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Cake day: February 22nd, 2024

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  • This is a fascinating one.

    Some things to consider, a toddler can easily defeat a baby but a 40 and 45 year old are evenly matched. There’s also the question of how much is there to learn, at some point the tech tree is pretty much done - iron is much stronger than brass but maybe light-speed heavy plasma guns are pretty much maxed out and physics simply doesn’t allow more.

    This could result in interesting stalemates, a natural limit to the size of conflicts for example if it’s possible to maintain a defensive sphere that can withstand the maximum level of abuse that a circle of attackers can provide - any weapons platform too far back being unable to increase the force applied. We might get technologically perfect civilizations effectively combined to bubbles of influence around their power sources.

    What is possible is that at a certain level of tech we discover how to tap into the universal internet, aliens give us the rest of the answers to physics and philosophy then show us how to build VR gear so we can explore the cosmos in perfect VR and no one ever needs to build Dyson spheres or hyperwarp megastructures because we can do anything with a dark matter powered computanium smart phone.


  • When I was a kid people said the same about typing, homework has to be handwrittena because no boss will ever accept a typed report.

    We had the same when media studies became a lesson, everyone freaking out that kids learning to watch TV is stupid but of course that’s not what they’re getting taught - media literacy turned our to be a hugely important subject even for those that don’t go on to work in the huge and ever growing media sector.

    Teaching kids to use AI tools effectively is the same, you hear it and imagine ‘they put homework prompt into chatGPT and hand in the output’ it’s the same as imagining media studies as being nothing more than watching TV. AI is going to be an ever more present and useful tool in our lives so kids need to learn how to leverage and utilize it or they’ll be at a huge disadvantage.

    You can’t hold back time by denying your kid a full education, they need to know how to effectively use the tools everyone else will be using.



  • Like many things it’s a solution to a problem that’s now solved in other ways, originally it was really easy to skip town and make a new identity so they had to have enough collateral to know you’ll come back - if you’re facing two years in jail if you lose the trial or losing 5 years worth of money if you flee it’s more likely you’d turn up to court.

    I guess it became a money thing at some point, the rich like it because they can avoid the same harsh laws the poor suffer, then lending money became an industry and of course they use some of the money they screw out of poor people to lobby the government to make the system even less fair… plus j imagine all sorts of clever accounting makes use of the money while in the courts hands, probably earns some kickbacks somewhere.

    Abolishing it and creating a more sane modern system would be a good thing but it’d be unpopular for many reasons - but we’ve always done it like this, but we would have a budget hole, but why are they making things easier for criminals when my life is hard / climate change / war / etc… politicians don’t deal with issues like this because the voting public would punish them if they did even though the voting public largely agrees and would likely totally agree if they understood it - which they never will because their opposition will find clever ways to make it seem complicated or turn it Into a culture war issue / moral crusade.