Mostly that I like the civilized world.

Like don’t get me wrong: Nature hikes? Camping? All great. National parks are a treasure. But I will freely admit I rather enjoy little comforts of modernity like “clean water just comes out of the tap when I turn it on”, “fresh food is a 15-minute walk to the grocery store away”, and “the spinny machine makes my clothes clean while I do other stuff.”

“Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions.”

In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.

The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren’t) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.

Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a “truth machine”. A speaker I heard put it simply: “AI cheats.” It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.

Damn, dude. I am envious of your travel arrangements. It’s especially incredible how hard it is to convince management that hours spent fiddling with receipts isn’t worth whatever small amounts of change they might save from not just paying a flat sum.

The commute was too far already (about 1h 10m driving each way), and they wanted me to transfer to another location which would require a full-on move, which I wasn’t up for.

In retrospect, after I left they got bought out, had a leadership changeover and rebranding, and closed several facilities. So I think I might’ve dodged something.

I’m aware of it. It suffers from the same issues as WWZ. Max Brooks makes a lot of assertions, some of which are factually wrong (about topics other than zombies, I mean), some of which require the zombies to share the same oddly specific immunities to be true, and some of which is even self-contradictory. (Offhand, the bit that sticks in my mind is he completely contradicts himself about whether zombies can even climb things.)

I mean, the Zombies in WWZ basically run on magic shields to be a threat. They’re utterly invulnerable to anything Max Brooks doesn’t want them to be killed by.

Like, if I remember correctly, they’re immune to shrapnel and bleeding wounds because “the dead don’t need blood”, and nerve toxins or shockwaves don’t harm them because “the dead don’t have a nervous system”. But somehow removing the head is a 100% infallible method of killing them. What is in the head if not blood and nerves, Max?

These are creatures which casually violate the second law of thermodynamics. If they’re playing by real-world physics, chemistry, and biology, they’re radically less dangerous.

Pretty good movies.

But I think that also understates how influential they were to superhero popular culture. It bears remembering that prior to the BatTrilogy, for a decade-ish superhero films had been either the squeezed-dry sequels of B-list characters, comedies, aimed largely at kids, and/or barely resembled their source material. While 90s and early 00s Superhero comics were moving through their edgy antihero phases, films struggling to define themselves.

The Nolan Trilogy brought the idea of Batman as a tortured loner, alienated from his family and allies, into the broader popular culture. Batman allows villains to die, spies on innocents, and eschews sidekicks. There is no Justice League. “You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain” is not the sentiment that pervaded superhero screen media in the years prior to the Nolan trilogy.

Even if you don’t like superhero stuff, they’re worth watching just as an artifact of mid-late 00’s culture, in my opinion.

This. Could I name a few communities I’d like to exist on Lemmy? Sure - but I could just go out and make them. The issue is more I don’t think they’d be sustainable as standalone communities.

You’re basically asking about “Hard” and “Soft” science fiction.

For me, at least, I lean a little bit more towards the “Soft” (what you call ‘Fi’) side of things. But I’ve also always found this a little bit of a false dichotomy; a story can go fully fantastic and explain nothing about its spaceflight, but lean heavily on actual psychology or other social sciences to drive its characters; so is it “Hard” or “Soft” sci-fi? Turns out it doesn’t matter; it’s Sci-fi and if it’s a good story, then it’s good.

I also have to somewhat push back on the idea that Star Wars “doesn’t even try to explain” its tech. A lot of people put a good bit of effort into laying out how the technology worked, up to and including calculating the energy involved in things like Turbolaser bolts (turns out, it’s a metric shitton of energy).

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen small (i.e., handheld-sized) commercial UAVs that fly like this. But as others have pointed out, at any realistic size you start to run into a lot of problems:

• The VTOL rotors will create massive drag when they’re not in use. There’s a reason virtually every aircraft with embedded VTOL jets engineered ways to cover them up during level flight. This cascades into a whole bevy of complexity issues.
• When you’re not using them, you’re lugging around 3 out of your 4 rotors for no reason.
• You’re also sacrificing a lot of internal volume for your lift fans. This isn’t so much a problem in small UAVs, again, but it’s not great if you were hoping to use that capacity for fuel or cargo.

So yeah, like others said as well - now that we have tailsitter drones of moderate size, there’s not really a use for this layout.

Hey! Thanks for the rep for !worldbuilding@lemmy.world . We are, admittedly, not as active as Reddit’s equivalent due to Lemmy’s fairly niche nature, but more are always welcome.

Yep. Their heroes, icons, leaders, family… and themselves.

Hell, they’d disbelieve if the glasses detected someone was telling the truth, but they didn’t want to believe that!

People would very, very quickly start to rationalize why the detection couldn’t possibly be right. Look at how many scientifically or historically proven things people already are willing to disregard because it conflicts with their worldview or beliefs!

