Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

This is fucking hilarious and also kind of inevitable: the Vienna Tourist Board advertises nude art on OnlyFans after getting kicked from Facebook and Instagram.

 

When you shift one of your monitors six inches relative to your other monitor and now you can't find anything on either screen.

 

If I got shot by a time-traveler, I would simply not die.
RIP to past me, but I'm... wait a minute

 

But seriously, how does Gawr Gura manage to shriek a pure sine wave?

 

So it seems that when someone says "Coq" I manage to spell it correctly in my head. Good to know.

 

Who was responsible for naming Street Road and how can I get them put in charge of naming more things?

 

It occurs to me that a lot of differential equations, for example the heat equation, are smooth but only in one direction.

 

When I was in high school, one of my friends wrote his final paper for English class on the subject of lying, and told people that he fabricated all of his sources because why wouldn't you, and fortunately the teacher was a cool enough dude that he found this funny.

Anyway, this is hilarious: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty

 

When you are almost but not completely certain that you recognize a location in a video, and suddenly it hits you: since when was that yet another tea shop?

 

Okay, despite me somehow thinking that NFT sites would have someone around savvy enough to be able to actually effectively disable right-click save, it turns out this may not be the case? I mean, I'm happy that they're ineffectual because NFTs are dumb and bad, but still. I guess I'm still stuck in the 2009-2010 realm where new blockchain stuff had to be built by people who actually knew technical stuff and weren't put together by crypt kiddies.

 

I'm pretty sure he understands passive-aggression but I am not entirely sure he understands sarcasm. Or maybe my "I'm being insincere" tone is becoming harder to detect? Or maybe he's just trolling me, which I would totally respect if that's the case.

 

When you miss walking into a catch-22 because the people who put it in place don't know who you are.
On the other hand, it was my catch-22 to walk into, so I feel a little bad for the guy who got yelled at in my place. Hopefully he can direct the yellers my way next time because he's almost completely uninvolved here. Poor guy wasn't even supposed to be at that meeting.

 

Vagueblogging not because I'm trying to be vague but because I'm reacting to a reaction to the debate in question as reading the debate directly would probably make me cry, but anyway:

The argument that a sci-fi replicator has to know the position and velocity of every single atom of every food item in a recipe is dumb. It doesn't need to know all of that stuff, because we don't need to know all of that stuff! Sure, it needs to know a lot more than a standard recipe, but a steak isn't a specific arrangement of atoms, it's a gigantic equivalence class of arrangements of atoms, and each of the arrangements are extremely highly structured, and generally in the same way, and humans don't care about the differences! You don't need to make each grain of rice unique!
It's not like the teleporter, which needs to get a specific person from point A to point B without losing their sense of continuity of self. Nobody cares about whether their steak is perfectly identical to any given steak! The food replicator doesn't need to be that precise!

Also you don't have to treat every single recipe as completely independent! Recipes have ingredients in common, and you only need to store each ingredient once and then you can refer to it, like in actual human-readable recipes!

The point is that there's a hierarchy of structures and at each level there's only maybe a few thousand things. And so you don't need to store bazillions of combinations, you just need to store a few thousand for each level of the hierarchy, and each of the things you need to store are themselves short descriptions in terms of the lower levels of the hierarchy. At the bottom of the hierarchy you get things like fats and proteins, which I would hope would all be mapped out by the fucking 24th century or whenever the fuck we're supposed to have food replicators.

But it's like, whoever says that the information compression can't be done the way it is for audio or visual data compression has clearly never actually worked with a neural net encoder-decoder compression setup because it's exactly the same idea: don't store all the exponentially-many combinations, you idiot, build a hierarchy of feature sets and store those.

Whether or not the food tastes any good is a different question, and in particular is a question of the people who are putting recipes into the food replicator, which is different from the abilities of the food replicator itself.


Anyway, a lot of arguments about sci-fi technology would be interesting except for the people who are having the arguments. But I guess you could substitute "sci-fi technology" with a lot of subjects and the corresponding statement would be true, so whatever.

If you want hard sci-fi read a physics paper.

 

New computer. Everything looks weird. All the keys are in slightly different places. I have a functional down button again.

