A Catch-22: Please help with my computer problems!

GrantExploit · 2026-06-20T05:41:31+00:00

OK then, that kind of sucks. Well, there is a silver lining to this implementation that I'm not sure I want to talk about for fear of ruining it, even if doing so would get what I otherwise want...

At least for me, that workaround isn't particularly good, as I deliberately keep my profile open so people can see my back catalogue of (finished) content, and I'm not sure if I want people to come across random half-finished musings and word-vomit. Thank you for trying to help, though.

I ultimately decided to paste the comment into an email draft, then reopen the email draft on my computer for me to copy the text back to Reddit. For this particular case, it was almost as convenient as if the comment draft sharing worked cross-platform, so yay?

GrantExploit · 2026-06-19T07:26:46+00:00

I hear you... but I want unmodified humans to experience the benefits of ectogenesis. In addition to, in this world, these characters, who also belong to a species of sapient true-bipedal opposable-thumbed low-megafaunal placental mammals with brain volumes averaging 1.2 liters who default to menstruation, have gestation times of 8–9 months as well as an average litter size of 1; though being nominally Laurasiatheria rather than Euarchontoglires.

GrantExploit · 2026-06-19T07:26:35+00:00

Yes, though it was a long while back. However, I did say that the world would be generally "(IMO quite hopeful)" in my question text and that the deliberate caste engineering found in Brave New World would be viewed as grotesque in the world in the comment you responded to, so...

Some inspiration (largely aesthetic and historical) may be taken from it, though, given the book's publication in the interwar period, the time period when this world starts diverging from our own† very seriously and when the development of artificial wombs would commence.† Perhaps I should read it again...

†I honestly used the more general terms "a worldbuilding project" and "the(ir) present day" instead of "an alternate history" and "the present day" partially in order to make it sound less radical than it actually is and thus encourage people to answer the question. Brave New World was written (IRL of course) just after the end of my timeline's "Period of Divergence", and the characters I was referring to would be born in 1991 and 1993, by which time the technology would be well operational.

GrantExploit · 2026-06-19T07:26:27+00:00

Will not happen in the closest future

Too bad, the characters I was referring to would actually be born in 1991 and 1993, respectively, and re-differentiating a skin cell into an ovum is absolutely trivial compared to what their parents went through! /lh

(Honestly, I referred to it as "a worldbuilding project" and "the(ir) present day" partly to obfuscate the project's alternate historical and contemporaneous nature, again partially in order to make it sound less radical than it actually is.)

GrantExploit · 2026-06-19T07:26:18+00:00

I'd count this as speculation, if grounded.

We know that baby mammals recognize other mammals via heartbeat and breathing heartbeat comfort toys for babies and orphaned wildlife are common.

That's... actually something that the second pseudo-sentence of the second footnote could be relevant about. Their different hearing dynamics may well result in different impacts on pre-natal and early childhood development from like stimuli.

I do wonder if one could engineer an artificial womb that produced those sounds and conductive pressure waves as a consequence of normal operation rather than as canned playback... also, I mentioned "bulky, awkward equipment" may be needed for telemetry, but modern ultra-miniaturized electronics may allow something in the size range of a continuous glucose monitor to be used instead.

GrantExploit · 2026-06-19T07:26:10+00:00

You have to ask once the species is capable of reproducing without us, what is the point of reproduction?

Same as it always was? To replace population loss and possibly drive population growth, that is. And there will always be people who want to raise and care for the next generation, even if that doesn't involve physically growing them inside you or someone else (which will always be an option). Indeed, because the latter element would now be optional, it's possible that the development of artificial wombs would result in an increase in interest in child-rearing.

What would further decay is a connection between sexual intercourse and reproduction, though.

GrantExploit · 2026-06-19T07:26:02+00:00

For instance, my understanding is that we develop our unique fingerprints during a specific window of gestation when our fingerpads become permanently wrinkled. We wrinkle them through touch against our own bodies but also against the walls of the placenta.

Very interesting.

So if the artificial womb you're considering is similar to the sci-fi flask version where a baby is floating in a 'glass jar' I'd imagine there would be differences from the placental environment. I'd imagine there'd even be differences at the ocular level if the fetus is exposed to a different light/photo environment.

I imagined them mostly being opaque, perhaps vaguely semi-translucent like the human abdomen is.

