I’d love be as optimistic as you but unless Trump changes his mind the US will get a brainwormed fanatical anti-vaccier in charge of deciding which vaccines are safe to use. Even if the states don’t cooperate with trump’s agenda there are so many long standing federal institutions which till now you’ve never needed to think about that are about to get wrecked.
Multiple regulatory bodies are going to get disbanded. The EPA is unlikely to survive, whole departments of the FDA are about to get gutted. Anything involving industrial safety is going to get its funding cut. Unconstitutional crackdowns on free and independent media is almost certain. Large scale damage to the functions of many government institutions can be expected. Massive economic damage due to reckless deregulation ( that’s even before they start putting tariffs on everything and wind up in multiple simultaneous trade wars). Funding for education and infrastructure maintenance will be reduced to allow tax cuts for the already wealthy. Massive loss of global influence and a massive gain in influence by hostile autocratic nations is also something you can expect.
I could go on and on but even if you were to assume they weren’t serious about project 2025 (if you haven’t read that you should) it’s real bad.
Space is big. It’s so big that our tiny ape brains have a hard time conceiving of how big it is. The sun is actually (despite it’s size) a relatively small target and is very very far away. Now the more delta-V you burn to slow the trash down the smaller its orbit around the sun will be. But that orbit starts enormous. So to get that purple line near the sun you do need to slow down almost the whole way, just to get it close.
There’s a massive gulf between what progressives say and do and what the alt-right online influencers claim they do. Perhaps the reason you haven’t heard of anything productive progressives have done is that you get all your news from people who do not want them to appear reasonable and so leave out anything reasonable that they do. These days woke is a word used only by those trying to denigrate the progressive left. Because Woke is a strawman. An empty vessel for you to fill with hate. A totem to represent all the ways in which society is changing that you don’t like.
I can think of nothing less productive than putting down a hollow strawman.
This question right here perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with LLMs right now. They could be good tools but the people pushing them have no idea what they even are. LLMs do not make decisions. All the decisions an LLM appears to make were made in the dataset. All those things that an LLM does that make it seem intelligent were done or said by a human somewhere on the internet. It is a statistical model that determines what output is mostly likely to come next. That is it. It is nothing else. It is not smart. It does not and cannot make decisions. It is an algorithm that searches a dataset and when it can’t find something it’ll provide convincing-looking gibberish instead.
Listen think of it like this; a man decides to take exams to become a doctor in France, but for some reason he doesn’t learn either french or medicine. No, no instead he studies every former exam and all the answers to them. He gets very good at regurgitating those answers so much so that he can even pass the exam. But at no point does he understand what any of it means and when asked new and novel questions he provides utter nonsense answers. No matter how good he gets at memorising those answers he will never get any better at medicine. LLMs are as likely to gain sentience as my excel spreadsheets are.
That all depends on where the data set comes from. The code you’ll get out of an LLM is the average code of the data set. If it’s scraped from the internet (which is very likely) the code you’ll get will be an amalgam of concise examples from one website, incorrect examples from another, bits from blogs with all the typos and all the gunk and garbage that’s out there.
Getting LLM code to work well takes an understanding of what the code it gives you actually does and why it’s bad. It will always be bad because it cannot be better than the dataset and in order for a dataset to be big enough to train an LLM it’ll have to have everything they can get including all the trash. But it can be good for providing you a framework to start with. It is however never going to replace actual programming and understanding of programming. The talk of LLMs completely replacing programers is mostly coming from people who do not understand coding or LLMs at all.
I recommend Scavenger SV4 It’s a very unique game where you send a rover down to a planet to grab what alien artifacts you can before your radiation exposure gets past the point it can be treated. You can bolt some of them onto your rover to make it better and send it down again. It also has several hundred different endings that are decided by how much radiation you absorbed and how much loot and what loot you brought back.
The sexual abuse of young boys has been going on for a very, very long time but for most of that time, the church and all its institutions were unassailable and infallible. So most of it went unreported at the time. The attitude that the church and by extension, the priest could do no wrong was especially prevalent here where I grew up. Which is why some truly horrible things were allowed to happen. The church committed some vile acts and they weren’t all sexual abuse and enjoyed the protection of the government all the while. Here have some fun reading.
Yes going outside in the first week is a very bad idea. However not because the radiation outside will instantly drop you. Much of the radiation will be coming from radioactive dust, known as fallout that’ll be comprised of all kinds of isotopes. The isotopes that decay quickly release a lot of radiation over a short period and if you go outside you will come back covered in them. This will bring radiation into wherever you are using as your shelter. This would not just harm the person who went outside but everyone else sheltering with them. So do not go outside for any reason. You can make do without power for a while.
On a related note; keep water and food covered. Skin is a surprisingly good defense against radiation but breathing in this dust or letting it get into the food you eat or the water you drink is very dangerous. After a week has passed you should for your own safety keep the time spent outside your shelter as low as possible. Short trips outside will become safer as time goes on but activities that kick up dust will still be dangerous for a long time.
There is alot of things the government does for you that most people likely have never thought about. Take invasive species for instance; There are huge efforts to contain and eradicate a variety of invasive species. You’ve probably never heard about these efforts. But they are needed to maintain and protect both farmland and the ecology of the United States. If those efforts are defunded and those species are allowed to run rampant it’ll be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.