The SLS? Well, good question. Seems a bit adventurous to put people in it on its second flight, but hopefully NASA knows what they are doing.

The Starship? Only the Starship (the top part) flew and landed. The booster has never flown. When reading about Starship, you need to be careful. The entire thing is called Starship, but the orbital part (top part) is *also* called Starship. That makes understanding the news a bit tricky.

Tests for the Starship had a long pause while the bureaucrats figured out what to do with safety and the effects on the environment and so on. That went about as fast as such things go, frustrating as it is.

Theoretically they could have started testing again, but my guess is that they made so much progress while waiting for the OK they decided to just go for the orbital flight next.

SpaceX basically have all the needed tests finished. I'm not sure if they have an official OK to do the orbital, but I seem to remember reading that they do have it.

I guess now it is just a matter of dealing with unexpected problems as they pop up.

Relax.

The most powerful rocket to ever fly that also just happens to be fully reuseable is going to take some time.

The SLS was based on 30-40 year old proven technology and *still* took over a decade to get off the ground. And we will have to wait for over a year to get a second flight. Granted, they are going to make it exciting by putting people inside...

>I’d be absolutely shocked if such a tool were not already in late-stage development, if not already deployed.

Me as well.

We see what the *relatively* budget constrained OpenAI can do. Now imagine an organization powered by $10,000 hammers.

I suppose they will have some sort of mechanism to keep it from being pulled out as well. But yes: that sounds practical.

So how do they fasten that onto the wheel? Does it just snugly fit over it, or do they need to screw it on?

>The purpose of 230 is to allow ISPs to remove harmful/inappropriate content without facing liability

Ding ding ding. Correct.

This was and is the intent, and is clear to anyone who was alive back when the problem came up originally.

However a bunch of court cases kept moving the goalposts on what ISPs and other hosts were allowed to do as part of "removing harmful/inappropriate content". Now it does not resemble anything close to what Congress intended when 230 was created.

If you are doing a good-faith best effort to remove CP, and you accidentally take down a site that has Barney the Dinosaur on it, you should be fine. If you somehow get most of the bad guys, but miss one or two, you should also be fine. That is 230 in a nutshell.

The idea that they can use it to increase engagement is absolutely ludicrous. As /u/Brief_Profession_148 said, they have it both ways now. They can be as outspoken through their algorithms as they like, but get to be protected as if it is a neutral platform.

It's time to take 230 back to the roots, and make it clear that if you use algorithms for business purposes (marketing, sales, engagement, whatever), you are not protected by 230. You are only protected if you are making good faith efforts to remove illegal and inappropriate content. And "inappropriate" needs to be clearly enumerated so that the old trick of taking something away with the reason "for reasons we won't tell you in detail" does not work anymore.

Why any of this is controversial is beyond me.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps a sophisticated-enough AGI genuinely feels emotions.

What is our moral duty here?

>Would the most sentient ai ever actually experience emotion or does it just think it is?

When you find yourself asking a question like this, change the sentence around to reference people and see if you can give a clear answer. Like this:

Do people ever actually experience emotion or do they just think they do?

And you have now just wandered into some extremely deep waters. Even if you can convince yourself that *your* emotions are real, how do you know that anyone else actually *feels* emotions? Maybe you are the only one.

And once you have thought about this long enough, you are almost certainly going to realize: we will never know for sure.

And that leads to the next really troublesome question: what are we going to do about it? Should we give digital agents the benefit of the doubt?

And even though I always say "there's always one in every crowd," it does not seem to help; it's like they can't help themselves. Still, here is my disclaimer: I do not think that any current digital agent is conscious, feels things, or anything of the sort. I am just not entirely certain what my reason here is.

And to the folks who heard a YouTube video about how transformers work and think that explains everything: it does not. We have a pretty good idea of how brain cells work in detail, but we have no idea how we get from some chemicals and potentials to consciousness. So just knowing how the building blocks work does not necessarily mean you have any insights as to how the system works. Emergent behavior is a thing.

>It wasn't distance so much as court jurisdiction.

Well yeah, these two things are tightly correlated. The further away from Edison and his influence, the more likely the courts were to not just defer to him.

Once the decision was made to move so far away, then the question was: where? And now all those things you mentioned start to play a role. It should be someplace sunny, with a decent amount of good, stable weather, with some infrastructure already in place.

>What? The fact is that they were the first nation to launch an object into orbit, the first nation to launch a man into orbit, the first nation to launch an object into orbit around the Moon, and many other firsts. They had put two satellites in orbit by the time our first attempt blew up on the pad.

Well, your username fits at least.

Yes, those are all true, but also incredibly misleading, and apparently you failed to understand what I wrote.

Again, once more for the kids who came in late at the back: the Soviets would find out when the States were going to do something and then throw everything at beating them to that. Go back and read my previous post for more information. The summary is that they were never technologically ahead of the States; they were just better at using what they had to get those "firsts" you mentioned.

​

>The idea that they were behind us yet somehow would figure out what we were already doing and beat us to the punch despite our head start is nonsensical to say the least.

You may find it nonsensical, but that is probably because you are misinformed. Go back to your studies, actually read dry and boring historical records, and then it will make more sense.

That and they were *really* far away from a certain Edison who had a stranglehold on the technology.

