There is the analogy of a balloon’s surface where every point moves away from its neighbor, or a better analogy of bread expanding as it is baked, since that’s more three dimensions. The idea is that space is expanding at the atomic level at a certain rate, but it’s so small that it takes an astronomical amount of these atomic increases to be able to measure it (we can’t measure expansion at solar system scales, or even between our galaxy’s stars, as gravity drowns out the effect. But space is so large that over distances like between galaxies, the light that has traveled all that way has had to travel over this expanding so much that we can see a shift in its wavelength. And overall everything is shifting red, so either we in our section of the galaxy are the center, or it’s something that’s common in any part of our universe. One of these is far more likely.

Reddit had simply changed for the worse after ten or so years. Some of the niche subreddits I was in were still okay and not touched by the issues (yet), but I felt that it was for the best to move to other places. The Reddit migration popularized the Fediverse idea (that had been there already), and it made sense to me to decentralize discussions to resist control. For the most part the past few years this has felt more or less like old Reddit, and even previous forums before I found Reddit, because in the end discussion areas are made up of the people posting in them, not the architecture they’re on. It’s the transitions between that are the hardest.

Still not as bad as pulling segments off Usenet to piece together based on faith in a description.

Apparently given his own definition, even Socrates needs to touch grass.

I prefer clover myself.

Yeah, because we dialup users definitely didn’t do all nighters online. At 300 baud. Nope, sure didn’t.

I don’t think we’re sure what makes it and what doesn’t. Some of the first radio broadcasts were very strong and maybe even directed more, but over time due to competition limits were put on transmission power. Then there’s the question of general direction vs. a directed beam which would have more distance before it gets lost. Lastly, lower bandwidths were used as technology modernized, which would hide more in the background.

But even if the strongest part gets to a planet and lasts for years, what if their time to invent and use radio is still far in the future, or gone in the past and they don’t even look in those frequencies. It could be more a matter of timing than anything else.

I still wait for the darkly humorous joke until it really happens message to us, “Shhhh, they’ll hear you.”

They had fair warning. No way they didn’t pick up signals on the way here and still chose to land.

Seems letting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air is geoengineering, so maybe we could form an Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on places doing this large scale.

Oh, we’re back on the “free market” bandwagon now?

You don’t have to be intelligent to ruin things. Look at Trump.

At least a thinking machine would have a reason for doing what it might do, instead of bumbling along and overshooting any safeguards left. Which given Musk’s attitude, Grok would be the first and last safeguard for everything. So yeah, this is worse than Terminator.

I’ve seen this movie.

“The only way to keep things from crashing is to plug Skynet Grok in.”

(about 2:00 in)

Given that “interesting” is how the Chinese curse goes, we’re in interesting rimes now. So more of the same as far as how humans behave. Climate far worse because again, we aren’t going to change. More dystopian, corporate rule (the cyberpunk novels had that spot on), AI better/worse depending on your perspective (more advanced, used everywhere). Internet far different than it has been, with familiar niches holding out here and there. Possibly recovering from some major disaster, maybe large scale even.

It’s safer to expect pessimistic results and be surprised. I don’t doubt there will be some good things to happen too, great advancements and maybe even big societal changes that help people. They’re harder to predict though.

“Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”

A good lesson is to look back on predictions made for the future 50 or 100 years ago. Often times the technology is the guessed the closest right, but how it is used, and how it affects the social structure of society is totally wrong.

Well, two that get reunited. The rest though, tragic.

As a conversational AI, I found this rather funny.

Given the period, there is an unwritten sigh at the beginning. With maybe a presumed pointing at their name that Brian either missed, or doesn’t know.

It wasn’t that hard. Don’t ask how I know. 5 cents a minute doesn’t seem like a lot even in 80s dollars, but…well, time flies… And it’s true, that bill only shows up once a month, by then the damage is done.

I’m on the good row, depending on the store and distance back. I have on one occasion delivered a cart back to the store via my car (a good mile or so away) - it was left in our neighborhood, I was doing it for myself and neighbors, not the store, so I don’t know where that puts me. It’s the opposite of true neutral, since presumably someone poor had used it and discarded it.

Yeah, otherwise it would have been very hard before they came into being.

Missed the first sentence I guess. It’s why I included the video for a much better, although also simplified and incomplete answer, and he says why.

It was fun to learn how things work, and when things worked as planned (finally). It’s when they didn’t work that got annoying and frustrating, and with assembly language with basically no error codes or any help, it was just…nope, that wasn’t right. Maybe followed by cycling the computer off and on because it locked up. Still have my old Mapping the Commodore 64 book on the shelf. Huge resource.