros probably paid them off after a single contract. So they've just been making money rather than costing money.


I think these calculations are a bit bogus.

If you spend $35k on a nice computer, and then earn $35k from doing some work using it, that doesn't mean that buying the computer has paid for itself unless the computer is solely responsible for that income. It probably isn't.

It's not necessarily even true that after doing that work it's "paid for", in the sense that getting the $35k income means that you were able to afford the $35k computer: that only follows if you didn't need any of that income for other luxuries, such as food and shelter.

If you're earning $50/hour, 40hr/week then what you've done after 17.5 weeks is earned enough to buy that $35k computer. Assuming you don't need any of that money for anything else, like food and shelter.

If the fancy computer helps you get that income then of course it's perfectly legit to estimate how much difference it makes and decide it pays for itself, but it's not as simple as comparing the price of the computer with your total income.

Regardless of how much it contributes, if you have plenty of money then it's also perfectly legit to say "I can comfortably afford this and I want it so I'll but it" but, again, it's not as simple as comparing the price of the computer with your total income.


>If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month.

Are you working 996 weeks or something?

At standard 40h work-week the math works out to 8.75 weeks to "pay for itself".


What if that machine lets you do your job 4x faster?

I don’t think working faster 4x makes you experience time dilation to the degree that you experience 8.75 weeks as 4 in your frame of reference; but my relativity math is a bit rusty, I could be wrong.

I have a bunny suit plushie on my shelf to this day. The other Pentium marketing blitz I remember was in the 1998 Lost in Space which had a TV ad for a Pentium XXI or something. Also notable was the Silicon Graphics branding in that movie. Which I have always found amusing since SGI didn't have any consumer products and even for businesses the prices were "Call Us" which has always meant eye watering expensive.

Any router made by a company that "donates" (bribes) to Trump's "ballroom" or other vanity projects will get approved. Irrespective of anything else. This is just another grift.

> Elon has said several times that humans can drive with two eyes and Tesla should be able...

And this is an amazingly stupid statement. Humans drive with most of their senses, not just vision. In fact our proprioception plays an important role in driving.

Even Tesla's use of cameras is poor because they're monocular and fixed in place. Most humans have binocular vision and those visual sensors have multiple degrees of freedom and the ability to adjust focus.

Even if you wanted to only use vision for navigation it's irresponsible to not use binocular configurations that get more reliable depth sensing.


The Tesla Model Y has 9 cameras.

That's enough for vastly more depth perception than any human eyes.


Nine cameras in each axis? Because the rear view cameras aren't doing anything for depth perception when driving in a forward direction.

Birds has 2 wings.

I have 20 toes. Therefore I should fly 10 times better.

Amazing how you lost your critical sense just because you want Tesla to succeed and drink everything Musk says.


Do yourself a giant favor and read up on what it takes to get a single Michelin star. It's not a fucking Yelp review.

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article".

They changed the name of the company to distance themselves from a number of scandals including Cambridge Analytica, COVID vaccine misinformation, and sitting on studies about teen mental health and social media use.[0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59083601


Not sure why you're downvoted but I absolutely do think that they changed their name for better branding. I also think they were involved in a number of antitrust lawsuits so renaming their company to Meta says "see, we're the underdog in this new big VR industry, we're not a monopoly".

Schedule the 1:1 first to let your manager know your peers have no value.


How could they not be? At $2 an hour they'd be leaving money on the table by not paying a tiny fraction of that for an LLM.


I don't think it's the platform paying the workers. I think they're third parties hired by the posters. Of course, OnlyFans itself could theoretically create and offer a service to replace them, but Fraud As A Service doesn't actually seem all that reliable as a business model.


That service is already offered by Fanvue.


I'll just get a Pentium Gold CPU, with a name like that I bet it will be the best model!


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