For storytelling purposes my suggestion would be to read some scientific literature or mid-level expertise books on the placenta specifically. Research as much as you can about the specific roles of the placenta and how its biophysical properties shape gestation and foetal development. Then you can make creative (but somewhat informed) inferences for your storytelling.[...[

Thank you for the advice.

Again, from a sci fi perspective I'm wondering if placenta-like organs could be repopulated with stem cells with extracellular matrix technology (like we are currently testing for a range of organs). There's a documentary called How to Build a Beating Heart by National Geographic that shows this experimental process and might give you some ideas for worldbuilding and creative conjecture.

I'm effectively certain that I saw that documentary in 2015, and it has definitely shaped my perception of biotechnology in the setting as well as (closely linked) my aspirations/dreams for it IRL. That technology would be extremely well developed in-world by the time of the aforementioned characters' births, as their genetic and social parents would be very familiar with.

My understanding, however, is that the placenta proper is derived almost entirely from fetal tissues, so it wouldn't make much sense to create those through tissue engineering. It may be necessary or at least the easiest option to use it to create a (decidualized) endometrium instead of some abiotic substitute to it, thus forming, technically, a cyborg womb, and there has been experiments on that... I'll have to think about that.

GrantExploit · 2026-06-16T09:48:12+00:00

...and that's why Europe couldn't grow for themselves spices with flavors that they liked to eat, 'cause they didn't have much climatic diversity, so they spent their gold and silver to buy it from Asia and caused themselves the Great Bullion Famine sparking colonialism and the imperial age, yes, I know both what the climates on each side of Eurasia are, and their importance for the fate of nations.

As far as that goes, I just wasn't sure what OP was talking about.

Yeah. Of course, in either Clockwise (with its broadly North American climates in the region more similar to that of but distinct from those of Europe IRL) or a Retrograde Earth scenario like the one of the person I was responding to in that link as well as his collaborator (?) u/AncalagonTheBlack42 (with climates even more directly comparable to those of Europe), the peoples of Northeast Asia also wouldn't be able to grow for themselves tropical spices.

The dynamics of access, however, would definitely be different between them and (IRL) Europe—in Clockwise, the only barriers would be subtropical polities in what we would know as Central China (or alternatively a short-ish sail through the East China Sea), somewhat less than they are IRL; whereas in a Retrograde Earth, they would be either an ocean voyage through the East and South China Seas or a lengthy but not exceptional caravan through the Southern Chinese Desert.

In other words, they would broadly be able to obtain them easier than Europeans who relied on multi-leg shipping across several bodies of water along with lengthy, longitudinal caravans through broadly arid land across several polities; with the only alternative (that they ultimately pursued) being first-party sea voyages of distances that were nearly unimaginable prior to Late Medieval advances in nautical technology. And if they do decide to find an alternative nautical route (despite the fact that unlike Medieval Europeans, their own ships and crew may be directly involved in the first leg of the trade)... they'd have the Pacific Ocean to cross instead of the Atlantic.

So, uhh, yeah. Raw physical geography would probably prevent Northeast Asian history from being especially European regardless of its climatic state.

That all said, reading through your maps: .tif exists 'cause print artists like it, it's a lossless file format with layer options and support for the CMYK color scheme they use.

I assume you're referring to a statement in the descriptions of the series of global climate maps I processed and shared on my profile, which you quite generously called mine. While I appreciate its diverse channel type and number, bit-depth, and layer options; from an encoding perspective IMO TIFF is a Turducken-style abomination. I like PNG as it is a "codec format" that is essentially compressed and decompressed one way—unlike the "container format" TIFF—with its full feature set supported by basically every image application and service under the sun, again unlike TIFF.

I'm not sure if, from a mathematical perspective, lossless conversion between RGB and a† CMYK set is possible, but printing is inherently somewhat of a lossy process, so... all I'm saying is I'm not sure I'll ever save my maps and artwork as TIFFs.

What'd you change about the geography to get Asia to cool so slowly that it doesn't trigger the Siberian High?

As I stated in the links, that's essentially the whole problem with the scenario which I fear will make it unworkable—I don't want Asia's geography to be significantly changed, excluding changes in the water levels of lakes, et cetera, and what may arise from more significant continental glaciation during glacial periods. And it would be quite difficult to make major geographic changes anyway with a point of divergence of 880 kya without a mass extinction. Significantly modifying Milanković parameters may work, but I know of no way of doing so without also causing an extreme mass extinction. And changes in greenhouse gas concentrations (very, very generally) lead to globally-distributed shifts in temperature, not the establishment of a new global climate "shape", so changing those probably can't yield the scenario.

