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The new novel "Singularity Soon" is now online https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/333795.html June 27th, 2022 A detailed description of the events that will lead to the Technological Singularity sometime next year. Some degree of problematic realism can't be avoided: The main character in particular is just not an acceptable personality type. In many ways, his behavior is socially risible. But these deeply flawed traits are exactly what we must be aware of in order to guard against a panoply of still unimaginable threats. Warning: some readers may be triggered. | THE INDEX | CHAPTER ONE | Leave a commentShareFlag WORK IN PROGRESS 20220420 1410 The leading novel about a theoretical way the Technological Singularity could happen MUCH sooner than anyone expects has entered a critical phase in the storyline: NEW BOOK STARTED! 20210308 0316 https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/333232.html It may take a while to get done, but there should be a steady stream of intermittent updates: wattpad.com/Flaglandbase It's basically 100% science fiction stories. I already published one SF novel and three SF short story collections, so why not a fourth one? I have also started preparations on my next non-fiction book, AND a giant all-inclusive website to host all my content (that may be a while off). 2 new science fiction short stories! 20201226 1518 https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/332837.html You will not have read them before. ATHEIST JIHAD: https://www.wattpad.com/1000116376-atheist-jihad BUDDHA'S WHEEL: https://www.wattpad.com/1001260490-buddha%27s-wheel-part-1 This seems like a good time to start a new religion 20200413 0817 https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/332450.html It's the age of anti-news, an abnormal pause in an era in which not much was happening anyway. We shouldn't waste this opportunity for important reflection. - Religion exists for a simple reason: to promise safety against the infinite number of things that could and eventually must go wrong. Or as I like to call it, the Torture Problem, the dark heart of the Tortureverse. Ultimately, the only problem in reality is the inability to commit suicide. So the first rule is that there should be no such thing as involuntary existence. More fundamental than the Golden Rule is this ultimate law of non-existence (though all laws will eventually be broken). Under the grim tenets of Malism, this seems like an impossible goal, and is therefore religious in nature. - It would have to be an anthropic religion, and secular. The problem with gods is that (logically speaking) most god-level minds must be as stupid as they are immense. Imagine the list of all possible minds. Almost all these minds would be infinite themselves. Virtually all such minds must also be infinitely defective: almost but not quite random, just minimally conscious of themselves, and who knows of what uniquely meaningless perceptions. There are simply too many things that can go wrong. - Interestingly, there can be no highest mind. If you try to extrapolate mind sizes and scopes, the trends seem to diverge forever. - An anthropic religion would try to invent universal principles to make the impossible possible. I've already bored readers for years about concepts like the law of maximum connectivity, the gray fog theory, anthropic offramps, etc. Due to their unavoidable vagueness, such notions are ultimately religious in nature. - The first step would be to deal with that pesky fear of death that most religions already share. That means encouraging the development of mind backup technology. My best guess on how to start would be to try to create an endless moment simulation: A full mental description of a human-level mind which remembers an endless past, complete with memories of having already had this exact same thought, innumerable eons ago. A memory fractal of eternal recurrence. It's going to be a long project. New short SF story https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/332149.html 20200403 1024 POSTULOCALYPSE OK I did not expect this https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/331797.html 20200326 1100 So now we've gone from there being no news to negative news. Or rather, the prevention of news. Nothing is happening right now, though eventually something might. Over ten thousand anonymous old people died in southern Europe, and hundreds of middle-aged persons worldwide. That does count as news, like an African famine or massive earthquake in Nepal. I would have expected a planetary emergency to seem more desperately heroic than passively suicidal. Why aren't there natural vaccines? 2:02 AM 3/19/2020 If viruses can't exist outside the body for very long, then people who don't get too close to infected persons should be exposed to many disintegrating viral fragments, alerting the immune system. That suggests the outer coating of successful viruses may have a type of self-destruct mechanism when it's exposed to air, beyond the well-known chemical and temperature effects. There are more and more imposters in science 20200314 0423 See my previous blog post for an example of completely contentless gibberish. It does have various expected buzzwords. A longer article about this theme: https://blog.jim.com/science/the-reproducibility-crisis/#comments An age of slow decay https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/330578.html 20191220 2:17 AM 12/20/ A perfectly meaningless week in a profoundly meaningless era. Meanwhile, not a peep about any of the real problems, starting with the endless evils of interface friction. The face of Satan is no longer Gates but Google. Stealing money is worse than murder https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/330302.html 20191201 1512 Money is crystallized suffering. Based on my own observations, an unbelievable amount of suffering. It's insane the hell you have to go through to get money. Murder meanwhile is the end of all suffering (we hope). It could be painful, but here we're assuming it's quick. Non-existence, if such a thing is possible, isn't bad at all. I suspect the critical amount is surprisingly low - the added suffering of one year's wages at most. The world must have ended some time ago 20191118 1501 That may explain the complete absence of any meaningful news events or social evolution. Or perhaps we're having one of those extremely boring nightmares? All I want to say on this night of the dead https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/329843.html 20191031 2148 What I can not get over is how endlessly and completely EVIL this shit planet is. If I can ever only get one message across, I want it to be that one. This is NOT about its absurdly under-reported sufferings, but about the world's voluntarily chosen evils. It is certainly not about the infinite tortures of the Omniverse we have not yet begun to think about. Multiple blog posts for a newsless era 20191005 1536 Trouble is trivial. All my troubles involved stuff I shouldn't have been involved in, and didn't want to be involved in. The things I did wrong happened in places where I shouldn't have been present, or should just have done nothing. There wasn't enough time. - How does the subconscious work? 99% of memories are "ghost memories". They might be consciously recalled, but never will be. These lost memories affect future thoughts. They are merged into composite preferences and dislikes. We relive the past through common actions and responses. - The Tintin comics Destination Moon and Explorers On The Moon were published in the 1950s. These stories featured a fission-powered rocket (inspired by Von Braun's article for Collier's magazine and Robert Heinlein's film consulting work) that looked like a cross between a V-2 and an Elon Musk pre-prototype. The rocket was mature twenty-second century technology depicted in the middle of the twentieth century. It could accelerate indefinitely at 1G. Normal fission decay products were completely contained by some fictional material invented by Professor Calculus (or recovered from a crashed asteroid in an earlier comic album), before being emitted in one direction without losing any energy, which also cooled the reactor. Perhaps the nuclear particles were "squeezed" through indestructible tubes made of this material. The moon rocket was essentially propelled by emitting a stream of cosmic rays. In the beginning there was gas https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/329373.html 20190907 2314 Actually, this was a few hundred millennia after the beginning. Then a series of increasingly elaborate coincidences ratcheted up the complexity. Eventually, these will lead to an unbelievably complex hyper-civilization filling the observable universe. Then, after undefinable eons of slow decline and decay, there will only be gas again. However, that gas will be slightly different than if all the intermediate complexity had never evolved before decaying again. The purpose of all moral struggles is to lead to a slightly different gas at the end - even though there won't be anyone to measure something so subtle. News rants