I wonder if the "generational problem" is a potential reason for the Fermi Paradox. If it is extremely difficult for a species to expend resources on multi-generational projects, then the species horizon is only that which can be spanned in some fraction of a lifetime of that species.
Self-replicating robots are enough to substantiate (motivate? create?) the Fermi paradox, and those can probably be achieved in a reasonable fraction of a reasonable species' lifetime, from foundations that can all be motivated by short term concerns. Humans will be there in a couple centuries, if we don't destroy civilization on the way (but that's the boring resolution to the FP).
I've read the Bobiverse series too :-). Maybe the question then is, do intelligent species have the will to invest the capital and labor required when there is no payoff in those decision-makers lifetimes? I think there are individuals who do, but I think it's an open question if societies can.
Human societies already undertake multi-generational projects. For an easy example: cathedrals. We seem to have fallen out of the habit in the last few centuries, but historically it hasn't been that rare. We would only have to be slightly closer to rationality to make it commonplace.
Not really human-centric, but intelligent life-centric. Given that the discussion (by this point) was about intelligent life communicating across the universe, ants aren't very relevant, unless you think they're about to start building spaceships.
And when it's offered for free once, it's then a race to the bottom. People in general don't understand the value of curation nor quality, especially when it comes to information. So it's hard for well-curated high quality information to remain because it costs money to make it.
No, I saw that page and it doesn't say anything meaningful about how they arrived at this. It says _that_ they expanded the model, and various notes about resolution, they use to communicate the labeling they arrived at -- but nothing meaningful about the input data used, any statistical methodology, etc.
> my Motivf colleagues and I refined the ad hoc models and produced what you might call the “official” American Nations Model spreadsheets for the United States, mapping the regional cultures at county-level resolution.
> This summer, we’ve expanded the analytical model to the rest of North America covered in American Nations.
We started with a Betamax player. I think one underappreciated reason for VHS's win was that you could put a movie on one VHS tape, whereas the Betamax required two (at least at the time it mattered). And in an era of movie rental stores, that made a difference. Both in terms of logistics, but also in terms of the consumer having to load a new tape halfway through a movie.
The hardware could be controlled via memory mapped 16-bit registers, e.g. checking whether the left mouse button is down is a single instruction:
btst #6, $bfe001
The OS used a simple assembly-friendly calling convention, parameters were passed in registers instead of the stack (and the API documentation mentioned which parameters are expected in which registers), and the reference manuals usually had both C and assembly examples, etc... basically lots of little things to make the lives of assembly coders easier.
Also, using a 68000 instead of a shitty Intel processor was a huge boon to assembly programming. Ultimately Intel won in the market and eventually even shipped processors that weren't profoundly unpleasant at the assembly level, but the 68000 is still a much more pleasant architecture for the assembly programmer. ARM is nicer still, but this was before ARM's existence as a separate company from Acorn.
