USS Houston was carrying President Roosevelt from Panama to Hawaii on a secret route, and the airship commander launched an unauthorised scouting mission to search for his ship, found it, and dropped a bundle of current newspapers and magazines for him.

Entered the Southern Ocean at roughly a third of the way around, took damage and lost all his water supplies, and had to do the rest of the race by rationing his beer cans. 1960s battery and valve radio technology failed somewhere in the Indian Ocean and he could receive but not transmit, and had to send a status update by throwing a message in a bottle to a passing ship.

There's a related link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Crowhurst who entered the Golden Globe race without the proper equipment, backed himself into a corner, planned to cheat to save his home, and didn't survive it.

'Why ‟controlling for a variable” doesn't (usually) work' - https://dynomight.net/control/

Other things that don't work, including four other 'controlling for a variable' entries at items 39 through 43: https://dynomight.net/things/

This is like clicking Google reviews on an eatery and reading “1 star we went there and it was closed!!!” “1 star they don’t let dogs in so we’re never giving them our money!”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

A limited amount; for each barrel burned to power the drilling we used to get 100 barrels back. Now we need to build a floating oil rig, drill kilometers down, build tanker ships and long pipelines, each barrel burned digging for oil gets 20 back. Or 10. With tar sands and fracking, the return is 3 to 5 barrels back.

As that ratio dwindles towards burning one barrel to get one barrel, the oil-based world economy slows, gets more expensive and comes to a halt even if there is more oil down there. (About 50 years of oil left at current world oil extraction rates).

Is it no nearer than it was in 1750, 1850, 1950, 2001, or 2010? It feels nearer. Relatively near, as in it feels weird to imagine another two thousand years happening at current rate of progress without anyone stumbling on it.

Is the continuing increase in global computing power, the lowering cost to do any kind of experimentation, the increased spending on R&D, the cross-pollination of ideas, not moving the needle at all?

https://web.archive.org/web/19991111060504/http://www.goatse...

A frustrating vision of the future would be when we've been asking for faster loading lighter web pages for years and then companies start caring about it and improving it not for us humans but for LLMs.

1998 - https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.psion.misc/c/oFtTHyx6IR...

1994 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IrDA

As a parlour game for the wealthy to use markets to find the best price for a slab of marble or a Faberge egg, it's fine. As a system for finding the best price for a loaf of bread which doesn't take into account how close to starving someone's family is, it's terrible.

As a system where an insurance company puts a number on a spreadsheet for the risk of a warehouse full of wood burning down and the owner uses that to decide whether to install a fire alarm and sprinkler system, it's fine. As a system where the owner uses that to decide whether to install a fire alarm and sprinkler system in an office based on how expensive it is to replace the dead employees, it's terrible. When the employer can't put a sprinkler system in because any competitor which doesn't can undercut prices, it's terrible. [Regulation which says offices must have fire alarms does not fix the general class of this race-to-the-bottom / exploit inhumanely as hard as possible problem].

When people can use contracts to come together to build a rocket engine, it's fine. When the idea is that you would use your perfect knowledge of everything down to whether a workplace has a fire alarm before deciding whether to accept a contract, it's ridiculous. You don't have enough lifetime or cynicism to find all the nooks and crannies people will be trying to cut corners with your life and safety. When the idea is that humans are rational and cannot be manipulated, it's ridiculous. When the practical result of that is that the wealthy can tell the employees that unions are bad, it's terrible. Note that this isn't classical corruption because the wealthy might believe that's true (unions harm the wealthy!), it's a problem of wealthy having lawyers and marketers to spread their message and nannys to free up time for them to learn things, vs others having no spare time or effort or assistance to counter it.

As a system where the person with the best use for a piece of land can buy it and use it, it's fine. As a system where employees have a 2 hour commute because all the homes closer have been bought up by the wealthy who don't even live in their spare homes, and this effect keeps one class of people as 'employees' because they have neither time nor effort nor opportunity to do anything about it, it sucks.

If we all had a magical base quality of life and could "play at capitalism" as a parlour game where the points don't matter the consequences are abstract - you know, like the rich do - then a lot more people would like it.

Consider the situation where 'Capitalism rewards risk' but the only sensible advice for what to do with your money is to invest it in a diversified index fund because anything else is risky. If you do that and stay relatively poor, you aren't taking enough risk to get rich, you idiot, get good. If you take risk and lose, you're an idiot who should have known better and invested in something else "like I did". If you take a risk and win, then you can play off your "lottery win" as you being a more meritorious capitalist. This leads to a situation where the more desperately someone needs money, the less risk they can afford to take to get money, trapping people at the bottom. The less they can afford lawyers to review contracts, the less they can afford to wait and consider their options, the less they can afford to travel for more options, the fewer options they have in terms of borrowing or terms of renting.

As a haves-get-richer, have-nots-get-screwed system, it's bad - at least, unfair, inhumane, eploitative, cruel.

How much would I pay to rent my fucking self from a landlord? No, bodylord? Mindlord? Poe's Law.

But looking at the post, they argue that big AI labs have an incentive problem which stops them from personalising, but Guardian Angel will make agents which are "Genuinely yours". In what sense is it genuinely mine if someone else owns it and rents it to me? And how does this fix any incentive problem, they're incentivised to better train wealthier people's AIs, and incentivised to keep dropping "my" intelligence or memory or and then dangle a booster carrot for a small fee. The more they can make it think like me, the more effectively they can work out how to exploit me, advertise to me, propagandise me, and that will be profitable information to sell to other marketers.

Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).

Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).

Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)

Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)

Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)

Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)

British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)

Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)

Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)

Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)

HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey

Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)

Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)

Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)

Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)

Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)

Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)

First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)

Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)

and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_e...