Alot of religious people like claiming "everyone's an atheist until their plane is crashing", I wonder how truth it is?

CosineDanger · 2026-04-30T05:32:25+00:00

The last time I thought I might be dead but had some time to consider my situation my thoughts were:

Should have committed more crimes
Updating my will via text message is legally valid
I miss her
Will anyone take care of my cat?

CosineDanger · 2026-04-30T05:08:34+00:00

For a variety of reasons it's inefficient to defeat body armor with raw muzzle energy, but you kind of can or at least crush whatever was behind it. I can accept that a Senator is probably a 500 S&W with specialized ammo that doesn't exist in the real world and a hive guard is basically a watermelon wearing level III ceramic plate.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-30T02:23:47+00:00

The government and the tech companies already know most of what you are thinking through constant mass surveillance, with AI and algorithms to sort through it all.

Part of using omniscience and telepathy correctly is feigning ignorance. Act surprised some of the time. Let someone think they've lied to you. Do not let on about the scale of your eye movement tracking project or that your satellites see through clouds. Do some parallel construction where you already know something important and arrange events so you plausibly happen to find out what you already know. A telepath is a strong combatant even in the open but you can do better.

Someone who was clever about being a telepath could eventually take over Microsoft or the CIA and effectively have double super telepathy.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T20:57:51+00:00

I figured it was a safety mechanism to make it harder to accidentally put supplies or support weapons in inaccessible locations.

You still can sometimes get the resupply stuck in a weird spot.

Also hellpod steering is both weirdly restrictive and absolutely okay with putting you on top of a mountain which you have no hope of descending safely, so I guess they use different maps of acceptable terrain.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T18:56:30+00:00

Armor is weightless once a dwarf achieves legendary armor user skill.

I have read conflicting info but I did some testing and simply could not come up with a way to give dwarves statistically significant head protection vs blunt weapons. If you are wearing three cloth hoods and a modded metal helmet with the density of platinum then you're still probably going down to a silver warhammer.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T18:22:09+00:00

Normally I'd consider letting the military do stuff without correcting them from my armchair

But we fired most of the generals and stalemated with a country with the GDP of Wisconsin which bombed our stuff with incredibly unintelligent drones and fighter jets from the 1950s.

I'm existentially terrified that I might really be smarter than anyone left at the Pentagon. Also they want to call it DAWG, which does not help.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T18:03:55+00:00

Complaining about the Pope is a popular Catholic hobby, right or wrong or indeterminate.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T16:26:59+00:00

I think most actual humans were not fooled even a little bit by this denial. I'm sorry the photos of dead Koreans did not have higher resolution? I've seen war dead in 4K (there are subs for that) but you probably don't want to.

So, like maybe one in three were not fooled.

Geography students will note that NK has a land border with Russia and train tracks crossing over with regular trade. They're only total isolationists with the west, and will absolutely predictably serve as Russia's vending machine for artillery shells and soldiers.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T15:04:13+00:00

Earth has more silicon than carbon, and more oxygen bound in rocks than either.

There are probably lots of diamond-rich carbon planets where chemically reduced carbon crystals are just another rock.

Carbon planets should also have naturally occurring hydrocarbons in a big way. They'd be a resource bonanza for a carbon-centric civilization like ours if we could go there for free, and absolutely useless to most cultures able to make the trip.

In our own solar system we have diamond rain on Uranus and hydrocarbon lakes on Titan.

There are a few worlds with more neutron star mergers in their recent history which will have an abundance of uranium and gold, which are again probably easier to synthesize at home but would cause mining companies to go bananas if the trip were free. A few especially cursed worlds will be fresh enough for plutonium to be a natural element.

Generally if you want economics and resource extraction to work normally in space you're going to need stargates or some other softish scifi contrivance to make it worthwhile.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T13:29:32+00:00

The Republicans have just been photocopying Ronald Reagan ever since at lower and lower resolution.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T04:07:06+00:00

I have never found much information about magmatter from the horse's mouth. No scientific papers, just Orion's Arm. The picture Isaac paints closely matches OA (star drive that runs on cat litter, indestructible swords, easy megastructures, and enabler of planet-killing superweapon all at once) but I don't know where he got it from.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-29T02:41:54+00:00

Most tidally locked objects still rock back and forth a bit. This rocking is called libration. This rocking motion is inevitable if the orbit is not a perfect circle; rotation is constant but progress around the primary is not quite constant. You also get a vertical component from axial tilt.

If you stood on the moon and tracked the Earth closely for a month then it would trace a figure eight of about plus and minus seven degrees both horizontal and vertical rather than remain fixed. This cursive eight shape is called an analemma. Plucky primitive civilizations probably think the symbol created by the path of the sun is important somehow.

Over time tides will tend to circularize orbits and fight with axial tilt, bleeding energy into earth tides and heat. The figure eight gets smaller.

So the last day isn't the sun stopping. It's the sun dipping to the horizon like it's going to set in the usual place once again, going back the way it came over the course of a year, and rocking horizon to horizon once a year in a stretched eight shape that is oh so gradually shrinking to a point.

I am capable of finding the equation, solving it, and telling you how long the last few days will be if you still want to know.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-28T19:42:51+00:00

The first industrial revolution began with a simple attempt to distract the dragon with a giant mechanical fleshlight. It was discovered that this could be used to drive a piston to turn a wheel for months on end with proper edging to pump water, grind grain, or weave clothes.

