thebardingreen

thebardingreen, 13 days ago

It’s not real and we live in an age of miracles.

thebardingreen, 13 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

That the many worlds interpretation is sort of correct, but incomplete. Hear me out.

Many worlds isn’t as mind bogglingly ridiculous if the worlds are constantly merging back into each other. Like the universe where a photon bounced left and the universe where it bounced right are functionally identical, then they ARE just the same universe. As long as which way the photon bounced didn’t make a meaningful difference, those two realities aren’t suddenly new separate lines, they’re like a rubber band that stretched in two directions, then bounced back together.

But let’s say you measure the photon and keep records of it. Now there’s two versions of you right? One measuring the photon going left, one measuring it going right. You’re in separate universes that shall never meet right?

No… you’ve stretched the rubber band a little further. Over a timescale that’s totally meaningless compared to the age of the universe, you will die, your records will decay and once the information is effectively scrambled into chaos… the two realities can just snap back together. Two universe… but now one again.

Now for some really mind bendy stuff… this stretching isn’t just localized in time it’s also localized in space. Meaning… if you measure your photon and split into two versions of yourself, but I’m on the other side of the world (or even just down the street from you) and I have no idea that there’s two versions of you, stretched across this temporary universe split… Well, there’s still only one version of me. Up until I encounter one or the other version of you. And if I never do… or if we just cross paths in the local grocery store and your photon experiment doesn’t come up at all… there’s still just one version of me.

And that one version of me can EASILY encounter both versions of you simultaneously without me ever knowing or it making a meaningful difference in my life. So your split reality is localized… possibly even microscopically in your body (like… most of your neurons in your brain didn’t really change at all because of your experiment, only a few of them have to fire differently, the rest don’t have to split… also, wtf) and in the parts of your lab equipment that kept records of the photon measurement.

Now, even whackier… the remerging isn’t perfect, just perfect enough that the universe doesn’t fall apart. Like… you know how sometimes you’re SURE that the neighbor had a red car, but then you look outside and it’s green and your spouse tells you it’s always been green? Stuff that fuels r/glitchinthematrix.

“OK thebardingreen,” you say, “sure, but wouldn’t that mean our records would detect the imperfections all the time and we’d have clear evidence when we go an check the database that it’s impossible to keep consistent records because of this spliting and remerging?”

“NO!” I say, “because of entropy.”

See, if the universe is going to try to flow along the arrow of time to it’s lowest energy state… and as we all know, something stretched (like a rubber band, but ANYTHING really) is in a high energy state. If we found lots of evidence this was going on, well that would keep the universe stretched out more, over longer periods of time. The universe can’t have that, so when you start checking records, things tend to snap to their lowest energy state (possibly even to the point that you realize the neighbor’s car WAS always green, and you just had a dream last night that it was red. But something’s bothering you about that… doesn’t seem quite right. You post on the internet and tell a eerie story about your strange experience and then go on with your life. The feeling fades. Becomes a funny party story.

Decades later, your grand kids remember a story you used to tell… and they retell it, but they don’t quite remember what color you said the car was. There’s no need for them to split into multiple versions (one who says red and one who says green), they just both say “the car was blue, then it turned out to be yellow.” The universe is FULLY collapsed.

(Also, we KNOW that keeping perfect records / taking perfect measurements is actually incredibly hard and we tend to throw out anomalous results as garbage data, especially if we can’t reproduce them, this could be going all the time and we would just consider it statistically insignificant bad data, within our expected margin of error, easily explainable as a common, everyday screw up)

So yes, that means there could be a small infinity of parallel universes where evolution / history went differently. A universe where sapient rat people are squeeking over their version of the internet about weird science facts. Sure… but so what? The sun is going to expand into a red giant and consume the Earth and erase most of that information and then the local planetary stretch collapses back into it’s lowest energy state… one where there might have been rat people, or hairless ape people, but either way, they’re gone.

Ready for MORE whackyness?? THIS is the Great Filter. Sort of.

