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Golf With Your Friends
Golf With Your Friends
I keep thinking about how Google has implemented it. It sums up my broader feelings pretty well. They jammed this half-baked “AI” product into the very fucking top of their search results. I can’t not see it there - its huge and takes up most of my phone’s screen after the search, but I always have to scroll down past it because it is wrong, like, pretty often, or misses important details. Even if it sounds right, because I’ve had it be wrong before I have to just check the other links anyway. All it has succeed at doing in practice is make me scroll down further before I get to my results (not unlike their ads, I might add). Like, if that’s “AI” it’s no fucking wonder people avoid it.
To solve the climate crisis the ~1 billion people in global north will absolutely need to significantly bail out the global South. There is no clear development path that doesn’t go through heavy fossil fuel usage, and it should go without saying we probably can’t even improve the living standard of another billion people, let alone seven billion without basically just giving them money and technology to skip the fossil fuel step. Countries in the global north have actually agreed to this framework, it’s just that noone has actually made good on the promise yet. So… not only is it not nonsense… it’s an active dispute between developed countries and developing countries.
Noone is saying that. The argument is pretty much that people want more scrutiny applied to other companies beyond tiktok, and ideally not be under constant surveillance by any of them, not that people want to be monitored by all police states equally.
There’s good reason to presume carbon is required. Carbon has some nice, and totally unique properties that allow it to facilitate life.
The most important features to carbon in this context are:
Stable catenation of atoms. Carbon atoms can bond to other carbon atoms in a long chain, and that chain does not become appreciably more reactive. This allows for the construction of very large molecules with specialized mechanical functions.
Ability to form stable multiple bonds. Carbon can form single, double, or triple bonds with itself (and oxygen and nitrogen), which allows carbon-based molecules to have ridgid shapes. Double bonds are found all over the place in life because they allow molecules to have sections that aren’t just wiggly noodles of atoms.
Bond stabilities that fall in a kind of “goldilocks zone” where carbon bonds to other atoms are strong enough to resist falling apart, but weak enough to be broken later.
Nearly identical electronegativity to hydrogen. Carbon pulls on the electrons in its bonds about the same amount as hydrogen. This allows it to make stable bonds that are non-polar, which, when used in conjuction with other, more electronegative atoms (particularly oxygen and phosphorus) allow Carbon-containing molecules to be hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or both simultaneously. This property is what allows for complex structures like Lipid bilayers and proteins to be formed.
No other atom, not even silicon, has this set of properties, and it’s very hard to imagine how you would make all but the most simplistic verson of life without these.
I mean, I can agree that simple autocatalytic reactions can occur with chemistry based on other elements… but it’s a stretch to say that suggests “alien life might not be carbon-based”. Maybe very, very simple, life-like chemical systems, but life as we know it is defined by large, many-atom molecules, and no other element can do this the the way carbon can (not even silicon, whose bond energy decreases with catentation of more silicon atoms link, which, combined with it’s poor ability to form multiple bonds ruins the possibility of silicon-based life). Anything that we can conceivably think of as “life” beyond simple self-reproducing chemical, or bizzare Boltzmann brain-esque systems will have carbon-based chemicals in it.
I’m kinda surprised how few people have mentioned Chrono Cross. It’s not the same game, but it has a lot of cross over, and might help scratch that itch for “more chronotrigger”.
I have similar suspicions, but my great concern is that, at that point, the solution that many countries will come to will be to start shoot migrants at the border rather than to actually do anything to mitigate the root cause of the migrations.
Even if they’re right, that just means I won’t be able to afford those “Miracle Medications” anyway…