Blind spots for me.

I once got caught out in a new vehicle. A tree somehow managed to sneak past both my visual checks, and my reversing sensors. It put an impressive dent in my bumper. Damn trees are evil ninjas. The fact I was reversing had nothing to do with it!

St Johns Wort can help. It’s not as effective as prescription medication, but can help deal with mild ‘low mood’ type symptoms. It’s comparable to the effect of a compression bandage on a joint. It will help with the equivalent of a pulled tendon, but will do next to nothing against the equivalent of a shattered elbow.

It is worth noting that there are 2 sorts of depression. Feeling sad, while unpleasant, is a lot easier to treat. It’s generally caused by external stimulus. While this is harder to treat with drugs, it responds a LOT better to lifestyle changes. Basically, you need to figure out 2 things. What is making you sad, and how do you remove that effect. Implementing it can be an absolute bitch, but it’s worth the effort.

The other sort of depression is proper “clinical depression”. This is a chemical imbalance in the brain. It can be brought on by external stimulus, but it’s not dependent on them. With this, your brain starts losing the ability to care. Motivation becomes a lot harder, and so the cost to payoff with positive activities gets worse. Internally, it’s like having the chroma on a TV turned down. Everything gets muted and dull. Nothing is worth the effort required to do it. This sort of depression does need proper treatment. It’s far more insidious and will grind you down. To beat it you need to change your very brain wiring. This can be done, but generally requires significant external support. If you could beat it alone, you likely wouldn’t have become trapped within it.

I’ve experienced both. Neither are pleasant. Just keep in mind, both distort your thinking. Often, you can’t fully trust your own thinking. Situations that seem impossible to cope with will just crumble when actually attacked. However, without enough motivation, you often won’t even try.

An just to note, if you get to the point of intrusive, self destructive thoughts, that’s when you need to seriously reach out to external help. Even if you think you can cope with them, they can send your mind spiraling downwards.

Apparently that quote was where a scriptwriter almost screwed Bush over.

The full phrase is “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Bush realised he was about to give the media a sound bite of him saying “Shame on me”.

Given the context, it’s far more understandable why he flubbed it.

Adrenaline does weird things to your brain, when controlling a car. When startled, we default to getting low and stable. That’s good when standing, however, it putting your feet flat on the ground is extremely bad when in the driver’s seat.

I’ve actually witnessed this in action. A slip resulted in 2 cars written off, 1 pushed through several gardens. I can easily see someone doing something similar, with a Tesla. Alcohol would just amplify the effect.

The question is, how that trend develops. Right now, our footprint is dropping, due to efficiency improvements. At the same time, that might change again. E.g. large scale Comms between a home world, like earth, and other planets.

There is also the problem of older civilisations. Any approaching type 2 will be VERY visible, as the spectrum of their star changes. In terms of human history, we are a long way off. In ages of the universe scales, 10,000 years is practically a blip. We see no evidence of Dyson swarms or anything of that nature. An extra 13 billion years is a LONG time for no one to leave a detectable footprint.

I quite like cottage pie (or shepherds pie, depending on my mood). I’ve found mixing sweet potato into the mashed potato topping makes a HUGE difference. Only 1/4 to 1/3 is needed, anymore and it can be overpowering.

To further add to this. The concern is related to what is nicknamed “the great filter”. The drake equation tries to estimate the number of communicating civilisations within range of us. Even with quite pessimistic terms, it still implies there should be lots of them. Therefore, a term is likely missing or wrong. This is known as the great filter.

If the great filter is behind us, that’s fine. E.g. abiogenesis being vastly harder, and so less likely, than we think. However, it could also be ahead of us. If it is, it likely won’t be far. We are already entering the era where we are detectable on an interstellar distance. Nukes and climate change have been raised as potential “great filters”.

An alternative idea is that we are not typical. If we are one of the first civilisations to reach this level, at least locally, then we would see very little. An older universe makes this significantly less likely.

Ok, and how many of those points would be improved by going public?

