It’s nice. Feels like browsing in an old western saloon.

I hope it happens. And by it I mean VR / AR equipment that I can comfortably use for a few hours at a time without getting sweaty, fatigued, or motion sick. When I’m using a computer I like to have a bunch of displays, and it would be really convenient to have a comfortable headset that I can wear instead and live my dream of coding in VR / AR and spin displays up or down on a whim, or better still use some as-yet-undreamed VR native UI that takes advantage of the platform. That dream is still a way off, it seems like, but I still want it.

I don’t think it has to be, or even should be the case really. I mean, as a general rule I don’t think it’s a great idea to let kids download stuff off the internet and run it without a knowledgeable adult at least reviewing what they’re doing, or pre-screening what software they’re allowed to use if they’re younger than a certain age. You can introduce kids to open source software and teach them computer skills while still putting limits on what they’re allowed to do, e.g. not allowed to install software without asking a parent, or only allowing them to test software on an old machine that doesn’t have sensitive data on it. I know I got thrown to the internet as a kid but I don’t think that’s the best way for kids to learn stuff.

That said, I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having them, so I don’t know how realistic that is for kids nowadays. I don’t know if they’re still as far ahead of the adults as we were when it came to working the internet so I recognize the possibility that that all may be clueless childless adult nonsense.

Oh my god yes. It’s amazing to me how much art we produce where the artist is adamant that no one ever see it. Like, Kafka wanted all of his works destroyed on his death, and his art is so weird and different that it got it’s own word to describe it, because there’s nothing quite like it. Makes me wonder about how much of that art happens every day, and we’ll never know because, for whatever reason, we can’t bring ourselves to share it.

I mean look at them. To quote Raymond Gillette, nobody’s that gay.

That is mesmerizing. Is some of the particulate in the video eggs (or hatchlings) that are becoming dislodged? Or is that all other debris in the water?

I don’t share your concerns about the profession. Even supposing for a moment that LLMs did deliver on the promise of making 1 human as productive as 5 humans were previously, that isn’t how for-profit industry has traditionally incorporated productivity gains. Instead, you’ll just have 5 humans producing 25x output. If code generation becomes less of a bottleneck (which it has been doing for decades as frameworks and tooling have matured) there will simply be more code in the world that the code wranglers will have to wrangle. Maybe if LLMs get good enough at generating usable code (still a big if for most non-trivial jobs), some people who previously focused on low-level coding concerns will be able to specialize in higher-level concerns like directing an LLM, while some people will still be writing the low-level inputs for the LLMs, sort of like how you can write applications today without needing to know the specific ins and outs of the instruction set for your CPU. I’m doubtful that that’s around the corner, but who knows. But whatever the tools we have are capable of, the output will be bounded by the abilities of the people who operate the tools, and if you have good tools that are easily replicated, as software tools are, there’s no reason not to try and maximize your output by having as many people as you can afford and cranking out as much product as you can.

I’m just making stuff up, but your comment made me look it up and of course it’s also the name of a controversial youtuber who blew up, coincidentally, around the same time the trebuchet did. Learning all kinds of internet history today.

The CPU malloceth, and the CPU freeeth, according to the divine Program. And lo, the virtuous array shall enter into the ofstream and be saved, while the wicked shall be dereferenced for ever.

I’d expand on your last thought to say that all art is a compression tool for meaning. Got an idea in your head you want to communicate? You’ve got your body and your environment to work with, good luck. Words, images, dance, sculpture, they’re all noisy channels we use to try and get information from one brain to another.

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:

I’m beginning to suspect Stamets isn’t even a real doctor.

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.

Concerning that researchers are giving their subjects full-strength memes like this and telling them they’re placebos. Hard to believe an IRB cleared this post.

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?

If each over-universe is capable of simulating multiple under-universes, I would think that being toward the fringe is way more likely than being toward the root. Maybe we’re in one of the younger universes where life hasn’t evolved to the point where it’s simulating universes complex enough to generate intelligent life for a hobby. Or maybe others in this universe have and Earth is just a backwater.

I don’t think it’s as simple as the teapot. We can already simulate tiny “universes” with computers that have internally consistent rules, and there’s no reason to think those simulations couldn’t get more sophisticated as we harness more computing power, which I think puts an interesting lens on the “why are we here?” question. I don’t think there’s evidence to believe that we are in a simulation, but I think there are reasons why it’s an interesting question to wrestle with that “What about a giant floating teapot?” doesn’t share.

That’s exactly the sentence that made me pause. I could hook up an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life to a Geiger counter near a radioisotope that randomly flipped squares based on detection events, and I think I’d have a non-algorithmic simulated universe. And I doubt any observer in that universe would be able to construct a coherent theory about why some squares seemingly randomly flip using only their own observations; you’d need to understand the underlying mechanics of the universe’s implementation, how radioactive decay works for one, and those just wouldn’t be available in-universe, the concept itself is inaccessible.

Makes me question the editors if the abstract can get away with that kind of claim. I’ve never heard of the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, maybe they’re just eager for splashy papers.

Ah, so the differing spin (and mass) of the merging black holes they just detected indicate that at least one of them was already a second generation black hole, and is evidence for multi-generation hierarchical mergers. That makes sense.