Old puppy

That brief period where fire spread was super op- you’d stumble upon decimated wastelands from natural fires.

I think intent would count for a lot here.

We’re all guilty of littering. Even the most careful of us will drop something without noticing- And I know I’m not the most careful. So I try and make up for what I’ve dropped by picking up bits of litter here and there.

Especially out in nature. When I see a bottle top or something, I tend to think to myself that the person who left that there is a bit of a dick. Now I have a choice - pick it up, or leave it there.

If I leave it there, then suddenly I am the dick I was complaining about.

There’s such an amorphous dividing line around bodily fluids. Swallowing your saliva is fine, but as soon as it exits the mouth, it shouldn’t go back in. Unless it’s from someone else that you really like, but even then only a tiny bit, incidental to the act of kissing. The same does not apply to boogers. There’s also some sort of age or stage of life after which it’s no longer acceptable to drink breast milk, unless it’s from a different species.

I guess it depends on how you define human, and bugs.

Insects have been, and continue to be, part of the homo sapien diet for millennia.

However, there’s a pretty strong argument that choosing to cause less suffering by not eating animals is a more human approach.

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Here, at least, flying above people is illegal. Surely the operators in this case will be at least losing their licence, if not facing charges.

OP was just talking about one job post.

You could always go to the old school version of general intelligence, and ask your family, friends, and mentors to offer advice.

Can you run the local llm at all? Just ask the question, go make a cup of tea, ask the next, go for a walk, ask again, play fourteen hours of Factorio…

Otherwise, there’s services like hordeai (I think that’s what it’s called) where you tap into people who volunteer compute resources to run your own model.

I wonder how many people from the States would prefer that the US become a Canadian province.

I was partying at a friend’s house, that night I slept in the back of my van. I must have forgotten to lock up when I got in, because I woke up to the sound of the front door- closing. I slammed straight from deep, morning after sleep to a massive adrenaline surge of fight-or-flight. I distinctly remember coming up with more than one plan almost instantly- There was a curtain between the front and back, so I couldn’t see the intruder, and they couldn’t see me. I didn’t know if they had heard me wake up, so my first plan was to get the jump on them by bursting out of the curtain throwing fists. The second was to stay quiet, wait until they turned the engine on, then use that distraction to sneak up and choke hold them against the headrest. The third plan was to immediately scream like fuck and hope they bailed. In that half a breath of time, I had a bunch of plans made. But I distinctly remember being totally frozen and unable to move at all, like a stiff, useless dishrag. I eventually realised that there was no-one in the car, and stuck my head through the curtain. In the dawn’s light I could see some random drunkard staggering down the road, leaning against cars for support. He must have noticed mine was unlocked, and his drunken curiosity led him to open the door. Thankfully, he must have had a moment of clarity and just walked away instead of trying to drive off using the keys that stupid past me just left sitting in the front seat. I’m also super grateful to his moment of sobriety for the decision to not take my wallet, which was also just laid out for anyone to grab.

So yeah, minor compared to other real violations, but it certainly had an effect on me.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little shit? Ill have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and Ive been involved in numerous secret…

Oh. Oh wait. I think the shock of what I just read reverted me to default internet discussion… Was that just a polite exchange where we saw the others point of view, then both admitted we could have done better? Nice!

That would be great, sure- but all I really want is boarding passes to be the same size as the passport. They go together, so why don’t they make them so they actually go together?

Angrily tries again to read seat number, obscured by the rumpled creases from the bit that sticks out from the passport getting folded in a pocket

Ah, so you’re a wizard. Meddling in unseen, invisible powers, using arcane diagrams and mysterious runes…

I’m just going to go with the scenario of ‘the specific part of the EM spectrum that we use for comms is no longer accessible to us’.

So, mobile data and GPS are out. A heck of a lot of people suddenly get very lost, and the immediate aftermath would include a lot of car crashes- mostly from people trying to play with their phone while driving, or just generally being distracted. Long term, people would get used to having to find themselves on a map. I doubt street directories would make a comeback, as it’s relatively straightforward to download a map to a phone by plugging it into to a computer, or USB to Ethernet. Oh, in that regard- The shortage of USB to Ethernet adaptors would probably hit before the toilet paper shortage.

