We have “family film nights”. We all have dinner together, then get out some beanbags, on the floor. We then all watch a film together, cuddled up on the beanbags.

The films are ones our daughter hasn’t seen, and can often push her boundaries. E.g. we watched “Monsters Inc” together. She was a little bit scared, but with mummy and daddy there, she loved it.

It’s definitely one for building memories together. We are too often distracted, even when present. Having dedicated family time makes a huge difference.

Oh, and she also doesn’t watch much paw patrol, even when around friends. Apparently “Daddy doesn’t like it” is quite enough to put her off it. A classic “respect over fear” situational win for me.

On a side note. The screen time correlation goes away, when you correct for the child’s parenting and lifestyle situation. It’s not “screens are bad” but that kids in worse situations watch more TV, etc. The causation is backwards.

Of course not, that would be immoral. They’ll track trollies and baskets, then tag it to the till and your loyalty card. It would be a lot more consistent, and harder to dodge.

I can see multiple uses for the tech. Unfortunately, many are a but dystopian, but some are legitimately useful.

I’ve still got about 100 or so of them. I was mass printing them as part of a coordinated project. We basically managed to saturate the local area with them. Once demand suddenly stopped, I was left with the next batch ready to go. I’ve still to find a good use for them.

Various events around the universe occur on human timescales. If time stopped for use, we would effectively skip ahead on the view of them.

I actually think we could reliably catch 1 second time stops. Scientists monitor various pulsars. They spin multiple times a second, throwing off radio wave pulses. If all of them suddenly went out of sync with our clocks, it would definitely be noticed. It might take several, however, to prove it wasn’t a weird hardware glitch.

I flew on an a380 recently. They actually used zoned boarding! The number of people who didn’t seem to get that they wouldn’t be allowed to board till their zone came up was amusing.

It saved a huge amount of time.

I’ve found I like interpretating phrase “common sense” akin to this scene, from blazing saddles.

https://youtu.be/KHJbSvidohg

I prefer the version. “If you smell shit, check the floor. If you constantly smell shit, check your shoes.”

It’s a reminder that a 1 off problem is likely external to you. If the problem seems to follow you around, it’s likely attached to you.

It doesn’t deny that the problem could still be external, but not to externalise things unless you are sure you’re not causing it.

If you pay attention to the footage, the riots are tiny. I think the biggest was around 100 people.

We finally managed to kick the right wing theives out, and some people are less than happy. They managed to rial a few idiots up, and the media have lapped it up.

I don’t know if it’s real or just nostalgia, but reddit is massively worse than I remember. I’ve gone back to nose a few times, and it feels like a ghost town, compared to what it used to be.

While I have an inner monologue, I’m also able to shut it down and still think. The inner voice is likely an artefact of how we learn. So much learning is done by voice instruction that it becomes the default for most people.

Most phones can open the camera without unlocking the phone. This makes it an easy prank source when someone leaves there phone unattended. Many a friend, acquaintance, or random stranger, has ended up with random selfies of me in their photos. (Generally just before i ask who misplaced their phone)

The other one is adding a few selfies when you offer to take a group photo for people.

There’s a paper published somewhere on the effectiveness of tin foil hats. It turned out that “traditional” designs actually acted to focus RF energy onto the brain.

It’s been years since I saw the paper, unfortunately, so I don’t have a link to hand.

HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

Edge of tomorrow.

A remarkably good film, considering how badly it was advertised.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won’t need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don’t do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren’t actually that bad.

The problem is, we can’t detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won’t recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.

Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.

A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn’t just luck out with the moon’s large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.

I don’t think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to “specialised generalists” would be a major hurdle.

Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.

Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.

I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.

The key point is that LLMs don’t process information, as we see it. The knowledge they have is predigested, and embedded into the text they were trained on.

Don’t get me wrong, they are a big step towards a true AI, but they cannot do some things that seem fundamental to intelligence. The best analogy is that they are a lobotomized speech centre. They can put on a veneer of being intelligent and self aware, but it’s a veneer.

I personally suspect they will be a critical component to a future AI, but are a dead end path on their own.