interolivary

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

About 3000 years ago I worked as a night security guard in a place where we’d often have celebrities during the day. One night during one of my rounds I found an iPod in the parking lot. Went back to the control room and started going through the menus to see if I could figure out who it belonged to, and based on the device’s name I realized it belonged to an abject asshole of a media personality / early “influencer” of sorts, who got rich by “preaching” what amounted to a secular prosperity gospel, essentially a cheerleader for the “fuck you, I got mine”-brand of capitalism.

I can say I didn’t have to think too many milliseconds about what to do with the device and felt no pangs of guilt about yoinking it. I used it for years and years, and probably much longer than that particular dude would have since I mainly worked low income jobs and I couldn’t have afforded a new one even if I wanted to.

I reset the device but kept its name as it was, just as a sort of small personal 🖕 to that guy.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Yup, it passed quietly surrounded by friends and family. Hasn’t been too many days (I think…). The CEO (or founder? Whoever) pulled the plug because they just didn’t want to deal with it anymore iirc

edit: Omegle shut down: Video chat website closed after abuse claims. 15h ago, not days ago lol

interolivary, 6 months ago

Yeah same, I thought it was long gone. Seems a bit like it was more undead than alive

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

With Comic Sans I can maybe buy that claim; it was never hard to read, people just think it looks silly (especially in more official contexts.)

At least to me Radon, however, actually is hard to read. I don’t know if it’s my slight dyslexia, but it feels like it’s purposefully doing the opposite of what the fonts like Comic Sans etc. did. It’s not quite Tengwar-bad but it’s still a bit of a jagged easily-confused mess that’s noticeably slower to read

interolivary, 7 months ago

It’s not like 100% of the face is some sort of instakill zone

interolivary, 7 months ago

… did they ever actually show the “CPU” of the ship’s computer? Maybe it was a bit squishier than we’ve assumed

interolivary, 7 months ago

The unfathomable horrors of modern life

interolivary, 7 months ago

Shit, I’m fine with the ending, I wish I was 34 again

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Yeah I have to say that I generally don’t know jack from shit when it comes to the Catholic church, living in an overwhelmingly Protestant country, and that’s if people can even be bothered with religion, so all I really had were negative stereotypes. Don’t often see the Catholic church in the news unless it’s about something bad.

So this move definitely felt surprising to me, although eg. the part about baptizing transgender folks being OK as long as there’s “no risk of causing a public scandal or disorientation among the faithful” was a bit, well… I guess funny is the wrong word. How does one assess the risk of a transgender person’s baptism disorienting the faithful? What does thst even mean?

interolivary, 7 months ago

Ah neat, thanks for the heads-up

interolivary, 7 months ago

This is hilarious, but… is it just me or is Rom’s face a bit of a nightmare fuel scenario? 😅

interolivary, 7 months ago

Yeah the term “shrieking heebie jeebies” springs to mind.

Good point about the personality though, somehow the hyperlibertarian scammer thing they have going on makes them feel less threatening, although I guess that should probably make them even more horrifying?

interolivary, 7 months ago

fur does help to hide (heh, get it) a lot

🥁

Pretty much what I suspected about “naked” skin vs fur, which just intuitively seems way more “forgiving.”

most of what makes a human look like themself is not the skin. it’s the bones and muscles and fat in the face, and the perceptions of living humans are incredibly sensitive to subtle variations in those features.

Ohhh this makes complete sense now that you say it; we’re incredibly well tuned for recognizing faces, so I guess not only would it be hard to make the person recognizable, but it might also be hard to not have imperfections in the face that give everyone an “uncanny valley” sort of feeling that something’s off about it?

I can definitely say that the problems with taxidermizing humans was definitely not something I expected to learn about today (or necessarily ever really), so thank you for taking the time to explain all that. It was honestly interesting to learn about something that I had absolutely no knowledge of beforehand.

If you don’t mind me asking, do you know this stuff via actually doing taxidermy, or are you just another infinitely curious person?

interolivary, 7 months ago

Heh, we can do a Classic Human™ and unite in hate: I really don’t like Mt Dew either. I think the US version is like even more toxic-looking (and possibly literally toxic for that matter) than what they sell over here in Urop, or at least I remember it looking exactly like you described.

interolivary, 6 months ago

Oh neat. That definitely qualifies under infinite curiosity.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Well if you’re high up enough that the absolutely crazy temperature (around 470 °C, 878 °F) and pressure (90 bar so like being 900m / 3000ft underwater) don’t kill you I guess?

interolivary, 7 months ago

<span style="color:#323232;">ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">       ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. 
</span>

It’d be incredible if it was some sort of life – even unicellular – but chances are it’s probably just something more mundane.

But I’m hoping for aliens though.

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Not finding any life anywhere (although hard to take samples outside the solar system) could maybe be even worse. That’d mean that it might be that some stronger version of the Anthropic Principle holds, and it could be that we’re completely alone in the universe because it’s sort of “tuned” to us, although without the intentionality that implies; random shit just happened until an incredible collection of very unlikely coincidences produced us, and just us.

Whether we find simple life out there or not, I’m honestly pretty convinced that what’s going on right now is at least our filter, and possibly the Great Filter. A species’ ability to transform its environment might always outpace its understanding of what the outcomes will be, and getting to this point might possibly also require a competetive species, so it might just be near-inevitable that technologically advanced species kick off something like a “terminal” climate disaster or nuclear war eventually.

