I do run an instance, but I don’t use Cloudflare, so I’m not sure I can be much help.

I think you badly misunderstood my take.

JoA never killed anybody. She just went into battle. Many people also believe Saint Patrick committed genocide against the druids in Ireland, but this is an historical myth, originating from the speculation of Elizabethan era scholars. The actual historical record only supports him preaching in Ireland, not being violent (plenty of the people who listened to him were THEN violent).

However, there are a bunch of saints who led armies (or were just soldiers) during the crusades, at least one saint who was a Viking leader who then converted and helped to (violently) Christianize the Nordic countries (Saint Olaf of Norway), and Saint Peter of Verona was an inquisitor who zealously hunted heretics in Northern Italy in the 1200s (very likely ALSO a torturer in addition to a murderer).

Fun fact: if you think that ppl sticking to old designs is silly, Panasonic has a whole $$ niche in Japan selling modern-internal, vintage-external laptops with DVD drives and old-style keyboards. https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/v0t06p literally has both a VGA and a thunderbolt lol

Just in Japan?? I’ll buy one of these right now!

I love the Lemmy UI.

But I’m a gen Xer.

There’s some great analysis floating around of how different generations actually interpret UIs (and make decisions about how or whether to engage with them) very differently. So there is no “one size fits all” that will make everybody happy. Change the Lemmy UI to something like Photon and I’d be like… “this is dumb.” Making a bunch of very different options is a lot of work. If you want to do it… no one is stopping you. The Lemmy project is opensource and you could go start contributing and making pull requests today. You could go run your own instance and make it look like whatever you want and get the average redditors to join that. I run my own instance. We have a whole two users. It works exactly the way I want it to and federates with exactly who I want it to.

Frankly, I’m not sure Lemmy needs to go out of it’s way to appeal to the average redditor in order to have a thriving, healthy community. Sure, there are some things I miss about having a giant user base to engage with, but honestly, I’ll trade them for the MUCH MUCH lower toxicity. I don’t know that “growing Lemmy” should be our focus. It’s not like we’re getting paid.

The same FBI that keeps telling Congress end to end encryption needs to have legally mandated back doors in it?

One of my biggest curiosities ATM is how to source nitrogen to breathe. What are the rarest resources in terns of the solar wind and stellar evolution of a system? Nitrogen seems to get blown away with a very distant ice line that should largely determine its availability right? It doesn’t seem to form compounds with staying power on any smaller objects.

Another benefit of mining the atmosphere of Venus. While Venus has a much higher C02 to N2 ratio than Earth, it has SO MUCH atmosphere that it has 4 times as much nitrogen as Earth does.

There’s frozen nitrogen on Titan, and smaller amounts of it on the other moons of the giant planets. If you have the fuel and time to get out to the Kuiper belt, there’s probably 50 times more drifting around frozen out there, even before you start mining dwarf planets (sounds like your setting has plenty of time).

There’s also N2 available in the the planetary atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. A tiny amount, as a percentage of those atmospheres, but again, considerably more than is present on Earth in terms of mass available, if you can get at. Mining Jupiter’s atmosphere is an orders of magnitude more challenging problem than mining Venus’s. But if you CAN mine Jupiter’s atmosphere, you’ll have all the light elements you’ll ever need. We could build thousands of Earth surfaces worth of space habitats and have plenty of water and atmosphere to fill them up with.

Again, I think the best solution is Venus. You get carbon for megastructure hulls, water, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur. It’s all roiling around in a toxic vapor mix, yes, but it’s all very useful if you can distill it out, which is all known science and there’s just SO MUCH OF IT.

In other star systems, I’d look for similar solutions.

I’m going to go with “sounds neat but is totally implausible.” Not totally implausible, but it’s a lot of work just to roll a bunch of unpredictable dice with the chaotic behavior of the boiling water and the chemical composition of the asteroid.

The water vapor is going to find the path of least resistance and come erupting out of the molten metal, probably quite explosively and you’re going to loose a bunch of valuable mass in the process.

EDIT: There may be a way to do this and get more predictable results (if you have a ton of energy to melt the asteroid very fast and very uniformly from all directions at once) but it still sounds unnecessarily complicated. There are simpler, cheaper ways to get better, more controlled outcomes.

I’m very interested in any plot holes I should look into in this basic layout.

I’m trying to stick to Dr O’Neill’s original assumption of only using the engineering materials of the present.

In that case, you definitely want to have an outer shell, or this thing is going to go the way of the titanic. That being the case, your impactors aren’t going to make a lot of noise, unless there’s crew in / on the outer shell (which there totally could / would be) and there’s a lot of impactors or they’re pretty big. There’s definitely some interesting stories to be told there.