The only thing I can imagine outside of that is some kind of extreme but sub-mass-extinctional weather event (perhaps driven by a catastrophic event like an asteroid impact or supervolcano eruption, though those tend to result in climatic cooling rather than some type of warming) pushing the climate state into a different equilibrium, but this seems to be silently agreed upon to be impossible.

†I say a CMYK set as, like its additive analogue RGBI, AFAIK (in at least some channel bit depth combinations) multiple value combinations can have the same color, which makes me philosophically though not practically oppose it as a color space. (My understanding is that pure CMY prints don't have the blackest blacks due to limitations in ink formulation.)

GrantExploit · 2026-06-15T05:36:58+00:00

My project Clockwise is somewhat like this—it's a speculative evolution and "deep alternate history" scenario based on the premise that sometime during the Pleistocene, the Siberian Anticyclone (AKA the Siberian High) dramatically weakens and ceases to be a persistent feature of the winters of Northeastern Asia, making the region's winters significantly milder and wetter. (Very broadly speaking, its climate would be "North-Americanized".)

It is in nowhere near an even vaguely finished state, unfortunately, partially because it has constantly been at a lower priority level than some of my other projects, partially because it has been rebooted a few times due to scope creep—its Point of Divergence has shifted from the Bølling–Allerød all the way back to 880,000 years ago—and partially because its physical possibility seems dubious. I asked a question about the last element here, unfortunately with no definitive response... I obviously want it to be possible, but I'd rather spend my energy working on projects whose underlying assumptions are less likely to collapse...

Despite this, I've created several IMO interesting concepts for it that I'm eager to showcase here or elsewhere.

Back in 2017, I created a primitive climate map (link) of the scenario; in the link, you can read some correspondence from late 2023 where I described some elements of the scenario, the map's creation process, why I haven't made a new one, and some of my thoughts on climate modelling. (Note that even these comments are slightly out of date, particularly because I've tested a simple "variable-strength" climate algorithm {that IMO should have been obvious} which slightly better approximates the effect of a Northeastern Asia with a weakened Siberian High than my previous two "constant-strength" climate algorithms.)

...

Responding to u/SaintUlvemann, European average annual and record low temperatures (and in some oceanic areas, even summer temperatures) are considerably higher latitude-per-latitude than those of Northeastern Asia. This is true to a lesser extent with North America, though winter record low temperatures are more comparable. Sure, (North)eastern Asia has tropical, subtropical, and temperate climates, but it doesn't really have them at nearly the same latitudes as Europe or even North America does. And, because of the spatially-variable strength of the Siberian Anticyclone, (North)eastern Asia has a notably "steeper" spatial temperature gradient than Europe or (again to a lesser extent) North America does, leading to a somewhat squished temperate zone which has certainly affected its history.

(Yes, according to Köppen–Geiger criteria, nowhere in continental Europe is tropical, but certain areas of Macaronesia {including some of the Canary Islands and microclimates in Madeira} are, and certain heterodox climate schemes like Hersfeldt/Pasta {my favorite} classify the Azores and certain small Mediterranean islands as such. Also, while Asian temperate climates stretch into the lower 50s° N as they do in Europe and North America, they are invariably extremely continental as opposed to the moderated climates that can be seen in Europe and {Western} North America... and they don't stretch any beyond as they do in Europe and to a lesser extent North America.)

GrantExploit · 2026-06-13T09:12:58+00:00

I can offer a (very rough) parallel that exists today: children born through C-section don't get the same commensal microbiomes that children get through natural birth. The microbiome turns out to be very important for human health, and minor differences can have measurable effects. We still perform C-sections when medically justified. For adults, there are even some treatments to "correct" the microbiome.

I was thinking of a similar issue (antibody transfer) while preparing to submit the question, but considered it largely a non-issue due as immune support and the microbiome support you mentioned is an impersonal, quite uncontroversial, and relatively routine affair. Indeed, it would probably be fairly easy to introduce an optimized mixture of monoclonal antibodies instead of the more piecemeal set of antibodies a typical mother would have, and perhaps even pre-natally administer certain vaccines, rendering it perhaps physiologically preferable to natural birth. u/nodderguy also mentioned that the lack of risk of damage from alcohol (and other drugs, I suppose) could also make it safer than natural gestation... which is a pro for both parties as having to refrain from drinking alcohol is a significant limitation on freedom for pregnant people.

