deleted by creator

Thank you! I’ve been (admittedly, very slowly) working on a mock platform for me to stage these fictional threads on, and I think I’ll probably host a website containing a fictional browser within your browser with different websites that people can click through and interact with, including “links” to fictional news articles and other cool stuff from the in-universe internet. Like an ARG.

I’m curious what made you think of this universe

I grew up on various cartoons of talking animals, and one of my biggest pet peeves of in animal-focused media is the “designated non-intelligent edible animal.” Lion King had bugs, Zootopia had fish/shellfish and so did Redwall. I absolutely hate that “some animals are more equal than others” trope from the shows whose entire premise is supposedly featuring animals living in harmony. Why not confront it head on and imagine a world of animals, no matter how sci-fi or magic, that could solve the predation problem?

I also love sci-fi shows like Star Trek, and wasn’t satisfied with the cute animal shows and technobabble laden shows being mutually exclusive, so I got really obsessed with the idea of combining cute animals and super advanced sci-fi technology.

When Zootopia came out with its super ambiguous and inconsistent worldbuilding around predator-prey dynamics, despite it being the core premise of the movie, it annoyed me so much that I knew I had to make a better version (at least better in my opinion), and I started seriously worldbuilding this concept.

what’s the story like

My main plot follows a group of small fuzzy animals (cat, dog, mouse, bird, etc) working in a government lab in one of the non-predation territories. The cat is my main character, and the plot opens shortly after the Feline Revolution that had cats joining the non-predation club, in which she was a pivotal figure. They are working on technologies that marked the surpassing of the humans that lived millions of years before they evolved in technological development, and I explore the conflicts with predation territories, interspecies friendships, and the possibility of the technology they’re developing being what killed the humans.

I’m partial to leaving decorating buildings to the residents who live there. Something like community murals and art projects on the prefab blank canvas that reflect the people and community those buildings foster. IDK, something about a lot of modern ornamentation commercial developers create feel even colder than no ornamentation at all, but that’s just a personal opinion.

My policy with alien life is “I’ll believe it when it’s proven beyond reasonable doubt.” All this is interesting but I don’t think most pepople are rushing to the conclusion that alien life exist just because of this.

In other news, Tesla to introduce buttonless handless doors. Tell Grok why you deserve to be let out.

I agree, I didn’t want to change the premise too much in my original comment, but ideally you’d do some complicated math to determine the optimal height for your location, building materials, and population density.

I don’t know what that calculation would look like in China because I don’t live there (I’m sure the Chinese engineers are well aware of those calculations though) but in my country it would definitely be a lot closer to the 10 story range, maybe even lower.

Either way, something us in the West absolutely NEED to get used to is prefab buildings that all look the same. A bunch of prefab skyscrapers like China has is still worlds ahead of the logistical nightmare of demanding every single building be custom designed like is so common here. You call it boring, I call it efficient. Having a few reusable designs (usually different heights) to choose from and copy paste building housing, like what China does, is what we need first, IMO, and then we can talk about the optimal heights for those prefab buildings.

∃ world : WorstPossible(world)

∀ us : AreLivingIn(us, world)

Always interesting when the subjects the meme is clowning on make themselves known when they absolutely didn’t have to.

We discussed those green skyscrapers in university environment class, and as far as I know they didn’t work that well. It was hard to keep the plants alive and when they did grow, they became a breeding ground for pest insects that got into the units where people were living. It’s very much prioritizing looking green over being green.

IMO it’s better to just have efficient but visually boring skyscrapers, and then have dedicated green space around clusters of density (which is what China is mostly doing nowadays). Separating housing and green space make both more effective, easier to manage, and more resiliant.

Also, in case you’re wondering, most Western environment profs are very impressed by what China has done, at least in the university I went to.

It always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that’s assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn’t take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.

It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn’t understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I’d genuinely be suprised if they’re even breaking even with the operating/maintenance costs vs whatever few unintentional fare dodgers they manage to stop. Most likely they’re losing money, while making the transit system less efficient by introducing a bottleneck, while discouraging drivers from trying out transit, just because they can’t stand the idea that people can just walk on the train without paying (even though they haven’t actually stopped them).

Get yourself to a safe place they can’t access and from there call security to remove them from the hospital?

Nah Nest was made by an ex Apple engineer, retained Apple’s “philosophy” of locked down walled garden everything, and introduced the idea of cloud controlled home automation to the masses. Killed off the idea of smart thermostats and smart home devices in general having a local server that does everything in your own home. Fuck that shit.

Also, for something pretending to be eco friendly, the amount of disposable packaging it came in was disgusting. A fucking thermostat that had more packaging than an iPad.

No, I complain about Google and Apple being proprietary. That alone is a deal breaker for me so I really don’t give a shit about them not having file management or whatever other old school feature. And if a sufficiently rigorous security model must take away old school file management in favour of a more restrictive system, so be it, as long as it’s open source and publicly auditable.

If you’re relying on a proprietary operating system, literally none of that matters because your root of trust is inherently untrustworthy. The operating system itself can (and have been shown again and again and again to do) include malware that can never be removed and you can never be sure it doesn’t.

My poop is so hard that it self sharpens

They still stole more STEM talent from developing countries than they lost

As if they haven’t been killing US citizens

Updates alone have no way to happen solely on the local machine.

No, but it wouldn’t need to cost the original vendor that much backend resources either if they’re willing to relinquish control of it. There’s a reason most Linux distros would rather you use the torrent than their hosted images, and package managers allow you to add any mirror you want and for anyone to spin up a mirror. Something like IPFS (or BitTorrent) would be a great fit for software updates, because it doesn’t matter where the file comes from, as long as it’s the same file.

Updates are expensive for the vendor because they insist on their servers being the only place you can get them from.

Image/video/audio processing that requires more compute than you can reasonably except from average consumer hardware.

I’d be more accepting of this if it wasn’t for the fact that they increasingly don’t even let you try to run it on your own hardware. Taking an hour or even overnight to process a video might not be ideal, but there are still countless use cases where that’s acceptable and worth the security of not sending your data to the cloud.

Antivirus and other forms of security which require near real-time fingerprinting and/or new definitions.

Antivirus is an antipattern and the need for it is usually a symptom of the OS architecture/permission control model being hopelessly vulnrable. An ideal system would be zero trust and some random piece of code wouldn’t be able to do anything truly harmful to begin with. You can still social engineer the user into giving a malicious program trust, but you can social engineer them into whitelisting it in their antivirus too.

Licensing/certificate servers

Certificates don’t need that much backend resources and can be decentralized in the same way as updates, taking load off the original vendor.

Licensing is a circular argument. I’m paying for you to maintain the system that determines if I paid or not?

Servers which receive and process telemetry data

Yeah that’s not a “feature” most people appreciate. At best they accept it as inevetable because they can’t turn it off.

Also, if a company tries using that as justification for their subscription model, they can go fuck themselves.

Resources for submitting/processing/securing legal/government forms/documents

If it has to do with the legal system or government, then it should be covered by the ultimate subscription model: taxes. I shouldn’t have to cover a company’s costs of filing things with the government when I already pay the government.

*Junior devs

Senior devs are more likely to write one liners from their VIM window.

hold the device in front of her face and to forcibly use her fingers to unlock it. In other words, a judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics

This isn’t bypassing biometrics. This is using biometrics as intended. Bypassing implies this was an unexpected side effect when every security researcher ever has warned that biometrics is intrinsically vulnerable and a terrible password substitute for this exact reason.