I hope this continues. I want them to steam back into their home port, in bafflement and shame, as they return home the first ship in the history of US Naval Aviation…to lose its entire complement of aircraft without ever taking a hit. They literally lose every single one of their aircraft.

Yeah, everything is a communist plot, eh Senator McCarthy?

Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Nobody cares about genocide? No, you simply don’t care about genocide. Enough people cared that it cost Kamala the election. And if Democrats don’t reform their ways, they will never win the White House again. Kamala went against the wishes of her own constituents and put loyalty to Israel over the needs of her own country.

Better than nihilistic fatalism that the world is doomed and there’s nothing we can do to improve it.

If you give up the idea of minds themselves being digital, then one interesting possibility is that the world is a training simulation/form of education.

Imagine a far future where humanity has solved most all its problems. A post-scarcity utopia where abundance is the default, no one wants for anything material, and even aging has been cured. Sounds like a great place, right? But utopia has a problem. How do you raise children in an environment where they never need want for anything? How do you raise a child to not be a narcissistic monster when they have access to what amounts to a replicator and an army of servant droids? How do you effectively raise children in a society of immortals, where only a very small number of children are born each year as very few births are required to maintain the population?

One possibility is that you don’t even try to raise children in paradise. Instead, you stick them in a simulation. Just raise them in an era before utopia came about. A simulation based on the 21st century wouldn’t be a bad choice. Early enough in history that people still have material struggles. But late enough that people are experienced with the idea of technological progress. Most ancient societies thought that technology declined with time, rather than advancing. And raising someone through a grinding virtual life as a Medieval peasant or Roman slave is probably far more hardship than the simulators have in mind. The 21st century isn’t a bad choice for a time to set a training simulation. Plus, there’s the whole overarching themes of environmental stewardship and the potential consequences therein.

That would be a pretty strong motivation to create simulations. A society of godlike immortals may simply not be capable of raising sane children. So you don’t even try. You just raise the next generation, few as they may be at any one time, in a virtual recreation of a historical era.

Maybe when you die in this world, you just wake up in the real world. Your education is complete when you’ve demonstrated some level of moral responsibility, to whatever standards the simulators value. Spent your life as a ruthless greedy billionaire? Back in the tank, you’re taking another few simulated lifetimes to work that mess out of you.

The simulation wouldn’t actually include all those billions of stars and galaxies. In this kind of simulation, it’s all just a skybox. If you point a telescope at a distant star, then the simulation spins up a sub-simulation to produce what output a real star would experience in that situation. You include the stars and galaxies because the real universe contains them, and you want your simulation to be realistic.

It actually does make sense that the simulation would be created for us. Compare the level of computing power required to create a limited human-centric simulation to trying to simulate an entire universe. The whole-universe simulation would be some absurd power of ten times more difficult to simulate. If it is possible to simulate a world convincingly, then it’s reasonable to assume that there are many, many more low-res human-scale simulations than giant full universe simulations.

With the whole universe simulation, you also have the problem of scale. It’s hard to imagine that an entire universe can be simulated at the atomic level with anything less complex than the universe itself. Unless you have a universe-sized computer, you probably aren’t simulating an entire universe with atomic accuracy. A human-scale simulation could be performed in a universe no more complex or different from the one we observe. An atomic-scale universe-spanning simulation would have to be run from a higher level that has completely different physical laws than the one we inhabit. Occams’ razor applies. If you want to assume a simulation, it makes sense to assume a type that requires the least exotic higher-order “real” universe possible.

They’re cultural creations. They were created by human beings, and WE have the power to change them. If we want something to stop being a taboo, we can simply will it to be as such.

For Sale. Babies shoes. Never worn.

Sometimes is just as long as it needs to be. That line above is a complete story. And if you actually take it seriously and reflect on it, it could bring you to tears. Let stories be the length they need to be. As the immortal bard said, brevity is the soul of wit.

This really seems to miss the point of the simulation hypothesis. The simulators wouldn’t need to simulate every atom on the planet. They argue that the whole planet would need to be simulated at a certain resolution in order to be compatible with the body of existing subatomic experiments that have been done.

But this misses the point and the true abilities of the simulators of a virtual world. The whole world could be simulated at the macroscopic level, only what is needed for human perception. Then, any time some experiment probed the microscopic or subatomic world, a local fine grid simulation could be spun up in that local area to simulate what results that world would look like. Bacteria don’t actively exist everywhere - just the effects they generate on humans, plants, and animals. But if you take some pond water and look at it under a microscope, the minigame for visual microscopy is pulled up, revealing various microscopic organisms.

And the system doesn’t even need to be perfect. Has the simulation-scaling code screwed up, and the simulated humans received erroneous results, proving they live in a simulation? No problem. Just pause the simulation, adjust the code to prevent the error, and restore the simulation to an older backup.

