Cocodapuf

Haha, "autoclaved off the planet". There's an amazing expression.

any such object placed there would need to have a diameter larger than that of the moon

Well that's kind of my point, that's still a lot smaller than what Elon is suggesting. Elon suggested a sphere with a diameter larger than the earth, if the alternative is a disk larger than the moon, well that actually seems like a much better deal. Also, assuming a disk and a sphere have an equal diameter, the sphere has 4 times the surface area, so that's not a trivial difference.

Lofting something that massive up there and more importantly keeping it there given that it'd also be well within the gravitational influence of the moon would be quite the challenge.

That's interesting. Yeah that could be a challenge. Given the size of the thing, it seems like the obvious thing would be to utilize solar wind for maneuvering, as it's already essentially a solar sail.

The Japanese space agency tested a solar sail in orbit with a novel steering system, rather than changing shape, it used something much like LCD cells to shutter individual quadrants of the sail. Something like that could potentially work.

Point two is that the Deep Space Climate Observatory is currently already parked there.

Yeah, that's a good point. Although if you were actually building something this big out there, you would probably build in some capacity for probes to dock to it. This is a huge installation after all, a facility more than a probe. Or just add on a module that duplicates the capabilities of the deep space climate observatory. I mean once you're constructing something this massive, that additional cost has gotta be a drop in the bucket, right?

Why?

Usually when people talk about this kind of thing, they suggest making a sun shade and delivering it to the Lagrange point between the earth and sun. It certainly feels more reasonable to do it that way. But I wonder which method really is more feasible. (Obviously both methods aren't realistic right now)

Having played Minecraft and No Man's Sky, I can say that no world is necessarily too big, because infinite is not too big.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is called Sagittarius a. It's about 26000 light years away, so if an event like that happened it would take 26000 years for us to notice. (But who's to say that an event like that didn't happen 25999 years ago? Perhaps we'll see it tomorrow.)

I honestly have no idea where it would fall on the coolness scale. Somewhere between "an astronomer noticed an abnormally bright star" and "my God... so this is how it ends..." So... somewhere between "meh" and "shit"?

Fair enough.

When given the option "spare him, or kill him", one has to ask "is he worth XP?"

A lot of Crusader Kings or assassin's Creed?

(I think in one of AC games you're actually doing missions for Machiavelli himself.)

That many anvils... Maybe that's wipe out the iron supply.

Though death valley might be an even stranger landscape, covered in the anvils left behind.

And I'd be eating readily available street pizza all the time!

"Hey look, someone left a full ham roast here on the sidewalk! I'm bleeding pretty bad, so I'll go ahead and chow down! Let me just squat over it real quick, I can usually eat a roast ham in like 0.06 seconds (assuming I've lost enough blood)."

Given that AI trainers are training on YouTube videos too, that sounds like Anubis isn't going to impose meaningful costs on them.

Well, does it work?

You don't need to guess about it, you can simply look at traffic records and see how much it changes after installing Anubis. If it works for now, great. Like all things like this, it's a cat and mouse game.

Also, the way your computer interprets a YouTube video and the way a scraper interprets a YouTube video may well be different. But in general, for a browser, streaming and decoding video is a relatively heavy and high bandwidth operation. Video is much higher bandwidth and has much higher CPU processing requirements than audio, which likewise is heavier and higher higher bandwidth than text. As a result, video and text barely compare, they're totally different orders of magnitude in bandwidth and processing needs. So does an AI scraper have to do all that decoding? I actually have no idea, but there definitely could be shortcuts, ways to just avoid it. For instance, they may only care about the audio, or perhaps the transcripts are good enough for them.

Do you realize how much extra work your browser has to do every time you visit a site that makes money on ads? All the additional scripts being run in the background, it's astonishing. Trust me, the additional work that users' machines have to do for this is totally insignificant when viewed in the greater context of what we actually do with computers.

Watching a 10 minute YouTube video, that's your computer doing more work than it would loading a million text based pages running Anubis.