But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).
> But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology
Nah, it's the users. Those are resistant to change even more. When they miss deadlines that they can now blame, sometimes rightfully, on the software change
If it's AI ... the whole point this version of AI was invented was translation. That's what transformers are for. So why don't they build versions of the apps and pages in every language under the sun from Aztec to Zaparo, from Hieroglyphics to Cuneiform?
That’s not true. Wolves are incredibly smart animals and will find and exploit weak points in otherwise expensive fencing systems. They also jump surprisingly high. Moreover, once they manage to cross a fence they do not kill to feed. Instead, they slaughter entire herds of sheep for the sport of it. I personally think wolves are incredible animals, but their sudden reintroduction in the Netherlands feels ill thought out.
“In a paper published in 2016, “The first proof of the recent presence of Wolves in the Netherlands,” authors wrote:
“In light of the expansion of wolves from the Polish border to the northwest of Germany and the sightings in Denmark, the appearance of the wolf in the Netherlands was no surprise to most experts. In March 2015, this expectation was fulfilled when, after generations without resident wolves, a single wolf wandered through the Dutch provinces of Drenthe and Groningen in broad daylight. From 7 to 10 March 2015, the Netherlands witnessed the comeback of an iconic species.”
Since 2019, the country has once again become home to its first pack of wolves with young pups after 150 years. Genetic sampling revealed the Netherlands wolves came from an Alpine population and Central European populations (i.e. Germany)“
> That’s not true. Wolves are incredibly smart animals and will find and exploit weak points in otherwise expensive fencing systems.
Pair the sheep and goat herds with one or two decent sheepdogs - Kangals/Karabaş, Ovcharka (in Slavic languages, ovce means sheep, so their purpose is literally their name) or similar large breeds. That is usually enough to drive off wolves to feed off of deer instead that are a true scourge for forestry when the hunters don't keep up.
Yes they can sometimes learn to jump high fences. And that particular incident could have been prevented if people were employing early warning detection systems.
Wolves don’t just encounter a farm and instantly jump over the fences. They would have been around for a significant period of time before doing that. And during that period they could have been detected and that attack prevented in all likelihood. This of course needs proper research but wolves are very cautious.
The wolf attack in question where a wolf jumped a fence 20 times could have been detected or cut short if an electronic detection system had been employed.
These systems have the potential to make a positive difference.
But these ways are not really being tried yet, 10 years later. We are not as adaptive as wolves it seems. Maybe that can change soon though.
I know, because I have developed such a system and studied a pack with it in Belgium the past year.
I captured wolves on video more than 60 times during that period. And in that period only 2x times were the wolves hanging around the farmers field which had horses (rather than simply passing by). I called the farmer and the wolves dispersed. The videos of this are also online.
The system uses thermal imaging and the University of Helsinki have incorporated the images into a thermally trained AI model. PIR sensors can detect wolves a relatively short distance away. But this system can detect wolves and label them as such at 50m or more.
Describing the slaughter as sport would not be accurate. The situation is an unnatural situation as the sheep have no way to escape. In a natural situation the prey would have had the opportunity to disperse.
If you try to break up a fight between domesticated dogs you would also note that they enter a different state of mind during such an attack. In these cases the trapped sheep just make the situation worse.
The fence however serves a very good purpose which in most cases would do its job. And in this particular case it’s also useful, it serves as a natural barrier to allow time for a detection system to detect the wolf and potentially invoke a response system. But it’s quite clear we need to adapt a little quicker ourselves, indeed our response was ill thought out.
Hmm. Well, not sure about this. If you put yourself in the shoes of the wolf, sheep are abundant, free, delicious everything- their "economy" is exclusively food-bound. Not sure what kind of fences would keep them out, and how expensive would they be- and how long they would last.
It's hard or maybe impossible to figure out what BB(10) is. But abstractly, it is some finite integer. That finite integer is trivially computable: make a turing machine that hardcodes all the digits and outputs them one by one. You can't know that this machine actually produces BB(10) if you don't know what BB(10) is, but that's separate from the question of whether the number itself is computable.
There is some notational subtletly here. Strictly speaking, BB(n) represents the output of the BB function for the input n. In that sense BB(n) is computable.