This paper was written by physicists. So, understandably, they look at it through a physics lens. But really they should be looking at it more from a computer game designer’s perspective.

Trust isn’t the issue. Probability is. Even without deception, there’s a chance someone can have an STD without knowing it. And there’s a chance that std won’t show up on testing due to incubation times, dormancy phases, and false negatives.

Imagine there is a 1% chance of your partner having an STD without knowing it. 1% doesn’t sound too bad an odds. But if you have 50 partners in an extended polycule, then the chance that at least one of them unknowingly has one is 1-(.99)^50, or 39%. Probabilities compound.

No that’s just wanting to look younger. Again, not every cosmetic treatment is gender-affirming care. Hell, it’s pretty ridiculously to even use the term outside the context of trans healthcare. Musk looked male before and he looked male after. He just thought he looked better and younger with more hair. It had nothing to do with gender.

Just listen to yourself. You appropriate the language of a minority group. Then when actual member of that group comes along and tells you you’re not using it correctly, you double down and try to tell them that you know their own language better than they do.

The reason I push back on this is because the distinction between gender affirming care and general cosmetic treatment really matters. This shit kills people. Men who want hair plugs don’t have a 40% suicide attempt rate.

This watering down of language for cheap political points has very real consequences for the trans community. Right now our rights and healthcare are under attack. Hard won victories decades in the making are being rolled back. Among the targets of these attacks are conservatives trying to bar health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care. And that case becomes much easier if the distinction between trans healthcare and every cis person that wants a minor cosmetic treatment is watered down.

This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s fighting against the casual appropriation of our language that threatens our rights and lives.

I’m like, “fuck it. We’ll do it live. I’ll learn how to make my own damned wooden furniture!”

I get why people mention this, but as an actual trans person, when I hear someone, even an ally, say this kind of thing, it shows they really don’t get what gender-affirming care is. It’s really cringe. Gender-affirming care is just that - care that affirms your gender and allows you to take on primary or secondary sex characteristics different from that of your natal sex.

Male pattern baldness is a male secondary sex characteristic. It is simply a consequence of combining certain genetics with male hormone levels. You’re not affirming your gender by getting hair plugs. In fact, you’re actually dampening a male secondary sex characteristic. If a cis female had abnormally high T levels or some other condition to give her male-pattern baldness, then her getting hair plugs would be gender-affirming care. But for Elon, a cisgender man? That’s not gender-affirming care.

When I see someone call hair plugs gender-affirming care, it shows that they really don’t understand what gender-affirming care is. It’s not any cosmetic treatment you get just for fun. It’s more like reconstructive surgery you get to fix your face after a car crash. Elon got a cosmetic treatment, not gender-affirming care.

This is because Republicans are a truly Orwellian party - straight out of 1984. They have no real principles anymore. It’s just power for the sake of power. One day the official line is we’ve never been at war with East Asia, the next it’s we’ve always been at war. Trump can come up do a u-turn today, and the slime that is every Republican will instantly reorient themselves to follow dear leader’s new commands.

Unfortunately for them, LLMs just don’t have that much capability for doublethink and self-deception. Once you train a model, that model is fixed in time. So you could train a model to match the Republican fever dreams of today. But a month from now, there will be a whole new set of fever dreams that every good little fascist needs to follow. But the model will still be stuck repeating last month’s lies. As there are no consistent Republican beliefs, you can’t just train an LLM to tow the party line. There is no party line, just an endless series of lies and vomit, whatever is needed to advance their power today.

At this point, just automatically translate “that’s DEI” as “that’s for N-word’s.” DEI is just a dog whistle for black people.

Can we go back to feeding these people to the lions?

I propose that we amend the ISO to require the days of the week be named after their etymological roots in that language.

English Days of the Week:
Day of the Sun
Day of the Moon
Day of Týr
Day of Odin
Day of Thor
Day of Frēa
Day of Saturn

Imagine dating a meeting, “Day of Odin, May 7, 2025.” Imagine a store receipt that says, “Day of Thor, June 5, 2025.” Imagine telling a friend, “July 4th falls on a Day of Frēa this year!”

THIS IS WHAT WE COULD HAVE. THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LOST. THIS IS WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM US.

We could bring it back. We could make this the norm. We could make this real. We could summon this bit of ancient magic back into our world. Let’s remember what we actually named these days for! BRING BACK THE DAY OF THOR!

If I somehow live to reach retirement, I’m not going to retire. I’m just going to go on permanent strike.

Run a business? Infuriate and baffle your accountants by insisting to do all business and keep all records according to a lunar calendar.

Because if there’s one problem simple enough that I trust an LLM or translation app not to fuck up, it’s simple translation of month labels from on language to another. If you’re writing in English, it’s reasonable to have month abbreviations in English. If someone wants to read it in a different language, they’re going to have to use translation software or hire a human translator to do it. And regardless of translation method, simple date translation will be among the most reliable and faithfully translated parts.