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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.

    Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.

    People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.

    If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.





  • If it is solved it will definitely be through technology of some sort. While I agree it will not be one brilliant scientist, technology will be the solution.

    That technology may come in the form of a way to produce more energy without fucking up the climate, and the engineering and logistical capacity to roll out the change at a breakneck pace.

    It may come in the form of simply developing a way to control the global climate directly.

    It might come in the form of some technology to control the behavior of humans so that we can actually respond appropriately.

    Or it might come in the form of the singularity, when self improving machines grow so far beyond us so fast that they can just do what is needed whether we like it or not.

    But one way or another I guarantee that if it’s solved, it’ll largely be a technological solution, because getting humanity to just…stop using energy at our current rate…is just not going to happen.







  • Get every flagship CPU and GPU from 2000 to today that I can get my hands on. Also as much open source code as I can get hold of. And especially AI stuff - there’s several fully open source models, so bring those, and as much technical writings on them as possible.

    Speaking of which, download every science paper published since 2000 that I can get hold of, in every possible field.

    Get as much info on the 2000 election as possible, to hand to Al Gore, see if he can win that election with a solid unassailable margin.

    Research stocks, lottery, and everything else I can to get fast money within the shortest possible period of time after I get there, so I can get super rich before the butterfly effect makes predictions impossible, I need billions in seed money and I need it fast.

    Then use that money to start a private research group, and hand them all the scientific papers I brought. Get those experts to work studying all this knowledge and figure out what can be turned into practical technology. Turn some of this into profit-making devices to fund continued development, but release as much as possible for free.

    Essentially, deluge the world in as much new technology as possible, mostly free and open source, holding back only as much as necessary in order to fund continued research.

    And oh jeez the pharmaceutical industry. Release for free every drug made since 2000, so the pharmaceutical industry can’t get their patents in them.

    Big list of stuff there, but if I pulled off even half of it, the world would probably be a much better place in 25 years than in my original timeline.




  • Most likely, in my opinion:

    Hold you for 24 hours to see if anyone reports a crime and describes you as the perpetrator.

    When no one does, find a crime which seems plausible for you, and where they’ve gotten a description that could possibly fit you.

    Interrogate you about it, giving you your lawyer of course. Assuming you do not have a solid alibi for that particular crime, there’s a real chance you’ll be charged and eventually convicted.

    If you do have a solid alibi, they might keep looking for other crimes to charge you with, or they might give up.

    If they give up, they’re likely to charge you with something related to wasting their time, for which you will at minimum have to pay a fine.


  • Anything and everything that politicians propose to protect children, I am automatically against. It doesn’t matter how good it sounds, if they say anything about protecting children, I’m opposed to it.

    This is because they know that ‘protect children’ are magic words that let them get away with almost anything, and that’s genuinely about the only time they say that anyway. Basically nothing the government does is actually to protect children.


  • Yep. This post is largely mixing up cause and effect. The popular programs are like that not as the cause of people not learning underlying logic and such, but as the effect of it.

    The only thing that would happen if popular GUI based interfaces had never come along would be that computers in general would still be something only a tiny amount of people use.