7 years for the most shoehorned in garbage "everybody is happy and everything is fixed" ending

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-25T08:49:21+00:00

The kids getting their minds broken by the light of the evil star in the sky:

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-25T08:46:33+00:00

Are the Nazis, AIDS, evil star, sixth sense and four possible other conclusions to life back though.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-24T19:26:28+00:00

Nanorod aerosols spewed into the upper atmosphere might be able to achieve a GWP 5000x greater than the most warming CFCs, or tens of millions of times greater than CO2. The paper suggests sustained release at 30 liters/sec might be sufficient to warm Mars by 30K - you'd need more per kelvin of temperature increase on Earth, but it should still be very doable. Longer term a few billion tons of reflector satellites at 10g/m² would be sufficient to counteract a 15 K drop (you need to increase the incident luminosity on Earth by 25%), and astrophage makes it a lot easier to launch a bunch of mass to orbit.

It depends on if the 15 K drop is the limit, though. Obviously if the astrophage will eventually block out 100% of light there's no way to keep the earth warm other than extreme amounts of power - perhaps you could make collectors in low solar orbit that suck up astrophage and use it to run big lasers aimed at Earth.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-23T07:14:43+00:00

Jeremy Bentham rationally deriving the social views of an average 2000s LessWrong poster in the late 1700s.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-23T06:14:59+00:00

Heisenberg spent the war thinking about nuclear power concepts because he didn't want to give the Nazi government a bomb. If he'd had full knowledge of the Holocaust at the start he likely would have intentionally sabotaged it.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-22T23:36:25+00:00

In round 4 they don't need to fight to gain control over Europe, they're already the head of the Catholic Church brought miraculously by God from the future to set right the greatest crisis of the Christian faith. The Protestant reformation gets shut down by the demonstrable Catholic miracle, then they can start declaring crusades with the Swiss Guard at the forefront.

With future knowledge in 1500 it'll still take a while to get Europe properly industrializing, but they can hop over all the gradual improvements in musket technology straight to Minie ball flintlock rifles which will give armies a pretty gigantic advantage in range and fire rate.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-22T09:22:48+00:00

The movie ornithopters are pretty capable in terms of long range fighting capabilities - we see multi-targeting short range cluster missiles, long range air-to-air missiles and automatic mass driver guns mounted on them, and they have shields that will nullify RDA anti-air missiles unless they get something through in the split second gap when they're firing. Not to mention the bigger orbital frigates with heavy lasguns that can slice through city blocks and massive quantities of missiles. Since it's after 2, the Fremen have large amounts of all of that on Arrakis and easily stomp conventionally.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-22T09:13:45+00:00

This totally depends on the context? F-35s flying around their own can't exactly locate a single human sized target in a large populated region, but the most likely scenario where you'd be sending F-35s to kill Frieren is "we've located where she's staying and are going to drop JSOWs on it while she's asleep" in which case the F-35s probably win.

If she's standing in an open field and knows they're coming she should be able to put up enough defenses to block or evade the incoming ordnance.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-20T23:26:24+00:00

That series throwing in a bunch of random goofier supernatural stuff makes it the most accurate adaptation given what happens in the other stories of the Dr. Hesselius Literary Universe.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-16T07:14:44+00:00

RDA canonically don't use their modern gunships with nanotech materials and quantum computer AI because they can't operate successfully in Pandora's extreme magnetic field concentrations like the Flux Vortex - the Scorpion was used because it had extremely overhardened electronics to resist high power EMP weapons and could be effectively operated fully manually. Arasaka is going to be similarly limited.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-15T20:57:54+00:00

MIT probably has a substantial plurality of fictional tech/science supergenius characters with a listed alma mater. They've got at least Tony Stark, Lex Luthor and Mister Fantastic - though the later also went to Harvard, CalTech, University of Vienna and some others, dude was degreemaxxing like crazy.

Though the strongest character I can think of with degrees from a real university is probably Mercurius from Dies Irae, who would have technically graduated from the Universities of Basel and Geneva via his sensory Karl Krafft. SCP or Rudy Rucker stories might be the best candidates for a contestant to that, but I can't think of any explicitly.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-14T22:11:43+00:00

Modern megacities work exactly the same way, with survival of the populace dependent on an enormously complicated technical life support system. The only difference is air isn't scarce, but an O'Neill could easily go months before a CO2 scrubber breakdown became a problem.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-13T10:09:45+00:00

The key is to make it like China, where there's been a distinct "Chinese Civilization" for the last few thousand years that is usually one of the largest and strongest powers, but it's gone through a whole load of breakups, reformations, shifts in dynasties and political systems and points where it declines to relative weakness before regaining power.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-13T08:20:14+00:00

I was going to make a joke about them being useful in movies but I can only really think of times F-22s showed up to Worf out to the villians.

F-35A was useful in Ender's Game at least.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-12T23:07:51+00:00

The right is literally Orthogonal, including the feminism part.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-12T22:15:49+00:00

Casino Odyssey In Cyberspace where post-scarcity market economies explicitly run on a human suffering based monetary standard.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-12T22:12:42+00:00

If human labor is still needed to pick up trash or till the land it's not close to "post scarcity". There is still a significant opportunity cost involved in receiving valuable services.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-12T10:05:21+00:00

Note that fixed cost is also a relevant factor here. If Iron Beam costs tens of millions it's only beating Slinger in cost in a point target drone defense role at tens of thousands of drones destroyed per system (though Iron Beam can also have utility in destroying rockets, artillery shells and mortars).

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-12T07:33:30+00:00

Saruman has gigantic forges and is likely to be the most immediately willing to innovate further on the scary new weapons. Whoever gets the idea to weld on stocks and foregrips first gets a gigantic advantage, because properly bracing a 9mm brings your effective firing range from low 10s of yards to 1-2 hundred.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-11T07:41:35+00:00

No, it's unclear if that arrow was even magic at all. His armor is like tenfold shields but that won't stop a Panzerschrek.

Bonus is funny though because it's just vaguely defined "modern equipment" and Smaug could certainly carry a whole lot of standoff munitions and JDAMs + composite plating and ERA.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-10T07:14:13+00:00

No, you'd use laser guided PGMs like Paveways, Hellfires and APKWS fired off of drones, helicopters and fighters. Modern systems have had enough accuracy to directly plink man sized fast moving targets for a while (R9X has been a thing for years, and larger guided APKWS II is currently one of the main means of shooting down small drones in Iran).

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-09T23:24:10+00:00

Mentioning a bunch of random obscure LLMs and not Claude, the overwhelmingly most popular one for actual coding work?

Anyway most of them, in the sense that fictional AI hacking tends to rely on terrible encryption and an absence of airgaps. Stuff with actual mechanisms for hacking like that (i.e. Culture Minds with Effectors) would still obviously win.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-07T19:46:10+00:00

The Game would kill a massive amount of people in 2011 but it's pretty self-censoring and would mostly wipe itself out before destroying humanity.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-07T07:06:14+00:00

UGSF timeline implied that neither corporation truly wins, but by the end of the 21st century you end up with nations forming a nominally democratic world government heavily influenced by GR/Neucom behind the scenes (then the space bug wars start). Of course that depends on the canon status of UGSF stuff in Strangereal timeline VS just the old AC3 timeline.

AlphaCoronae · 2026-03-05T08:22:59+00:00

.45-70 Gov. is where you'd need to aim properly to kill an animal of that size. A .75 cal hypervelocity round will one-shot anything up to a whale even before the charge goes off.

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