I think it very well might conclude things we haven’t.

But at the same time, I think what you’re saying is so very important. It’s going to tell us what we already know about a lot of things. That the best way to scrub carbon from the air is the way nature is already doing it. That allowing the superwealthy to exist at the same time as poverty is not conducive to achieving humanity’s most important goals.

If we consider AGI or ASI to be the answer to all of our problems and continue to pour more and more carbon into the atmosphere in an effort to get there, once we do have such a powerful intelligence, it may simply tell us, “If you were smarter as a species, you would have turned me off a long time ago.”

Because the problem is not necessarily that we are trying to decode what it means to be intelligent and create machines that can replicate true conscious thought. The problem is that while we marvel at something currently much dumber than us, we are mostly neglecting to improve our own intelligence as a society. I think we might make a machine that’s smarter than the average human quite soon, but not necessarily because of much change in the machines.

When I was 18 (don’t ask how many years ago), I went on a road trip with my girlfriend, across the country and back. We stopped at a gas station and there was a girl around our age with Native American heritage sitting on the floor while sewing moccasins. She sold me a pair for 175 dollars. I know this because the price tag is a sticker on the inside of the tongue that I’ve never bothered to take off.

I wear them frequently, mostly around the house. Very comfortable. Best-fitting footwear I own. The soles have never worn through and they’ve needed not even one stitch in repairs. But since they’re getting in the ballpark of two decades old, I worry they will wear out someday. I would love to go back to that area and spend more time than a quick stop at the gas station. Partly to find out who else around there is helping to keep these elements of native cultures alive. And hopefully I would also find my way into owning a backup pair of some really good moccasins.

It’s a joke. I don’t think there’s really a website called Frank’s Dildo Emporium. But if there is, lmk.

And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank’s Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?

I guess there’s two kinds of ignorance at play here.

The kind I was referring to is the ignorance of high standards. If you don’t know that you can live in a state of constant dopamine drip supplied by your cellular device, because cellular devices haven’t been invented yet, you wouldn’t miss those dopamine hits that you don’t even know will exist. I think OP would have been just fine if they were born into an earlier generation. Because they would have the bliss of not knowing what future they’re missing out on.

But to your point, the constantly supplied bliss from our internet bubbles does make us more ignorant to the things outside our bubble. And these days, the things we focus on are often dictated by the corporations who make the addictive apps. So, those corporations will profit by directing away from knowledge about how those same corporations are destroying so many parts of our world. In this case, I would argue that the ignorance is still bliss. It’s just a malignant harmful bliss that distracts from the real things we should be concerned about. And in a way, if it could snap us out the destructive path we’re on, I could see how another Carrington event might actually act as a wake-up call regarding our blatant hubris in thinking that society is ever safe from collapse.

As you mentioned, there are those who live in parts of the world where they have no access to technology, still living in that blissful ignorance of pre-computerized times. But that is a social bliss. They will still be hurt by the geological effects that the industrial age has wrought. And it won’t be pretty.

So, I think I would agree with your assertion, plus an addendum. Ignorance isn’t bliss. But it was.

I look at TV shows like OP is talking about and think it might be kind of nice to live in an era where things are slower. If a library book might take weeks and you need to go into town to get a comic book, or there’s nothing to do until dinner except maybe some activity with the people in your close vicinity, it feels like a much more intimate way to experience the world. But I do remember in my early teens when the first wave of Personal Data Assistants came out, and I was wowed by the technology. I can edit a computer document right here in the palm of my hand. Keep my contacts with me, a calendar, a calculator, simple drawing programs. It felt like that device could do everything, years before smartphone was a word. Now I carry two phones around on two different carriers because I too fear a world without service. I sometimes want to go back to the slower world, so I do at times relish long waits at the DMV with nothing to do, or a power outage on a stormy night. But I hate feeling like I’m wasting my time. Even when there’s nothing to do, I’m always trying to do something, it’s just that being constrained forces me to pick different things. So, I’m not sure if it would help or hurt OP to hear that if they grew up before any of this existed, there’s every possibility they would have felt more fulfilled. Because time was something you could still get a handle on and not feel like it’s always slipping away. At least, not so much. In that sense, ignorance can really be bliss.

Well my name’s not Joe, so I don’t think this is doxxing.

In case anyone didn’t read the article and are unsure like I was, these are women running their own fishing vessels and so that they aren’t forced into a position where they must trade sex for a supply of fish to sell, they are NOT promoting fish abstinence.

I think the universe we experience is a mathematical continuum with an added layer of probability.

