It would be nice to add a "right to private thought" to the Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as something similar to other countries' rights and freedoms laws wherever possible.
Technology like that would be incredibly valuable, which means it will be developed if it can be.
You might possibly convince decent democratic countries to not do it, but if you think China, Russia, etc, would hesitate to get hold of this power we don't live in the same universe.
> Technology like that would be incredibly valuable, which means it will be developed if it can be.
I agree! The technology to read the thoughts and intentions of the human brain has some positive applications. I am sure Stephen Hawking would have appreciated significant improvements in this space when he was still alive. The right to private thought does not revoke the right to subject oneself to mind reading technology. Research could still proceed, and positive, lawful application of the technology could still benefit those in need.
> You might possibly convince decent democratic countries to not do it, but if you think China, Russia, etc, would hesitate to get hold of this power we don't live in the same universe.
I agree! The independent governance of countries has consequences, but I believe its advantages outweigh those of global governance. I would rather that there always be a tension between many democracies and dictatorships, than a single governing authority.
Yep, true and helps immoral scumbags embrace their depravity and do what the others would otherwise do, and even bear some semblance of a moral ground in the eyes of the clueless.
This is why I think we should treat or reframe laws as formal systems, akin to Lean / Metamath / etc... : treat it like a database of axioms / principles and theorems with proof.
As long as we don't we have to choose between explicit and repetitive or implicit but concise. The advantage of implicit but concise is that individual citizens can grasp larger sets of axioms & principles, but the we run the risk of having lawyers, judges etc. be confused, confusable, or feigning "innocent confusion" about the law and the spirit of the law. The advantage of explicit but repetitive is that its much harder to confuse if a party can point to a literal sentence stating exactly the situation in one place, but the law easily bulks up exponentially.
On the other hand using a formal system, you can clearly distinctly mark the axioms and normative postulates, and include example theorems ("yes a black citizen is also a citizen", "yes the gypsy is a human", etc...). Even when cases haven't been covered as explicit theorems, the formalized aspect means parties can derive unambiguously the sentences they need to shove in the face of a judge.
I wonder if there is a health hazard wearing this due to breathing in spores or toxins released into the air? Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin? Very interesting none the less. I have imagined humans making living clothes for a long time, so it is nice to see that idea materialize.
"Following drying at 45 degrees, the material is not quite living and not quite dead, but instead in a "low-metabolic, dormant-like state", Li told Dezeen, meaning it is not actively growing."
Don't think spores will be an issue since it's not the mycelium's sex organ mushroom that you're thinking of
From TFA: "These are mixed in with the cordyceps militaris"
"Many authors consider C. militaris quite common, spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere,[6] and fruiting bodies appear in Europe from August to November."[0]
> Governments don’t do anything about the status quo, for a number of reasons: it inconveniences them to look too deeply into the darker corners of their own financial systems, and they make money from printing their own currencies and don’t much care how that cash is used. But most of all, they don’t do anything about it because they haven’t got a clue.
The last one couldn't be farther from the truth, and the first one couldn't be farther from a lie.
I learned to love Sisko a lot more than Picard tbh. I find him much more relatable than some pretentious english-frenchman who gets weird around kids. I never understood why he’s such a jerk to Wesley in the beginning.
It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.
Fringe definitely handled the continuing storyline much better. The way they blend in, then transition from, the monster-of-the-week format is excellent writing. It did put a deadline on the story, something which the X-Files writers seemed allergic to as the series began aging.
Worth remembering that both the X-Files and Babylon 5 premiered in the same year (1993).
TV science fiction was just beginning the transition from "monster of the week" to season+ long pre-written plot arcs.
Twin Peaks was only a few years earlier (1990), which pioneered(?) bringing the hitherto only soap opera and family drama continuous storyline to other genres.
TNG is indicative of this too, with the adaptation of season-long plotting between 1-2 (little), 3 (some), and 4+ (more).
Which is to say when the X-Files premiered, having a series-long plan of any sort was still a novel idea in TV scifi.
Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
I feel like I'm the only person who didn't really vibe with Firefly. I usually like the "space Western" motif but Firefly was so broad and over the top with it that it just seemed silly to me.
I'll grant that Firefly's sci-fi western motif was novel, but it could have done fine without it. The show's magic for me was its characters and clever dialogue. It it was funny, and it had heart. There was an enormous amount of satisfying character development for such a short run.
The Expanse is fairly good on its own and I did enjoy it but it could have totally filled the void left by Firefly if they would have just had a few comedy writers on the team. Instead, we got a ship full of gloomy self-loathing heroes with poor mental health who were too caught up in second-guessing everything they did to fully appreciate the absurdity of everything happening around them. (I know, I know, the show came from a book series, just humor me...)