>we were way behind the Soviets

That is a myth that somehow keeps getting wilder as the years go on.

The States were, on a purely tech basis, either even or slightly ahead of the Soviets the entire time.

The Soviets had three huge advantages though. They had Korolev, they had a great spy network, and they had a system that let them put safety a bit lower in the priority list.

This let them try stuff earlier. The usual game plan was to figure out when America planned to do something and then throw everything into doing it first. Korolev was an absolute genius at making it work. All in all, it was a strategy that seemed to bear fruit.

The problem with this strategy was exposed with the race to the moon. This was not something you could just throw together at the last minute. Even worse, Korolev died, leaving the program without the guy who somehow always figured out how to make it happen.

Even the Soviets realized the futility of it all. After a half-hearted attempt to continue with the program after the U.S. got to the moon, the Soviets had to give up completely on that.

They did develop some pretty cool engines and had a decent LEO program that went on up until the Soviet Union fell.

But the idea that the U.S. was behind or *way* behind the Soviets at any point is simply not consistent with the facts.

Flat out wrong? No. Exaggerated for a little fun on Reddit? Probably.

But I'm sure you actually followed all the original sources on Wikipedia when you wrote that, like I did. If you had, you would have perhaps said that the situation is more complicated or more controversial instead of the rather low-brow "flat out wrong lol" you went with.

No, you are the one who is misled. While it's true that they are prey to some animals, they are most definitely predators first and foremost.

Otherwise, you would have to call humans a prey animal, as in some situations, we are. Now *that* would be highly misleading and completely take any meaning out of the words "prey" and "predator".

The eyes should be your hint. They are 100% optimized for being a predator. That they are not an *apex* predator is clear to all of us here.

*grin*

Something like that.

Doing a bit more research on this, I discovered that it's a bit more complicated than I realized. Yes, there are studies that say exactly what I wrote. There are also studies that say that the severity of injuries goes up from higher distances.

What is absolutely true and supported by all studies is that cats falling from above 6 stories do have time to relax and prepare. This is shown by the nature of injuries reported. Below 6 stories, it's mostly broken limbs, which implies that the cats were still stiff. Above 6 stories it becomes injuries to the body, implying that the cats had relaxed.

I would recommend that you follow the links in the Wikipedia article to the original sources. You'll see why the data makes clear that there is a difference. (The cutoff seems to be around 6 to 7 stories)

Heh. Yeah, how dare I. ;)

I followed the links to the original sources.

Your first one comes from "The Straight Dope". It's an entertaining place for odd facts, but I would not treat it as a primary source. In any case, when we read about Cecil's attempts to clear the matter, we eventually reach this point:

>I called the Animal Medical Center to see if this possibility had been considered. The original authors were long gone, so I spoke to Dr. Michael Garvey, head of the medical department and current expert on “high-rise syndrome.”

Dr. Garvey was adamant that the omission of nonreported fatalities didn’t skew the statistics. He pointed out that cats that had fallen from great heights typically had injuries suggesting they’d landed on their chests, which supports the “flying squirrel” hypothesis.

So while technically true that this point was raised in the not-entirely-primary-source article, it was pretty much dismissed by the expert interviewed for that same article. When pressed, apparently Dr. Garvey allowed that reasonable people could disagree, but the fact that the expert falls on the "it's wrong" side, this point should probably be taken with suspicious eyes.

Your second one is more interesting. There have been different studies over the years and in some of them, we do get reports of more serious injuries in cats falling from higher places. In others, there is a dramatic decrease in injuries. As far as I was able to gather in a cursory look through the data, this is still a completely open question as to which data is more representative. Perhaps someone has a metastudy on this.

The nature of the injuries changes dramatically, though. At higher distances, cats can prepare themselves, get righted, and loosen up their legs for landing. The injuries tend to be more in their chest cavity. At shorter distances, the injuries tend to be more of the "broken limb" variety.

I would say it is on the *low* side of safe. The higher up a cat jumps, the more time it has to relax and prepare for landing.

I have no idea why you got downvotes; the eye shape thing is spot on.

Correct. They are not apex predators, so they have to keep their heads on a swivel and check their 6; but not only are the predators, they are obligate carnivores.

Cats are notable for how well they can hide pain. I would be curious if there are other animals that do this as well or better than cats, because I am not aware of any.

All you have to do is not actually know history. Hey, would you look at that? Hate *is* easy!

Why am I not surprised that this is bullshit.

On the one hand, I think it's great that Tesla gets a lot of props these days. But I think it's absolutely tragic that so many people feel like they have to pull someone else down.

Yeah, they didn't get along and Edison kinda screwed Tesla. That was sort of par for the course in business back then (and today, if we are being honest).

But no, it's never enough to point out somewhere that Edison was wrong. Now he has to be the devil from Jersey.

- from someone who once completely bought into the whole Edison is Evil goof

The tortoise cheated. #Shellshock

Or we just use batteries that are better at this.

The only places where hydrogen really excels is where we need some sort of physical interaction (industrial uses) or where the energy density is useful (planes). Only the first one is clearly going to work. The second one is still a bit iffy, because we have not yet figured out a good way to contain hydrogen within a reasonable space without it either being energy intensive or heavy.