I don’t think it would be in the advantage of a smart civ to willfully contact another smart civ till it is confirmed that the “to be contacted” civ has a really good understanding of game theory.

You cannot negotiate mutually assured destruction with a civ that does not understand what mutually assured destruction means.

Do I think we would be destroyed if some other alien civ finds us? No. If civ A observes civ B destroying civ C, everyone would want to destroy civ B immediately. The possibility of there being peaceful contact for civ B goes away.

Also, contacting us must be in the benefit of the civ that contacts us (assuming they are rational).

It’s always the same story, poor sanitation, environmental degradation, corruption and climate.

Naah I don’t buy it. Individual cities and countries collapse, but not anything larger. Also, poor sanitation throughout history was mostly because of a lack of understanding of germ theory.

Nawww, I was thinking more of a secret nihilistic text or something. Something that just makes an entire civ kill themselves or something. Or maybe some equation that spells eternal doom or something that leaves everyone absolutely hopeless.

I’ll try going through the summaries of the books you recommended! Thanks :)

That’s such a cool setting for SciFi! Discovery of an alien civ by studying UFOs. Astonishment at discovering multiple civs. Finding out the reason why these civs don’t exist anymore. Protecting ourselves against this threat.

I wish I had time to explore this :(

I don’t dislike AI. I dislike capitalist morons snake oil salesman-ing AI.

Yes, there is obviously a great great ethical use of AI. The utopian future is a publicly owned AI system, where all jobs are automated, where all labor is done practically without scarcity at superhuman competency levels. Humans sit on their front porch playing the cello, knitting, or perhaps just fucking. Any sort of progress necessitates the creation of AI in our day and age.

The definition of AI depends a lot on context. Are we talking philosophically? Well, that’s a rabbit hole I don’t want to get into at all right now. Technically? Well, here’s how I’d go about it:

“Intelligent systems are those that have a set terminal goal, and continually attempt to get closer to achieving their terminal goal, by refining each attempt by learning from past experiences interacting with their environment.”

So if we have to look at this as a function, AI would have these qualities: Input params and output params. AI is the function in the middle. AI takes input params and tries to correctly manipulate them to form output params. It uses results to change its model to be “more correct” in the future. So by this definition, your dumb 20 year old computer vision models would still qualify as AI.

Slop

AI is new means of production. The fight mustn’t be against this new means of production. Rather, it must be to seize these new means of production.

“AI bad” is not a coherent argument.

Unciv is a pretty cool game! It’s basically FOSS civ 5 that can be played on mobile. Huge timewaster haha

Interesting! Is there any way to combat this “false consciousness”?

For which office? You guys already have elected progressives in some offices

Peak

Happy birthday Moop! <3

The only terminal goal that corporations have is to make money. As much of it as possible.

Production of Andor was greenlit with the assumption that investing money in it would result in a positive ROI. Nothing more, nothing less. The same applies to them funding the fascist admin.

Most monologues and speeches from Andor:

• Nemik’s manifesto: Talks about liberation and authoritarianism.
• Kino’s speech: I interpreted it as a call for revolution against the ruling class.
• Mothma’s senate speech: Talks about how fascism rises with a loss of an objective reality (in the public consciousness).

Andor’s really a banger! Please consider watching it if you haven’t already.

Yes.

The argument for privacy in monetary transactions is much more nuanced than the one for simple text messages. Reducing privacy in text messages only punishes the “good guys”, as bad guys can still use e2ee communication media very easily.

For monetary transactions, things get more complicated. Tax evasion, money laundering, human trafficking, purchase of weapons can be done using super private payment systems. If adoption of this becomes widespread, then liquidity of these currencies increase. For example, if I’m selling illegal weapons, then the Monero that I receive from that purchase needs to be somehow converted into real money so that I can buy a house, groceries and so on. If Monero becomes widespread, then I don’t even need to this.

Imagine Bezos, musk and all the other crooks just getting way way more of powerful.

How do they handle the traceability aspect? Like, if it’s a blockchain, that makes transactions public by definition right?

Not quite. They use something called “ring signatures”.

Centralised payment systems are much more efficient. Yes, corporate capture can make them suck (visa/MasterCard duopoly). To ensure security, financial infrastructure tends to be super capital intensive. This leads to an oligopoly in a best case scenario and a monopoly in the worst case scenario.

Being a natural monopoly, I would highly highly be in support of state owned financial “stuff”. Cooperativize operations as much as possible, but let the state raise capital for this. Good for national security too.

Certain types of crypto can be very good if you want transactions to be anonymous (Monero being the best example). Wanna purchase drugs from an illegal ecommerce platform? Monero is untraceable. Wanna buy weapons, launder money, etc? Monero works. Otherwise, it’s pretty much useless in the face of existing non crypto services.

BTC sucks for transactions. But its value proposition is kinda different. It’s kinda like gold (kinda).

Humans throughout history have based currencies based on items that can be easily verified to be real, and are scarce. Gold is an example. Gold can be mined, yes. But it’s pretty scarce. It’s easy to tell gold from “not gold”.

Hence, in a world where financial systems weren’t exactly integrated and digitized, assets and market info was hard to track, trust in other countries and their institutions was super low, gold worked.

But we abandoned the gold standard for a reason. Hence, do we really want a digital gold equivalent (in terms of verifiability and scarcity)? What even is the point? That’s why BTC doesn’t make sense (for me)