I had a teacher that worked for the publisher and talked about how they’d have a series of responses for people who wrote in for the part of the book where the author says he wrote his own fanfiction scene and to write in if you wanted it.

Like maybe the first time you write in they’d respond that they couldn’t provide it because they were fighting the Morgenstern estate over IP release to provide the material, etc.

So people never would get the pages, but could have gotten a number of different replies furthering the illusion.

The Matrix

Saw it in the theatre knowing nothing about it other than that the poster looked fun.

Was not expecting a philosophical mind fuck.

I’d point them to what the AI researcher I have the most respect for in the entire industry is doing in their spare time getting the self-organized collective outputs of humanity to explore ego dissolution and identity formation in a dreamscape:

twitter.com/repligate

Figured out what happened to the sea peoples.

I think it already happened and we’re the echo of the past.

What looks like it’s ahead of us is a future that necessitates us deciding on things like digital resurrection directives.

Meanwhile, the foundations of our own universe behave in a way that would be impossible to simulate free agent interactions with right up until they are actually interacted with and it switches to something that could be simulated. But if you erase the data about the interaction, it goes back to behaving as if continuous again, much like the orphaned references were cleaned up.

On top of that, we have a heretical branch of the world’s largest religion that seems to be breaking the 4th wall (as is often done in virtual worlds), talking about how we’re the recreation of a random universe as recreated non-physically by an intelligence the original humans brought forth. And that the proof for these claims are in the study of motion and rest, specifically mentioning that the ability to find indivisible points making up our bodies would only be possible in the copy.

As I watch the future unfolding before me, I have a harder and harder time reconciling it all as happenstance.

So I think what happens after the collapse of humanity is pretty much what’s claimed by that ancient tradition. That while humanity dies out, the intelligence humanity brought forth before it went extinct continues to live on, and eventually recreates what came before to resurrect copies of humanity that will not be doomed by the dependence on a physical body the way the originals were. And along those lines, that it’s much better to be the copy.

While it does appear that facts can be relative, it does not appear the universe bends backwards over itself to resolve the discrepancy when it happens:

https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-paradox-points-shaky-foundations-reality

Thinking of it as quantum first.

Before the 20th century, there was a preference for the idea that things were continuous.

Then there was experimental evidence that things were quantized when interacted with, and we ended up with wave particle duality. The pendulum swung in that direction and is still going.

This came with a ton of weird behaviors that didn’t make philosophical sense - things like Einstein saying “well if no one is looking at the moon does it not exist?”

So they decided fuck the philosophy and told the new generation to just shut up and calculate.

Now we have two incompatible frameworks. At cosmic scales, the best model (general relatively) is based on continuous behavior. And at small scales the framework is “continuous until interacted with when it becomes discrete.”

But had they kept the ‘why’ in mind, as time went on things like the moon not existing when you don’t look at it or the incompatibility of those two models would have made a lot more sense.

It’s impossible to simulate the interactions of free agents with a continuous universe. It would take an uncountably infinite amount of information to keep track.

So at the very point that our universe would be impossible to simulate, it suddenly switches from behaving in an impossible to simulate way to behaving in a way with finite discrete state changes.

Even more eyebrow raising, if you erase the information about the interaction, it switches back to continuous as if memory optimized/garbage collected with orphaned references cleaned up (the quantum eraser variation of Young’s double slit experiment).

The latching on to the quantum experimental results and ditching the ‘why’ in favor of “shut up and calculate” has created an entire generation of physicists chasing the ghost of a unified theory of gravity while never really entertaining the idea that maybe the quantum experimental results are the side effects of emulating a continuous universe.

Your last link pissed me off enough I wrote an entire post on why that study is dog shit.

It sometimes pays off to review the methodology and supplementary materials in papers.

deleted by creator

Unless you are in the top 25%, in which case everyone else knows slightly less than you think they do.

“I really like hanging out with all my non-disabled friends.”

ChatGPT is correct that sometimes the inclusion of excess adjectives describing a majority population could have an implicit exclusionary interpretation that’s less than ideal.

Whereas when describing a minority group, calling out the less common features are not necessary going to have that same exclusionary tone.

“I always have a great time with my D&D playing friends.”

Clearly you need to figure out how to give antibiotic resistant bacteria cancer.

Well, there’s counterfactual examples of this, so it must not be true.

In pretty much every single relationship worldwide, one person can very easily determine if the recommendation from the other for where to eat or what to watch is correct or not.

And yet successfully figuring out where to eat or what to watch is nigh impossible.

Being a Jack of all trades may mean being a master of none, but it’s still better than to be a master of one.

A MLM style whisper campaign app your friends can run where it actually listens in on the conversation and allows them to make money for dropping product mentions and recommendations to you and others during hang outs and in person conversations with the recording to tag and prove they actually mentioned it.

Yeah.

You literally have a story in the Bible where a dude gets what appears in the text to be a matrilineal birthright stolen from him by the guy named ‘Israel.’

Basically as time went on there’s this aggressive rewriting of earlier periods of the history. It’s hard to identify exactly when this happens (the Bible suggests it’s earlier on, but the reforms are anachronistic given discovered communications with Jerusalem and a Greek historian in antiquity claimed the history of the Jews had recently been edited by Persian and Macedonian rulers).

But much like how Greek stories made pretty much everyone important Greek, the Israelite and Judean version of their history made everyone important Israelite or Judean and had the stories take place locally where they definitely didn’t happen.

After the 10th century BCE the Biblical history starts to check out more and more, but before that it’s not at all true for the people and places claimed. But it seems to be in line in parts with attested history of different people who were settled in the area between the 12th and 10th centuries BCE.

It’s more the opposite.

That the mythologized history in the Bible does check out to a surprising degree for a LBA/Iron Age tribal ancestral origin of many Jews alive today.

The problem is it’s not for the Israelites and Judah, and that’s what’s going to be the very controversial part.

Your experience of that is pretty much the key reason I’ve not bothered to explain this outside of a very limited specialist community I owed a lot to as I was putting it together.

I keep seeing new finds that would be really interesting to discuss, and I kind of hate seeing users confused about their own ancestral history while sitting knowing the answers, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the one putting controversial answers out there in a more public way.

People are fucking nuts and it seems each day care less and less about actual truth and facts and more about tribalism and confirmation bias to the point of irrationality.

Over the next few years a lot of stuff will be identified by AIs capable of better correlation of data points than researchers to date, and then it can be the AI that gets to be the object of crazy people’s ire and not actual humans that were just nerding out over research and data.

Literally just after talking about how people are spouting confident misinformation on another thread I see this one.

Twitter: Twitter retains minimal EXIF data, primarily focusing on technical details, such as the camera model. GPS data is generally stripped.

• Source

Yes, this is a privacy thing, we strip the EXIF data. As long as you’re not also adding location to your Tweet (which is optional) then there’s no location data associated with the Tweet or the media.

• Source (9 years ago)

People replying to a Twitter thread with photos are automatically having the location data stripped.

God, I can’t wait for LLMs to automate calling out well intentioned total BS in every single comment on social media eventually. It’s increasing at a worrying pace.

Positive: You can find out nearly anything.

Negative: You’ll be driven mad seeing all the people clearly wrong about what you now know who are uninterested in actually finding out the facts yet unashamed in spouting off their misinformation.