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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • So what? Most of us were never meant to be impactful, or even lack the ability to be impactful. I would posit that life in general was only ever meant for us to vibe with the universe for a brief time. In the span of epochs, and especially once humanity makes itself extinct, vanishingly little will have any material impact on even the planet, much less reality as a whole.

    Unless you manage to trigger false vacuum decay. Then you have made the biggest possible impact by destroying the entire universe. Not sure this is an appropriate goal to reach for, but hey. You do you.


  • But somehow matter magically organizes itself into life?

    There is a recent, decently-supported hypothesis that the emergence of life is a byproduct of entropy, and the need for a system as a whole to almost “self-process” itself from a state of high order to one of lower order. So life is an emergent “engine” that allows entropy to function more efficiently. Or, at least a more efficient path than non-life.

    Downside is that life - as we understand it - is only possible under a narrow range of environmental conditions, and complex life even more so. So while “life” may exist throughout the universe in measured single-celled doses, complex life - especially sapient life - may be distressingly rare or even wholly absent except for us.

    Which is a real kick in the nuts when you examine the scientific evidence of how fast we are hurtling towards our own extinction.








  • I’m not aware of any blogging platforms that respect my privacy and align with my values.

    Why rely on someone else’s property?

    So long as you have a decent symmetrical Internet connection and your ISP does not block port 443 (https, and ideally also port 80 - plain http - for emergency fallback), you can self-host any kind of website you want.

    Stick with a static site generator, and your technical needs for hosting will drop down to practically nothing. You could run your website on almost any kind of a low-power device, including - if you have reflashed it with something like OpenWRT - the gateway router to your home network (although this isn’t something I recommend beyond a “holy shit, it worked!” scope).

    There are even people running static websites on computers close to four decades old (512k Macintosh, FTW), although the limiting factor there isn’t the hosting but the computer’s responsiveness in responding to page requests… they aren’t the most spry circuits in operation and are easily overwhelmed.

    Honestly, the sky is the limit for what you can do, and you can go as simple or as technologically complex as you desire.



  • It needs guardrails similar to capitalism in terms of checks and balances and protections against abuses of power. And it needs to be an economic framework, with direct-participation democracy doing the political work.

    We are at the technological threshold where a Republic is no longer needed as the primary interface of democracy, but such a direct-participation democracy needs to be paired with an electorate which is highly educated, places said education on a higher pedestal than wealth or power, and focuses on experience and meritocracy above all else. Most importantly, said population must have virtually no economically vulnerable people, as poverty nerfs intelligence by up to 15 points and dramatically reduces a person’s ability to think critically beyond their immediate day-to-day needs. Having a population that can see near-100% attention to national questions makes for an effective direct-participation democracy.

    Essentially, the people vote directly on everything, and about the only “political apparatus” that exists would be those structures meant to carry out the will of the people and diplomats that interact with other countries. There would be no leaders or politicians, only people being the gears of government.

    If a person is particularly passionate about a cause, they can champion it in public forums, going up against other debaters, but are not allowed to monopolize the forum in a career-like manner.

    Plus, such a democracy would be reflected down into the worker’s collectives which would operate on virtually identical principles, only with scopes restricted to that collective.

    There are other parts of the societal structure that could enhance said communism.

    The legal system will need to be 100% apolitical and utterly divorced from the political structures or economic incentives. Lawyers become judges by courts of their peers, who examine their body of work and determine if the expertise is sufficient for the judgeship. Ideally they wouldn’t even be told who they are evaluating, their only opportunity is to recognize the work done through any anonymization done to it. Judges that misbehave can be removed either internally or by an external vote by the population at large. Laws can be implemented in either direction - from the population or from judgements - but must be approved by the people.

    The police system needs to be a national system that cannot allow bad apples to just jump from precinct to precinct to avoid discipline (as per America), but must also be unarmed as a base unit. Only SWAT has the ability to carry more than restraints. Police are assigned to neighbourhoods to learn and integrate with the residents, as per Japan’s system. Trust is built by literally walking the beat and being an integral part of the community.

    Any wider security forces (NSA/CIA/FBI) or military would be focused only on external and internal threats, and are highly constrained to only act in the best interests of the society as a whole, but are also under a sort of “prime directive” to not meddle in other countries except to blunt/neuter what they are doing in the first place. Military, in particular, would be primarily self-defence and international peacekeeping.

    Both the military and the police and any other security forces would have a shadow council of randomly-chosen civilians whose entire purpose would be to criticize and constrain overreach, along with dedicated lawyers whose entire purpose is to advise on laws. All police and military members would have the ability to access JAG-style lawyers and would be protected when refusing to carry out illegal orders.

    There is a lot more I could add, but imma gonna stop here.




  • everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open

    To me it is four things in particular:

    1. How AI use erodes skills in the subject AI is being used to assist in. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been demonstrated across all industries from software developers to radiologists. Most experience a 10-20% erosion in their skill set within the first 12 months of AI use, but others in the study groups have seen up to a 40% erosion in their skill sets.
    2. How AI use shuts down critical thinking, and makes users more stupid. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been clearly demonstrated by MRI scans of the prefrontal cortex while users are actively using AI.
    3. How AI use makes the user slower. This is the only user point that is not 100%, as only less than 2% of the most senior and skilled users show a slight increase in work completed… after more than 12 months of using AI. Projections have been made on the other 98%, and over 90% of them will never work faster with AI than without it, regardless of training or experience.
    4. The gratuitous hallucinations, which are only increasing in scope and severity with every AI generation. It arises entirely from the constraints the AI are rewarded with - providing no answer is weighted just as negatively as a wrong answer - and anywhere from 60-80% of all responses are hallucinatory or incorrect in some fashion, depending on the current model.

    In prior generations, any industry with such performance would be laughed clear out of the boardroom.

    But because capitalism is desperately seeking a solution to what they perceive as a problem - how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour - AI is being adopted hand-over-fist.

    After all, the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.