Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.
The term “artificial intelligence” has been in use since the 1950s and it encompasses a wide range of fields in computer science. Machine learning is most definitely included under that umbrella.
Why do you think an AI can’t double check things and fix them when it notices problems? It’s a fairly straightforward process.
AI can also know to doublecheck themselves and how to fix things.
You’re still making the assumption that “they” are the same people. That’s the point here, Wikipedia-the-organization is being threatened.
Assuming that there’s just one single new site that pops up that everyone agrees to go to en masse, and that it has enough resources to handle the load, and that its administration is aligned with the same goals as the original.
It could happen, but it’s by no means as simple and easy as cloning a repository.
The tricky bit is that Wikipedia is a “living” document, constantly being updated and refined by a huge community of dedicated editors, and you can’t download the community and pop up a new one overnight. AI isn’t that good yet.
“But why is it necessary?”
“I concluded it. Didn’t you hear me?” <Makes a note to subpoena this annoying questioner later>
My point is that the “already fully prepared” requirement is extremely small and easy. “Having a car” is enough (or, in the event of one of these disaster scenarios, having someone else’s unattended car somewhere near you). So bringing it up as an objection to the usefulness of this hard drive is not really significant.
You’re overestimating the difficulty and expense necessary to support this device. You could probably power it from a car. A solar panel and inverter cost less than a hundred dollars.
That’s not going to matter when the shooting starts.
And, best of all, walk among them in the continental United States. A vast, sprawling country of crumbling infrastructure just waiting for a saboteur’s gentle nudge, awash in easily-accessible guns, and demonstrably populated by sheep who can be panicked into decades of self-destruction by a couple of buildings getting knocked down. Who haven’t experienced war anywhere except as entertainment on their TV screens in centuries.
Here’s hoping that even Trump’s idiocy has a limit before it comes to that.
I’ve used the word “conquer” for this, but even then that makes it feel kind of like a board game.
I’m glad he got back to this literally days before a Canadian federal election.
There’s an immigration process, go ahead and apply if you want.
There are an infinite number of things for which there is no evidence. Preparing for those things would be taking effort away from preparing for things that are actually real.
The first lunar astronauts spent 21 days in quarantine because we know that diseases are real and in the past there have been real examples of explorers bringing back new diseases from the places they visited. They didn’t simultaneously get ritually cleansed by a shaman because there is no evidence of actual lycanthropy being a thing.
Of the possibilities, I find
How do you find that? Through some kind of rigorous analysis, or just an intuitive feeling?
As I keep saying, the human mind is not good at intuitively handling very large or very small numbers and probabilities.
You’re analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can’t do is analyze a risk we haven’t imagined yet.
What you can’t do is analyze a risk without doing an actual analysis. For that you need to collect data and work the numbers, not just imagine them.
Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen.
Yes, and all the causes that we know don’t apply to any nearby stars that might threaten us. You have to make up imaginary new causes in order to be frightened of a gamma ray burst.
A quick Googling puts them around $50. The PrepperDisk is priced at $270 (Canadian dollars in both cases). So add a second drive and it jumps to $320, plus the cost of whatever additional complexity there is to the motherboard to support it, plus extra development cost for the RAID controller. And the device itself becomes bulkier.
Sure, this satisfies the handful of people who were concerned about that. Everyone else ends up with what’s basically the same product but more expensive and bulkier. I can easily see the developers deciding that’s a net loss for sales.
Money. Raid 1 would make every Prepper Drive cost a lot more, since it would need double the storage space. Fewer people will buy them. Instead, keep them cheap and let the people who are truly concerned about redundancy solve the problem themselves by buying two.
If you’re concerned why not just have two of them? That’s more secure, you can store them in different places.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.
That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that’s coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don’t know about that one.
And you don’t need to worry about it, because as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this. How much mass do those asteroids have? What’s their collective cross-section, and how does that compare to the volume of space they’d be passing through? How big is Earth in comparison?
I’m betting the odds will still be microscopic. I feel safe betting that because we have real world evidence that bodies in our solar system don’t frequently get hit by ghost asteroids from the Magellanic Cloud (there’s an 80’s sci-fi movie title for you). Large impacts are few and far between these days,
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst.
Once again, sure, you could imagine that ordinary stars sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
If you want it to actually be a worrying scenario, though, it needs to be backed up with some kind of evidence or theory that makes it plausible. And again, we don’t actually see frequent gamma ray bursts in reality, so whatever mechanism you propose needs to be rare for it to fit the data.
Where do I say anything about “offing” the board? That’s rather a leap. I’m talking about the US government attacking the corporate structure of Wikipedia, which isn’t paranoia because this article is literally about exactly that.