I think the line between fantasy and SF is blurry enough that there’s no value in trying to find it.

This man is a delusional idiot, both because he believes AGI is happening in our lifetimes, and because he believes the US has any ability to militarily strike at China.

And that, kids, is what happens when you add energy to a system while simultaneously releasing the potential energy already stored there.

Oh hell yes! Awesome update.

I’m curious about what the client would be in this context. Does it require a desktop environment, or just an X server? Are you using an existing web browser, or are you rendering web content directly in the app?

Same one.

Also, for very much the same reasons I’ll also recommend Observation. Play as an AI aboard a space station, trying to keep its remaining crew member alive after some kind of unknown event knocks out power and does… Other things. Absolutely superb twist on the genre, with a great sense of mystery and wonder.

Iron Lung. Very clever premise. Deeply, intensely creepy throughout.

Operating in the dark is another case of “very difficult, not impossible.” RTGs were invented in 1954, and were used in real life by the crews of Apollo 12 through 17 to power long running lunar experiments. The RTG from Apollo 13 is still sitting in the South Pacific right now.

You can launch a mission to the moon whenever you want. Launch windows are mostly just about doing it economically. If you’ve got unlimited budget and political will, you can - more or less - send up as many rockets as you want, whenever you want.

None of the things you’re describing are actually impossible, just really, really difficult. That’s an important distinction. The fact that they accomplished them speaks to how desperate they were.

Very cool. I’ll need to sit down and read the full spec, but I’ve got some FastAPI apps where I could see this being useful.

Well, yes it does, but I’m not sure what story exactly. It’s certainly not the easy “Trump did it” that we would - with good reason and precedent - usually assume. Seems like he actually inherited this one.

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Wouldn’t it be “Gosh dang it”? Hank is a good Christian boy, he doesn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.

Modern routers have a feature that’s typically known as “hairpin NAT” or “NAT loopback”. This means that if the DNS lookup resolves to the router’s public IP, it routes the packet internally instead of passing it out to the internet. So for your subdomains all of the traffic should stay local. Typically this feature is enabled by default, but you may want to check just to be sure.

Regarding B… Yeah, I’ve tried and tried to find an intuitive explanation for this, and I’ve never yet found one. Basically the answer boils down to “Because the math says so” and every attempt to explain that in practical terms always comes down to drawing a light cone diagram and showing the causality paradox in geometric terms. I find this intensely dissatisfying because it’s really just visualizing the math without actually framing it in any way that’s truly comprehensible beyond “Trust me bro.”

This video, while a little over padded with fluff, does contain the best and most comprehensible version of this explanation that I’ve seen, but I’d love for someone to be able to put it in terms that actually make sense without just drawing lines on a graph and gesturing at them. Maybe that just isn’t possible. Perhaps the whole point is that FTL breaks the laws of the universe and our understanding of reality is necessarily constrained by those same laws.

Edit: OK, this video is a much better version of the explanation I described. I still find that explanation unsatisfying, but it is at least highly comprehensible.

Agreed, floatheadphysics is doing an amazing job of explaining these concepts in a comprehensible way.

I’m not following how this explanation is supposed to help with their question. Like, what are you trying to get at here?

As a fan of both Gurren Lagann and Uzumaki I am deeply torn on this.

Interesting. If I’m following this correctly, the architecture is very similar to how services like Tailscale and Zerotier work; every client contacts a central server to say where it can be reached, and then the central server shares that information with authorized parties, but the actual communication is all peer to peer.

Assuming I’ve grasped this correctly, this sounds like a very smart use of a proven architecture. I guess my main question would be, how does the central server determine when to share contact info between two clients? Is everyone essentially aware of everyone else (on the backend at least) and then some client side component restricts who can actually communicate, or is there some pre-shared secret that would authorize the server to connect your client to someone else’s?

Edit to add: The other thing I was going to note is that obviously removing the central server means there’s no way to retrieve your messages if you lose or wipe your phone, but I see you’ve already included robust backup options. Thumbs up for that.

Edit 2: Just to clarify my question, I see that theres a system for scanning or importing QR codes in order to add someone as a contact (I do want to suggest that you should also be able to use a code; not everyone always wants to be sending an image in place of, effectively, a phone number), but my question is more about how this is architectured on the backend. Does the key encoded in the QR code authorize the TURN server to connect you with the other user?

It’s cool, I bought one for you.