Ah the George Washington strategy.

Or Phillips and JIS?

Can you reset any of the voice assistants to respond instead of Siri or Alexa or Bixby or whatever to “go go gadget?”

Waterfowl, kri!

Incorrect. The vast majority of the airspace over the contiguous United States is controlled, though there is a lot of it where participation in ATC is not necessary for VFR flight. From 1,200 feet AGL up to 18,000 feet MSL you’re in Class E, and from 18,000 to 60,000 you’re in Class A. Above that you’re in Class E again. In some places, usually over some un-towered airports, Class E will extend down to 700’ AGL or down to the surface as marked on sectional charts. Class D airspace, as well as the center columns of C and B airspace, extend to the surface.

Class G airspace pretty much only exists below 1,200’ AGL in most places, I think there are remote areas in the middle of the flyover states and Alaska where the Class E floor is higher because there’s nothing there, but that may be changing with ADS-B and shit.

It is not mandatory to participate in air traffic control to fly in Class E airspace. Laymen tend to use “controlled airspace” to mean “off limits without permission” but that’s not how that works; Restricted areas for example require clearance to enter but exist as a separate concept to the alphabet airspace system.

“Controlled airspace” means some part of the air traffic control system has coverage in that area and can provide traffic separation and sequencing for IFR flights. For VFR it’s a little more complicated; in Class A airspace (high altitude en-route airspace) VFR flight is not allowed. Terminal airspace (Class B, C and D, found around airports) participation in ATC is required for all flights. ATC services in Class E airspace is optional for VFR and is on a “workload permitting” basis.

Small point of grammar: Floating “over” controlled airspace means you are still outside of it. Airspace is 3 dimensional so in addition to having horizontal boundaries, it also has vertical boundaries. Class C airspace for example, which you find around semi-busy airports like Raleigh-Durham International, looks kind of like a quarter stacked on top of a penny, except the stack is 4000 feet tall and 10 miles in diameter. You remain outside of the Class C airspace if you fly directly below the outer “ring.” Or if you fly directly above it. I’ve done both, though I usually make a habit of calling up the approach controller and requesting flight following so that they can talk to me if they need to (“me” being a licensed pilot flying Skyhawks or smaller).

If you are going to fly an ultralight aircraft, you should seek out and receive training about the national airspace system, learn how to read a sectional chart, read things like Part 91, etc. I would advise carrying an aviation COM radio and monitoring local CTAF frequencies.

If flying something like a free balloon, you should know the prevailing conditions before takeoff. If the wind is blowing in the direction of a no no place, just don’t launch. Stay on the ground until conditions for safe and legal flight exist.

Are geriatric names coming back? Are we going to have a generation of Gladyses and Eustices?

Being able to engineer is by itself something that can even exist in genetic memory, instinctual.

I don’t think this is the case. There are creatures that instinctively construct, like ants and beavers, but their constructions are more an emergent behavior from simpler rules or systems. Their behaviors have evolved, the ants that dig slightly more efficient nests were more successful and went on to reproduce more offspring colonies.

At the root of engineering is the sentence “If I do this, then I bet I can get this to happen.” That behavior is unique to humans. It takes a lot of forebrain to do, and to develop that forebrain took a very successful omnivorous, multi-strategy primate.

Speed runs of the video game Super Mario World for the SNES are divided into a lot of categories, some allow glitches, some don’t. Glitchless runs are just about playing the game as intended as efficiently as you can. The absolute fastest run though, Any%, involves a trick where you perform a glitch that allows you to write arbitrary values into RAM, effectively reprogramming the game on the fly to trigger the end cut scene. This is called Arbitrary Code Injection. Now you’re playing a different game by a different, more abstract set of rules called 6502 assembly.

Upright bipedal gait with knees that lock, dexterous hands with opposable thumbs on highly articulated arms not significantly used for locomotion, binocular, tri-color vision granting great depth perception, the ability to sweat to stay cool for long periods of time under moderate exertion? All of that is just gettin’ gud, playing the game of evolution exceedingly well. Sometime between tying a knapped flint to a stick to make an axe and digging the first irrigation trench we arrived at that level of Arbitrary Code Injection. We’re not playing the same game as the other animals anymore.

Engineering predates what we now call science by millennia.

Diaper Retard Hitler will kill the Western world as we know it, and the only other option we present to you is a man who is too old and senile to hand out werther’s originals by himself.

Civilization is a lost cause.

I think the invention of engineering is what finally broke evolution, but there are a lot of factors we have that bootstrapped us to that point. Walking upright on two legs is more efficient at the price of raw power. Many creatures can outrun a human but no land animal can come close to our jogging range. A Cheetah can go 60 miles an hour for a minute or so but a human can go 10 miles per hour for 6 hours straight. It also frees our forelimbs, already made flexible, versatile and dexterous by our distant tree swinging ancestors, for tool use. Funnily enough, another ability that is unparalleled in nature is our ability to throw things with accuracy and power. You also need pretty good hands to master fire, and thus cooking, and thus unlocking extra nutrients from the food you catch, which provides for that very hungry brain of ours. A few millennia later and we’ve pretty much got control of the biosphere itself.

