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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • They are branded, so effort would have to be put into making them appear to be authentic.

    Not really. Branded QR codes are just regular, unbranded QR codes but messed up— You basically just stick the the branding right on top, and then let the built-in error correction take care of the rest. Should take all of 5 minutes to set up, or maybe 20-30 if you wanna be a stickler for detail.

    And I think it’s improbable that staff wouldn’t notice.

    If I were working at the restaurant— I think I’d notice after a couple weeks— They’d have impunity up to then— But even then, I’d just assume the management switched it out or patched it up because they wanted to change the link for metrics or messed up something backend or something like that.

    The staff is paid to wait tables, not to audit cybersec from the perspective of the customers.

    And again, the roi for the bad actor seems incredibly poor.

    Probably highly variable.

    If the restaurant has a lot of patrons that are wealthy and technologically illiterate, with banking apps on unupdated phones with known exploits, then you’d think “ROI” is basically everything in the bank accounts of the patrons.

    Same if the online menu includes online payment options for whatever reason.


  • Regardless of age, I think you could probably argue that the small, glowing rectangle in your palm is an inferior reading and dining experience compared to an actual menu.

    That’s not even to mention the unholy abomination of a tech stack that a system like this would be— Camera, QR decoder, web browser, WiFi/cellular, their web server— That signal might travel hundreds of miles to your ISP, their host, and then back— Probably a couple layers of outsourcing/contracting/helper apps they used to set it up— Though it’s apparently normal to take all that for granted these days, it’s still sorta ridiculous.







  • It’s a condensation surface on which vapours revert to droplets in a liquid state due to the colder ambient air-cooled temperature of the leaf compared to the gaseous medium and heat source below it (and therefore lower vapour pressure immediately next to its surface), allowing the condensate/distillate to be collected and funneled for disposal, recycling, consumption, and/or another stage of distillation, and, in this case, producing an increasingly concentrated azeotropic water-ethanol solution which you can sell for the big bucks.

    …Slightly simplified, of course. You may in fact need multiple leaves over pots, or even a couple leaves bent into funnels/chutes, and possibly even one pot over another pot.

    I.E., By definition, a leaf over a pot is a still, as long as you put it at a slight angle and leave a small hole at the edge so the distillate can be collected. ­— Again: Physics provides, money is mostly an illusion/labour optimization mechanism, and sheet metal might be convenient for this use case but literally everything is materials. … If your only thought on how to produce a technology yourself is “Who can I pay for this?”, then, yeah, you’re not thinking in the right lines to get there.


    On another note, I like your username though. Did you know they do like pump jet lifting body action stuff in the air? Really cool.


  • “Science” ≠ Technology!

    If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they’ll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.

    Inversely, you don’t even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they’ll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).





  • It’s a constant symbolic reminder, and still a 10X scope increase.

    If you want to be pedantic about making “the clock slightly longer”, you might as well say “I don’t see why they don’t write their dates out in base 62. Then they could make the clock shorter by writing wD instead of 2023”. The point is that everyone who sees “02023” can have a bit of an “oh shit” moment where they instantly understand what it means.


  • this is assuming you end up in a culture that would even value technological advancement.

    People value their friends and family not dying, and the murdering raiders from neighbouring tribes being kept at bay. And people that don’t value that don’t tend to last very long.

    You’d need the social skills to demonstrate technological improvements (say, a better axe) without causing everyone to freak out and call you a demon.

    …Starting with an axe would be nice. The lumberfolk would appreciate it, surely. But then what happens when the old blacksmith blames your witchcraft for the crops failing next year, or for the village chief’s child falling ill? So maybe teach the blacksmiths too, so they also benefit from you— I’m sure they’ll love having some upstart come in and tell them how to do their jobs.

    You’re an outsider, no matter what, and you’re never going to completely look like them or sound like them or act like them— Can we really think that any amount of social skills will be enough to keep you safe, when they might just be determined to hate you for what you are?

    Maybe start with a combination of military and medical technology. Show them a crude crossbow; when they see the next raid of Goths or Aztecs or Mongols or Vikings or Peloponnesians or whomever being repelled before they even reach the gates, they’ll come to appreciate it sooner or later… Their enemies are against their gods, so if you helped defend them from their enemies, you must be sent by their gods. Disgustingly, hating the same out-group is a great way to keep yourself safe in any given in-group, whether at work or at war. Medicine’s probably trickier, because if you fail to save somebody then some people will probably blame you for their death. But if you make it clear that you can’t stop fate from running its course, and you start with some basic stuff, they’ll probably come to appreciate that their friends aren’t dying as much from infections anymore too.

    Fear of death has always been sadly the strongest motivator for embracing technological change. Modern aviation, computing, and nuclear science all came after WWII; and “anti-vax” movements only thrive in countries that have already essentially eradicated the concerned diseases. It’ll be harder for them to crucify somebody whom they can see is standing between them and death.


  • Eh. Like 90%+ of everybody who ever lived in pre-Industrial civilization was a slave or a serf or something like that. What does that say about the other 1% that “owned” them? And if your goal is explicitly to bring lots of revolutionary technologies, you’re probably going to disrupt a lot of established power structures. People in power don’t tend to take kindly to that, and as the ultimate outsider, you’ll be the perfect scapegoat for anything that goes wrong.

    It’s dumb to think only about fighting, and this specific scenario isn’t something that you’re ever going to be able to win through brute force alone. Also, using guns “to make them listen to you”, as the original comment said, sounds pretty evil depending on how it’s done. (E.G. Menace and threaten anyone questioning you: Evil. Gain favour with the royal army by providing guns, then ask for funding for medical research: Less evil.) But ultimately, it’s reasonable to be prepared for other people to act in bad faith.


  • Monarchs cares about power. Give the ruler some more metallurgy or siege engines first, so you have their favour. Then split the Royal Court’s physicians into two groups, one that washes their hands, and one that doesn’t. Do the same for leeches, bloodletting, hydration, etc. It’ll be hard to argue with the resulting death rates. And in the long run, you’ll have a much bigger impact by introducing empricism/A-B testing/evidence-based medicine than any one thing specific thing you could have done.