Weβre still here.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Asklemmy
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Pick any human development index measurement and view its progress over the past 10 years
The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey's Beads. It's an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn't be possible.
I believe we are statistically in the most peaceful time in world history right now. Unless someone triggers a nuke.
Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven't all nuked each other (yet)
Pretty sure Japan wouldn't agree with that last point....
the south lost the American civil war,
They've been trying to play the long game
The cultural victory, if you will.
The south won the war when they killed Lincoln.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn't kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman's Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois's "The Souls of Black Folk". What he describes is, at it's heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
I try to be a "silver lining" type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I've been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, EpsteinβBarr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There's even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.
The RSV vaccine is even being used in the wild! Certain high risk demographics can get it during RSV season. And not rare high risk either, women beyond a certain point in pregnancy and older people.
the common cold
the WHAT?
THE COMMON COLD
(well... just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)
Humans domesticated wolves in this timeline. Imagine being in one of the dogless hellscapes.
Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket
ive said to my kids "you have the sum total of all human knowledge available at your fingertips 24/7 and youre bored? "
Wait so now I'm in trouble for not being on my phone? Make up your mind! /s
There's a big difference between doom scrolling and education.
Give them welbutrin and there mind will be on overload. Worked wonders for me. no sarcasm.
Do you feel this "overload" all the time or in bursts?
It was all the time because couldn't get my mind to connect to all the things I was thinking about. Now I can and it just comes out. For example I never wake up in the morning hungover or anything my eyes just go bing and I am wide awake. I then rune 3 miles then read about an hour of wiki for whatever my mind comes up with. Then I got to my job for 48 hours.
The problem with that is it has led to ignorant people believing theyβre smart β all because they can find any random site that backs up any nonsense they assert. Critical thinking and credible research are endangered concepts now.
Oh, of course. There are negatives to everything for sure. But I think as a whole itβs made life better in a lot of different ways.
Instead of sleeping in a cave and spending all day trying to kill food with a sharp stick, you can use your pocket internet to have food delivered to your door. In your very comfortable living space. Thank you Science and all the smart people in history that brought us here. Life is not as bad as the losers would have us believe.
I mean, we're communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?
On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it's pretty cool. Um.
Hi. :waves:
Do you ever worry that somebody could just forcefully grab you, unzip your pants and forcefully stuff hundreds of angry snakes into your pants? Or that you're going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there's going to be a bear in your shower? Or that one day all the countries will just nuke each other for funsies?
I often worry about things that don't makes sense. Like the one time my ex girlfriend was eating ice cream, and I wondered if one day she might give birth to a moose.
I like you. Never change.
Hi! Howβs it goin?
Hi!
I'm OK, mostly.
Had some good Chinese takeaway tonight, which was a treat. Ate that while watching my countrymen descend into some kind of froth for dystopic, authoritarian autocracy. That's kind of a bummer.
I abide. Trying to, anyway
For now.
Iβm more a visual person, so let me show you some graphs: Famine rates are down: https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Famine-death-rate-since-1860s-revised_850.png
We can do so much more with our computing resources - Note, logarithmic scale: https://www.singularity.com/images/charts/MicroprocessorClockSpeed.jpg
Billions of people live in a democracy, before 1850 almost none did: https://bigthink.com/the-present/democratic-rights/
US centric, violent crime is down. Not the lowest itβs been currently, but better than it was when I was growing up.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-crime-in-the-us-since-1990/
Good people still exist, so does love.
Can't confirm. World is dark. Life is pain.
Indoor plumbing, heating and air!
Applebeeβs has announced the much-anticipated return of its All You Can Eat Special, which includes Boneless Wings, Riblets, and Double Crunch Shrimp.
I hate... so much about the things that you choose to be.
Nuclear war has been mentioned a couple times but i feel it deserves elaboration: We've been real fucking close a couple times. There was a Soviet "nuclear counterattack station", or whatever, that got the "nuclear strike detected, fire retaliatory missiles" signal and the person responsible simply refused. The signal was due to a glitch, there was no attack. That guy probably saved millions and millions of lives by refusing to carry out his duty.
If you consider (potential) timelines being "close" to ours in terms of only a small number of things needing to change to get us there, the one where everything went to nuclear hell is very close to ours--but we're not in that one.
::: spoiler For the first time in the known provable history of the universe, it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity. The peripheral systems that surround that entity and enable persistence are still getting worked out. In the long term, this is a massively profound step in our evolution. It may not seem like it now. This comment probably seems silly to some, but mark my words in two decades from now the world will be a very different place as a result of such a system.
I don't think AGI is some future leap in technology away from where we are now. I think that present AI is around 80% accurate and that is still better than average for most humans. Present AI is simply like the assembly language of AGI. Eventually we build out the complexity in blocks until it is effectively AGI. The power requirements will be enormous, but so is Solar output.
So much of our organizational norms and assumptions are based on the defacto assumption that we are all mortal and corruptible. Conscious immortality is now possible in a system that can be aligned to meet our needs. This shift is M A S S I V E and will change us forever.
Half or more of us will fight against such a change, but they are irrelevant. Even if AGI is pushed underground, anyone in business or politics that defers their decision making to a real AGI will out compete humans in the long term. It will normalize in either scenario. The only question is how long it will take to achieve. This is a change that will mark our time in history for a millennia or more. It will be the biggest historical event of note up until now, in the long term. I don't think AGI is like nuclear fusion, where it is always 20 years away. I think present AI is like the Intel 4004; the first microprocessor. It needs a ton of peripherals and is still heavily flawed, but the fundamentals required to prove useful are present and that is what really matters.
it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity
You're just describing a library. And we've had those for millennia.
That said... we've had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid's Elements or Plato's Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.
Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.
point taken, but that's also an accurate description of cosmic horror
Any human based legislative system is an equivalent horror in reality - (Marcellus Williams)
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