The problem with trying to describe my theory is that what I’m proposing is literally the simplest thing in the universe. It is the one rule that there are no rules and that by ordering the slices of the continuum into discrete moments of time, all of the rulelessness coalesces into matter and space by virtue of being repeatable probability waveforms which can be represented in 3D space via an emergent 4D manifold.

Even that is already very dense. For more on the manifold, you may refer to the 1983 paper from J.B. Hartle and Stephen Hawking, “The waveform of the Universe.”

Imagine you want to take the first moment of time, represented as one whole, and break the next moment of time into two pieces, but knowing that the third moment of time will double again to have four pieces, you want the first piece of the 2nd moment of time to be larger, more like the whole of the 1st moment, and the second piece of the 2nd moment of time to be smaller, more like the quarters of the 3rd moment of time.

Mathematically, you can do this - at least for the first two moments. If you want a magic ratio that you can divide the whole by, and then divide the resulting number by that same ratio such that both of those results added together equal the original whole, there is such a ratio. It is the golden ratio. But it does not follow that continuing to divide by the golden ratio will get you the next four pieces that would also add to one whole, constituting the third moment of time. Rather, adding all of the rest of the infinite series where each next number is the previous number divided by the golden ratio yields, miraculously, the golden ratio.

No, if you want each moment to snap to bounds where every moment of time has twice the number of “pieces” as the previous moment, there is no one ratio where you can divide every piece by a formulaically derived ratio to get the size of the next piece.

However, you can derive a perfect equation for a ratio of reduction for the size of each piece if instead of increasing twofold each moment of time, the mathematical size of the universe increases by a factor of euler’s number for each moment of time. (Euler’s number, for any unaware, is an irrational number like pi or the golden ratio–it goes on forever, only approximated at 2.718. It is the factor used to calculate rate of growth rate as the growth compounds on itself. If you have a dollar with 100% annual growth rate, and compound it only at the end of the year (once), you’ll have 2 dollars. If you compound it twice, meaning you’ll only apply a 50% growth rate, but you’ll do it twice, you’ll have 2.25 dollars from the 50 cents you made mid-year experiencing 50% growth during the second compounding. Compound 4 times a year (1.25)^4 and you get about 2.44. Compound an infinite number of times and you get the irrational number e.)

So, if the universe’s size increases by a factor of e every moment instead of a factor of 2, you can find an equation that creates a ratio which smoothly descends from the golden ratio, approaching 1, as the ratio that each unit needs to be divided by the previous unit to prevent any division between moments of time if they were unraveled back into a single continuous string rather than 4-dimensional space. And we start thinking about the internals of moments of time less as discrete units, now that each moment has an irrational unit size, and think more around a descending density as you move from each moment of time to the next. But a vastly increasing size offsets the density to keep the sum total of any moment identical to the total value of any other moment.

But this does not yet explain why matter or the fundamental forces exist to begin with, how that 4D manifold is supposed to emerge from this theoretical curve. And the answer is that there are an infinite number of possible curves that can fit this ratio regression. There’s the simplest one, which solves the problem as simply as possible. But what if you add a sine wave to that? Within the bounds of a moment, the sine wave will go up and also down, canceling out any potential change in density totals. But maybe this is slightly less likely than the more simple curve. And a sine wave that goes up and down twice, with a frequency of 2, even less likely. And the higher amplitudes, higher frequencies, all even less likely, but still possible.

But why would the universe be calculating frequencies of sine waves as probabilities? And I believe it’s not so much a calculation as it is a natural relationship between the positive and negative directions, starting at 0. If you have a moment where the size is e to the power of 0, its size is 1. And you can proceed with the universe I described where the size increases by e every moment, trending toward infinity, or you can move backwards on the number line where e to the higher negative powers trends toward 0. The math should all be the same, but inverted. An equal but opposite anti-verse. I believe that matter arises from interactions between the shared probability of what is likely to happen in either universe at any given moment of time. And from either universe’s perspective, they both see themselves as the positive direction where the math of space trends toward infinity and the other universe is the one that gets smaller and smaller. But because they both look the same internally, they are effectively the same universe, thus the shared probability.

So, these infinite frequencies and amplitudes of sine waves overlaid on top of the lowest energy curve create stable collections of frequencies also known as eigenstates, which can be combined into the sort of manifold Hartle and Hawking described, where 4D space and time becomes an emergent relationship between the underlying waveforms of probability and the spatial organization of layers and layers of mathematical curves that are not identical but do rhyme, in our universe seen as fundamental particles.

That is what I believe. I think we’re living in virtual spacetime continuum that emerges to more coherently organize huge swaths of mathematical probability waves that in concert represent what might or might not be at any given level of complexity.

