I’m a sci fi nerd from foundation to Hyperion to the expanse but I’ve never heard of Blindsight, and you’ve absolutely sold me on it

Ooo added the book to my list, thanks!

Also, Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined explores whether we’re conscious or not based on his work in neuroscience and primatology. It’s like a book length version of the quote you posted

They found a way to create a high surface area capacitor made largely from abundant resources. Even a proof of concept is a discovery. We may not see it in practice in our lifetimes because science and industry take time, but that doesn’t diminish the value at all.

Why is this a false equivalence? I’m not saying this is the next Faraday. I’m comparing contemporaries. You can’t know what technologies will make what kind of difference in the future, but there’s no harm in being excited about our interested in them and their possibilities. I think my comparisons are fair, especially if you consider the technology of each contemporary era. What about Turing? He created a mechanical computational machine and extrapolated the future possibility of machines that could mimic human communication. That is absolutely an edge case assumption given the technology of the time and yet here we are with LLMs running rampant.

A couple of guys doing cool stuff in a lab is how progress is made. If we stopped people like Tesla, Newton, and Faraday because “candles are readily available and whale oil is a natural resource” we wouldn’t have any of the tech we take for granted today.

This discovery is super cool, like imagine its applications in walkable cities where the entire pedestrian pathway is also storing energy from wind and solar

“non-empire”

Crimea and Ukraine might contest that

I never spent enough time on YouTube for it to develop its algorithm for me. I watch like 2 videos a week maybe, usually searching for something specific, and most of the recs for me have always been obscure clickbait I’m not interested in seeing

I see no problem with this, what with all the recommended slop

Brb broke my wrist

Asus

Yeah I was passed the return date and a state away when I caught the issue

Sweet, thanks! I haven’t settled on a distro yet, but from what I’ve seen this is something Asus does to kneecap as much of the community as they can

Asus Q533M. I found a user patch on stack but it was for older models. Tried to update it myself and run a rebuild, but I might have missed a step since it errored out

Right? It’s some firmware level issue, but I haven’t looked deeper into it recently because I got frustrated with a couple failed patch attempts. I guess you have to include the laptop model explicitly or it doesn’t know to look for it

I screwed up so bad. I bought a laptop to trial different Linux distros and also because my old one is 12yo now and has its own problems. However, the manufacturer ONLY provides Windows support drivers, so the keyboard won’t work without a kernel level patch and I am not a kernel-patch level guy yet

👍

It’s state-controlled propaganda. If you find you tend to agree with the opinion and slant pieces, you should vary your sources to see what they’re not reporting.

I read this like the closing lines from Hang On To Your Life by the Guess Who

I have never been able to figure out how to block fingerprinting without entirely disabling my browser and it looks like the race to the bottom is accelerating

Let’s be clear, Reuters. This is a clash over immigration as far as you accept the white house narrative. It’s much more a clash over due process and executive overreach. You don’t say someone got mugged in a clash over gun use. It’s just the tool they’re using to disempower you

Encore!