It already has.

You know what both of those films are? Exactly what their creators set out to make.

Are you seriously going to try and pull some smug insufferable “everything is art” bullshit here?

No, I’m more saying that “art” has no useful or stable definition especially as you are trying to use the word, to contrast “just entertainment” from “real art.” I don’t believe a line can be meaningfully drawn between those because lots of creative works have found themselves on both sides of that line depending on when they are in time.

Using Shakespeare as an example, he and his actors thought they were making plays that would be enjoyed by the few hundred or maybe few thousand people who would show up to the Globe theatre during the few weeks they were performing a particular play, and then never again. They weren’t setting out to make immortal classics for the ages and none of them lived to see that take place. When did Shakespeare’s plays become “real art?”

I don’t think JRR Tolkien intended people to take The Hobbit as seriously as they do today.

George Lucas didn’t think he was making a century-defining masterpiece on the set of Star Wars.

There is nothing preventing a future where massively anachronistic misinterpretations of the shooting scripts for eight episodes of Two And A Half Men become required reading for all teenagers 200 years from now as time transcending, culture defining classics.

On the other hand, what brilliant works are forgotten because they failed to find an audience in their time, or they became a meme and burned out?

The only honest criteria you could present to me for what makes “real art” different from “just entertainment” is the court of public opinion, which is subject to change over time. I live in a world where huge budget movies are based on stories and characters that originated in pulp magazines and penny dreadfuls.

I’m not interested in trying to draw a line between “this is just entertainment, feel free to view this in whatever abridged format you like” and “This is real art, so I demand you undergo whatever effort is necessary to experience it in what I consider to be the original and correct format, I don’t care what your priorities are or how much time and effort you can budget to this project.” I don’t see a functional difference between an individual reading a version of a classic book that has been abridged by AI and watching the relevant episode of Wishbone. There’s someone alive today who only knows The Tempest or Cyrano De Bergerac as the version with a Jack Russell terrier in it. Who are you to say “No that’s not good enough”?

As long as the original works continue to be available I have no problem with any method of abridging them, and I don’t believe any work is above consuming in abridged format for whatever reason especially on accessibility grounds.

Also is this an AI making a dumb blonde joke?

Having a pool doesn’t make it easier to hang dong, just marginally more plausible.

See at some point this discussion starts to feel kind of up itself. @roscoe@roscoe@lemmy.dbzer0.com casually created a dividing line between “books that are for entertainment” and “real literature” but balked at marking the location of that line. “Don’t be obtuse.”

I genuinely don’t think that line exists. Shakespeare was the Netflix Original of his day, and his day was some 400 years ago. A lot of “real literature” is labeled as such basically on the authority of generations of pretentious twats, at least a few of whom basically think “old = good and new = bad.”

We translate works from one language to another all the time, you think the precise nuances always make it through that process? We also adapt novels to film or television as a matter of routine. The original post uses the example of The Great Gatsby, which has at least one film adaptation. Is that a perfect 1 to 1 transfer of the author’s intent? Then you have retell

Beyond this, if I understand correctly, this could be used interactively. Say you’re using this on an e-reader, you could have the original text in the book, and then have a “what the fuck does that mean” button you can push to get an AI powered simplification if a sentence is too complicated for you or you don’t understand a particular idiom or something. I bet there’s someone out there who reads English as a second language generally well enough for The Great Gatsby, but doesn’t get the colloquialism “turning it over in my mind.” Hell, I’m a native English speaker and I could use something like that for a lot of works over 100 years old that use obsolete language I’m not familiar with.

Or…there’s this book called Congressional Anecdotes by Paul Boller, who writes in a style that is trying to be more clever than he is. Instead of saying something like “Senator Grug from Montana called Senator Flub from Wyoming an idiot, and that made Senator Flub angry” he instead writes “The esteemed member from the Gold and Silver state referred to his colleague Flub as a man of dubious intelligence. This didn’t sit well with the senator from Wyoming in the slightest measure.” I got just far enough into that book before giving up on it to recognize when an author on Cracked.com basically plagiarized it for an article. I mentioned it in the comments and the author messaged me like “Hahaha shutthefuckup” That book needs an AI simplification like I need a good night sleep.

Who is the judge of what “real literature” is?

Transcript of me examining this picture:

"Okay, face looks okay, jacket makes sense, let’s look at the hands. Looks like four fingers on her left hand there, the right hand, thumb’s a little screwy, is that a stick or is she part tarsier? Something’s kind of screwy there. Boots look about right, there’s even a pretty decent depth of field on the sho-THE FIRE IS IN THE TENT.

What do you think of the Voice of America broadcasting news in Simplified English?

I’m alright with this sort of thing for use by ESL folks who read at a 4th grade level in English, would like to practice reading in English, but don’t want to read a literal children’s book.