Add to that the fact that it’s not at all sure that space colonization is actually doable, at least in a time frame that would allow species to spread to other planets before they screw the pooch with their original one. Not only is space travel ridiculously hard and has a ton of terrible health effects which for us humans include eg. blindness in prolonged zero-G (even a trip to Mars would be enough to badly fuck eyesight), it also takes stupid amount of resources since you have to build spinning habitats for your ships, stations etc to solve at least some of the problems and you’re probably already running out of resources on your home planet. Building a self-sufficient colony on another planet is another thing that many researchers think is likely so hard that it may as well be impossible at least for the next few hundred years, and we probably don’t have that long – whether it’s us triggering some “black swan” event and doing a speedrun to turn Earth to Venus, or climate change just getting bad enough that billions die and in the resulting chaos we pretty much nuke the rest, or whatever. Looks like we’ve been just smart enough to fuck things up, but so far just not smart enough to un-fuck them.

So, if we find no signs of any life and we manage to effectively destroy ourselves somehow, the worst case could be that that might be it for the observable universe’s or even the entire universe’s life. Finding unicellular life would at least mean that it’s possible something else pops up somewhere at some point, but we’d be just as screwed as we would be without that discovery.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Ha yeah I think I’ve read something to that effect. Fun idea at least, but holy shit would living in a floating Venusian city be scary; would you trust systems built by the lowest bidder to keep the city in the air so it doesn’t fall down into the Venusian hellscape? Also, better have great handrails 😄

interolivary, 6 months ago

Heh, you’re welcome. It’s one of those things that can cause either an existential crisis or some sort of “enlightenment”, depending on the day, or at least is for me.

Remember that it’s a pretty controversial hypothesis for, well, probably obvious reasons, but it’s not a tinfoil hat fringe thing either

interolivary, 6 months ago

I didn’t find the text on the anthropic principle or rather the principle itself very convincing. But nonetheless, I think you might have misunderstood what the article you linked is arguing for. They say that “the idea that physical laws must be the way they are because otherwise we could not be here to measure them is called the anthropic principle”. However, you talked about a universe that is “tuned” to us? Isn’t the anthropic principle actually more likely to cause life in general, not only life on earth? That is, if the conditions are just right to cause us, why wouldn’t this significantly increase the chances of creating life somewhere else?

Sorry that’s just my terrible wording, I can’t English today so I just used the first word I could reach for and tried to explain that it doesn’t imply any sort of intention. You’re exactly right! But there’s different versions of the principle (usually divided into “weak” and “strong”) and they imply slightly different things, but I think that page doesn’t go that “deep” since it’s more of a general intro. “Stronger” versions of the AP basically… err, can make that “tuning” (again, I’m sorry for using that term I know it’s bad but English hard 😅) stricter or more restricted in a sense so that instead of this universe being like it is “because” of its suitability for carbon-based life which might then sort of pop up anywhere, it might be just us here.

edit: re the “worst case”, I just think it’d be sad if the only life in the whole universe got snuffed out because we do something stupid. Not that I necessarily believe or don’t believe in the AP or the likelihood of us being totally alone here, I’m not qualified to have an actual opinion

interolivary, 6 months ago

I mean, your criticism here isn’t all that far from many of the common criticisms of AP from scientists, and personally I think those are all very valid points. But at the same time, there’s a lot of good arguments on the AP side too, so it’s a bit of a ¯_(ツ)_/¯ It’s not like it’s a hypothesis that you can necessarily ever prove or disprove due to its nature, so it does veer more towards philosophy

interolivary, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

But the anthropic principle doesn’t imply an intention either, though. Much the opposite: it’s all just dumb luck, but for us to be here right now observing it, some of that luck had to go a certain way (eg some physical constants had to get the values they have or matter wouldn’t exist etc).

In some ways this really isn’t even in question, an example being the apparent “fine-tuning” of physical constants so that there’s stable matter than can form more complex compounds, and that stars can exist, etc. That “fine-tuning” itself is pretty clear, ie we can calculate that if this or that constant was 0.000004% off then everything would go to shit.

But it’s only apparent tuning: it just boils down to the fact that those constants have to be the way they are, or we wouldn’t be able to be here as observers: if even one thing was slightly different then eg hydrogen would be the most complex chemical in the universe or something like that. Ain’t no observers emerging out of nearly perfectly homogenous hydrogen soup. Or a universe that collapsed into a singularity and disappeared into whatever the hell is on the other “end” of black holes a Planck time after the big bang, because instead of bonds being too hard to form they were too easy.

Now the AP just then takes that idea and runs off with it, with the strong principle ending up with the conclusion (and this is much simplified) that we’re the only ones out here due to the amount of “fine tuning” required, and the weak being less, well, chauvinistic 😁

Some people think that the “fine-tuning” of physical constants means the universe was made for us, when the truth is closer to the opposite of that, with us sort of being made for the universe. Again without intention or a Maker, but simply meaning that with these “universe settings / seed”, something similar to our current universe is what you get

edit: this Douglas Adams quote on rationalwiki is a great distillation of the AP but in a humorous way:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

interolivary, 6 months ago

But he likely had paranoia or something like that, education won’t much help you there 😁 even the smartest person can suddenly start believing pretty weird things