Intelligent civilizations spreading across the stars will create a HIGH energy state, as all those potential diversions splinter in more and more ways across greater distances. SO the universe will tend to favor outcomes where chaotic, clever and unpredictable life forms DON’T spread out of their own solar system, or travel across vast distances, because THAT would be a high energy stretch state. Although even just spreading across a galaxy is still only a LOCAL stretch as far as the universe is concerned. Heck, beings 100 light years away who never build a huge solar system sized radio telescope to pick up our faint emissions don’t need to cause weird reality splits. They could exist in a weird little myriad of their own stretched realities and NEVER interact with ours in a meaningful way. And if one day one of their radio astronomers detects a strange radio signal from our star that NEVER repeats and is NEVER explained… well it really doesn’t matter to them at all if we sent that signal or the rats did or the sun just hiccuped in way their physical models can’t explain. Our whole solar system becomes a Schrodinger’s cat box in which both us AND the rat people sent that signal existing in a superpositioned state until someone measures it… which they probably won’t and probably CAN’T so the universe maintains it’s low energy state.

So if you’re ever like “If I go back in time and kill my grandfather, does that mean I never existed”, what if you just created a weird stretch reality that will paradoxically persist for a while and then all collapse back together as soon as the universe can get away with it?

In this thought experiment, it’s possible that a small infinity of time travelers showed up to Stephen Hawking’s time travel party. BUT, that would cause a high energy stretch over a weird knot in time… so the universe will TOTALLY favor outcomes in which no one showed up, so in the vast majority of universes, NO time travelers show up to hang out with Stephen Hawking, BECAUSE that’s less stretching for the universe to do before it snaps back to a low energy state.

So, the many worlds interpretation doesn’t mean that infinities of universes are being created constantly, it means there’s JUST one universe, but multiple pocket realities can exist in it, localized in both space and time, and these pocket realities are constantly snapping back and merging with each other, sometimes inconsistently. Which is EXACTLY what we’d expect from an energetic system progressing through time, experiencing entropy.

thebardingreen, 15 days ago

Yeah… it’s very clickbatey to NOT include that detail.

thebardingreen, 15 days ago

I didn’t finish the first season. I couldn’t keep going. I probably won’t give the second season a chance.

thebardingreen, 16 days ago

Funny. But, as it runs on Windows, it’s definitely not the most private.

I suggest Emacs or vi running in a Qube.

thebardingreen, 16 days ago

Ah. I forget that real world paper exists, my ADHD brain can’t make functional use of it.

thebardingreen, 20 days ago (edited 16 days ago)

It’s probably less about telling off the UN and more about sound bites / video clips that will play well with his bosses and their political base back home.

Historically, right wing isolationist ideologues of all nationalities seem to cheer and double down when faced with international criticism. They know it’s them and their beliefs against the world and they have a fantasy that they can win, right up until an overwhelming number of them die for it.

Israel as a nation is not in a mood for self reflection and definitely doesn’t want to understand the hole their digging themselves into.

thebardingreen, 22 days ago

And a random, traumatized squirrel.

thebardingreen, 22 days ago

Uh… that’s been me. With Special K, Red Berries no less. I’m not too proud to admit it.

thebardingreen, 22 days ago

Regional Lemmies. Not holding my breath.

thebardingreen, 22 days ago

For real, he looks kinda like a Kazon.

thebardingreen, 22 days ago

Scotch?

A little old lady from Leningrad inwented it.

thebardingreen, 22 days ago

I googled this and that’s enough internet for today.

thebardingreen, 23 days ago

Thanks for the breakdown. When I read the headline, I guessed at a bunch of what the article said and you confirmed most of it.

thebardingreen, 23 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

I always find these breakdowns to be a little bit disingenuous. Like, you could do this same analysis on the whole email system, or on the whole world wide banking system, including ATMs, or on the energy usage of all DNS queries or even on global ActivityPub activity, not to mention shopping on Amazon or browsing Facebook. People DO do these kinds of breakdowns on generative AI, for exactly the same reasons, and reach the same kinds of conclusions.

Having a global computer network is INCREDIBLY energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. It’s not shocking that a given application of that network is energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. These kinds of analysis are put together by people who already don’t like cryptocurrencies (for all kinds of reasons both valid and ridiculous) who then go cherry picking MORE reasons not to like them.

thebardingreen, 26 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

As someone who does cybersecurity consulting for govt. contractors, companies invest in security when some external force forces them to, and then they spend the bare minimum to meet whatever that force requires (and they try to get away with less at every opportunity).