People want sequels because they trust value to to them justice, not roll out stale cookie cutter versions like FIFA etc.

Would investors demand that valve take a smaller cut, or would they demand they take a bigger one in future?

Would they cut support for older games?

Would they add ads to the overlays?

Would you then be able to get “Steam Premium” for an ad free experience?

Please let me know what bit of steam’s business model would be improved by them constantly chasing a higher profit every quarter?

Both line pockets. The difference is the focus. The shareholders for valve have been invited. You can’t just decide to buy a bit of valve, then tell them what to do. Publicly traded shares mean that the people investing are often only interested in the value and dividends, anything that boosts that is good. If the company dies from it then who cares, they’ll jump ship and invest elsewhere.

Valve’s current mentality is that keeping the customers happy keeps the money flowing. It has now reached the point where compounding effects make up for the short term reduction in dividends.

Customers are happy, share holders are happy, and no-one can barge in, demanding a piece of the pie.

Stock market shareholders want constant growth from their investments. Enough of them also only care about short term growth, even at the cost of long term.

Valve, being privately owned, only answers to its own shareholders, no-one can just buy in and start demanding more profit seeking. They have collectively decided that slow but reliable growth is better. This results in them not actively pumping their customer base for ever more profit. They have no intention of killing their golden goose.

Agreed.

I personally don’t think they exist. More likely space-time gets tied in an extreme knot. The gradients produce Hawking radiation. This radiation will both evaporate the mass from the black hole, as well as provide radiation pressure on in-falling matter. From the outside, hawking radiation is incredibly weak. Time dilation will push the pressure towards infinity, as the dilation approaches infinity (at the event horizon).

Matter would never actually reach the event horizon. The radiation pressure would increase to push it away. The event horizon would also recede ahead, as the black hole evaporates. The matter would skim the event horizon, but not actually cross it.

There are 2 parts. At the center is the singularity. Theoretically, this is an infinitely small point of infinite density. This has no volume. Around this is the event horizon. This has volume, and is what we refer to as a black hole. Theoretically, you could have a black hole without a singularity, you just need an area dense enough that light can’t escape.

The Packers are generally on minimum wage. When something isn’t in stock, the computer automatically offers an alternative. The packer can either follow the suggestion, or use their judgement. If they blindly follow the computer, they can’t be criticized. If they use their judgement, and a customer complains, then they are blamed. They really have no reason to stick their neck out, even if the computer is being idiotic.

The key difference is that your thinking feeds into your word choice. You also know when to mack up and allow your brain to actually process.

LLMs are (very crudely) a lobotomised speech center. They can chatter and use words, but there is no support structure behind them. The only “knowledge” they have access to is embedded into their training data. Once that is done, they have no ability to “think” about it further. It’s a practical example of a “Chinese Room” and many of the same philosophical arguments apply.

I fully agree that this is an important step for a true AI. It’s just a fragment however. Just like 4 wheels, and 2 axles don’t make a car.

I design build and operate broadcast equipment. A good chunk goes onto UAVs. I’ve built small quads, and I’ve played around with equipment fully capable of some of the more complex tasks. E.g. live 3D mapping from an airborne capable computer.

I’m also friends with several people who used to design and build military equipment, including radar systems. Military tech is a weird mix of amazingly high tech, stupidly simple hacks and long lifespan versions of off the shelf technology. I’ve a fairly good feel for how hard or easy a good chunk of the bits are to build. Most of what I suggested I could personally design and build, or easily commission, given some time, a reasonable budget, and access to restricted resources as required.

In its simplest form, chaff is just tuned lengths of mylar foil. As it flutters, it glitters in a radar beam. This creates a large noise floor. While modern military chaff is more advanced, the old stuff will still cause problems for modern systems. It’s not trying to hide a tank, or pull off a missile’s lock. It’s trying to swamp the signal from a tiny, mostly plastic, drone.

I’m also not saying to reinvent the wheel. Chaff is now a fairly niche defence tool. It’s hard to use while advancing, and gives away your position. It also needs to be integrated with other countermeasures to be useful. It is still a fairly solved problem however. It’s cheap to make, quick to deploy, and available in bulk, if required.

