While there are indeed "details" out there that have a great impact on the macro-dynamic, and even pose as blockers, history also provides us many counter-examples. The steel-making process has been invented and reinvented many times and in different places in an (arguably) independent manner. The same for sea-faring, writing systems, laws, and so on. They have all been different but did enabled progress more or less in similar way, and thus - are also details that it's fair to gloss over.
You two debated this as a philosophical or even moral issue, but it changes everything when you look at it from the natural hazard prospective. It doesn't even have to be a subjective matter. Picture this - you know the climate change is happening and you understand that some colony of animals will surely vanish because of that if you wont do a thing about it. Doing something could mean just taking a few pair of animals and relocate them to a safer area. Do you think that the survival of such descending colony of animals mean anything (to anyone)? Who can argue that it won't be our time (and obligation) to reduce the risk of having the only known capable civilization residing on only one planet or galaxy?
For sure, but that's my point; "taking a few pair of animals and relocate them to a safer area" is not what this paper is discussing. A better parallel would be "take digital photos of the endangered animal and circulate them around the internet." The proposed method doesn't spread us -- it spreads teeny tiny machines we made, for no reason at all other than to say we did it. And long after we're gone, when the Sun has died, far away galaxies will be polluted with little machines, each containing a copy of some data about us.
Right, but it’s only a feasibility study. By definition these only study the minimum system that could accomplish the goal, which was to visit as many galaxies as possible. Given the mass budget and density of the data storage contemplated there’s no reason the probes couldn’t carry enough information to create real human colonies in the process of replicating themselves.
The dilemma of spending significant amount of effort and resources for a colonizing project when the result won't benefit the enterprising society is not new. When looking for a reason, considering only the (individuals' or collective's) benefits on a rational basis does not make much sense indeed. Most likely there must be something more, akin to a religious goal, aiming for species' or civilization's greater good.
It's also called "vision". It's what provides and powers directions on large and long term scales. Those "simple" and "mundane step-by-step issues" are just chores by themselves, yet at the same time may become stepping stones in the context of a well thought vision that people buy into and rally behind.
In the open space, shades get very cold, like a few degrees over absolute zero cold, because even without a medium to facilitate convection and (atmospheric contact) conduction, the loss of heat through mere radiation (into the pitch black universe) is very efficient (for normal, non-reflective materials). Thus, for an astral body to remain in a melted state, continuous steams of energy should be poured in (and some thermo-insulating gaseous atmosphere may also help to reduce cooling, if the body in question would have enough gravity to retain it), but that's hardly a thing to worry for a project where the energy itself is carefully controlled and dosed.
"to Thai, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are all ปลาหมึก. For English speakers, those are similar things, but all clearly distinct. But for Thai speakers, they're all ปลาหมึก, just different types."
Then, ปลาหมึก = coleoidea? If so, the squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are (in English and many other languages) all just types of coleoidea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleoidea
Coleoidea is a technical word, though, and ปลาหมึก isn't. Ordinary people use ปลาหมึก to refer to all of them, but they might not use that same word to describe e.g. nautiloids. It doesn't map neatly on our technical language.
Also, the kind of satellites that aren't much more than mirrors, even with today's knowledge, they can be designed to change their profile/surface and thus reduce the absorption of the incident radiation, if they'd had to cross the space between the sun and the sunlight collector areas.
"I’ve seen too many «well crafted» implementations of such technically vexing features as «fetching data and returning it» that were so overengineered that it should have been considered theft of company money."
This judgement has merit. However, over the years I got to perceive that over-engineering tendency to be the manifestation of exploratory spirit in one's craft. This is how the Unix got to be created at Bell Labs. To their managers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on programs like the "ed" editor, thus they cared about "value being provided to the user (or the business)". What was later officially named Unix was not pitched as an operating system, but instead framed mostly just a needed way to organize the growing set of utilities, among other things (i.e. as a footnote). What are the over-engineered bits (and the related gained experience) in a given project may become useful for something else. People (tend to) do this kind of stuff. But should they be blamed, considering the enticing promise of growth and development of new technologies, practiced by employers themselves, as part of recruitment game?
"We should look at how people are using LLMs right now instead of chasing promises of superintelligence."
This. When more computing power and memory resources became available to software engineers, we've seen how that impacted the software development. Sure, there were happy stories of new class of problems being attacked, which couldn't before due to resource limits, but a lot of software just stopped being frugal and did pretty much what it did before, but somehow consuming much more. Extrapolating to the case of staggering resources poured over the AI solutions, I'd be surprised if most of it won't just be consumed to generate higher resolution (and longer) videos.
rsync does what was designed to do and the lack of scope creep is not a bad thing. There is "fpsync" - another tool on top of rsync (which was mentioned in one of the comments at article's page) that covers the parallel processing use-case: https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/fpart/fpsync.1.en.html
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