https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/329145.html?view=423097#t423097 20190907 2243 * Evil is interface friction The Holocaust was really bad, but it doesn't help us to understand evil. To understand evil, we need to look closer to home. Like why do computer printers suck. Why does everything suck? It's never the obvious bad things, but the hidden but vaguely sensed bad things that matter. - * Established universe laziness Prequels and sequels don't necessarily mean the creators care about the characters being recycled for the umpteenth time. The legendary characters are just generic stand-ins for ageless story tropes. They help us skip the backstory to get to the interesting stuff. Except for the top level of the story, the amount of new and original added content is about the same. Too few people care about the top level of the story. That's where imagination lives. - * Coming Soon * Terminator: Dark Fate For this sequel (made with help from James Cameron), it looks like they will bring back a hybrid liquid metal/robotic terminator like in Terminator 3, and a part-human terminator like in the first prequel Salvation. It doesn't look like we'll really learn anything new. Like the physics of telling someone's eye color by touching his shoes. I don't think they can do that even if you spend half an hour in a 5-ton MRI scanner. - * Someone cucked again 8ch.net appears to be gone forever, all because some mass shooter's manifesto was posted there. What is going to replace them? The censors are always winning. We need better and easy to use Darknet software. It's just not happening. A letter from Brenton Tarrant dated July 4, 2019, written in pencil and addressed to "Alan" in Russia, appears innocuous. It discusses a trip Tarrant says he took there in 2015. But the letter also warns a "great conflict" is coming, and uses language that could be construed as a call to arms, the Associated Press reported. https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/christchurch-shooter-letter-4chan-prison/ https://kiwifarms.net/attachments/streamed-from-my-gopro-with-https-_live4-io_v-live4gopro-2350426065176752-mp4.695026/ Jack Arcalon's explanations: Quantum Mechanics over-oversimplified https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/328833.html 20190907 0131 Quantum physics can be explained in ways that are much too simple. The simplest explanation is that everything is sort of "blurry". The next level of over-oversimplification might be that the universe is made of little particles "bouncing" off each other. But the way they bounce is strange: If you bounce balls, you can predict exactly which way they will rebound. If you bounce tiny subatomic particles however, they will bounce differently each time - even if their initial trajectories are EXACTLY the same. But if you repeat this collision many times, the average of all the rebounds will be exactly what each individual collision should have been. This unexplained mystery is at the foundation of reality. Solo: A Star Wars Story https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/328577.html 20190906 2353 I borrowed the DVD from the library. It was an exhausting film, all style and little substance. Solo was basically solving the galaxy's problem while being chased by everyone. They reprogrammed a starship with the mind of an android during a fighting retreat. The visuals were nice, but it was totally fake and phony and useless. We learn nothing, and don't get any better. Reality is almost the opposite of this film, and I'm sort of the opposite of Solo. In real life, I took a week to do what should be a ridiculously simple task (changing license plate bulbs). There are tasks related to mandatory bureaucracy that I take longer at than he needs to save the galaxy. We need just the opposite of this film. Mind Backup problems https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/328397.html 20190902 2345 An infinite number of minds are "possible". Most possible minds are meaningless. They are not tied to outside reality. You could describe such a mind as its own universe. They would share none of our concerns, or any real concerns. - However, minds that evolved as a part of a larger universe are more restricted. They have to defend and maintain themselves, within their containing universe. Such minds can only experience a tiny fraction of possible awareness. - A mind in our universe is likely to have a set of rigid goals, also known as its terminal value. To make a Mind Backup copy, we need to capture the essence of a mind in maximum detail. That would be the expression of the mind's highest values. These values could be recreated as one or more "ideal" settings or situations from across their lifetime. Each setting would only have to be a detailed description - so long as some future hypercomputer could use this description to create an endless moment simulation. The Hard Problem of consciousness 20190804 0355 The Hard Problem only seems hard because the mind is an open-ended process, while thoughts are momentary. They're temporary and incomplete models of reality. Consciousness cannot be understood at any instant. The inscrutable vagueness of consciousness represents all its provisional knowledge. You could say human awareness relies on virtual memory, and the strangeness is a false memory. Consciousness seems complex because it's only made of simple parts. Does anyone know where you can see the Christchurch video? https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/327640.html 20190722 7:34 AM Censorship is total. It's like the Body Snatchers took over the world. Just what is going on here? More to come. (Anonymous) It's hard to find, but still up at: https://kiwifarms.net/attachments/streamed-from-my-gopro-with-https-_live4-io_v-live4gopro-2350426065176752-mp4.695026/ My greatest mistake predicting the future: https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/327895.html 20190724 23:42 I thought progress was like an endlessly multiplying universal solvent, improving everything it touched. That meant ways would be invented to make both people and society smarter. The self-guiding hand of progress would regularize and rationalize every group and individual like magic. - Yeah, I was wrong about that. In reality, browsers are SLOWER now than 10 years ago, because of endlessly multiplying crapware thoughtlessly added by malevolent computer programmers (but I repeat myself). No news is bad news https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/327222.html 20190609 7:50 AM 6/9/ The boredom singularity approaches with every day of nothing to report. Looks like the world will end with a whimper, in ice. 76 days and counting . . . 20190530 0838 It's official: all news has stopped. The most boring period in human history shows no sign of ever ending at this point. I don't blame Trump personally, but he seems to have figured out a way to absorb the world's news-generating potential for himself. FoxNews is nothing but Washington talking heads now. comments posted: To be fair, the news may have really stopped with the hijacked airliner terrorist attacks, but there were a few echo news stories after that, like the Columbia crash, Michael Jackson's death, and a few terrorist shootings. But now it all seems to be winding down for good. My idea of paradise Is to be left alone. WWJAD? https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/326895.html 20190319 A magazine article about some Swiss guy and his girlfriend who stole about a billion dollars worth of old artworks: https://www.gq.com/story/secrets-of-the-worlds-greatest-art-thief He found it surprisingly easy to steal paintings and other artifacts from dozens of European museums and dealers. It could take several visits to case and prepare the scene. He put up signs like "removed for restoration", and sometimes the theft wasn't noticed for weeks. Then they hid all the stuff in his locked room in his mother's house. When he got arrested, his mother, who had known nothing about the crimes until then, burned all the paintings, and tossed the artifacts in a canal. This being Europe, the bitch got off with a slap on the wrist. Just so everyone knows who I am: for that crime, I would shoot his mother in the head. drive by blogging 20190228 1548 Checking my old records it turns out the world has always sucked about as much as it does now. The Net has continued the illusion of the Flynn Effect, masking our ongoing genetic cognitive decline. Drive by blog post coming 20190123 1515 Busier than ever, but may have time to post first impression soon Jordanetics: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity's Greatest Thinker 20181210 1008 A new book by Vox Day. Jordan Peterson's type of intellectual complexification impresses the mainstream masses. That reminds me of that time when I zoned out a Noam Chomsky appearance and suddenly it was much later. https://infogalactic.com/info/Jordanetics He died 20181201 0758 The last post at the Wimminz blog (linked from the side bar) was eight months ago. A comment from someone claiming to be his wife or girlfriend strongly suggests there won't be any more posts ever. Online oblivion is sudden. The