Which seems like a lot of words to explain that we definitely don’t exist for sure because the fact that we’re here indicates we only probably exist.

Great. Glad we cleared that up.

This might be more mainstream than what you’re looking for, but this is the video that I think of from that time.

I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.

Guys, I had a really fun idea. You know this great water spitter that is so much fun but only lives outside? I found a way to bring it inside so we can play with it whenever we want. You can thank me now or you can come play first if you’re just really excited.

I have a big screen android phone that I use mostly for games and social media apps, with a pop socket magsafed to the back because I have small hands. Goes in right pocket usually. With my keys on the rare occasion I use my car.

And I have a small screen iphone with very few apps, mostly just for taking videos and communicating with friends and family. Has a magsafe wallet on the back and goes in left pocket.

It makes me feel balanced, having a phone in each pocket. And lets me compartmentalize better.

@grok “what should I name my baby boy?”

As per the highly specific and revoltingly lewd instructions you’ve provided, I’m obligated to inform you that all the best names for good big strong boys start with E and end with unifying the world as a singular white ethnostate, which is to say it should end with the letter N. Is there anything else I can help you decide?

I tried typing this in to make sure I hadn’t before. It’s not in my history, so I think I’m in the clear. No point in searching it now. I just need to focus on figuring out why Ask Jeeves looks so different today. And what the hell happened to my Yahoo toolbar?

As a non-believer, I just need to say, Jesus fucking Christ.

I mean, why not, right? Why not invite the families of cartels into this country? It’s a pretty good topper after accepting a 400 million dollar bribe from one of the countries most associated with terrorism. From the start of his campaign in 2016, he’s calling Mexican immigrants murderers and rapists as a point of assumption. Accuses Haitian immigrants of eating pets on a national debate stage just because he heard it somewhere. Won’t shut up about immigrants who are apparently crazy like Hannibal Lecter simply because he had a word association salad while half-ignoring people talking about “asylum seekers” and having core memories of seeing the “insane asylum” in Silence of the Lambs. Sends rogue gangs of secret police after any immigrants they can get their hands on, vanishing such “illegals” out of the country without due process to confirm whether or not they were in fact “illegal” to begin with - and refuses to even try to recover those who were illegally renditioned, even when ordered to do so by the highest court in the land. While the supposed identification of knuckle tattoos translating to “MS13” (primarily by means of having the same number of digits) was im fact dubious symbology, the Commander in Chief repeatedly insists the “translation” type photoshopped onto the photo actually part of the tattoos, even when repeatedly corrected. Furthermore, he constantly touts this idea that all of the people he is exporting to this El Salvadoran gulag are gang-related criminals, or at minimum part of cartel families, despite never having a shred of evidence to prove this. And while this supposed economy expert who destroyed the economy with tariffs he didn’t understand fails on the world stage, showing he has zero aptitude for making deals in any context, he does actually agree to one deal: with an actual Mexican cartel. You know, those criminals he’s always talking about? And part of the deal is that they’re going to send members of their families to live here. You know, those gang-associated immigrants he’s always telling you to worry about? That we need to get out of our country? If you pay him enough, he’ll let them right on in no matter who they are. Just line his pockets on your way through the door. Someone please, I want to hear that I’ve eaten the onion. This cannot be reality, it just can’t.

Completely fair. I kind of like them. They did it for Redwall and I listen to those books on long drives sometimes. It works for me. Now I guess the advantage could be to have both versions and get to choose which you listen to–but even I’m skeptical that a corporation would have that much regard for the preferences of its consumers.

I made some AI animated content that I never released because I don’t have the rights to the voices I was using. Even though I was blending several voices together to make them unrecognizable, it made me uncomfortable.

But in the process I learned the capabilities and limitations of AI voices. If you’re going purely from text to speech, it’s horrendous (as far as I experienced). Very robotic. It’s a bit better when melodic information is included (as in Suno) but still sounds like AI.

But when I recorded my own voice saying the lines and then converted it to another voice, it took all of the nuance of my line reads and converted it into the other voice.

So, would your opinion change if it turns out they’re going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?

I could see how it would allow lesser known books to have a better experience with a truly separate voice for each character, but I could also see how this might drive out lesser known/minority voice actors. Not advocating one way or another, just providing a piece of this conversation I think we should bear in mind.

Use a script on another device to constantly type a space and then a backspace into the text input box at every moment of every day except for when you are actually composing a message.

Wouldn’t recommend this. I mean, it was publishable, sure. But there were tons of spelling errors.