Most modern military equipment isn’t expensive due to its inherent nature. It’s expensive because it’s a niche product, and the buyers have deep wallets. The same game plays out in broadcasting. A £100k camera isn’t that much better than a £5k one. It is better however, and buyers are willing to pay for that difference.

The reverse is also true, as Ukraine is proving. 100 $1k drones are more useful than 1 $100k, ultra capable, drone or missile. The point of a swarm is to allow multiple cheap systems to do the job of a far more expensive weapon.

Easy for a remotely advanced military force.

An explosive drone is easy. Just a small amount of high explosives and an electronic detonator.

Strobe lights could just be an overdriven LED. It just needs to dazzle optical sensors for a few seconds.

Chaff is just lightweight foil. It’s effectively an oversized party popper. It’s job is to help overwhelm radar based tracking.

Software is the hardest bit. At the same time, many computer game ‘AIs’ are good enough at this they need to be dumbed down significantly. It would be more specialised, but only needs to be written once, then rolled out to a fleet.

Batteries would be a swarms limiting factor. Single shot lithium would likely be the bulk. 5-20 minutes of flight, then it’s dead. Disposables would likely need to be moved into position by other means, either a dedicated transport drone, ground transport, or air drop. Your transport doesn’t need to stay in the combat zone however, it can bug out and be reused. Larger more specialist systems would land and loiter to save batteries, and/or be fuel cell powered.

Reliability is handled by numbers, losing 10% is fine, when you have 20% extra.

Computing requires would be met by something like Nvidia’s Jetson range. They are designed for low power, low weight AI processing. Putting a tflop of computing power in the close Comms loop would be simple. The controller would be the most expensive part of the swarm. Not only would it need enough power, both computing and electrical, but also significant Comms capabilities. Radio links, with optical backup would be the workhorse. With a mesh setup, including dummies to help hide it’s location. This is similar to how the display drones work. An expensive hub, serving a cheap swarm.

While none of this is “easy” for a random guy in a shed, or a terrorist in a cave, it’s child’s play compared to a lot of the tech the US can deploy.

Nvidia GPUs aren’t the only way to run a machine learning type system. They are just the easiest to use, currently. China has also been developing their own AI optimised chips. Though I don’t know much/anything about them.

This is a good example of how AI can be used well.

Current AIs are effectively fuzzy pattern detection and matching engines. This one can sift all the data coming in, and spot patterns that previously corresponded to problems. It then flags them for human interpretation.

The AI chunks the vast sea of data. A human is then involved to sanity check what it has found, and react accordingly. E.g. a pattern appears that often precedes a broken rail within a month. A human can check the subset of the data, and schedule a maintenance team a week later. Conversely, a pattern that leads by hours would require an immediate response.

I’ve worked with drones of various sizes. Bigger and more expensive ones are more capable, but hard to make bullet proof. If you can remote off their sensors and weapons into cheap, more disposable systems, it makes sense.

A big drone, like a predator, drops a package into an area. Mid sized multicopters provide local computing power and coordination. Small planes provide fast loiter surveillance. Small multicopters with cameras give more accurate coverage. For attack, you have what amounts to a hand grenade with props. Protection takes the form of similar disposables. A flying strobe light to mess up optical tracking. Chaff bombs to mess up radar tracking. Smoke to obscure the high value units.

A lot of these I could throw together myself, given a few weeks, and a few grand. What part wouldn’t be easy, for a large and well funded military r&d team?

You would need a properly layered engine. The full lore is baked into the global engine. Each NPC gets their own biasing in the engine. A subset of knowledge they have, as well as things they explicitly do or don’t know.

Generating the underlying knowledge set, in a way that is easy to work with will be the challenge. It’s ok for AI to fill in the gaps, but the story designers will need an easy way to get them to behave properly.

There will also be a lot of unintended consequences. A good team would be able to do amazing things with this. A bad team would produce a complete mess.