Devil's advocate: deft use of zeitgeist-known settings in time-limited media can make for more efficient storytelling.
A captain of a ship.
An outlaw.
In a western-seeming system of planets.
If nothing else was said, that already paints a pretty vivid background from the audience's preconceptions. All of that exposition can be skipped. Or at most, quickly nodded to in order to confirm.
Sure, a show could rebuild the same thing neater from primitives, but how much show time would that take? Western was "close enough" to the point, so they went with it.
They're going to, because there is no property that will not be milked for nostalgia.
Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the only thing we know is that everything we thought we knew (Roswell, Area 51, Dulce, Majestic 12) was a lie.
Maybe at some point have the in-universe version of Northrop-Grumman (or pick whatever defense contractor you like) actually make a breathrough in reverse engineering alien technology (or say it's China, to play on American xenophobia) and now the enemy isn't some vast government conspiracy but dark capitalism. Have an Elon Musk analogue, AI death cults around weird alien artifacts, SV startup culture, UFO grifters within the government, creeping fascism, all of it.
Someone could make an intelligent and interesting show that studies the nature of hyperreality, the evolution of UFO folklore as a mirror of generational fears, and the embrace of metaphysics as a trauma response to the dehumanization of modern technological society. The problem is, that wouldn't be the X-Files. Something closer to Lone Gunmen, maybe, as written by Grant Morrison, without cops being protagonists, but the vibe of the 90's and the Smoking Man and all of that is just too quaint to be plausible nowadays.
They'll do it anyway, and they'll do it badly, and they'll probably do it with AI.
That wouldn't work. The X-Files revolves around a government conspiracy because governments are genuinely scary. They have near infinite resources, can break any law they want at will, are frequently motivated by convoluted social engineering schemes, don't investigate themselves (so it requires a plucky outsider hero character) and so on.
If you try and make capitalism the enemy you just end up with Erin Brockovich.
I don't know. Obviously a certain personality type considers government to be an all-encompassing evil (which is the Cold-War era fear the conspiracy theories of the X-Files drew from) but in the modern day corporations (particularly tech companies) seem to be far more competent and dangerous.
And I think it makes sense that if there were defense contractors and companies secretly reverse engineering alien technology, that capitalism would be their primary motivation. I'm just saying the zeitgeist of conspiracy theory tends to reflect current generational fears and a remake of the X-Files should reflect that.
Defense contractors only have one customer - the government. They are "capitalism" in the weakest sense of the world. Tech companies aren't scary. Everyone interacts with them, they're run by well known personalities, they're subject to the courts and follow laws etc. The story tension you'd need just isn't there.
I think the government conspiracy fear works best for the audience who still has some belief in government. So it is a disturbing moral corruption of something they consider powerful and benign. Lots of people older than myself reported this feeling from the 60s and 70s as things like the Pentagon Papers came to light.
The corporate fear works if you assume either fascism (top-down collusion between the two), government incompetence/irrelevance (so corporate power is unchecked), or widespread government corruption (more bottom-up collusion).
So feelings on these themes may help indicate your worldview or the worldview of the audience and writers in different eras?
It would be interestingi to know if AI is less likely to follow rules if the instructions provided to it contain foul or demeaning language. Too bad we couldn't re-play the scenario replacing NEVER F*ING GUESS! with:
**Never guess**
- All behavioral claims must be derived from source, docs, tests, or direct command output.
- If you cannot point to exact evidence, mark it as unknown.
- If a signature, constant, env var, API, or behavior is not clearly established, say so.
Underrated comment here. https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function This study convinced me to be "nice" to AI agents. At least as I understood it, there's something in the weights that activating the "desperate" vector makes it more likely to cheat or cut corners. So yes I would err towards your suggested prompt over NEVER FUCKING GUESS.
The big claim in general appears to be that the signal is not obvious because it averages out to normal background radiation noise. The article doesn't communicate this well though.
The bit that you quoted, I think that's just a random sentence that looks dumb out of context. I don't think it means anything special.
In general, it is very easy to detect that radio signals are present.
A better comparison is with radio signals for which a method of spread-spectrum modulation has been used, chosen such as to have a bandwidth so wide that the averaged signal falls below the thermal noise level.
Such radio signals will also not be detectable without special detectors.
WiFi and Bluetooth use spread-spectrum modulation methods but they have relatively low bandwidths, so they can be easily distinguished from thermal noise. Much wider bandwidths are required to prevent detection.
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