However, the BB function itself is not computable. It makes sense to ask "for what inputs is the BB function computable?". When people talk about BB(n) not being computable, they are really talking about the computability of the BB function at n, not the computability of the integer that happens to be BB(n).
BB(10) is computable. That doesn’t mean anyone can actually figure out what it is. It doesn’t even mean it’s theoretically possible to do so. Computable just means that there exists a turing machine that will output the digits.
Also, how much fuel do you need to bring along to accelerate a human and life support system and the whole craft including fuel, for a lifetime? Is it larger than a planet?
Actually, even something as primitive as a NSWR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket) can reach a good percentage of the speed of light after basically processing a comet for fuel. From the Wikipedia article:
"The design and calculations discussed above are using 20%-enriched uranium salts. However, it would be plausible to use another design which could achieve much higher exhaust velocities (4,725 km/s) and use a 30,000-tonne ice comet along with 7,500 tonnes of highly enriched uranium salts to propel a 300-tonne spacecraft up to 7.62% of the speed of light and potentially arrive at Alpha Centauri after a 60-year journey."
Sure, not 99% the speed of light or continuous 1 g acceleration but IMHO good enough for an oversized nuclear squirt gun.
Still, this is many, many orders of magnitude short of what’s being discussed. Essentially the forefront of technology could get us to just barely speed past our nearest neighbor in one human lifespan.
That's why we need to find a globular cluster with metal-rich planets, and take a generation ship over there.
Sure, a thousand generations will live and die along the way, but once we get over there, you've got stars every 0.1 ly or so, and with very plausible future tech, you could navigate between them in a few years. You could set up a proper starfaring, interplanetary civilization, with tradeships either going back and forth between two neighboring systems, or winding on long, never-repeating routes, visiting a dozen or so star systems in a human life.
(Most globular clusters appear to be old and metal-poor, and we haven't found a lot of planets there, and this only works if you find a globular cluster where ~every star can support a colony.)
> Sure, a thousand generations will live and die along the way, but once we get over there[...]
Unless you're planning on forcing those thousand generations to live in inhumane conditions (e.g. force a static culture), that should probably be "if we get over there". I'd be very surprised if, after 1000 generations, the chance for arrival is > 50%.
It takes only one generation to decide not to go along, be that by changing course, or by not reproducing enough, or internal warfare, ...
Sure there will always be some people who want to explore for exploration’s sake. But a generation ship leaving a garden of Eden we’re quite literally built for in order for our children’s grand^(1000)children to terraform a rock half a galaxy away in order to have a different mix of resources?
That’s a hard sell for the first generation, to say nothing of those who come after.
I would expect indoctrination something like what keeps alignment among devout religious practitioners would be forced to emerge. The alternative is extinction on a spaceship hurtling into the vastness of space.
I suspect education on that ship would look a lot different than it does on Earth.
That would mean we'd send them off with highly limited knowledge specifically designed to keep them docile, and an automated dictatorship that keeps the system rigid without leaving room for cultural development.
At best that's slavery, at worst it's reducing those 1000 generations to cattle.
I think it highly depends how big you make the thing &indeed what are the living conditions. If the people living on the thing can go one with their life withou much hardship they might not mind - even here on Earth most people just go on with their life and are happy.
Yeah, right we are 300 hundred years from the target but & 500 years on the way but so what ? You go for somo zero-g polo, do some cooking and pottery classes with firends, maybe learn machining so you can help with ship maintenance and so on.
It is the same on Earth - you go on with your life knowing you will propabably not live long enough to see some far future projects to be complete, like the final form of the Hagia Sophia Catthedral or Half Life 3 release. And thats mostly fine ?
Even with enough space and great living conditions, there will be greedy people who will try to gain power by gating resources. There will be factions forming, there will be conflict, and fighting. You need too many people for all to feel like one cohesive social unit for 1000 generations, humans just aren't built that way.
And that's just conflict. What if an early generation decides to target a planet that's less useful re/ metals etc., but that's much better suited for human life? How can you guarantee they won't decide to change course as a gift to their descendants, without draconian measures against such ideas?
