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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • No, is just a reaction from two molecules into two other molecules. Oversimplification, but you know how vinegar and baking soda react when the come together all fuzzy and bubble? It’s the same when oxygen and hydrocarbons meet, except that it take heat to get it going, and conveniently releases more heat, which is usually enough to cause more reaction, often until it runs out of either oxygen or the hydrocarbon.

    It would be an even better parallel if vinegar and baking soda didn’t react if they were both below a certain temperature, and if the bubbling created heat, which warmed up the stuff next to it. If that were the case you could see a cool thing where you could keep them could, and just touch one spot to start them reacting, and it would spread like ‘fire’


  • Or, if you want to shut it down, the plan works, but since the magic effect has a range, to ball begins expanding before it makes it to the ring, taking the end of the barrel and the ring with it. If the ring is indestructible the character has to go on a search for the ring at the point of impact every time, it i expands within the ring, meaning you have a canon ball that explodes at the end of your gun with shrapnel, or you have to melt the ball down to retrieve the ring downrange.



  • I think the engineering part kicks in once the cannonball leaves the ring, or maybe around the mass of the shrunken ball. If the cannon ball retains it’s mass in it’s shrunken size does the gun have enough power to move it? If it does, then the gun is a ship cannon already, just a convenient size. If it doesn’t and can only shoot because the balls are as easy to fire as regular shot, then as soon as the ball exits the ring it is a cannonball being moved with the force of a small shot and likely drops to the ground an inch or so past the muzzle.





  • That’s kind of my point though, nothing is every really designed for the food of humanity, we evolved in an environment and adapt or die. It may seem hopeless while we’re living through it, and it may be ‘different’ than the past, but it’s always different, from the wheel to agriculture to the printing press to mass production, things are always taken advantage of by those with the means to do so, and we always come out different in the other side, were just living through this one and everyone feels special in the time they’re living through. Just imagine the days of the printing press and how powerful those who owned the press would appear.



  • dnick@sh.itjust.workstomemes@lemmy.worldShips
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    19 days ago

    It seems obvious that the whole thought experiment is just semantics. One of those things that interesting to think about the first time, but after awhile it’s just illustrative to point out how we just define things imprecisely and that I’m almost all cases it is far more convenient and practical, but if you look at anything from the right perspective, the lack of precision stands out. Even ‘walking out of a room’ doesn’t have a perfect description if you slow things down far enough, but practically it’s pretty useful to describe it as a distinct event.



  • Right, but things rarely happen ‘for the good of humanity’, they just happen, and like mass production or the newspaper or even writing and language itself, it appears, we make use of it, we stumble and eventually we figure out where it really fits into the world. It will always be taken advantage of by those with the means to do so, but my point is that there is a period where we truly don’t know how to approach it as a society and there is a learning curve and we are in that adolescent or teenage year type curve for the Internet, and probably toddler stage for ai, and we will learn, but we’re not there yet.

    Further, whether we learn enough quickly enough, or whether those with enough power and foresight will truly steal that opportunity from society remains to be seen. It may seem like it will be obvious right now, while we’re in the thick of things, but only history will tell if it’s an obvious eventuality or whether it is comical that they think they are smart enough to actually control it. Maybe it contains the seeds of their own undoing.



  • I still consider us in something like the teenage years as a society, just discovery something big like the Internet and social media and we’re going to handle it poorly until we learn to handle it responsibly.

    Heads or tails whether we make it to adulthood before the powers that be manage to wrangle things in their favor first. Signs point in a bad direction, but there’s no saying that the tools that worked on society before won’t break when the next thing comes along. Maybe ai will take a form that liberates, or hits the powerful far more negatively than it hits the masses.