queerlilhayseed

I’m unhappy at how hard it’s become for me to tell the difference between Weird Al and Weird AI. When I was a kid it was easy because it was always Weird Al. Now every time I see either I have to take a second, closer look to convince myself I got it right, and sometimes even then I get it wrong. And I resent that.

kinda reminds me of https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2718

Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.

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Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of its previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.

I think if we’re ever going to find an answer to “Why does the universe exist?” I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is “yes, it’s a simulation and we can demonstrate as much” then the next question becomes “OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?” which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Alternatively, if the answer is “no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality” then… well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Yes, kind of, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a point against it. “Why are we here? / Why is the universe here?” is one of the big interesting questions that still doesn’t have a good answer, and I think thinking about possible answers to the big questions is one of the ways we push the envelope of what we do know. This particular paper seems like a not-that-interesting result using our current known-to-be-incomplete understanding of quantum gravity, and the claim that it somehow “disproves” the simulation hypothesis is some rank unscientific nonsense that IMO really shouldn’t have been accepted by a scientific journal, but I think the question it poorly attempts to answer is an interesting one.

IME:

That’s fair. I’m generally in favor of automating cars given how horrifically bad humans are at operating them, I just don’t trust the free market to decide how low the odds need to be before the button can be put on the market.

Someone offers you a button. If you push it, you get a driverless taxi ride for $20 but there’s a small chance that a random person in your city dies. Do you push the button?

The first trillion is the hardest I guess.

You are correct, I guess “Permanent Ubuntu Live USB” isn’t really accurate as I tend to distro hop. I picked Purple because I was using Ubuntu at the time, then I came to associate that one with “current linux image” and the others were more situational. This was about the same time I came to realize that for 99% of file transfers it was easier to just scp things across the network rather than dig a USB drive out of the drawer, so pretty soon after I bought them the only thing I used them for was bootable images, and for whatever reason Purple has been the first choice for that task, so I’m pretty sure it has had more writes than the other four put together.

I bought a 5-pack of 8GB USB drives for making live USBs, many years ago it feels like, and have somehow managed to hold onto all of them. I tend to use Green and Black the most for file transfers and they have started to fail pretty regularly but I can’t throw them out, they’re a family. Funnily enough Purple, the one that got assigned “Permanent Ubuntu Live USB” duty and has seen more than its share of writes, is still rock solid.

I loved having a smartwatch, for the brief period of time I had one. They fell to (IMO) the pitfalls of being annoying to charge and being tied to massive smartphone walled gardens. After a few years my smartwatch couldn’t even hold a charge through a single day, and had lost support from the manufacturer anyway, and was hard to keep synced with my phone, and eventually the hassle became too much for it to be worth it.

But if we had a standard API for wearables that smartphone companies adhered to, and I didn’t have to charge it every night, I would love to have another smartwatch. They’re so convenient.

One of the things that really excites me about the internet is its impact on the development of language. We’re still at the very beginning of its impact, considering the timescale on which language has traditionally evolved, but I suspect that in time the advent of the internet will be considered a major inflection point in the history of language, maybe the single greatest inflection point in the history of language itself. All of a sudden, billions of people who otherwise would never have had the means to converse directly, are now able to converse directly with billions of other people all over the globe, in near real-time. I can’t really imagine how that doesn’t have a seismic impact on how human language evolves. I would love to jump forward in time a few centuries just to see how the things that are happening right now shake out in the long term.