It doesn't look like a Cyberpunk movie.

The real world looks surprisingly like a cyberpunk movie already.

Billionaire seem to have a… unscientific view of a sci fi future.

That's cause due to network effects people who are making such projects are equivalent to grocers in qualification. Just were in the right place at the right time. They are not engineers, not philosophers. But since they've read and seen in sci-fi that they have to show something engineer-philosopher-like, they are doing all this bullshit.

Our world's problem is in these monopolies which should be busted. After they are busted, we'll see a lot of goodness through the usual normal competition.

And also I don't think the sequence of events that led to the current state of things should be treated as some proof of "capitalism not working" or "computer-driven futurism being a dead end" or even "space travel not ever happening" or anything as radical. Every time is different. It's like living all your life alone after one bad relationship.

We should dream, and we should make, and we should try, and we should tell those who think it's their "vision" or none to go kick rocks.

I'd recommend diving into this for a more scientifically 'thought out' and optimistic extrapolation: orionsarm.com/

Man... if the Technopocolpyse is what you consider optimistic, I'd hate to find out what you consider pessimism!

With the caveat that I only read the transcripts, I don't find that compelling at all.

The initial sentiment is correct; folks like Sam Altman responding to existential problems like “oh we can just build a Dyson Sphere in 30 years” should be in freaking jail instead of power.

But the only other justification I see is “well, this is stupidly impractical in the context of current humans.” Things like:

• “What, we make all those nanobots and get all that energy with fusion and use it to disassemble Jupiter?”
• “Why don’t we just use that energy to leave the solar system?”
• “Say it’s a Dyson Swarm; what do we do living on all those solar satellites?”

She’s fallen into the same trap of “existing sci fi” she accuses other of falling into.

We’re not talking about a bunch of people in space looking to expand a habit. At this point, we’re talking about some AI that’s already converted an entire moons worth of mass into computronium, can upload folks to VR and simulate realities, that can reconfigure atomic nuclei into ultradense strings of matter or construct and control tiny black holes to generate energy and elements.

It’s left the solar system loooong ago.

Its capabilities, needs, and goals are completely umhuman, and at that point pondering how to efficiently capture the output of all this stellar mass sustainably is absolutely practical to plan. A Dyson Sphere (or more practically a swarm) isn’t the only way, but it’s not the worst idea for a “young” intelligence. And in OA, at a certain point, the Sephrotics seem to construct “sci fi” dyson spheres as habitats for aesthetic reasons, whereas their actual industrial/computational bases are more utilitarian arrangements of masses.

No, I just skimmed the transcript because it’s an hour long, heh.

I did get that bit about SETI and the original paper, which is interesting, and also agree that astronomers looking for them over the paper is hilarious and stupid.

That's a more interesting idea but still quite questionable, given how expensive sending anything to space is, and then maintaining it.

It made more sense with solar was expensive per square mm, but that is no longer the case.

Also, transmission is a huge problem. It's easy to say 'make a maser,' but making giant one and aiming it reliably (lest one fries nearby terrain as the satellite moves to track the sun), and making a receiver big enough from how much the laser spreads out from geosync orbit is a tall order. Geosync is super far away.

There's plenty of space on the ground, for now.

That sounds like privacy, not evil.

Because history, as well as current events, tell us that governments will absolutely make privacy illegal, so if you can do an end run of them by not being beholden to ANY government, then that is absolutely a good thing.

That sounds like privacy

Oh boy you are naive if you think that's the result of no regulation.
The real result will be monetization, using and selling the info to everyone who wants to buy including governments.
If you care about your data, keep it on servers in EU or Switzerland, it may not be perfect, but the protection is more crucial than the risks under their protective laws.
USA is a cesspool, and the worst of both. The only difference from space being that the government can take the info without paying.

Naive? No. What's naive is thinking that if you give power to anyone over your own data , even your government, that it will.protect it.

You think the EU cares about your privacy? I know my own government is doing it's level best to destroy mine, but at least I'm aware of it.

You, however, have the naivete of Pollyanna and think your vaunted EU is better.

Primarily, they're both gaming-focused.

I found out about Pop!_OS when doing research for gaming on Linux. It's maintained by a private company, and they invest a lot of time into keeping their drivers up-to-date. AFAIK it's still one of the best choices if you have Nvidia cards, because they have a separate ISO just for Nvidia machines.

For a short time, I used Kubuntu because I love KDE Plasma. I had been wanting to use Plasma again, and I kinda wanted to try a non-Debian/Ubuntu-based distro. That's when I stumbled upon CachyOS, and I don't think I'm switching to another distro for a while.

CachyOS is Arch-based, with a super-easy install. They have their own version of the kernel, optimized for gaming. It really is fast, too. Not only does it beat Windows in most speed tests, but it beats pretty much every other distro as well. If you like Arch, I highly recommend CachyOS to keep some of the basic stuff optimized while you tinker with your system.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. Agree on KDE being great. Idk if it is because it has more of a windows feel, or because it isn't as flashy as GNOME.

If my current Bazzite instance doesn't work out, maybe I'll try Cachy.

I've heard great things about Bazzite, so I'm sure you'll be fine there.

I just wanted something new, and Fedora was too similar to Ubuntu under the hood. I don't know if I'm going to look back from Arch-based. Maybe when I break my install lol.