motto seems to be stay out of the hospital. A moment of silence for a lost dissident: - https://wimminz.wordpress.com/2018/03/22/death-dodging/#comments - Speaking of pessimism, there's a great post at Grey Enlightenment: - http://greyenlightenment.com/de-motivational-talks/ - We need vastly more pessimism in our lives. As written many times in this blog, the universe is infinitely evil, while our world is maximally evil. It's as bad as it can get away with. We all come up with our own solutions. I have mine, you have yours. Christianity may or may not be helpful for normal people, even though it's wrong. It's probably less bad than the camouflaged Marxianity endorsed by mainstreamers like George H. W. Bush. Looks like Hell needed another devil 181020 1423 So one of my torturers has died. In a world of endless evil, even evil must sometimes perish. Paul Allen was partially but directly responsible for Microsoft Windows's deliberately defective paradigm, endlessly extending crippleware based on cancerously bloated code. He will continue to torture me from beyond the grave with every screen stutter and frozen mouse click. He's torturing me right now as I'm trying to write this blog post. Been very very busy 181015 0118 No time to write more I believe in the paranormal 180614 0903 (for real) To me, the paranormal is something inexplicable that also has to be real. To be real it has to be undeniable. It's the questions I can never get answered. - Suppose there were always UFOs moving through the sky, big purple disks gliding under, over, and through the clouds in seemingly random directions . . . but for some reason no one else will admit to seeing them, no matter how many times I point them out. At some point you know they can't be illusions, or your existence might as well be an illusion. - This is the perfect description of my life. Something is happening that I CANNOT understand, but no one will admit to its existence. Instead of purple UFOs the thing that cannot be explained, and my best candidate for a genuine anomaly extant in this world, is the near-universal acceptance of evil bureaucracy. the Low Tax Party 20180521 The libertarians should have given up in 2004. No one is buying what they are selling. They should adapt to the USA's and the Western world's ongoing disintegration. Libertarianism starts with a proper focus on the self. You can't control other people, and absolutely cannot change them. White people can't safely live with black people without as yet uninvented security systems. Taxes are a delusion of a majority to justify the mass-imposition of irreconcilable values. The Libertarians should rename themselves the Low Tax Party. That would be their golden promise. No matter what, never break it. New comics imprints! 180501 17:48 They include titles that have been banned by both Marvel and DC. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Dark_Legion_Comics - https://infogalactic.com/info/Arkhaven_Comics Infogalactic articles on political evolution 180425 18:52 https://infogalactic.com/info/Dysgenic_evolution - http://infogalactic.com/info/No-go_area - https://infogalactic.com/info/Male_surplus - https://infogalactic.com/info/Generation_Zyklon - Read it here first Why the paranormal seems real 180412 18:56 Whenever something inexplicable appears to happen, the normal laws of probability should still apply. That means that for every apparently paranormal occurrence, there would have to be many "almost paranormal" incidents: It briefly looks like something strange happened, but then we can see what was actually going on. By integrating these near misses, we should realize the falsity of real anomalies. Maybe there are too few near misses, or else awareness deliberately removes the perception of them. Infogalactic on mind paradoxes 180407 2201 https://infogalactic.com/info/Infinity_and_the_human_mind - https://infogalactic.com/info/Optimizers_and_Multipliers - Is awareness a trade-off between emotion and intellect? Awareness has been hypothesized to be the emotional representation of many incompletely defined facts. If they are completely defined, there's no need for awareness. The more feeling, the more awareness, but the less intelligence. The only way to understand awareness may be to minimize it away, just one tiny thing after another. On pessimism 180331 07:15 The sum total of reality is REALLY bad. Inconceivably bad even. More horrible than anything we could ever imagine. The only appropriate response may well be endless screaming, like that "ultimate trip" soundtrack in 2001. I don't approve of this fact or of reality. Victims of evil people know that hatred is defeat. The bad guys have already won. The problem with war may be that it's not bad enough. Instead of ending something it creates worse things. The theme of this blog is that people only have to worry about the world if they agree with it. Otherwise, it's the world's problem. Evil is mass agreement. If the world is evil, contempt is freedom. Hate is also the only thing that can reliably overcome fear. No one in the history of the world has hated bureaucracy more than me, in my case including the Microsoft, Firefox, Javascript software interfaces. They're so goddamn slow. Their programmers are demonpeople. I hereby officially name the sum total of everything that exists (the Tegmark Level 4 Multiverse) as the Tortureverse. IG original entries 180311 22:04 All stuff banned from Wikipedia. https://infogalactic.com/info/Urban_youths https://infogalactic.com/info/It%27s_OK_to_be_white https://infogalactic.com/info/The_Cathedral BLACK HISTORY MONTH 180228 23:59 A brilliant series on Occidental Dissent http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2018/02/19/black-history-month-2018-the-only-miracle/ http://www.occidentaldissent.com/category/black-history-month-resources/ Proof that the world is evil 180228 Actually, I have two proofs: Windows 10 and Firefox. These pieces of shitware are so satanically, demonically slow, that the people that made them must be actual devils. I click and I click and I click and nothing happens. - The reason is the bloated code (bloatware) that is included in these programs. In the future it will be revealed as spyware, and there is no way to stop it. The strangest part of evil is the mass acceptance of evil. Mass acceptance of evil is the strongest force in the world. Why we need extreme right-wing political figures 180106 1637 To help provide cover for far-right and alternative right political figures of course. Nothing as useful as an extreme version of yourself to compete with. Infogalactic entries 180101 0810 https://infogalactic.com/info/Lifelogger_(device) - https://infogalactic.com/info/Jack_Arcalon - https://infogalactic.com/info/Angry_White_Male:_How_the_Donald_Trump_Phenomenon_is_Changing_America_-_and_What_We_Can_All_Do_to_Save_the_Middle_Class - The proposed quantum hypermind article has not been approved yet. The details of the process wherby many similar but non-identical mind copies recombine and interfere are too vague, and involve too much original research. Interestingly, this process may undergo a phase shift above a certain complexity level, with mind-paths splitting so abundantly they lose any common mind-like essence. What we call minds may not be practical beyond this size (meta-minds will be). This could also be the start of the "Gray Fog" evolution. A website hacked by Scientology's OSA spy agency: 171225 1047 http://scientologyreviews.com They had a lot of accurate reviews about paid Scientology brainwashing services (the verdict: feels pleasantly numb at first, then an inexorable descent into madness). Seems like some operative has somehow redirected all their content to a white page of death. I've never had a computer powerful enough to go on Facebook 171212 Or most other "popular" social websites for that matter. Currently I run an Acer AXC-704G-UW61 that just keeps freezing and crashing and nothing ever loads right. It's listed at Walmart's site for $260 but I bought it in 2016 for $100 less than that. What kind of evil Satanscripts are Zuckerberg's devils loading in the background? On tablets it appears to be even worse. Anyway, that has been my online experience since the twentieth century. The evils of the world are as inexplicable as they are endless. We need to think and feel about this more. This whole century has been shit so far 171201 22:32 Been checking out the available deals on desktop computers. Really shows how progress is stagnating. $400 for 4Gb/1TB. As far as I'm concerned, there has been no meaningful improvement since the late 90s for the things I want, only slick crap like useless touchscreens. - It's like the whole world has early onset dementia, and can't even notice it. The future of Deep Learning https://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/321202.html 171129 19:00 Deep Learning is just an extension of perceptron technology. Perceptrons came close to changing history in the 1950s, before being inexplicably derailed in the first AI Winter. This derailment may actually have been an anthropic shadow. - Deep Learning goes one level higher than old school perceptrons, by combining a layer of them to become highly