I also propose that there will be self replicating drones that are more akin to kilometers scale industrial complexes.

Are these floating around in space, harvesting asteroids and comets and building more habitats? Or are they trundling around on the inner surface of your cylinder building structures and repairing damage? If the latter, they probably make more sense as a swarm organism then as a essentially a titanic bulldozer. Especially because you’re exploring biotech.

If they’re floating around in space, an overlooked source of mass for constructing megastructures is the carbon in the atmosphere of Venus. Carbon is a great material for building / reinforcing your shells, especially if you can get it into some of it’s more interesting forms like nanotubes (which might be MUCH easier to do with biological processes than with current industrial processes). Some back of the envelope math suggests to me that there’s enough carbon in the atmosphere of Venus to build thousands of square kilometers of 10 meter thick megastructure shell without taking more than a few percent of what’s available. If you take more, this has the added effect of lowering Venus’s atmospheric pressure to the point you might be able to mine or even terraform it. A win / win IMHO. That’s part of why I suggested a meta alloy of carbon and iron (basically super steel).

Any civilization capable of tackling O’Neill Cylinder / generation ship scale projects would have no problem mining the atmosphere of Venus using space elevators.

400k years into the future when Sol is further into the red giant phase.

I highly recommend watching this video. It’s going to give you some hard numbers on the timeline of the sun’s evolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ3HACbDMuE

tl:dw; The sun’s going to get hotter and brighter before it becomes a red giant, but we have literally 100s of millions of years before that will start being very noticeable. Enough time for the dinosaurs to die out and mammals to evolve all the way to humans probably 8 times over before we start having problems. 400k years isn’t enough for this to be even noticeable.

Also note that if you’re exploring the future era of increasing solar radiation, it’s been proposed that we just move the earth into a wider orbit. If a civilization is capable of thinking truly long term, this is doable even with modern technology and could buy the earth potentially billions of years more life (I’ve heard it said that when the sun becomes a red giant, it will heat up the moons of Jupiter for long enough that they could have liquid water on the surface and evolve life… there’s no reason the Earth couldn’t keep going that whole time too if we just moved it).

https://room.eu.com/article/saving-earth-from-an-expanding-sun <- I don’t find the 100 million year timeline in this article to be that credible… see the Cool Worlds video I posted above. It’s a very, very low estimate that takes some alarmist, worst case scenario thinking.

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2547/1

I still wonder of the sounds unique of such a place.

There are different ways you could end up with interesting sounds in a place like that without resorting to sloppy enough engineering for the habitat to be vulnerable to major impactors.

• With the biotech angle, consider having a somewhat different mix of atmospheric gasses (or even large bodies of water for aquatic adapted people to live in). That will change the nature of sound.
• All the biotech critters are going to make for quite an alien soundscape anyway, I imagine.
• The ambient machinery maintain the place is probably going to make strange sounds all the time.
• If your inhabitants are post human (your time scale is big enough that evolution, in addition to deliberate genetic manipulation could play a role), they could have hyper acute hearing, or even hearing adapted to specific frequencies for <reasons>. They might pick up on all sorts of sounds a normal human ear couldn’t hear. If you want to really play with sound, lean into that aspect.

Beyond that though, sounds native to the structure itself I don’t think would be very different from those of earth, unless it’s very poorly built in which case, it’s doomed and I don’t find it’s long or even mid term habitability prospects very credible.

Upon arrival the generation ship becomes the central hub of the primary habitat.

Where are your generation ships going? If they go to red dwarf stars (which they should), keep in mind their tendency to flair up.

https://www.space.com/red-dwarfs-activity-bad-news-alien-life

That will pose an interesting challenge for your engineers.

I imagine at that scale the gravitational interaction between the two bodies becomes a significant factor and would result in some sound. When does the Roche limit begin to become significant in very layperson terms?

At the scale you’re talking about, I think about 22 KM apart is where you start to gravitational interactions starting to produce a resonance. Move them closer and yeah, you’ll get effects. Depends on the tolerance of your building materials… hums aren’t great for things like bridges and sky scrapers in the long term… they’re probably not great for O’Neill cylinders either, especially one’s built of mostly modern steel. Again, I think if it gets to the point where your population can pick up on it, they have problems.

Except if they have hyper hearing as I speculated above. Their hearing could even be tuned to the faint resonance of the orbiting cylinders, so that if they pick up on even a minor change they know that something is very wrong and can take action.