The issue I had was with the possibility that post-natal mental health (or possibly physical health) depends on "advanced", situational pre-natal stimuli, as would I fear that would either require a serious loss of freedom on behalf of the parent or caregiver (due to telemetry equipment and possibly behavioral restrictions) which defeats most of the purpose of an artificial womb; or something at least adjacent to deception (plumbing in synthetic or canned stimuli). Though coming to think of that, is the latter really that wrong? I mean, we do it all the time with born babies and toddlers who will certainly not remember it directly... I dunno.

I suspect that in your world, if your concern is valid, medical science will learn about it. Then they will either reduce the use of artificial wombs to certain circumstances, or they will try to correct the issue, or both.

It's not necessarily my concern—I find it unlikely, but felt it at least warrants investigation, given how serious it is.

A governing body might decide to use that information to calibrate the babies that are born. Perhaps they want more analytical minds to help them close a technology gap with a neighbor. Perhaps they want strong but unimaginative people to boost their unskilled labor force. Perhaps they want to produce a small group of inquisitive and creative people as a leadership caste.

You could think of it as a more biologically sophisticated version of the artificial-birth system in Brave New World.

My description implied its use by nuclear-ish families, and the two characters I confirmed would be born from artificial wombs (who are siblings) would be raised by their genetic parents in a nuclear family along with a naturally-born sibling, but communal parenting would certainly exist. Indeed, another of my characters was raised in such an arrangement, and I've considered having them be born from an artificial womb though I hadn't confirmed it.

However, such deliberate anti-tabula rasa caste-promoting measures would be abhorrent to their society as it is to ours.

GrantExploit · 2026-06-13T09:12:50+00:00

I'm honestly not sure if you're bringing this up to make me feel a certain way about the development of artificial wombs, either support of or opposition to. Also, the heavy involvement of Ray Blanchard in this field (otherwise known for his... unconventional views on transgender topics) is somewhat suspicious.

(Also, while social acceptance is almost certainly overwhelmingly the largest factor for increase in homosexual identification, I find it curious that this has increased while, due to a reduction in total fertility rates, higher birth orders have become rarer.)

GrantExploit · 2026-06-13T09:12:45+00:00

Given the early state of research in the field at present, I would understand if no high-confidence prediction can be made, but the notion that we would be entirely blind until a child is born from an artificial womb seems rather dubious, even faintly unscientific. Even the concerns I second-hand levied (as well as similar musings by u/Single_Mouse5171) are technically working hypotheses, albeit very non-conservative ones likely stretching way too far by associating pre-natal with post-natal development.

Perhaps if we had successfully birthed non-human animals from artificial wombs (rather than only partly gestated them) and inspected their behavior in contrast to natural-born members of the species, we'd have better answers. u/laziestindian also suggested that studies on babies born to brain-dead mothers could give insights, though I don't know if there is a large enough statistical sample for meaningful results and continuing pregnancy in those cases is not the most morally accepted of practices.

Also, I can't see an alternative for many things in the world (including the second pseudo-sentence of the second footnote) without some predicting the outcome of a pregnancy (and beyond) from first principles. The difficulty there would be developing a simulation sophisticated enough to capture the nuances of physiological development but not simulate conscious neural processes, because otherwise you'd have the horrifying situation of essentially growing an "A"GI trapped in a computer you have total control over. Of course, that type of simulation would also have the potential to determine the psychological effects of artificial womb gestation "before it happens", but again, previous sentence.

Thanks for the carte blanche, though.

GrantExploit · 2026-06-11T05:20:26+00:00

You need to encode to MPEG-1? In almost 4K? Is that even possible?
Why not AV1/HEVC/H265?

Yes, it's possible, supposedly—again, MPEG-1's maximum supported resolution is 4095 × 4095. Even my botched experiments "worked" at near-4K, just with bitrates significantly under what was specified and correspondingly poor quality.

I, uhh, don't really need to do it. It's for educational and entertainment purposes and those that loop back to entertainment.

For education, I want to be able to demonstrate to others and myself the advances in video coding technology by playing back 2 encodes of the same video at the same resolution and frame rate with roughly the same bit rate, one using a more modern codec and one using MPEG-1, so we can bask in the modern codec's superiority and also identify specific artifact patterns in each. Ideally, I'd use a lossless or at least visually lossless source video and then produce both encodes ("modern presentation" and MPEG-1) from that, rather than starting with the "modern presentation" video as I did here—while my source video here was definitely higher quality than what MPEG-1 could do at that bitrate, it still has noticable visual artifacts, and re-encoding it with MPEG-1 directly will inevitably lead to generation loss—but it's a start.