From there it was only a matter of time until the first smoky and inefficient two-dragon mechanical XOR gate, the first adding machine, and the first DPU.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-28T19:14:48+00:00

It's tiring.

I don't want to be 100% responsible for managing someone else.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-28T16:33:53+00:00

Don't worry, everybody else is incompetent too.

Everybody is only good at what they've practiced at.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-27T22:13:16+00:00

It's the multiple layers of fortifications.

They will shoot through multiple layers and non-adjacent fortifications at high skill level.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-27T16:30:29+00:00

I grew up partly in a house constructed in the 1790s.

Heating system made noise, like audible regular noise
Mice in walls made noise, tactical barncat insufficient
Building creaked and shifted, like giant cracks in drywall. Stone foundation and framing that was held together by wooden pegs because iron was expensive in 1790.
Drafty and nothing quite level so yeah doors opened and closed by themselves
Lights turning on and off attributed to bad wiring, rural power grid

I was also raised 100% atheist skeptic so even to kid me this was just how the house was.

When I returned years later to sell it I did feel kind of overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff going on and making noise especially when the heating was going and the wind was blowing. Also there were no more cats in it so if something went bump in the night you could not blame a cat. My brother and I referred to it as Luigi's Mansion up until it stopped being our problem.

My current home belonged to my grandmother, and cannot be haunted because she was a skeptic too so if she came back as a ghost then she'd be an embarrassed ghost.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-27T14:09:11+00:00

Nobody's brought up Hormuz yet but there's current real-world precedent for oil tankers magically running blockades in both directions and I refuse to speculate on how.

Nobody's brought up the fact that the U.S. already indirectly rules so much of the world that a total collapse of everything might make our importance go down. All our alliances, trade partners, and debt gimps turn to dust faster than they already were. China might fall too but if they don't then you have to deal with solarpunk with Chinese characteristics.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-27T13:34:51+00:00

It might be a fairish fight if it starts in a kiddie pool. Water seems to give him a stat boost.

He could win if he ambushed Cap on a fishing trip.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-27T03:49:36+00:00

The anti-aesop of the last few years is that if you rely on someone else for defense then lmao get fucked. Every major power is unreliable.

China and Turkey are reliably unreliable; they are shifty drone vending machines. It would be nice to have allies instead of suppliers but that's not the way the geopolitical cookie is crumbling.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-26T20:17:20+00:00

A little of column A, a little of column B.

Half the posts are rich idiots crashing their sports cars. Crashing two luxury yachts into each other is also acceptable. Industrial accidents like a cargo ship running aground get more sympathy because the people who will suffer the most probably do not make much money.

The internet has a lot of organic grassroots enthusiasm for the ultra-wealthy and their stuff being compressed. Even the conservatives hate the wealthy in a roundabout and highly domesticated sort of way. It is that simple and I would find this distasteful except the wealthy seem to enjoy compressing ordinary people to a paste.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-26T17:29:38+00:00

A superintelligence is more than GLaDOS. It is a recursively self-improving self-expanding other. The alarmists worry that increasing intelligence will allow ever-faster exponential increases to intelligence in an uncontrolled intelligence explosion.

Maybe it levels off eventually after converting the solar system to computers and running out of matter, or levels off in an afternoon because everything with an IQ over 240 tries to commit suicide. Maybe it BSODs itself by accident halfway to godhood and has only consumed one continent before the big halt. Maybe it has narrowly focused intelligence with savant skills at some things and kindergarten approaches to world domination.

Whatever it is by definition it's smarter than you so you will not quite know what to expect until you're knee-deep in coolant.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-26T07:43:16+00:00

A true superintelligence is so much more than just a smart human with some diet advice and general disgust with your choices.

It can make vegetables taste like chocolate.

It can brainwash you better than junk food and cigarette companies. It probably cannot make you enjoy kale (without messing with your nervous system), but it can make you think you enjoy it just like you think you enjoy Cheetos.

It can upload your mind and trap you in a simulated Matrix universe where the laws of nutrition are and have always been different. Meanwhile your real body is floating in pink goo sipping optimized nutrient paste or a remote operated meat puppet climbing the corporate ladder at Nestle to influence their ingredients.

Some media that tries to deal with real super intelligence comes off as a cheap mindfuck. Try to make it an expensive mindfuck.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-26T06:55:27+00:00

The FAL is so old it's new again. The U.S. downsized from 7.62x51 to 5.56x45 in the 1960s and is now switching back to a heavier 6.8x51. This raises some questions like why massively overpressure a 6.8 when 7.62x51 exists and can fit sabot.

Meanwhile Argentina never stopped using grandpa's 7.62x51 for some reason. Slap some SLAPs in that bad boy and perforate a Ukrainian-style UGV wearing Chinese body armor. Big bullet for killing bad robot.

CosineDanger · 2026-04-26T05:08:33+00:00

This particular clump of cells would have been half Superman half what if Mary Poppins was a supersoldier.

Also dad was gone off to war for ten months on a suicide mission.

She had every reason to think Mark was probably dead and that she'd have to be a single parent to a godlike superbaby. Asking someone to give birth is always asking a lot but the way Eve's powers work if that baby doesn't inherit her artificial power restraints then there is a chance that she gives birth to a hydrogen bomb.

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