Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Soulmark AU, only instead of the first words your soulmate ever says to you, it's the last ones.

 

Quantum mechanics is often used as a metaphor for various things, often to contrast either the mechanistic determinism of Newtonian mechanics (quantum mechanics as being "random" or "contradictory" or "controllable by the observer") when really the metaphorical weight of quantum mechanics is the breakdown of the observer-observed dichotomy: the reason that the results of quantum mechanical observation appears to depend on the behavior of the observer is that the observer is necessarily part of the system, that in order to know one must interact, and by interacting one affects, and yet this doesn't mean that one can impose will upon a system, because that will is itself part of the system. There is no disconnected observer, and the apparent randomness or contradictory nature of quantum mechanics can at least be partially blamed on attempts to separate the observer from the observed (this doesn't actually resolve the issues fully).
Of course, I'd probably be irritated by people trying to use this in a metaphor, because I'm not fond of metaphors in general, but at least it would make me less irritated than the casting of quantum mechanics as random or contradictory in order to make commentary on, say, capitalism, or the patriarchy.

 

The street had curbs in all the right places

 

Todaybor Day

 

The more I learn about "music theory" the happier I am that I never pursued it. I suppose I should have expected that in addition to not saying anything that I find to be of value, it also has the usual racist roots underneath the standard thin veil of false objectivity.

 

Lady Macbeth will be like "I know a spot"

 

US Constitution declared socialist praxis since it explains how to form unions.

 

Is not the opposite of Anselm's Ontological Argument also true, that bad things are worse if they actually exist rather than merely being hypothetical, and hence the Worst thing must exist for the same reason that God exists?

 

Brain glass

 

Curse (blessing? Blurse?): May all your embarrassment be secondhand

 

I still find the effect Pendulum had on DnB to be hilarious. I mean, yes, I think that that effect took the genre in an uninteresting direction and led to a shrinking of the breadth of sound that DnB was willing to employ, but in hindsight, as someone who now rarely listens to anything calling itself DnB, the entire genre deciding to copy Pendulum tracks note for note is kind of laughable. Even Anthem trance decided to relentlessly copy a gimmick and not a particular set of people.

And I say this as someone who wishes a particular style of music was more popular, but it turns out to only have been produced by one guy for about two years in the early 2000s, so there's a total of like twelve tracks in that genre.
Do I wish the entirety of the surrounding genre decided to copy this one guy's output from those two years? Not really. A few copycats might be nice, if only to get more of that sound, but I'm pretty happy that the rest of the genre went on to do its own thing, if only because I favor musical diversity even though it means that there's only about 200 pieces of music that I'm willing to listen to more than once.

 

I think I'm part of the group of people who don't think that cilantro tastes like dish soap, but I'm not actually sure because I don't remember the last time I had a dish that had cilantro in it (the fact that I don't remember probably counts as evidence that it doesn't taste like soap to me)

 

Today's brain noise: *in the style of Sting*: Sausage in a bottle

 

That feeling when you're scouring Amazon for a spatula that at least has minimal resistance to fault-injection attacks

 

Whose fault is it that we have the White Tiger and the Black Tortoise, but the Dragon and the Bird end being Azure and Vermillion? What, "blue" and "red" not fancy enough, but we can get away with "white" and "black"?

 

Who wants to see me make an entirely unsupported analogy between the Cambrian Explosion and spontaneous symmetry breaking?
Also here is an interesting post on possible reasons for the Cambrian Explosion, which, yes, is technically on LessWrong, but is on a hosted personal blog rather than the forums and isn't by Yudkowsky.

 

New plan: if I ever revamp my tumblr, I'm going to delete all of the existing posts and have the entire thing be just a single post reading "If you're making a callout for me and need receipts for things I said, did, believe, or condone, this is the post you should link".

Except by this point I'm pretty sure that I've forgotten my password, so who knows if it will ever happen.

Don't read my tumblr, kids, there's nothing of value there. It won't even give you radiation poisoning.
*shrek voice*: it won't even give you radiation poisoning

 

I'm not sure if I've ever heard the original "Spooky Scary Skeletons", only the Tombstone remix.

 

Sudden realization that it makes sense for GPT to be able to count but not add reliably. Counting is "what comes next" prediction, which GPT was explicitly designed for. Addition is not easily interpretable as "what comes next" without some form of recursion.

 

Last night was probably the least coherent dream I've had in a while. Just a mess of "and now this is happening".
I do kind of wish that I remembered more of the Rationalist children's book that appeared toward the end.