There’s a large portion of the world’s population who like to stay inside and listen to the radio or watch TV, the internet still being an unwieldy thing that the yung’uns use. These people will start getting their entertainment and news by walking outside and congregating - At least until they get a computer or phone setup wired. Hopefully, many will continue to go for walks around town to see their friends and eat a meal. A lot of households are going to have a whole lot of Ethernet cables run all over the floor for quite some time. People will start buying switches and routers to get more outlets next to the couch, for example.

Massive queues will form around the few existing payphones, until businesses and homes at central locations will start offering up ethernet ports. Because this started soon after the Blackout, rooted in generosity and helpfulness, this will just become a free service.

Taxi drivers will start congregating at these spots, plugging in and updating their location, moving to other locations where there is few drivers- and hoping that others aren’t getting the same idea, unable to know that until they arrive. The old guard of taxi drivers, who worked pre-Uber and have an encyclopedic knowledge of the local streets are in high demand, and people seek them out.

A lot of scientists are out of a job. People who worked with radio astronomy are suddenly having to peer through optical telescopes again, and keep talking about the good old days. Whole divisions of people at space agencies, responsible for things like monitoring and control of satellites, space probes, and rovers are suddenly retasked to creating ways to create autonomous return probes to find out what the fuck just happened. Some start trying to work out ways to replace radio by using giant scaled up versions of television remote controls, putting giant infrared lights on mobile phone towers, with smaller repeaters on top of houses and cars. (For funsies, I’m assuming point to point microwave comms are out- which has the implication that microwave ovens don’t work any more, with the associated knock on effects of house fires from people melting microwave dinners in ancient, unmaintained conventional ovens).

People who worked with wireless stuff- from FM radio DJs to antenna design engineers are all out of work. Perhaps they start selling coffee to people stopping by those public ethernet locations? Unfortunately, there’s a noticeable economic downturn from so many vacant jobs, people being out of work suddenly, and commerce becoming so much more difficult. Cash becomes much more useful, and those handy dandy wireless payment terminals don’t work so good anymore, and while waiting for wired replacement terminals to arrive, people get used to cash again. There’s a knock on effect of people keeping cash to themselves, despite the government being almost completely unchanged. This downturn, along with jobs that don’t exist any more, puts a lot of people out of work. However, they are likely to start filling the jobs left vacant by the thousands of people who perished in the utter chaos that was every aircraft on the planet trying to land at the same time in utter confusion.

A couple might make it safely down, but it only takes one accident- say a little Cessna coming in low, not seeing the 747 coming in faster from above, to turn the runway into a total mess of burning jet fuel, wreckage, and stunned people slowly bleeding out, surrounded by smashed bodies and assorted socks. Aircraft block major highways attempting to use them as runways, often causing huge multi-car pileups by giving already already distracted drivers a totally insane thing to have to deal with. Many pilots take the opportunity to ‘do a Sully’. Hundreds die as waterways around major airports become congested with crashed aircraft, with many potential rescue personnel sleeping through the whole thing, because who the heck has their landline phone number, even if they have an actual phone plugged into the wall?

In short, I’d watch that movie. Maybe a series in three parts, immediate, a few months later, and then years after. Great question OP, thanks!

Oh, also- people who made special effort to get a phone that has a headphone jack will be smug as fuck for a very long time.

I really appreciate your comment- Do you work with RF day to day?

What I like about these kind of questions is how different people take things in a totally different direction. I find it absolutely fascinating to see detailed replies about connotations I never thought of. It’s the whole reason why I love xkcd’s What If. If you’re unfamiliar, do yourself a favour and have a read. I particularly enjoy his answer to the question of everyone standing in one spot and jumping at the same time. He more or less ignores the core question and focuses on the societal & environmental impact of a mass human migration to one point, resulting in a fantastic read.

We may be discussing slightly different things here, I’m not sure if I follow the application of your math in this context.

My point is that a thinner wire will get much hotter than a thicker wire, given the same amount of current. Is this not the case?