I’d ask if you’re at my work, but this is an amount of organizational improvement that they haven’t yet been able to begin

I mean, you’d lose most of the Appalachian Mountains which as one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world means losing a ton of ancient fossils that helped piece together the biological history of Earth. I’d also be curious how the glaciers would be impacted given how heavily they shaped much of North America

You also lose several major cities including Toronto and St Louis, Canada loses most of its habitable land (assuming the climate isn’t significantly impacted by the existence of a second Mediterranean Sea, which it definitely would be) Chicago is going to be quite different but probably an even more important port city in such a world. Las Vegas is now a port city, so probably less casinos and more just major city. My wife would be sad because the Quad Cities (a metro area on the Iowa/Illinois border) wouldn’t exist and she really likes that area. I’d be sad because the Mississippi River would be much short and therefore way less cool. But it’s a really wild concept that gets crazier the more you think about it

The US is fucking huge…The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin

It is hilarious to imagine if this were real. Like what would European explorers and Settlers have done if they started mapping it out and went “wait a minute…”

China was notably one of the last places on earth to retire steam locomotives from revenue service, only ending mainline steam in 2005 and reportedly ending the last branchline’s use of steam in 2023, but may still have some revenue steam service surviving elsewhere

Bosnia still has some revenue steam service at a coal mine (notably running locomotives built by Germany using prisoner labor during WWII that were designed to use minimal resources and with a design life of only 10 years)

Jesus it’s not even like it just ran rmdir from the current directory and got lost, it just flat out explicitly deleted everything from the root of the drive

Yeah as an admin I love that I can run familiar Linuxy commands in powershell but I also hate that they can’t just use/fork the real userland utilities so everything works just similarly enough to completely throw you off when you stumble across a difference

I love reading this as the backups have never succeeded

Its all creepy until you realize it was all just a chat with an LLM and not actually an agentic machine learning model or chain of models hooked into some custom APIs

LLMs famously collapse into rediculousness once a conversation goes on too long. They’re now at the point where that takes more than a couple of paragraphs of text at least

On the upside, they specified D: drive which is typically a lesser used bulk storage drive, so less activity to potentially overwrite the files marked as deleted

There’s a mod for that!

But more seriously, watch the water in your sight glass, keep it about 3/4 full at all times and check it like you check your rear view mirror in your car, and don’t forget to open the cylinder cocks every time you stop (or at least when you first start moving) and you should be pretty good to avoid unexpected damage to your locomotive!

I’ll be real, I absolutely loved the first story, it took a little bit to get into the second one (but thoroughly enjoyed it after all) and I gave up partway through the third one because I was struggling to get pulled in and my library book was due soon anyways. So absolutely worth it for the first two stories at least, and hopefully you enjoy the third one more than I did!

Hilariously this was a plot point in a book I read recently. Isambard Kingdom Brunel replaced the firebox with some poorly shielded uranium, but the initial locomotive that was to demonstrate the technology was sabotaged and exploded, killing his parents.

This same book also had a fictional mad inventor who created a part newt-human hybrid named Victoria with womanly assets if you catch my drift, who upon failing to educate it he sent to a brothel because he couldn’t stand to “dispose of it” but when the princess and heir to the throne Elizabeth went missing, the newt-human hybrid Victoria was installed on the throne to prevent a constitutional crisis. And this is all events that occurred in the first 2 pages, so I’m not even spoiling anything!

Reminds me of one of my favorite photos, a steam engine being delivered by steam engine!

Oh absolutely without actual government action the overall population decline will be catastrophic. Basically if it’s handled the way that climate change has been, our kids/grandkids/great-grandkids will be screwed because it’s a similarly significant world-wide challenge for humanity that like climate change will require some changes to how people live and run the world. However, unlike climate change, population decline won’t necessarily kill off humanity entirely, because it will self-resolve one way or another, either by society collapsing due to the medical system collapsing or by actual social change to adapt to the normalizing population level

This is a problem that’s being co-opted by right-wing nazitards like Elon Musk who are making it about race, but it’s really a global issue without a lot of clear causes or solutions

Its really only an issue in the context of capitalism. Capitalism relies on growth. No growth or negative growth means capitalism collapses and all of the hoarding that the rich and powerful have been doing was meaningless. Capitalism grew out of Mercantilism which was an extremely similar economic theory but Mercantilism largely assumes that any trade is bad because someone is “winning” and someone is “losing” meanwhile capitalism learned that trade is good because the same money can be spent more times by more people.

The short term solution is to create significant financial and other incentives for people to go into healthcare, particularly CNAs because a larger aging population than the working population will require lots of CNAs to care for the elderly. Right now these workers are woefully underpaid and largely abused by both their patients who lack the mental faculties to know what they’re doing and their workplaces which are increasingly frequently owned by private equity

The last one about friendships not meant to last is one of the hardest lessons to learn.

My wife had one friend who fell into drugs and ultimately even after she hit rock bottom and went clean my wife largely doesn’t interact with her any more. She’s said she feels like she’s matured far more than this friend was ever willing to.

I became friends with a guy who was my only friend who shared my interest in homelabbing. I later learned the skeletons he was hiding in his closet and broke contact entirely (and revoked SSH keys and the like)

The real challenge with DNA access is that there’s too many nefarious things that can be done with that information. Without strong legal protections worldwide, some can use information from one’s DNA to determine genetic conditions that they’d exclude from employment, access to social programs, or access to specific aspects of life even. Eugenicists freaking love DNA because it gives the perfect excuse, technical means and mode to carry out their practice, insurance companies could use genetic conditions to set rates in an unfair manner, and of course we could find ourselves with botique babies where certain aspects are spliced in or out in the attempt to make either the perfect child or more terrifyingly the perfect soldier.

Open access to DNA simply enables racism, social casting and eugenics at a scale and scope that humanity has yet to see, and the idea of this possibility is frankly terrifying.

Realistically he was just the right person at the right time with the right ideas to make a righteous mess and end and ruin so many lives in a surprisingly short timeframe.

Also worth remembering that Hitler took heavy inspiration from Benito Mussolini, even coming to visit Mussolini early on to take inspiration from him (and later propping up Mussolini once the anti-fascists got too successful) even the Nazi sulute was inspired by Mussolini, who had lifted it from a series of silent films about a Roman hero which those films had likely invented the concept of the “Roman sulute” in one of the earliest examples of Hollywood fiction influencing reality

Would be funny if AI models are generating such wildly useless “clocks” because they ingested too many dementia screening tests in their training data

I’ve never actually needed on of these but they keep showing up in movies/games…so I’d vote this

Sounds like you need a small electrical project then!