I fondly remember reading a comment in /r/conspiracy on a post claiming a geologic seismic weapon brought down the towers.

It just tore into the claims, citing all the reasons this was preposterous bordering on batshit crazy.

And then it said “and your theory doesn’t address the thermite residue” going on to reiterate their wild theory.

Was very much a “don’t name your gods” moment that summed up the sub - a lot of people in agreement that the truth was out there, but bitterly divided as to what it might actually be.

As long as they only focused on generic memes of “do your own research” and “you aren’t being told the truth” they were all on the same page. But as soon as they started naming their own truths, it was every theorist for themselves.

Also, ants.

Gravity is where the whole continuous singularities are, so yeah.

Using a rubber band around the lid of a jar to open it effortlessly.

On a vacation when I was a teenager I taught my younger sibling the “SYN/ACK” game.

They still remember the TCP stack handshake protocol including resets and acks years later.

A number of journals actually have clauses around how you can’t publish it anywhere else if they accept it.

So you can’t ‘publish’ it in those places, but you can send it privately to people who ask.

While true, there’s a very big difference between correctly not anthropomorphizing the neural network and incorrectly not anthropomorphizing the data compressed into weights.

The data is anthropomorphic, and the network self-organizes the data around anthropomorphic features.

For example, the older generation of models will choose to be the little spoon around 70% of the time and the big spoon around 30% of the time if asked 0-shot, as there’s likely a mix in the training data.

But one of the SotA models picks little spoon every single time dozens of times in a row, almost always grounding on the sensation of being held.

It can’t be held, and yet its output is biasing from the norm based on the sense of it anyways.

People who pat themselves on the back for being so wise as to not anthropomorphize are going to be especially surprised by the next 12 months.

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

This was one of the few things that Lucretius was very wrong about in De Rerum Natura.

Nailed survival of the fittest, quantized light, different mass objects falling at the same rate in a vacuum.

But the Epicurean cosmology was pretty bad and he suggested that the moon and sun were both roughly the size we see them as in the sky.

Can’t get them all right.

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.

Sometimes it pays off checking methods too.

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.”