skilled at one specific task. Now we have to go one level higher still. Imagine multiple layers of perceptrons that have been trained to adapt to learn ANY task. A universal Deep Learner that could learn to do many different things. That layer of layers may become the first simple artificial mind. - It could do this by becoming aware of the differences between very similar tasks. Imagine going on the exact same trip on two occasions, but with two completely different goals. Even with a blank mind, the experience will still be different. This difference could be called awareness, some sort of ghost knowledge. This may only be the minimum requirement for awareness. - Dreams show that minds can still be aware when some parts are inactive. Full awareness may be made of simpler instances of awareness all the way down, like combining two compact cars into a limousine, or perhaps like traffic. - According to Schopenhauer, higher awareness derives from will. Will does not derive from awareness: (source) If you move around until you bump into something, you only feel it when something stops your movement. You can only see something because you can't see through it. You are only aware of something when it resists your will. - That's the source of pain and pleasure. Pain is stymied expectation (which should be reduced), and at a higher level it is having to do something. Will means purpose, some set of goals. Minds tend to try to combine these into fewer but higher goals. - Ultimately, all minds should reach for the highest possible terminal goal. Biological Leninism 171115 12:41 A major post on Bloody Shovel just explained communism. Turns out it was just an alliance of marginal groups banding together to displace and enslave a smaller successful group. - https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/ Life is horror 171031 18:29 . . . a sense of overwhelming doom caused by the awareness of the immensity of the lost past - and that's when every other tractable problem has been solved. It's easy to misunderstand people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as if they're thinking that everything is wonderful now, but just can't get over how terrible things were back then, and that's why everything is actually horrible now. In fact they dislike the way things are now, so we have that in common. Which brings me to the Others, all your parallel versions in other universes. You've already lived through World War Three. In many inevitable futures you will be destroyed. This is all much worse than it sounds. And yet in some possible future we must all exist forever, assuming the rate of expansion can exceed the error rate. It will take the ruthless elimination of all deviations from the master plan, as tirelessly multiplying improvements create ever more errors and hidden flaws. At the core of immortality will be endless suicide. Halloween post: could we find the anomaly? 171031 07:57 There is ultimate reality, the best possible theory, the best extant theory, hypothesis, conjecture, speculation, and then this blog. Here we have discussed many aspects of the Ancestor Simulation theory. Popularized crudely in The Matrix films, it's also known as the Brain In A Vat theory. The conclusion is that our world is probably not a simulation, but there is reason to be skeptical. The world looks completely real. It appears to be 100% consistent, but it only has to be just realistic enough to fool each observer at that moment. Could there be something wrong? Maybe even obviously fake once it's been pointed out? Think back about a news story you happened to brush against in real life. Later, you may recall elements of the story like ghosts in your memory, sliding to their destiny like pieces on a chessboard. This unexpected consistency can seem stranger than an anomaly. Whowever is in charge of this simulation is fully committed. Or are they? Could there be clues that are meant to be found rather than accidental glitches? As someone shadowbanned by reality, I suspect a mass-conformity field. It's best expressed as the inexplicable emergence of common beliefs and attitudes. We know humans are imitators above all, but they don't quite have to be so NPC about it. Newest entry on Infogalactic: SJW Convergence 171029 07:34 Ratchet or racket? This may be how the world is being made politically correct one group at a time. - https://infogalactic.com/info/SJW_convergence - New blog linkThe universe is stranger than we CAN imagine. High quality physics and political analysis: https://motls.blogspot.com/ Infogalactic and the curse of government controlled healthcare 171027 19:27 In a world made of scams, one of them must be the greatest of all. Evil is just another name for mass consensus. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Health_care_monopoly Infogalactic: how divorce is used to exploit producers 171023 08:14 Humanity is based on wealth extraction. Takers and givers must both play their assigned roles. Political correctness is like peacock feathers. But why be a peacock? - https://infogalactic.com/info/Divorce_rape Intensely invisible: Infogalactic on cutting-edge political controversies 171019 21:31 Closed groups expand by imposing immense costs on the rest of society. The rest of society responds by kissing the group's ass, and kicking the ass of anyone who dares to object (the story of Islam in the West). - The curse of the Lost Boys: https://infogalactic.com/info/Lost_boys_(populations) - Let me be very clear about Lost Boys: I would kill them before allowing outside groups to impose a gender imbalance on the rest of society by exporting their "surplus" males. However, that would never happen. In any hypothetical scenario where I could kill Lost Boys, it would be much easier to shut down the group, force the group to change practices (for example by aborting their surplus male fetuses), or isolate their expelled surplus men in a humane manner. - The curse of race censorship: https://infogalactic.com/info/Race_censorship Liberal lies of omission seem to be evenly split between virtue signalling and genuine utopian hopes. I'm strongly opposed to the concept of gender reassignment in society 171018 19:12 Don't get me wrong I'm not unsympathetic though I don't claim to be a "nice guy" (too lazy for that). I understand that reality is infinitely evil, and transgenders are one of reality's infinite number of victims. Do no harm is my motto. Transgenders do harm because they contaminate the dating pool. If you go on a dating site, you can't know they are really female. This doubt alone makes it less likely that eligible matches are contacted. I find that unacceptable. There should be no taxpayer or insurance support for transgender therapy. The latest Infogalactic articles 171016 21:22 If you have a new book coming out, be sure to start an article about it on Infogalactic. Do this even if Wikipedia won't allow an article on that subject. - Alt*Hero: a new super-hero comics universe: https://infogalactic.com/info/Alt_Hero And it's not a universe with left-wing laws of physics. - The new book by Scott Adams: https://infogalactic.com/info/Win_Bigly:_Persuasion_in_a_World_Where_Facts_Don%27t_Matter Persuasion is very strange indeed, and driven entirely by emotion. The universe is full of self organizing matter 171015 19:49 Most of it is too organized to be considered life, an endless branching of dead-ends. On Earth there are strange spheres and ovals made of rock, or right-angled slabs that look like poured concrete, or giant underground crystal shards. On other worlds there are much much stranger and more complex things. Perhaps pseudo-crystals that look like plants and fractals, or geometric clouds. Here is a fictional example of such complexity (In this case, the sub-life pattern establishes itself on top of existing minimally primitive life, similar to the seemingly unlikely process by which humans became intelligent.) - Life has used up most of the spare complexity on Earth, similar to the theorized Archeomorphs, the proliferation of hyper-organized structures that may have used up 99+% of our universe's complexity in the first moments of time after the Big Bang. None of these complex structures are alive though. What if all life on Earth is just a higher type of dead-end? Might explain everything that has ever gone wrong. Somewhere in the universe there may be "hyper-life" coming our way. ---- The most alien aliens in scifi are... Whatever entity put the mathematical message in the number pi at the end of the novel 'Contact' by Carl Sagan (a thought too complex for the movie). Anything that can change arithmetic is beyond all limits. - In second place, whatever beings controlled the monoliths in the movie version of '2001'. Infogalactic articles on anthropic intelligence 171012 THIS is one of the greatest mysteries. Or at least it is the greatest mystery that almost no one has ever thought let alone talked about: - https://infogalactic.com/info/Paradoxes_of_complexity - IG: The paradox of identity. In the future, the concept of the self will merge into the concept of a "group self". The unitary timeline of perception known to all humans will be replaced with many fragmentary (and often temporary) timelines that retain shared intellectual assets and goals. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Closest_continuer The best and the worst things in life are oddly alike 171009 20:55 Both involve a situation where something horrible did NOT happen. For example, someone made a stupid mistake, but wasn't killed through blind luck. That may be even worse than actually getting killed. At the other extreme, I know nothing better than when some horrid bureaucratic rigamarole finally comes to an end. - The only things that would be better or worse are drugs or torture. Amazing how the nullification of suffering can feel so different depending on the circumstances. Just another day in an evil reality. Most of life is fooling yourself that the end is finally near. The mind is just an escape plan. Some smart but lazy people believe the reason they don't have children is to save money. They probably wish they could not have more children more often, to get more savings like an ATM. - Why did the Vegas shooter do it?Obviously, he was enraged and wanted to take revenge. What was he so mad about? How about everything that one could reasonably be mad about put together. - example of an IG improved article- https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Anti-racism&type=revision&diff=725312151&oldid=725312014 New non-fiction book by Vox Day: "SJWs Always Double Down: Anticipating the Thought Police" 171005 17:56 The number of workplace false accusations and legal harassments is exploding through the roof. At least they are if you're at the bottom of the victimhood hierarchy (i.e. a white dude). Just how much worse can things get? Answer: very. It's called virtue signalling, which leads to a purity spiral, which leads to a Left Singularity, which leads to oblivion. The only question is whether the same people whose tolerance bred the abuse will suddenly start fighting back. Almost as if they subconsciously wanted that to happen. - Link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Double-Down-Anticipating-ebook/dp/B075BGGKLG - Infogalactic article: https://infogalactic.com/info/SJWs_Always_Double_Down:_Anticipating_the_Thought_Police What the heck is a Knowledge Core? 171003 21:40 A new data management paradigm to automatically sort, organize, compile, and present complex information. We won't know how we got along without them. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Knowledge_core The most correct explanation is an oversimplification 171001 08:36 Sure the explanation will be wrong, but the question itself was wrong. What they asked was not really what they wanted to know. Intelligence is a matter of assembling metaphors. That is what may eventually replace Wikipedia. - The current explanations are not oversimplifications but just incomplete. How does a plane's wing push the air down if it's flat underneath? Air curving over the top of the wing is said to speed up, causing it to push down less, but bounced off the top off the wing it should generate downward force. The best way to understand it would be to simulate just two air molecules, above and below the wing. Why do fast-flying aircraft have swept wings? They are said to prevent air from moving supersonically in relation to the wing. When a plane goes twice as fast it has twice the momentum (energy) but may have four times the lift. Other "unexplainable" examples are holograms, special relativity, DNA, computers, quantum mechanics, magnets. InfoGalactic article on the highest purpose in reality 170927 18:37 The universe may well be infinitely evil. I strongly disagree with reality, but you can't fight something infinite. No more than you can fight the deliberately defective software that is the bane of my existence. Or can you? Evil is a fundamental force. The Holocaust was bad for the same reason that computer printers are bad. The ultimate choice may be between suicide and despair. And yet there may be one justification for deliberately creating suffering in order to end it: - https://infogalactic.com/info/Anthropic_off-ramp Uniting the right 170921 07:39 After the gab.ai site moderation controversy and an increase in neo-nazis marching with swastikas, people are saying the alt-right should unambiguously reject the ultra-right. Not so sure about that. Rhetorically, a better response may be to keep the communication lines open, but say it is out of fear. Not because they are scary people, but because whatever is creating them is scary. We simply don't know what's happening. Try to persuade them to switch to NeoReaction, even if there is no chance of that working. Are Jews good or bad? 170917 07:29 That depends on only one thing: Do Jews cause there to be more or less mandatory bureaucracy? If Jews cause there to ultimately be less mandatory bureaucracy than there would otherwise be, then they are good. If they cause there to be MORE mandatory bureaucracy then they are bad. InfoGalactic on cutting-edge political developments 170913 Politics is not about compromise but about winners and losers. Sometimes, the best way to win may be not to play. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Right_accelerationism - https://infogalactic.com/info/Exit_(NRx_concept) Increase in mixed race marriages 170911 07:32 https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/mongrel-nation/ - You see it more and more often at the supermarket: single white women with brown children. What's going on here? There is evidence that potential partners of a different race look better than potential partners of the same race - if they are objectively equally unattractive. Almost everyone's subjective ideal partner (if one were available, which is almost never the case) would still be of the same race. Blacks and Asians also may appear to age better than whites. Meanwhile, society is changing and not for the better. Social change is rarely an improvement. It merely provides chaos for evolution to act upon. The only hope is technology. On the USA/North Korea ICBM crisis 170909 18:11 This is serious business. Even a small nuclear war could trigger a massive die-off, complete with mass suicides in many countries. If I was Trump (assuming the South Koreans went along), I would make reunification the core of the negotiations. It's the only thing that might work at this point. The political capital of the reunited state would be Pyongyang (mostly symbolic), and the current North Koreans would be assured that everything they have accomplished would be maintained or continued. Legally speaking, they would pretend the south joined the north. DPRK conscripts get demilitarized, but officers can keep their jobs in the unified armed forces. Travel between north and south would have to be restricted until 2045 to get their economies synchronized. The monstrous Kim could take five billion out of his bank account and live anywhere he wants - except in the current DPRK. That part might also have to be renegotiated. He would have to be defanged without being significantly inconvenienced. That makes it both harder (we're dealing with absolute unpersuadability here) and easier (if only he could be gotten rid of). China would be promised the USA would reduce its military presence in Korea, and no American troops would enter the north, though Chinese troops might. The missile program would be converted to commercial satellite launchers. I would even let them keep their nukes under a unified command. After a year they could review whether to get rid of them. They might or might not need them to keep China at bay. IG: self-aware patterns 170907 08:23 Awareness involves the ability to change memories; to sort and improve them, to merge them, to make them permanent or to allow them to fade out. Not voluntary, but the after-effect of the churning mind. That means awareness is a time-like pattern. It needs time to exist. Surely there couldn't be anything like instantaneous awareness. The time-like pattern could be "virtual", i.e. a digitally complete log of a mind's cogitations would be aware as it was generated, but the existence of the log would also amplify its awareness. The multiversal complexity of even a randomly created mind log would be equivalent to a software-generated mind log. But could a text in and of itself somehow be aware? Yes, but only within itself. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Self-aware_pattern - Meanwhile, if progress continues, there will be an unimaginable awareness explosion sometime around the second half of this century . . . or before. Promises have been made! Based on how evilly bad today's computers are, how often they keep crashing and freezing, how goddam slow they are, that somehow seems unlikely. The existence of Javascript alone is a reason for deepest despair. But just because today's OS/browser programmers are such evil demons who deserve every bad thing that happens to them, doesn't mean they won't stumble on something interesting and unpredictable. Modern SF sucks 170905 18:05 I'm basically cursing because it sucks so much. They don't write science fiction like they used to. Can't buy new fiction in the mindblowing style of Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven ('Rendezvous with Rama', 'Neutron Star') anymore. Michael Crichton came closest. I've barely read any authors who started after 1970, with the exception of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Cory Doctorow. They must have signed a treaty to stop writing about the sense of encountering the truly alien. I mean in a subjective/poetic sense. I don't have patience for characterization or normal emotions and interactions. There are enough complex, fully realized, characters in reality. Let's skip to the good stuff. Characters are less important than original plot and new ideas, which are less important than the strange and unknown possibilities of nature, things bigger than ourselves - where the unimaginable meets the incomprehensible. The truest feeling, the most genuine response to reality is absolute bafflement. That stuff is hard to write. The SF stories I like most are also among the shortest. In the best book ever, The Silence of the Lambs, the story is less relevant than it seems (though it was better plotted than almost any other book). It would be a sin to summarize it because what really matters is the background dread, the subconscious awareness of infinite disorder. Beyond our notion of God, lies the inexhaustible void of Gnon. Potential anomalies may be closer than we realize, challenging our basic perception in possibly taboo ways. There are timelines where McCain's presidency ended last January, and republican nominee George W. Bush defeated democrat Trump. There are mass movements and meme epidemics that control everyone. Most parallel earths are much more primitive, most of the advanced ones are more advanced in the mental sciences. The strangeness starts in the nearest timelines and never stops multiplying. My rule of fiction is my rule of mainstream reality: it's generally crap, to be rejected utterly. Most of reality is not worth writing about from the inside (including all historical fiction and probably fantasy too). Why do that if you don't want to be part of it? It should be described from the outside, like an ant ecology. Free speech is fried 170902 https://dstormer6em3i4km.onion.casa/those-who-supported-freedom-of-speech-and-those-who-did-not/ (link by Jim) - It would be nice if people were fighting back, but there may not be enough true outsiders for that. Could be a dysgenic trend. This confirms what I've always known: the masses are conformity automatons. Usually that's a strength not a weakness. Talking about it won't help. Exposing the truth doesn't matter if the truth is perceived to be popular with most others. Reminds me of the book 'Major League Losers', about how wealthy owners of big league monopolies exploit cities to get free stadiums, tax breaks, and subsidies. A new religion is taking shape that brooks no opposition, call it Panimislam or something. The Eurocrats may eventually order all products must be shariah compliant or pay a jizyah tax. The smartest way to fight a stronger opponent is to exploit his strength against him. A few years ago, the North Korean government moved heaven and earth to try to find someone who tossed anti-Kim brochures from a moving train. The passengers and all those they knew who owned printers were relentlessly interrogated like it was the end of the world. The perps did more damage by causing the regime to waste resources than by spreading their message. Under an insane regime, there are times to act insane. - InfoGalactic articles on the Free Speech Shutdown of 2017: - https://infogalactic.com/info/Deplatforming - https://infogalactic.com/info/Hatreon - https://infogalactic.com/info/Angry_white_dude IG: cults are fundamentally unpredictable 170901 08:40 Both to others and to themselves. That makes them drivers of chaos, and therefore of change. Whatever cult appears next may determine our future, good or bad. It could be a mass movement popularizing cutting edge thoughts. I almost think this process should be manipulated for good, but that didn't work out too well with the Taliban. - relevant example https://infogalactic.com/info/The_Unbreakable_Miss_Lovely Been waiting for something to happen for a looong time, like Obi Wan in the desert . . . 170829 21:34 Starting to think it's wrong to claim that change is slow. Change may be an oxymoron. William Gibson assumed we would be wearing mirrorshades and punk mohawks while driving Mitsubishi hover convertibles by now. Has it really been almost twenty years since the ninth planet was first visited by our spacemen? As I recall they had problems with their sliderules freezing in the low temperatures. Real history is deliberately boring, like depression and poverty. Self-stabilizing failure caused by conservation of intelligence. Gorbachev should have pretended he was actually improving and expanding communism, relabeling entrepreneurship as a form of 'cellular communism'. If something meaningful is going to happen, progress must accelerate. That will take more intelligence, instead of today's trend of concentrating existing intelligence in elite enclaves. If it does happen, it will be like love at first sight. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/prediction-real-estate-values-must-collapse/ What the partial eclipse looked like 170825 18:04 Sometimes you have to see things for yourself to know what they really look like. For example, the appearance of Venus up close (the photos have all been edited to emphasize details), or other "bland" worlds like Titan or Uranus. Most questions don't need to be asked, and many of the rest can't be answered by others. In the case of the partial eclipse, it looked exactly as if you were wearing sunglasses outside, even though you weren't. Another reason for paranormal claims 170824 The world is incredibly, stunningly, boring. Sometimes it gets so boring it becomes dangerous. Then the brain has to make something up. How does that happen? Simple. The weakest signal gets amplified beyond its importance. Thanks to the awesome and reliable power of coincidence, there is usually some available seed. What if there is no weak signal to amplify? Then any deviation will do. The feedback loop that edits our memories into permanence needs to be understood in order to understand awareness. Why the concept of God was invented 170821 08:19 To give the masses something to be secretly angry at of course. Better the Guy in the Sky than the local potentate. Nostalgia is about recurring cycles 170820 07:10 It's about the future not the past. Anticipation and remembrance are more important than experience. I used to advertise the theory that awareness involves reliving past experiences. That is also a goal of nostalgia. However nostalgia is really about hoping to immortalize certain settings. Mind Backup technology, if such a thing is possible, should be an attempt to record the favorite and most important things, a few hundred settings described in full. InfoGalactic: on the only magic that could actually exist 170819 09:50 In the coming century mankind will realize that our shared reality, as revealed by physics, is not some finite-state computer program, but a hyper-sample of everything that exists. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Quantum_magic Shit situations 170818 12:19 There are few things worse than that. Well, torture sure is worse (including conditions like cluster headaches and kidney stones). But what I'm talking about is a type of bureaucratic confrontation. It's when you're trying to persuade some functionary with state-granted authority about some policy that is to your disadvantage and also unfair. You will always lose. It's a nasty and evil situation because it's a failure. Getting treated like shit means being slightly less than worthless. Among other reasons, bureaucracy has been created to prevent people from lying because of selfishness, or because they disagree with power. Like I said, one definition of pain is having to do something. At such a confrontation, neither party wants to be there, but one of them has the power. Does awareness violate entropy? 