I actually wasn’t even trying to criticize NASA. “The people personally funding rockets” refers to private companies like SpaceX.

My only criticism to NASA isn’t really on their funding, but on their general goals of spreading joy through their accomplishments; of having Hollywood movies where we see the whole world unite around a shared cause.

The sad reality is, that reality could be as simple as “our planet doesn’t blow up” and we’d have some people remark “MIGHT BE WORTH IT TO KILL THOSE EVIL LIB’RULS” or “Finally, we achieved Armageddon! And here I thought we needed to purge the West Bank first! Where’s Jesus and the risen army?”

The hallucinatory praise for them around me has severely affected my mental health at work.

I can envision in some narrow scenarios they can help with automatic generation. Honestly, we always had IDE tools to do some of that. But so many people at my work - people who I’ve otherwise had a lot of trust in - are obsessed with it, even when every time I use it, it churns forever, or turns out terrible results.

Recently my senior was proud to demonstrate an initiative where he’d been working with AI to make our unit tests run ten times faster. I looked at the code, and what he did basically tasted only a tenth of the things the original did because of what it stripped out. I explained that to him, and later in the day he admitted he’d been lead down a rabbit hole of bad optimization.

This was a guy I look up to, who I’d ask questions of all the time in my first year of working there. And meanwhile we have management personnel literally getting upset when our engineers don’t turn to AI first to solve a problem.

I literally don’t even want to watch Project Hail Mary.

I think of all those space movies where the Earth has to do something together. Where it cuts to listeners in Paris, Beijing, Zimbabwe, New York, and Moscow before going back to some Mission Control center saying “We’re counting on you.”

Then I realize, in reality, there would be American cultists actively fighting any kind of effort to save the world, or run a giant “DEI WILL DOOM US” campaign because one of the astronaut crew is part Asian.

I want these stupid fanciful astronauts to see that we actively don’t have the circumstances to create these wonderful worldwide moments of joy anymore because of the overwhelming levels of sick hatred they’ve created in bankrupting our world of empathy and flooding it with religious propaganda.

The people personally funding rockets could have cured cancer everywhere with their savings. I honestly think if a lethal meteor was headed for the Earth, they’d want to live, but they’d invest everything into trying to save themselves rather than trying to save everyone.

Some things we could encourage: Design social spaces with more repeat interactions. Many toxic people feel they can just move on to another part of the crowd. But if everyone knows them, and that they’re an asshole, It’s not so easy. See the example of “beep”, a user in the comics community who repeatedly cropped out the artist of comics.

I could also envision ways to reinvent forum moderating. For instance, one idea I had for moderating toxicity in a video game is that bans would not last a very long time, but for them to be lifted, the offender must upload a video, or present themselves live on webcam, of themselves describing what they did and apologizing.

If it’s too much, there’s more subtle approaches; like that old study on DOTA 2 where they’d present a post match survey, asking people to rank their teammates - then their own level of team contribution - and it would lead to reduced toxicity in their next match.

I would warn that you can see different results across language barriers. Some games actually have much nicer communities in other languages.

It shows you there are different circumstances leading to the vein of toxicity, but the causes might be much larger than a moderation team could tackle.

Mindblow: Find websites pertaining to local affairs.

There are very interesting events I go to in my local area, but we don’t often think about how much of our lives on phones are built around what’s happening 300 miles away from us.

Find a website where some interesting event or discovery might lead to you actually saying hello in person to someone.