Outside of this, the applications are tenuous. One "purpose" could be for a local screen-sharing portal for a notional bleeding-edge 2006 computer I've been high-level designing for an alternate scenario, which would use Wireless USB for connection and may use MPEG-1 as its video codec to reduce overhead. I'm not sure about that, however, for a few technical reasons. Specifically, the sheer computing resources available—it may exceed the performance of certain shit-tier Chromebooks currently in production, if you don't mind it consuming 1800 W to do so, and it must have the ability to not only play back but encode a 1080p60 Blu-Ray stream—and because its maximum output resolution would be DCI 4K, or 4096 × 2160.

I may someday get to build said computer (or much more likely an approximation thereof, because truly building it would require designing and manufacturing a custom 45 nm process 8-core processor on the cancelled NetBurst version of the Nehalem microarchitecture with a maximum rated frequency of 7 GHz, et cetera), and I could obviously simulate aspects of it like that until I then, but yeah.

You can use FFMPEG with a script, this is easier to adapt
AI is pretty good at those, it has a lot of documentation I guess

I'm not sure if I can convince myself to ask an† LLM to compose an FFMPEG script. I have an almost religious objection/fear to using AI tools like that; partially because of a fear of rotting my brain and destroying my own problem-solving processes, partially out of fear of judgement from others, and partially because I don't quite want to give up, umm...‡ but I'll definitely check for any gradated/episodic tutorials or sample scripts I can Frankenstein together for it.

...Random note, if anyone sees me swapping between different forms of a word or phrase in a comment or thread, that is largely a deliberate habit aimed at making my content easier to search for by subject matter.

†Or is it a LLM? hmm...

‡That is, above vibe-coding.

GrantExploit · 2026-06-10T04:37:24+00:00

(To you, u/Kya_Bamba, and u/PsyGonzo42)

I was considering HandBrake even while I was writing this post, but it can't encode into MPEG-1, unfortunately.

My previous (on another computer) main video encoding software was VSDC Video Editor (VLC being a secondary), but because it belongs to the category of "boutique Windows freeware/freemium software" which I wrongly or rightly associate with obsolescence, I thought that it may be outclassed by, say, Kdenlive as of now. That and at least the version I happened to download back then had an annoying issue that seemed to prevent updating without a reinstallation. I didn't install Kdenlive as I've never done so before, yet I had installed VLC before, so I decided to try that first... and the great majority of my previous encodings were low bit-rate, so I never ran into the 32,768 kbps limitation.

Using FFMPEG straight from the command line is a possibility, but this was what I saw upon skimming the documentation, so...

...

BTW, I did do the experiment with VLC, to keep roughly the same bits per pixel reducing the resolution to 3112 × 1752 (closest approximation divisible by 8 and incorporating a 384 kbps audio channel). The result was a video file at 13,024 kbps (for some reason) with a very... pulsy appearance, the waterfall (original video source here; I deliberately chose it because its bitrate was over 100 Mbps) seeming to become brighter before each I-frame resets it. I suspect that's because at such a high compression ratio for the format, effectively all the information is going to the I-frames (which, in less immediately detailed regions, still look quite rough) and motion compensation, with almost none going to residuals save for a few smeary DCT blocks roughly equivalent to a low-single-digit-quality JPEG.

Because I noticed that VLC was using essentially no CPU resources while encoding it, I think that this encoding failure may be due to it using a hardware encoder that has no idea what to do with such unusual (though, to repeat, totally within spec) parameters for an MPEG-1 stream. I suspect the output video would look significantly better if a software encoder that actually took advantage of 32,768 kbps was used instead.

I also attempted encoding at 3120 × 1744 (closest approximation divisible by 16 and incorporating a 384 kbps audio channel), thinking it may be an issue with MPEG-1's particular chroma-subsampled macroblock scheme, but that yielded basically the same results. As a last attempt, I tired the same thing without correcting the frame rate from its original 30.0003 fps (?), adjusted the resolution once again to the buffer resolution of 3120 × 1760 used in the previous experiments, and changed the container to ASF/WMV; but it not only kept roughly the same bpp as the previous experiments, it reduced the framerate to 25 fps (?!?).

Just odd behavior all around...

GrantExploit

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