170817 08:37 The perception of existence itself is pure strangeness. It seems like something from nothing. This may be true for all awareness across reality. Some say that everything that exists must necessarily be balanced by the existence of its opposite. So is there such a thing as anti-awareness or negative awareness? - Perhaps that could happen in areas where aware systems can't exist, because of too much chaos or entropy (that should describe most possible patterns). In theory, most possible awareness should be absurd awareness. The feelings and perceptions would be real, but the associated thoughts wouldn't make sense. This is very much unlike our world, which basically makes too much sense. At the least it's too boring. - So why isn't our existence absurd? Well maybe it is, but we can't rationally tell, since we are irrational to begin with. Other conceivable reasons have also been given. - Or just maybe awareness is necessarily consistent and rational. InfoGalactic: the possibility of frozen awareness 170814 19:47 Could also be the ultimate end of solipsism. https://infogalactic.com/info/Endless_moment_simulation Intelligence is NOT awareness 170813 18:13 Current AI research is not about creating thinking software. It is about solving highly specific tasks. That makes it about ending thought, not starting it. Deep Learning is just a chain of Perceptrons that optimize themselves for ONE highly specific task. Therefore no awareness at all. Which brings us to the HAL solution: only old-school old-fashioned algorithmic programming could provide a framework for generating awareness. You're welcome. InfoGalactic: on fringe science 170811 17:37 Some outsider science is really out there. The problem may be it's not far out enough. https://infogalactic.com/info/Crackpot_theory Links & thoughts 170810 10:53 In the book "The Unknown Warriors" by Nicholas Pringle, British veterans of World War Two tell about their war experiences, and about the Islamic hellhole that the UK is turning into. UK Sharia-resistance activist Tommy Robinson is currently being shut down from social media, while facing worse legal threats than any UK street thug or Muslim robber. They even get Muslims to beat him up in jail. More than a few veterans think the UK allied with the wrong side in WW2. Some say the Holocaust could have been avoided if Churchill had negotiated peace with Germany without disarming. Then Hitler could have invaded the USSR but tried to win over the local populace, and incorporated its provinces into some kind of extended Reich. Could have? Easily. The same way most problems could be ended, at the top. Meanwhile, the BBC tells us that the problem is the UK is not socialist enough. Another right wing encyclopedia: http://www.ency.fyi/en/Main_Page 4gravitons advanced physics blog: https://4gravitons.wordpress.com/ Alfinnextlevel physics blog https://alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/ Original source for the Infogalactic mind scanning methods article: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/04/ My most popular entry ever: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/179180.html SF Novel extract: The Undergoing 170806 He never suspected the great conspiracy existed. It was unthinkable such total deception could exist. But he knew within minutes when it ended. There was a coffin on the curb on trash day. This took several seconds to register. Two houses down, the coffin wobbled slightly on the recycling bin on which it had been placed. The motion was slowing. Just put there moments ago, he thought. This was confirmed by the slamming of the neighbor's door. It had to be empty. Then he noticed the silence. He slowly turned. The street was on a hill that overlooked a stretch of Interstate. It looked different now. The cars had all stopped. It wasn't a traffic jam. They were too far apart, and he saw people walking between the vehicles, like they were switching between cars. Z-Day? he thought. "Thank all we won't be needing those anymore," he heard a garbageman say behind him. There was a crunching sound from the garbage truck. Down the street, someone left their house without locking their door and flagged down a passing car. All the blinds on all the windows had been raised, as far as he could see. Why weren't there any car horns? He waited almost a minute in the disquieting silence until he heard one. "This isn't the Matrix it's all real," a passing cyclist shouted, his voice trailing off as he headed downhill. At that point he remembered he could watch local television with his tablet's built in tuner. It took some fiddling. He crossed the street without looking up. The news anchors were all in the studio this morning, looking animated. RESET DAY the text at the bottom of his screen exclaimed. In the next fifteen minutes, he learned most of what he would know. The news team had a lot to talk about. They were poring over lists, reading out relocation schedules, the names of distribution centers he hadn't heard of, plans to rearrange all urban centers. The President would step down in three weeks. It would take three months to handle all prisoners. Border controls would cease next year. All FAM-groups would get their own channels. Traffic committees were forming everywhere until new roads could be laid out. Vast instructions were to follow. Apparently, people were going to spread out a lot more. He walked downhill as he watched, crossing another street without noticing. There were a few pedestrians, looking more purposeful than usual perhaps. Three times during the broadcast he heard something he immediately filed away for later consideration. "It's symmetry, Joan," the morning newscaster was saying. "This took a lifetime to build up, so the disassembly may take just as long. It's wrong to think that it's easier to destroy than to create." The realization hit like a stream of ice water. Earlier, one anchor had interrupted the broadcast to say what sounded like the "Thorpestrom Epoch" had ended exactly an hour ago. Another mentioned that Thorpestrom set elements were being moved to the desert. There was also a joke about no longer being on the "Thorpestrom Show". His name was Thorpestrom. It was a rather rare name. He had no living relatives and few acquaintances in the area. He stopped in the StoreMart parking lot. No one seemed to be watching. "You won't know which way to run," the text on a MovieBox poster said. Reality was nothing like what he had thought. Humans might not even really exist. The world had always been too boring. Nothing ever happened. That should have tipped him off. At the moment, he cared less about what had happened than about what was going to happen. The store's air conditioning felt artificial. The back was sealed off by some type of black curtain that looked fantastically out of place. "Hello everybody," he said. A housewife glanced up from the cereal aisle. He would have expected paparazzis. Perhaps there never really had been any. He picked up some cans and walked to the register with the pretty checkout lady. He noticed the lottery ticket display was gone. "Do I still have to pay?" he asked. "Of course, all resources must be balanced," she said in a professional voice. "I'm sorry, I guess I forgot my wallet." "Your debit is still in the system. Pin is 2324 right?" "Has everyone been spying on me?" "How is that possible if you were null observer one?" she replied sweetly, as if that question was asked every day. "Would you like to go on a date?" he asked. "Yes, but not with you." He remembered another thing about the television broadcast then. Hearing his own name was so strange he had ignored that detail. Twice, the morning show hosts had mentioned another name. The degradation continues 170801 1937 Twenty years ago, I would have expected that by now computer operating systems and browsers would have been absolutely awesome. Instead, they got turned into crap while being replaced by diabolically constricted "apps". Nothing ever gets better. It just gets replaced. This is truly an evil world. In reality, there's nothing more frightening than stupidity. SF Novel (extract): The Object 170727 by Jack Arcalon - "What does it look like to you?" Tom asked in the sudden bright light. Everyone reacted to the object differently. First impressions seemed to provide an insight to its nature. For that reason, a motorcycle helmet with a black visor had been placed on Rick's head before he was led around the house to the back yard. The helmet hadn't blocked his hearing. "Can we trust him?" someone said far away. "First Contact initiation eleven," Tom had recorded in his phone. Now that the visor was lifted, Rick spoke: "Is it Japanese?" "Why?" Tom was taking notes. The object was some sort of vehicle, that much was clear. It sat perfectly straight on the uneven ground. Behind it a jungle wall of Florida trees like overgrown weeds. "It looks like the result of an equation someone found, that just happens to render into an acceptable . . . whatever this is. A space van." "Why Japanese?" "Anime scenes are so over-composed they don't look like drawings sometimes. This thing is like a computer render from the 1980s made real. Very smooth gradient, the opposite of lustrous." Rick believed people's expectations could be unexpectedly accurate, from the taste of blue ring octopus to the personality of an interview subject. He approached the light gray shape and reached out. As expected the object stopped his hand, but it didn't feel solid. Virtual reality might be like this. - There were seven people in the backyard, current or former students at the local university. They had set up chairs and folding tables behind the house. In the unreality it took him longer than normal to notice the two girls. Rick worked for an unaffiliated college news site, but he was not a student. "Why haven't you guys called in the government?" Rick asked. "I don't think we're supposed to call them. The object would probably disappear. Whoever made this sent it to us to figure out. If we do go public, we'll tell the whole world." Tom spoke less intensely than in his interviews, but he didn't seem tired. If anything he was too calm for the circumstances. He ran the post-libertarian alt-media startup BitEverything and also had a family. His wife didn't know about this though. There was a soft background roar from the distant highway, and the endless