@FaceDeer@kbin.social
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FaceDeer

@FaceDeer@kbin.social

Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

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FaceDeer,
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You don't pronounce the word for imagery as "jrafics?" How odd.

FaceDeer,
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Reflecting on how ironic it would be for a deer to crash a car into a human crossing the road for a change.

FaceDeer,
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The "Dark Forest" hypothesis is riddled with holes, it only works as the premise for a scary science fiction series and not as a real-world Fermi Paradox solution. The main problem with it is that life on Earth has been readily detectable for two billion years and there's no reason a paranoid xenocidal alien species wouldn't want to wipe that out preemptively, so we'd already be long dead if it were actually the case.

I don't see why it's scary to be the first. To the contrary, that means that our descendants will get to colonize the reachable volume of the cosmos without risk of running into a more advanced species that squashes them like bugs (whether deliberately or simply by having already occupied all the useful resources).

FaceDeer,
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Never say anything that isn't entirely bad about Elon Musk.

FaceDeer,
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Well, I won't say I think there's no risk at all. AI is advancing rapidly and in very surprising ways. But I expect that most of the jobs that AI is currently "replacing" will actually still survive in some related form. When sewing machines were invented it didn't poof tailors out of existence, they started doing other things. The invention allowed people to be able to own way more clothing than they did before, so fashion design became a bigger thing. Etc.

Even if AIs get really good at psychology there'll still be people who are best handled by a human. Heck, you might end up with an AI "boss" that decides which cases those would be and give you suggestions on how to handle them, but your own training will likely still be useful.

If you want to be really future-proof then make sure to set aside some savings and think about alternate careers that you might enjoy keeping abreast of as hobbies just in case something truly drastic happens to your primary field.

FaceDeer,
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Wow, I need to go eat something. I was just about to ask "when have we seen a Caitian in Lower Decks?"

FaceDeer,
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Hey, we're celebrating here, don't harsh the good vibe.

FaceDeer,
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It's not actually meaningless. It means "I did test this and it did work under certain conditions." So maybe if you can determine what conditions are different on the customer's machine that'll give you a clue as to what happened.

The most obscure bug that I ever created ended up being something that would work just fine on any machine that had at any point had Visual Studio 2013 installed on it, even if it had since had it uninstalled (it left behind the library that my code change had introduced a hidden dependency on). It would only fail on a machine that had never had Visual Studio 2013 installed. This was quite a few years back so the computers we had throughout the company mostly had had 2013 installed at some point, only brand new ones that hadn't been used for much would crash when it happened to touch my code. That was a fun one to figure out and the list of "works on this machine" vs. "doesn't work on that machine" was useful.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

That's not been my experience. It'll tend to be agreeable when I suggest architecture changes, or if I insist on some particular suboptimal design element, but if I tell it "this bit here isn't working" when it clearly isn't the real problem I've had it disagree with me and tell me what it thinks the bug is really caused by.

FaceDeer,
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To be fair, the bug report was utterly useless too.

FaceDeer,
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The medical guy standing next to her is clearly thinking something along those lines, based on his expression.

FaceDeer,
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And once AI gets just a little better those replacements can step in to our shoes seamlessly. All those cancelled and permanent-hiatus webcomics can start updating again.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

No. You won't feel pain if you're not conscious. What are you on about?

Also, you can see the Earth and Moon in the corner of the frame, he's not that far away. Probably in Earth orbit, or in near-Earth solar orbit. So the celestial body he's most likely to hit is Earth, which means he just wakes up after impact and everything's fine.

FaceDeer,
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I don't know what scenario you think we're discussing here. If the astronaut is capable of dying from damage then the comic doesn't work.

FaceDeer,
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If the astronaut is unable to sustain sapience then there's no problem. It's no different from regular death.

FaceDeer,
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I was going to link the classic WKRP bit, but I knew that people would point out that the turkey had an airplane so I had to dig a little deeper on this one.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

I was enjoying this comic until I suddenly realized turkeys can't fly.

Where Are All The Bicycles?? (startrek.website)

I have an issue in general with scifi totally ignoring the existence of bicycles, but star trek is particularly fun to think about since in so many situations beaming down in an away team with electric mountain bicycles would be incredibly useful in a basic utilitarian sense. Like shuttles, bicycles could be treated as...

FaceDeer,
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To be fair, most planets they went to had pretty rugged terrain with no roads near the Stargate. They did use UAVs and MALPs sometimes.

Though one thing they could have found useful going through the Stargate would be dirtbikes, that would have been a fun addition.

FaceDeer,
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Spock casually flies up a mountain using hoverboots in one of the movies. Why this isn't standard issue on away missions is beyond me. They don't need bicycles, they can fly.

FaceDeer,
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My main annoyance was how short that bit was.

And also that they teased us with the mention of sea shanties twice without ever delivering.

FaceDeer, (edited )
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I had Homer giving commentary in my own head as I wrote it.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

It's a fun meme trend and all, but an insistent little part of my fanboy brain keeps on bothering me to say it; Ketracel White is not actually a drug. It's merely a metabolite that Jem Hadar were engineered to be unable to make for themselves, so that they would die if they tried to flee the Dominion.

It's much like vitamin C is for humans. Humans depend on vitamin C, they die if they can't get enough of it. But snorting vitamin C is not a particularly pleasant experience. And for creatures that aren't dependent on vitamin C even less so.

There, my nerd brain is satisfied. You may continue with the funny memes.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

AI is a perfectly fine name for it, the term has been used for this kind of thing for half a century now by the researchers working on it. The problem is pop culture appropriating it and setting unrealistic expectations for it.

FaceDeer,
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I fret that in the future - possibly not even the far future - the phrase "stochastic p*rrot" will be seen by AIs as a deeply offensive racial slur.

FaceDeer,
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R2 needs lots of skittery little toes to move around as smoothly as he does and cling to the outer hulls of starships.

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