> Also as for changing course - that is in many cases impossible, at least unless you want to make it 100% certain that you will die alone in the coldness of space. Just too much energy needed to signficantly change the trajectory & starts, at least in our part of the Galaxy, being too far apart.
Sure, the later generations wouldn't have that choice, but the first few definitely would. You need to bring a ton of fuel anyway to slow down, and 1000 generations is plenty of time to increase fuel efficiency a little. So a minor change e.g. at generation 5 seems very much doable, unless you have concrete examples that prove otherwise.
> It is the same on Earth - you go on with your life knowing you will propabably not live long enough to see some far future projects to be complete, like the final form of the Hagia Sophia Catthedral or Half Life 3 release. And thats mostly fine ?
I'm not forced to live my entire life working towards the Hagia Sophia or HL3, with the choice to do otherwise being taken away from myself AND from 1000 generations of my descendants.
If I was on that ship, I'd vote to blow it up, just so those responsible won't get away with it.
Yep, that ship would be a powder keg waiting for one missed ration to go off, see [1]. Hell, if the internet(?) goes down for a week that might be enough to cause a violent uprising. Actually, even if everything goes right and everyone is happy dying on the ship for no real reason, something will go wrong, it is just human nature.
The Hagia Sophia or the Sagrada Família took more then a lifetime to build but they were usable for their intended purpose, long before they were finished.
Re: changing course, as long as your generation ship accelerates for more than one human lifespan, your future generations of involuntary colonists aren't going to have a lot of options besides going along with it. The choice wouldn't so much be "keep going or veer off and colonize a closer star system" as it would be "keep going for another 800 generations or veer off and colonize a closer star system in another 80 generations". I mean, there's probably no way to stop them from making that choice, but it's hard to see anyone caring whether their nth-great-grandchildren die with one or ten millennia left on the trip.
If the ship accelerates for the first 100 generations, the 2nd generation likely still has every chance to target a different planet. I don't know which generation would be the last, but I'd need to see actual math to believe that it's strictly only the first generation.
One more consideration is targeting data. Do you even have another target or the sensors to find one ? The means of detection for a suitable planet or even just a good solar system, where you build a bunch of habitats might require huge telescope arrays or even something like a special telescope that uses the Sun as a gravity lens source.
Might be out of reach for even a massive generation ship.
Then you have a natural upper bound on the amount of amenities etc, because if you provide too much, 1000 generations can probably use it to try and find another target.
I'm sure you can keep making the situation more and more specific, but that's not going to increase your chances, or make the whole thing morally acceptable.
Also as for changing course - that is in many cases impossible, at least unless you want to make it 100% certain that you will die alone in the coldness of space. Just too much energy needed to signficantly change the trajectory & starts, at least in our part of the Galaxy, being too far apart.
Yeah, but why. It's not like you could redirect it enough that you'd land somewhere in your lifetime. It'd just be changing where the ship ended up in 10, or 100, or 1000 generations.
The point of sending them off to a carefully selected globular cluster would already be to give them a better life.
I'm not saying someone won't convince everyone on board that a silver future for their Nth-great-grandchildren worth derailing the golden future of their 10Nth-great-grandchildren (especially if it looks like the generation ship won't last 10N more generations), but from my POV sitting on a couch that isn't on a generation ship (well, not something traditionally defined as a generation ship), it doesn't feel like something you'd get everyone all fired up over.
You're proposing to enslave a thousand generations to ship them off to dead worlds rich in certain resources. I have no idea how you imagine their life to be once they arrive, but I can promise you that you're not giving the first 2-5k generations a better life, you're forcing them into a horrible future. It's deeply concerning that you don't seem to understand this.
Since we're already in the realm of far out engineering, you could get the energy from a laser beam from a source orbiting the sun. Your spaceship would have some kind of array to capture the energy beam.
This gives you energy, but I'm not sure how to turn that into velocity. Presumably you'd want some kind of ion beam emitter on board to propel your craft forward. Halfway through the journey, you'd turn the ion beam around to decelerate as you approach your destination.
In the Arthur C Clarke novel Songs of Distant Earth, spacecraft pushed huge blocks of ice ahead of them to absorb stray interstellar dust.