I could see a scenario where a quiet hum is a warning sign of disasters to come…

Impactors are actually a significant hazard to O’Neill cylinders. Unless your megastructure has some well designed mitigation strategies, it’s doomed.

That’s not an answer to your question, but we have to take it into account in order to answer it.

One of the most practical suggestions for such mitigation is an outer shell that can absorb most impacts, combined with some kind of active countermeasures that can shoot down impactors big enough or with a high enough relative velocity to pose a threat that could potentially penetrate the outer shell.

Most likely, the outer shell wouldn’t rotate like the inner shell. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them being it’s easier to dock with the thing, another being it’s easier to repair the outer shell without having to deal with it having spin gravity that is flinging your repair equipment off into the vacuum of space. There are a number of proposed solutions for traversing from a rotating inner shell to a non-rotating outer shell and back again.

In this case, there’s going to be a layer of vacuum in between the outer shell and the inner shell. That means the answer to your question is “totally silent”. A meter wide asteroid can crash into your outer shell at 10,000 mph and the inhabitants of your inner shell won’t hear a peep. Anyone in or on the outer shell would feel or hear something, depending on a whole set of factors from the material the shell is made of to how far away the impact is to whether or not they’re in a space suit.

But let’s say you have an O’Neill cylinder without an outer shell (IMHO, if you’re going to go through the immense effort to build one of these things, this is a bad idea unless you have some amazing hypothetical deflector shield technology we have no idea how to build) and let’s say an impactor gets through your deflector shield. Let’s additionally assume that your shell is made out of some kind of meta alloy composed mostly of nickel iron and carbon nanotubes. Something that has the tensile strength to support a 30 km long structure (for the curious, the physics that governs this is exactly the same as the physics that governs suspension bridges). Let’s also assume there’s around 200 feet of dirt and rock in between the shell and the people walking around on the inside of your space habitat.

The average velocity of a random meteor that might hit the International Space Station is 50 to 100 KM per second. Most micrometeorites that hit the ISS are basically grains of dust and are too small to produce an audible sound. A number of years ago, something slightly bigger hit a window and left some visible damage. IIRC, no one heard it, they just noticed the damage after the fact.

For an asteroid impact to be audible in the environment we’ve described, it would have to be a significant impactor, big and fast enough to cause significant damage. It’s quite possible that the impact could put a hole in the outer shell where dirt starts getting sucked out into the vacuum of space, and the inhabitants still wouldn’t hear a damn thing. They might notice a sinkhole forming pretty soon, and that would be no good. (Especially because it means spin gravity is literally helping the vacuum of space to suck material out of the habitat).

If something hits the O’Neill cylinder loud enough for the inhabitants to hear it, in all probability, they have a really big problem.

“The DOJ is pushing radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case”

I have a feeling that this is going to become the standard defense against ANYTHING the robber barons don’t like in both the courtroom and the media in coming months and years.

CONT.

““THAT’S JUST LIKE YOUR OPINION, MAN!””

And suddenly, you don’t have to feel small, and ashamed and defective and like there’s something wrong with YOU. You know you didn’t intend any disrespect, you don’t think you’re lazy, you tried to remember. You’re really a young person (often in our culture a young man) who realizes you have the strength to say I won’t be treated this way anymore! when someone calls you out.

That’s why it feels like you (and your therapist) are arguing with an angry teenager. It’s because you are!

So… why don’t we grow out of it? Why are we stuck here? Why do we keep fighting battles we lost and won a long time ago when all fighting can do is hurt ourselves and our loved ones?

Part of coming to this understanding for me was reflecting on the difference in the ways RSD comes out at home and at work. When my RSD is triggered by my partner, I can get defensive and argue and go into that teenaged space of ““I won’t be treated this way anymore!””

But when it’s my boss who triggers my RSD? With some tiny piece of negative feedback? I can’t do that to him, unless I’m ready to get fired. And I know that… so what do I do?

I get fucking scared man! Scared and ashamed and embarrassed. I get crazy impostor syndrome. I can’t sleep because I’m so stressed out. Because my boss put me right back in that feeling of being the seven year old who can’t remember Saint Francis’s name. And that all affects my work performance and my job satisfaction. And now, at 42, you better believe that impacts my health, my home life and my ability to provide for my family.

RSD hurts me man! It’s terrible! It’s the worst!

Back to my point (can you tell I’m ADHD?) why don’t we grow out of it?

Well just like any learned behavior, we can grow out of it. And just like any emotional damage, we have to heal it. That teenager keeps fighting because that little kid is still scared and ashamed, because that little kid has never had a chance to feel safe and accepted and like it’s OK to be the way he is and has never gotten a chance to heal.