 

Ah yes, my favorite song: shoes in the dryer

 

I think the real problem with the NFT conversation is that people, people who are both for and against NFTs, are getting hung up on the things that the NFTs are attached to. The NFT is not the gif or whatever; the NFT is the statement of ownership. Yes, you say, statement of ownership of the thing, but that's exactly the point I'm making: it's not about the thing. It's about the statement. Not ownership of the thing, no, that's a fool's game, and why the NFT space is so full of idiots. You don't own the thing. You own the statement. The statement happens to be about owning a thing, because NFTs were designed either by idiots or scammers or idiot scammers, but that's not the point. The point is that you own a statement.

Consider a signature scheme. A signature scheme does several things: it establishes the identity of the signer, it establishes the authenticity of the message, it can establish the integrity of the message, etc. You can turn it into a simple identification method by setting the message to be, for instance, the empty string, or a picture of a monkey. The message doesn't matter; the point is the identification. The message is merely an artifact of the original signature scheme.

An NFT is a financial instrument that ostensibly has something to say about a picture of a monkey. But the really value is not the picture of the monkey, or the ownership of the picture of the monkey. The picture of the monkey is very fungible. The NFT is the signed, validated statement. What the statement says is irrelevant, merely an artifact of the original idea.

This is not to say that NFTs are actually good at all; most financial instruments are awful, and NFTs have the added benefit of environmental damage. But while the NFT discourse on both sides manages to entirely miss the point, I'd be surprised if there weren't people who understood that NFTs are like the famous works of art used as money laundering: the thing is incidental. What you're selling is the statement.

Anyway, NFTs are dumb and bad.

 

Part of the problem is that I'm trying to think of "pop music" as one monolithic thing, despite the fact that I listen to about one pop song every two years, and that's not nearly enough to keep up with the pace that music changes at. Like, yeah, all the pop created at a given moment might sound like it's all copying from the same sources [disputable] but those sources change very quickly! Pop is rather shameless in what it will pull from, so there's no unity over time.
So what happens is that I end up vaguely remembering Weeknd as of two years ago and Carly Rae Jepsen as of ten years ago and Backstreet Boys as of twenty years ago and trying to build a "pop music sound" from those, all filtered through the lens of my own musical tastes. No wonder this isn't working.

 

Having said that thing about art-as-money-laundering, I think I'm finally starting to understand why people consider art forgery to be bad. I don't agree at all, but I'm starting to understand some of the valuation process. Again, it's not about the painting. It's about authenticity and uniqueness, which happen to be attached to a painting and a painter but only because authenticity and uniqueness have to be attached to stuff. If someone could sell pure authenticity, pure provenance, that at least would be a bit more honest (which would make it less useful for money laundering).

 

I had a vaguely interesting dream last night, wherein I was the close friend of the heir to a robotics company. We were somewhere deep in the main facility, I'm guessing several floors underground, when the building got attacked. Our only escape route was an experimental time travel device. Look, this was surprisingly coherent for one of my dreams, don't ask questions.
Anyway, we end up some time in the past, but this was a multigenerational company so it was the same building and everything and we just had to find a way to get the time machine working again. Unfortunately, my friend noticed the prototype prosthetic hands on display in the main hall and kept pulling his glove off his own prosthetic hand to compare them and probably alerting everyone around us that he was wearing one of the prototypes, except a more advanced version but still clearly made by the company.
We managed to make our way to the library to hide, except then one of the shelves lifted up and in a waft of fog (because of course every time a door opens in a technology company there's a fog machine behind it somewhere) the head of security stepped through, followed by a pack of utahraptors, because that's what the company apparently used for security in the past.
We were held in place in the library while the CEO, my friend's grandfather, was summoned to interrogate us. While my friend was useless in the face of his grandfather (not because of said grandfather; he was just kind of an airhead in general), I explained that we were from the future and all of that, and to prove that we were in fact from the future, my friend and I pulled apart a couch where we had hidden the newest robot prototype that the company had made right before the attack.
As the robot unfolded into a standing position, I realized that my friend's father, who was the CEO of the company in our time, had designed the robot to have the appearance of some dead female relative, and that I really hoped it was a dead sister of his and not a dead mother but either way grandfather didn't look happy to see said robot. And then the dream ended.

Anyway, the interesting bit of all of this, and perhaps the most telling part about when this dream was written, was when I had to remember what year we had travelled back from, and in my anxious haste to figure out a year that sounded futuristic enough I ended up saying "1995".