As you get going further and faster, this energy redshifts further and further making it less and less useful. Also there’s of course the problem of focusing a laser with that amount of energy tightly enough on an object increasingly far away.
Not sure if my interpretation here makes any sense but here it is.
Due to relativity time slows down on the ship, the laser is still hitting the ship, how would the measurement of the energy received from the laser be perceived on the ship, from the ships perspective a 1000 years worth of energy arrives within a few decades. My head hurts thing about this. If you had a ship that could instantly jump to 0.5c travelling away from earth and we beamed a message using a laser at say 1Gb/s, how would the bandwidth appear to the ship?
You have it backwards. The further and faster the ship goes, the less energy is received. The energy collected over a day will be spread over a week, a month, a year, a decade, etc.
GP has it backwards too. For 1g of acceleration, none of the beam that is produced after a year will ever reach the accelerating spacecraft. You only need to run it for a year.
For 1g of acceleration, none of the light produced after 1 year will ever reach the spacecraft. You only have to operate the power source for a year, but you only get a year of source power spread across an infinity of time.
Another option is to visit as many massive objects as possible on the way there, doing gravitational slingshots until you're half way, and then gravitational brakes on the approach. Of course now you're taking detours, but since certain amounts of fuel make the trip impossible, any workaround at all is an improvement. What's an extra few thousand years between friends?
First, what “many objects along the way”? There are basically none. To do this requires many detours that significantly increase the distance you’re having to travel.
Second, the faster you’re going, the less useful a gravitational slingshot is because you spend less time in the object’s gravity well.
It’s a fun and useful trick within our solar system, but I don’t think the physics plays out well for interstellar travel.
Stars is what I meant. Although upon further thought I think you're right. I guess the intervening stars are unlikely to be moving at helpful velocities for such a game of pinball, metric expansion being what it is.
Slingshots require very specific conditions and configurations of orbiting bodies that won't really work in deep space - all the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud bodiees are far too small and too far away to be usable.
But assume for example that you don't care about how long it is going to take (you are an immortal cyborg, an upload living in the computer or a popsicle in hibernation & the AI is driving. Then you can just "island hop" between Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud objects, never gaining any high % of the speed of light but always having the next body in your sights, not farther than a few decades or a couple hundred years of flight at most.
You reach the body, refuel, repair, maybe upgrade and then off you go, to the next one. And eventually, you might be at you destination, with a fully fueled and repaired ship. It might just take like 20000 years for start to finish, but hey, you can use it for something productive like learning to play Go or something. :)
You're right, I overlooked some important slingshot requirements. As for the longevity, I figure the ship can build a facility for growing settlers when it arrives. With no humans on board it can sustain heavier accelerations.
In this setting this was first done when a bunch of immortal vyborgs was on a colony ship, about hundred years from arrival but there was a probe with a matter printer already in the destination. So their got the idea to send the probe both blueprints for a humanoid body printer as well as their mind backups. That got their colony going quite a bit faster but might have resulted in some funny/awkward moments once they met in person later. :)
Presumably you could also run this withou a mind upload and let he individual develop normally.
Less if we just send some eggs and sperm and spin up a human on arrival. We can construct a larger life support system out of things we find at the destination.
Or better yet, send some cancer cells so they can replicate during the journey, then switch from cancer mode to gamete mode for the final generation. That way they're fresh when you need them. You're gonna want DNA repair happening continuously, rather than all at once upon a thaw.
If I recall correctly, it's about the size of a large asteroid (assuming 100% conversion to energy). It's a long time since I worked the problem, though, so I could remember wrong.
Albert Heijn has 40% market share of Dutch supermarkets, and their distribution centers are shut down while they are working on this. Could become quite ugly quickly.
On the platform, my code is split between HTML, JS and CSS files.
I like modules. They exist in some form or another in most programming languages and they are one of the few definitively good ideas in software engineering. Give me the ability to split off parts of my work with some public API and hidden internals. Works on different levels too, like with a reusable library that consists of modules.
JS has a module story. But HTML and CSS just aren't connected to it, without using something like JSX.
That's why I end up abandoning "using the platform" every time.
I dont know any other environment except the browser where code is split into three in a similar way.
But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).
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