I had this epiphany about communication with my partner. What if I just admitted why I was feeling what I’m feeling? What if, instead of saying ““I won’t be treated this way anymore!”” I said ““What you’re saying is really reasonable. And I’m terrified, because it came out of left field and I feel <overwhelmed/scared/afraid> of having to take on some new responsibility I expect to fail at. But that’s not your fault. I just need to process this feeling, because it belongs to a kid who thinks he’s gonna get shamed and put down and he’s going to go through all this self loathing and self abuse.””

tl;dr: The only way to break the RSD cycle is to give that little kid a chance to heal, so the angry teenager doesn’t have to stick up for him anymore. And the only way to do that is to address the feelings under the deconstruction and the debating and the intellectualizing.

ADHD tangent: I feel like RSD and toxic masculinity are very closely linked, but that’s another rant for another hyperfocus post.

A post on RSD I wrote on Reddit four years ago. People seemed to find it helpful.

I am the ADHD half and I have been this partner. At my partner and at my therapist, who is an amazing man who has helped me and my partner remain functional and together during the pandemic and deserved better from me.

I have debated such indefensible positions (that I don’t even agree with) as the definition of trauma, the morality of expecting others to regulate their behavior and even the necessity of washing one’s hands during a pandemic. I will break something down, look at it from every possible angle, deconstruct reality any way I can until I find a way to describe it that will make some (in that moment) unacceptable truth seem reasonable and acceptable.

This is 100% RSD related. And I’ve been thinking about RSD a lot. Are you familiar with it?

If not, you can learn all about it just by googling ““Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria”” so I’ll skip any explanations of it and just talk about my journey with it. Hopefully some of it my be helpful to you and to your partner.

I’m guessing your partner does not believe that he has an asshole inside him who gaslights his loved ones and others trying to help him into thinking that his shitty behavior is somehow acceptable. You can argue hard and passionately against something that is objectively true and do so while feeling righteous, instead of self deceiving and overbearing, as long as you believe your own bullshit. And believing our own bullshit and distrusting other people’s point of view is a survival thing for people with RSD.

Here’s the thing I’ve recently come to believe about RSD: It doesn’t have to do with the ADHD brain. It’s not part of our biology, it’s not something ““caused by our brain architecture that we should get a pass for.”” It’s 100% a learned behavior (in myself… I obviously can’t speak for ANYONE else). But if that IS true for others, it means that people, especially men, who grow up with ADHD in Western culture, are learning this behavior HARD at a young age. And like most toxic psychological survival mechanisms, it has it’s roots in learning to avoid something awful AT ALL COST. And that awful situation was REAL and felt TERRIBLE. And it’s also gone… the little kid who experienced it and the teenager who learned to push back against it is now a grown ass adult and can learn better, less toxic ways to deal with it. And I wonder if RSD will manifest differently in kids growing up now, than it did in kids who grew up in the 80s and 90s and early aughts.

What is ““it”” though?

This is a hypothosis. I’ve only tested it in myself and it seems to be true, so take what I have to say with, in the words of Babish, a pinch of Kosher salt.

For me, it’s rooted in ego, competitiveness, self worth and, frankly, a rejection of the shitty behavior of others.

Learning it from the nice teacher

Scenario: A little boy is ten years old. He’s doing algebra for the first time. He’s clever and he gets the concept of variable REALLY fast, way faster than anyone else in his class. And he loves his teacher who’s a nice lady and sings Peter Paul and Mary and Simon and Garfunkle songs with the class. She praises him for figuring things out so quickly. He feels great. He’s so proud of himself, he goes home and tells his mother ““I’m doing really well in math class!”” A few months go by. He’s struggling with paying attention. Turning in his homework on time. Finishing quizzes in the time allowed. He also thinks he understands some concepts that he doesn’t. But it still all comes really easily to him. He likes the class, likes his teacher, wants to do well and enjoys showing off when he knows something. But he’s not keeping up with the reading and is struggling in other ways. . . here’s the important bit: That kids has NO idea that he’s doing poorly! None at all. He still thinks he’s doing well. And he keeps going home and proudly telling his mother ““I’m doing so well in math class!”” Because he likes being there, he likes his teacher, he likes math, he understands the concepts and his teacher is really nice to him when he knows the answers. He believes he is doing well in math, even though ALL THE SIGNS that he’s not, that a more experienced person would see are there all around him.

Then the fall is gone and it’s time for parent teacher conferences. He’s excited to take his mom to meet his math teacher. They all sit down together and presents that little boy’s mom with…

A solid C-

And the feed back ““Your son is very bright and understands the material very well but doesn’t turn in assignments, is disruptive in class, doesn’t pay attention and isn’t applying himself.”” And his mother is FURIOUS and later yells at him and says ““You told me you were doing well in math! Why have you been lying to me?””

