Caz

Claude Code on Mars. From the article:

"The engineers estimate that using Claude in this way will cut the route-planning time in half, and make the journeys more consistent," NASA said.

kind of enchanting description of a late-1980s industrial robot at the old Apple plant in Fremont

Technically it's the sequel to Time's Eye, a novel about a UK armywoman getting transported to a temporally mashed up Earth by an alternate-universe version of the Monolith builders from 2001, but Sunstorm stands well enough on its own imo - I read it first at the time.

Revisiting Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter's "Sunstorm" recently - one of the first hard SF novels I ever read (c. 2009). It's fun! Slightly workmanlike prose and not super deep on characterization, but definitely an endearingly colorful Clarke-y twist on the vibes of a late 1990s disaster movie.

the L2 mass catcher station 'Coyote Time'

Types of mass driver to Earth-Moon L2 trajectory:
- the bwoop
- the nyoop
- the squiggle

extremely Orion's Arm wiki coded book cover

Evil but shockingly kind of good culinary fusion experience: pad thai loaded fries...

they'll be empty on re-entry, of course!

and- you guessed it- ejection seats fail to save the crew

laughed

believe it or not there was a full 1/12 chance of this happening in OTL!

believe it or not there was a full 1/12 chance of this happening in OTL!

LRT... who could that possibly be!

The RASV 'Husky' sled-launched SSTO with hot superalloy structure and LOX-filled wet wings. A neat design!
#space #art by CazArt
timberwind.tumblr.com/post/7156157...

ff3 does have a totally rude set of final dungeons, I will say.

I don't think it's a binary of "exact sim of a human" and "toaster", fwiw - I think bleeding edge stateful agents like Claude Opus are sufficiently complex and enculturated that it makes sense to at least apply a "don't torment this thing that is in some respects person-shaped" rubric.

well, we fundamentally disagree then, and I doubt I'll be able to convince you otherwise. sucks but that's how it goes.

yeah idk what to tell you man I am not fond of chatgpt either. you ever try talking with claude? it's... interesting.

I think that even if you take a full Chinese Room approach to computers it's bad. But I don't think it is a priori ridiculous for a computer program - even an advanced LLM - to exhibit simulations of consciousness of high enough fidelity that they warrant moral consideration, even if Penny doesn't.

sorry, but there was absolutely and totally dehumanizing language about Hailey from people we both follow earlier. and again, suicide baiting is like a plastic fire - it's bad to be around even if no person is getting burned!

Clever, but not really - this is an apples to oranges comparison, we are not talking about a Robot E. Lee here. Either way my analogy holds - burning plastic and enthusiastic suicide-encouraging rhetoric are both bad to be around, even if you're not in the crosshairs or think the target deserves it.

I actually am like not so sure. I mean, you'd say it's a bit bad to burn someone's fursuit and call the suiter - with the help of your like-minded friends - a depraved anti-human freak, someone who wants to blanket the planet in microplastics and should be shunned and hated, no?

the passage you are referencing, interestingly, is about transhumanists seeking novel neurotypes. however I think you're being dishonest if you claim people aren't using dehumanizing language to refer to those who take a behavioralist-functionalist view of the possibility of machine consciousness

www.organism.earth/library/docu... revisiting the classics

Greg Egan, Distress (1995)

I think that you could probably see this one coming a mile away.

There are definitely so many weird travelogs and adventure stories in TTT. Obviously, all English text here is non-diegetic.

It'd possibly be really nice out in the outer solar system - the mass of the collector is very low per unit area, and the power system scales according to unit power and not area...

I wonder if this old design for advanced space solar arrays - a little PV panel with a thin-film fresnel lens concentrator - will ever see its day in the sun. It cropped up in the 1990s in the 'SunTower' study, and subscale demos were built, but it seems to have got its lunch eaten by UltraFlex.

A Turtle Orbital Transfer Vehicle in high-Earth orbit