Right now in government contracting we’re experiencing this paradigm shift where the NIST-800-171 standard (which everyone was required to follow, but kind of on the honor system) is going to be replaced in 21 months or so by something called CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification). But, CMMC is basically just the same requirements as NIST-800-171, so why?

BECAUSE, everyone just SAYS they’re NIST-800-171 compliant on all their contracts. Everyone self scores themselves on it and gets a WAY higher score than they do when being scored by a 3rd party, and then reports their self scores up the chain. The way this works in both DoD and NASA projects, which is what I’m familiar with, is the big players like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc, have thousands of smaller suppliers and those suppliers have smaller suppliers, so the requirements flow down from the govt to the big contractors to the small subcontractors and each link in the chain is responsible for making sure the upstream links are compliant… which they NEVER are, but they all say they are!

Of course, the government KNOWS this is happening, but lacks the resources to do anything about it. So the solution is to make everyone get third party certified that they are compliant. Half that industry is setting themselves up for failure to meet that deadline (which, of course, has already been delayed and pushed back multiple times) and I have a feeling that when small companies start failing their CMMC certs, they’re going to get stern warnings instead of losing their contracts because the government has to buy shit from someone.

When I talk to the money / business people at my clients, this goes in one ear and out the other.

There are wide spread (willful) misconceptions among those folks that cybersecurity is something IT people do and everyone else just does their jobs without having to think about it. I’ve had CEOs say things like “No, we’re not doing that, we can’t work that way.” when I educate them about their requirements… and then look to me to provide the solution where they don’t have to change anything about the way they work and when I can’t, they get frustrated with me and my team. I’ve had them ask me “Well what do the big companies do?” and I say “Look, they actually TRY to do all these things they require you to do and they fail at it ALL the time, but I’ve heard you complain about how their bureaucracy and rules slow everything down and make working with them difficult. A bunch of that stuff IS what they do to deal with this.” And they just don’t believe me. I’ve had CFOs say “We don’t have the budget to do all of this, so which parts are the most important?” and I’ve said “This is the LAW. You’re supposed to do all of it!” But they know and I know that for the time being no one will hold them accountable.

Right now, tons of companies just say “We’re NIST-800-171 compliant” or “We’re working towards NIST-800-171 compliance” and their contracts go forward and they hire someone like me to tell them what to do and then they don’t do 60% of it and delay doing 20% of it.

This is in an industry that is required by law to try extra hard on their security. In industries where there are no such requirements, or less requirements… good luck.

thebardingreen, 26 days ago

Nuke hurling trebuchets are an underexplored fantasy tech.

thebardingreen, 28 days ago

“Harley!”

“Yes puddin?”

“I need you to dress up as that Sailor Moon character from that Japanese cartoon show.”

“Oh, you’ah so kinky puddin! Ah…Why do you want me to do that?”

“Because I wish to place you on a throne of darkness surrounded by the skulls of our enemies and force Gotham to kneel before you and swear their allegiance to you.”

“Oh puddin! The things you say get me all wobbly inside! But why the cahtoon costume?”

“Harley!”

“Yes puddin?”

“JUST DO IT!!!”

“Uhh… Ok puddin.”

thebardingreen, 28 days ago (edited 23 days ago)

I’ve written more than enough words to win, while failing to finish my story. I’ve also played a lot with local LLMs. Can confirm on all counts.

thebardingreen, 29 days ago

That’s hot.

I mean… imagine being out in the sun like that, covered in all that fur.

thebardingreen, 29 days ago

Are you an old lady? That was his thing.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Vorta Man, Vorta Man, Vorta Man loves Changling Man. They have a fight, Changling wins. Vorta Man.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago (edited 24 days ago)

I have watched those exact guys eat an organization I worked for alive. At the end, they had like… 10 business consultants and 1 junior engineer. At an electronics engineering company.

i.natgeofe.com/…/NationalGeographic_1742512_3x2.j…

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

All my machines are named after Autobots.

thebardingreen, 1 month ago

Humans starting with the Venerable trait is OP.