Learning it from the mean teacher

Go back in time three years. The little boy is seven. He’s just started at a new (weirdly Christian) school. The teacher has spent several days telling the class the stories of Saint Francis of Assisi. The little boy remembers most of them, because he loves stories. One day the teacher puts him on the spot and makes him get in front of the class and tell the story. And he’s excited. So he goes up to do that. And he starts telling the story. But he doesn’t remember the saint’s name. So he says ““Saint Peter!”” Because he’s seven and that’s the only saint he remembers. The teacher stops him in a strict voice and in front of the class tells him ““You haven’t been paying attention! You’ve disrespected me and my class by not remembering the name of the Saint we’ve been studying all week! You’re so much smarter than this! Go sit back down. Sit up straight, pay attention!””

As above, the little boy feels ambushed. Didn’t see it coming. And still doesn’t even know the Saint’s name.

I could go on. You learn the lesson from parents, coaches, the next door neighbor, your Spanish teacher, your piano teacher. You learn it over and over. From kind people who mean well and want to help, from impatient people who want something from you NOW, and, often, from angry people who are sick of your shit. But the message is the SAME.

You are so <smart> <talented> <creative> <charismatic> <knowledgeable> <intuitive> you would be <such a success> <capable of so many things> <exceptional> <promising> if you just <weren’t so lazy> <paid better attention> <applied yourself> <took pride in your work> <had better self discipline> <were respectful> <had good judgement>. Also SURPRISE, you didn’t see this failure coming (subtext: you idiot).

And you try and you try, but no one ever gives you anything and you just feel like

““I could be awesome if I just didn’t have such a flawed character.”” Basically. It’s the message you get.

And one really toxic thing is, you start to believe it and you get comfortable with failure.

Another really toxic thing is, you KNOW you’re NOT <lazy> <undisciplined><etc> because there are things you ARE really good at and you can do them super well and so the problem isn’t with you, it’s with a world that expects you to be able to do those hard things and shames you because ““they’re so easy””.

And then one day, maybe it’s tenth grade now and you’re sixteen and you’re bigger and smarter and self confident but also awkward and you’re angry. . . at yourself, at others who reject you. And someone makes you feel that way and you feel the shame and self judgement start to come welling up but then you get angry and you’re like:

We know that black hole mergers are a thing, as LIGO has detected gravity waves from these exact events.

To get too much more specific, we need to ponder the mass of the black holes and their distance of separation.

You did specify that these black holes were of equal size. They would orbit each other, potentially for billions of years, just like any two other massive objects and how these orbits behaved would depend on their mass, orbital distance, relative velocity and the gravitational influence of any other large bodies. For example, two 30 solar mass black holes orbiting close to Sagittarius A* (our galaxy’s central super massive black hole) would have a very different orbital pattern from the same two black holes orbiting each other in intergalactic space.

ADHD dad with 15 year old ADHD son here (also, I have a severely ADHD dad… undiagnosed / untreated, probably like most boomers with ADHD). Second what other’s said. My son is like the least aggressive person ever. Observations of his childhood vrs my childhood vrs stories of my dad’s childhood make me STRONGLY believe aggression in ADHD kids is environmental / cultural in nature… for whatever that’s worth.

1. Homework and chores, hands down. My son says he’ll do it, and doesn’t want help / doesn’t want to be reminded. But GFL unless I sit down and do it with him.

2. Son is an only child, but he gets along REALLY well with his 9 year old cousin (who also has ADHD) and his friends. My son runs LARPs for them. If my son gets angry / aggressive toward anyone in the family, it’s his mother, who sets the strongest boundaries with him. It’s been like that all his life. Mostly they have a good relationship, but whatever social strain he has going on, it’s there.

3. N/A. My son is not aggressive (and never has been). When faced with aggressive behavior from other children, he tries to talk them down and withdraws / gets depressed if it doesn’t work. Again, I attribute this to his early childhood education and to the culture he grew up in. I would say changing the culture / teaching self management and communication tools EARLY is the best advice possible.

4. Worst case, my son and I can enable each other with some of our dysfunctional ADHD behavior and tendencies and we need help from other family members to keep us all on track.

5. See above about culture and education.

People HATE the company, for good reason, but it consistently scores top marks for actual privacy implementation.

Better name than X.

I’m thirsty Tuvix. I’m just… so… thirsty…

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I am fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon, and the question is not that hard.