So they detect “willful” deception? People would just fall back on the “…well, I didn’t know” / “didn’t think XYZ counted” / “didn’t consider ABC” as their excuses. Or if it can be shown that 0.00-near-infinite-zeros-01% of the population has some quirk which makes them detect wrongly, suddenly there’d be most of the population claiming that.

I think the life cycle of collaborative projects - small circle to big blowup, drifting from the original spirit or ethos for better or worse - will be accelerated by algorithmically-driven social media. Hell, it’s already happening.

When I look at older collaborative fiction, it’s much more likely to remain centered around a few core creators and their guidelines or approaches. The more content in a project is owned by them, the more they’re able to influence others to not diverge too far from it.

When things blow up massively, that can all change in a heartbeat. Whoever is running the project frequently struggle to maintain those guidelines: Either because they don’t want to seem like controlling jerks, or because the flood of new content genuinely overwhelms their ability to moderate.

The problem is, this accelerated lifecycle can also burn out projects far more rapidly as people become disconnected from what appealed to them in the first place.

I was of the camp that said that even millions was far too small. This is a war spread out over thousands, if not tens of thousands of star systems. Hell, Venators have crews of ~10,000, and we see multiples go down in a single battle. I wouldn’t be surprised if a million clones died on some bad days alone.

Also someone who played through that: I agree.

Nostalgia Rorquals Online have a very rose-tinted view of the time. Sure, there were more ships in space… but a lot of those “ships in space” came in the form of an entire cap fleet landing on your cruiser roam the second you tackled a Rorqual. Fatigue timers and diminishing returns were absolutely needed.

I think the current crop of issues wouldn’t be fixed by just going back; they can be traced to other factors, like Citadels encouraging players crowding together.

Have a couple different ones:

Star Wars:: How many Clones were actually in the Clone Army (and, by extension, how large are the setting’s armies in general)?

The original wording used in 2003’s Attack of the Clones is (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous, so from that point on fans have forever debated this. On the one hand, there’s arguments that the visible cloning facilities and formations on-screen suggest literal interpretations of “unit” as “soldier”, and armies of a few million at most. On the other hand, fans have also pointed out that a galaxy-spanning conflict being fought by fewer troops than fought in World War 2 is ridiculous, and the casualty figures given would mean the entire clone army had been wiped out many times over - unless “units” can be taken to mean a much larger formation of troops.

Expanded Universe materials (both pre- and post-Disney) have given figures supporting both sides.

Eve Online: Was the game better or worse in the era of “Rorquals online”?

Context is, at that point in the game’s history, much of the game’s economy was driven by very large mining capital ships - Rorquals - systematically stripping in-universe resources at high speed.

Proponents suggest that the presence of vulnerable ships out in space doing things promoted conflict, and that this induced conflicting player groups to raid each others’ territory, creating game content. Detractors argue that Rorquals inevitably existed under the protective umbrella of existing large player groups, meaning only those groups could effectively harvest resources, creating a positive feedback loop where strong alliances got stronger and everyone else got wiped out.

(Personally, my answer is ‘both’ - but most of it has to do with other game changes besides Rorquals.)

Railfanning: Is coal-fired steam locomotives going away a good or bad thing?

Coal-fired steam is undoubtedly cool. you get the authentic sensations and smoke clouds that oil-firing really doesn’t provide. Many who favor it bemoan old coal-fired locomotives being converted to run on oil, sometimes also arguing the locomotives should be preserved as historically used.

On the hand, other fans point out that coal firing creates a very real fire hazard; there have been multiple brush- and forest-fires started or thought to be started by coal-fired locomotives. There’s also issues with coal becoming harder to get as use in power generation dwindles, and these fans would prefer to convert to oil rather than not run at all.

Most people just see a steam locomotive and go “Cool!”

I saw it much later on. Originally dropped out after Eva 01 straightup graphically eats the one Angel; that was too much even for me. Later on I picked it up and finished it.

In retrospect, it’s not my favorite. I was introduced to Gundam before Evangelion, and that ticked all the right boxes for what I enjoy in a Mecha show (less symbolism and weirdness, more grittiness and politics). But I still admire Evangelion for the qualities it has: Its characterization, its message(s), and for doing its unique thing - to say nothing of the raw value of the animation.

Rebuild was decent. It went from a mild retread of Evangelion, to once again completely bonkers off the rails, to somehow wrapping around again to picking up similar positive themes Evangelion had.

The opening is one of those things that just sticks with you. Minimalist artwork with just the studio’s name and a couple of lines sung gently… then this sick trumpet beat drops and the title flashes in the most 90s way possible.

I’ve been looking for a decent one, mostly to potentially run a fan in the event of a summer outage. I’ve actually been surprised how hard it is to find one that will support it at a reasonable price.