I’ve heard some strange stories about a mysterious land on the other side of a vast ocean. In this far-away land of countless wonders, companies are only symbolically restricted by laws. This means that they can legally exploit their employees and customers in all sorts of creative ways, and charge pretty much whatever they want. Maybe you’ve heard similar wonderful tales as well?

Back in the bad old days, messages cost you real world money. If you wanted to reach lots of people by SMS, it would be pretty expensive. Might as well let Twitter pay for the messages, especially when you’re just writing a public announcement.

In 2006 the restriction did apply. The idea was that you would type the message on a computer, and let Twitter send a few SMS messages to a small group people.

You weren’t supposed to have millions of followers or write a full length blog post using a hundred short messages. The idea was that you cold reach people quickly even though they didn’t have access to a proper computer or the internet. So much has changed in the past 18 years…

Well, what do you think? Pretty infuriating huh? Somehow makes you understand people who commit violet crimes in a fit of rage.

Same here. It worked a few minutes ago, but I guess Lemmy hugged it to death in the meanwhile.

Terms and conditions apply. This site was intentionally made to be as infuriating as possible.

That limit came from the days of SMS. The idea was that you can’t go to the internet, because data is expensive, the network doesn’t exist, your dumb phone can’t even open websites etc. However, you can send SMS messages, and those things have a 160 character limit.

The solar atlas is another good starting point for making these calculations. Just by looking at the map, you can easily see how location makes a big difference. Solar power in Spain will be pretty good, while in Germany it’s a bit meh. If you’re in Scotland or Norway, solar power will be even worse. Well, you can always compensate by buying more panels, but that’s not great either.

The actual output is also greatly influenced by quite a few variables, like angle, and efficiency of the panel. As the panel ages, the efficiency goes down. Also, higher temperatures decrease the efficiency of the panel, so the burning hot panels in Libya might not produce as much as you thought based on the solar irradiance map. In other words, it’s complicated.

How about hobbies? If everyone in the group is passionate about fishing, knitting, model airplanes, flower bouquets, wood working, painting or something like that, you’ll have plenty to talk about. If you talk to people, and get to know them a little better, you’ll suddenly begin to feel more connected.

That sort of tech would open some really interesting doors. If the human mind is augmented in one way or another, it becomes difficult to tell where the human part ends and machine begins.

Once you take that to its logical conclusion, you being to ask questions like, what’s the difference between a human mind and a machine mind. Is there a meaningful difference?

You could augment a human mind with machine parts, live your normal life and continue to augment more and more as your organic cells gradually die over the course of several decades. Once the last organic bits die of old age, there’s nothing but machine left and your transition to a digital life form is complete.

Sounds like you need to download pretty much everything ever written on mathematics, physics, biology, and medicine. That info dump would also have to include a bunch of stuff that hasn’t even been invented yet, and probably won’t be within the next 500 years.

Once you have all that in your mind, you’ll be incredibly frustrated that modern day technology is at least 500 years away from what you actually need. You would need to build a bunch of quantum electronics fabrication factories so that you can build the real factories that actually produce the machines you need for assembling the very first brain reading and recording machine.

Although, since you have all that revolutionary science and tech in your head, you should use that to fix global warming, world hunger, cancer and a bunch of other stuff so that you can raise the trillions of capital needed for building the main project.

1. Use a square bowl placed on top of a circular plate.
2. Add 11 parts water, then 2 parts cereal, using a mix of ancient Babylonian and traditional Japanese volumetric units (bonus points if you don’t actually convert them).
3. Heat in the oven at 709 °R for exactly 73,037 ms. (Is that a decimal or thousand separator? Ask your local mathematics teacher.)
4. Once heated, let it cool to exactly room temperature by placing it outside (regardless of the weather).
5. Add a generous layer of cold ketchup on top, forming a smiley face.

Optional: Garnish with a sprig of mint and serve with a side of existential dread. Bon appétit!

All debt? Does that include companies too?

They’ve borrowed at least billions to grow their businesses, and that sort of money won’t just disappear without a trace. In this case, the trace would probably include economic instability of some sort. There’s a reason why central banks use interest rate to influence borrowing and inflation.

I would go back to the time when I got my first computer and write myself a long message from the future. It would contain things like:

• Make several backups of this list and review it every year.
• Watch out. Some people are really toxic. (list of people to avoid)
• Know yourself, and act accordingly. (list of traits I have, but haven’t realized or fully understood at the time)
• Be careful. (list of minor accidents that could potentially happen in the future)
• Be mindful of important decisions. (List of some big decisions that turned out to be good, bad, great, awful etc.)
• You can do it 👍 (encouraging words)

The universe feels like a pretty whimsical place, so why not? Might as well try it out. If it sucks, you can always let everything crash into a singularity and start over.

Don’t feed the trolls.

The arrowhead sounds more viable. The oldest ones can be thousands of years old, and the prices are all over the place. Fancy ones cost a fortune, while a badly beaten one will be well within the budget.

That would have been handy when playing pokemon go.

Here’s one way you could have used it. You drive your car to a remote location. You grab your rifle and your dog, and go hunting. You mark the location of your car on the GPS and start walking. In the evening, you can use the GPS to find your way back to the car. You could also go hiking and use the GPS to find your way back.

The whole point is to mark locations and later find your way back those locations. In the era of geocaching you would have made a custom point of interest and input the coordinates manually before actually visiting the location.

This device actually shows you lots of information you rarely need these days: direction, speed, distance, coordinates, signal strength, just to name a few.

Oh, and some backpacks have a hole for headphones. I guess you’re supposed to keep a CD player in there or something.