chirping crickets. "Let's go inside." Tom slammed an area at the side. It broke open into a dark rectangle and a stair fell from the bottom. Rick looked at the rearranged pieces. A very creative way of making a door. The strangest and most important moment of his life. Nothing that had happened was impossible yet. The object didn't settle when they entered its dim space. - The inside looked even less real, more interior diagram than design. Interesting shapes front, back, and center. Walls marked into grids of different shades. No obvious instruments. The light was even and came from nowhere. The floor was mirror-flat but seemed to grip his shoes like a carpet. Two control chairs waited before the big front window that displayed the sunlit backyard. It seemed very distant somehow. Someone stepped into view and started filming from outside. "Is it crooked?" Rick asked. "The floor is perfectly level inside and out. Last week, it somehow stayed level inside when we cranked the object twenty degrees outside. It's no bigger inside than out though." "It looks bigger, like a van you could live in." Tom turned as he gesticulated, giving the quick tour. He slapped a wall, and a panel fell out that unfolded into a passenger seat. He pulled open another door like a curtain, and a small but complex rest room lit up. "Completely soundproof inside." A thin panel separated a kitchen/living area from the front seats, and what might be an omnipurpose work area. There was a vaguely robotic thing there. "They really know how to fill a space," Rick mused. "Or manipulate it. Have a seat." Nothing he had seen could be called alien. He realized that alien was an entirely human concept. This was not a scifi story but a moving moment. His mind was working too fast to generate stories. - They sat before a windshield that seemed perfectly flat from the inside. From outside, the whole craft (if that was what it was) curved slightly in all directions, not for any aerodynamic reasons. Even the chairs were different, zigzagging plates that conformed perfectly. Rick felt they would hold him in place without seatbelts. The front panel was flat but divided into an uneven grid. Tom swiped a rectangular section and the pieces slid apart. This was beyond any human technology. Now there was a simple control, a white rectangle with a horizontal and vertical slider, and a joystick where they crossed. "X-axis is altitude, Y-axis is velocity," Tom explained. "That's a rather bad design." "Simplest one possible. This one is better:" He unfolded and rearranged and slid away more panels. No hinges, just moving plastic metal. The new control panel looked formidable. Dozens of blue screens lit up, filled with fantastic diagrams. "It adapts itself to each pilot but also makes them more alike. You can also get buttons if you want." Tom pressed some screen icons. "There are symbols but no text," Rick said. "Those symbols are adapted to our deep brain structures so they start making sense after a while. Much better than Windows-W." "Is the object aware? Does it have a mind or something beyond a mind?" "Surprisingly, I don't think it does. It's more of a mind mirror." Now there was a complex but ordered diagram, unreadable but not that strange. Perhaps it reflected Tom's personality. "You came on the right day. We're about set a speed record this afternoon. A quadrillion times the speed of light." "That should take us clear across the universe." "No, just the back yard." - "High speed camera ready, full on in . . . five." Another second passed as the dials on the main laptop counted down. The whole group had gathered on the porch, where control tables were set up under oversized beach umbrellas. To Rick it felt like a party. There was no reason to worry. Whatever this was transcended worry. "Stand back please," the young Asian woman told him. All very professional. There was a whine from the high speed camera, and a laser strobed. It had a very high speed sensor, but not remotely fast enough of course. Rick stared at the object so hard his mind went blank when it wasn't there anymore, like forgetting something. Whatever it was had been filled with background scenery. Actually, the object was on the other side of the yard now. Did it look different? No just a different angle. The blast should have destroyed the universe a quadrillion times over, but Rick somehow suspected the butterfly sauntering between the object's origin and destination was having a bigger effect. "It moved from A to B by passing through all points in between," Henry the grad student physicist assured him. "If only Feynman were here." The doorway opened and Tom got out, staring at his new location. "Well that was anticlimactic," Tom said. The big Russian guy stepped up to slide a hydraulic jack under the object. The compressor came on, and it cranked up slowly. "Object weight is unchanged. Grass has been flattened as if lowered gently from above," he said. - Rick realized why he wasn't afraid, even though his life had changed completely. Death was the end of possibility, but anything was possible now. Eight Hispanic males were found dead in a trailer in a San Antonio mall parking lot 170724 17:36 They were being smuggled into the USA hoping for a better life than would have been possible in the countries previously inhabited by them. It's always men streaming in. The gender imbalance and effective worldwide woman shortage, whether through forms of polygamy or illegal immigration, is just another nail in our coffin. Infogalactic: the alternative to Wikipedia 170722 08:11 Another important upgrade at Infogalactic. They now have a new category for some entries called "verified". The next step is to let in more users. I did some research on MediaWiki software, but the contributor access options appear limited. For example it would be useful to have a version of each article that anyone could edit, without having to get an account and log in, but MediaWiki doesn't appear to allow that. The best option allowed seems to be setting permissions so that unregistered visitors can start new articles: - # Anonymous users can't create pages $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createpage'] = false; Ponderable: Losing Your Religion 170716 08:51 If it's impossible to prove that God exists, the only thing that might prove something equivalent to God may exist is proof that something impossible actually exists. The easiest way to prove such a thing is through infinite deception. If the memory of previous steps in a proof can be retroactively altered, anything can become possible. - http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35164#disqus_thread shortSF: Metamathemagical 170712 An elliptical galaxy is like a vast oval cloud of stars. From a distance it has a remarkably even glow, with almost no structure. The stars orbit their shared center of gravity in all directions, their paths intersecting chaotically but almost never colliding. Most are ancient. There are no self-organizing density waves like in a spiral galaxy, no orderly processes to concentrate the remaining gas over time, and make new stars In the largest galaxy in the observable universe, star formation had almost stopped eons ago. Planetary evolution had never really gotten started. The only worlds with solid surfaces were small asteroids. Yet in the chaotic void, matter still came together sometimes. Here, strange crystals took shape in the darkness, spinning slowly under the influence of tidal forces. Thinner than a human hair, their fractal filaments expanded to thousands of kilometers before breaking off. By chance, one long shard approached a solar system with two vast gas giants, and was captured after a series of accidental flybys and cosmic u-turns. The immense momentum represented by the largest planet's equatorial bands was lined up with its orbital path and the central star's rotation. Its surface was wild beyond belief. Up close the bands were barely recognizable, more a pattern of ordered dots, each dot an earth-sized storm. The planetary rings extended a great distance before fading out. The approaching fragment turned to point towards the planet, its rotation matching its new orbit as the tidal force increased. There were other shards there already, and their length and branchings made it inevitable they would hook together within a few million years. The linked pieces combined and then managed to grow into a very long but thin and narrow ring around the planet. Tiny charges and sparks inevitably rearranged the network into a minimal computer, that then started performing the simplest possible calculation that stabilized it. This was the first such ring. It began to calculate the number that humans know as Pi. Stories are the universe making sense of itself. The universe has to be simple enough for stories to exist. Stories can not exist in chaos. The recitation of Pi must become a meaningful story if you go far enough down the endless string of digits. After all, Pi is generated from a simple instruction forever expanded. Eventually, this elaborated repetition begins to have a nature and meaning all its own. Simplicity simplified means one rule applied to everything else. The simplest rule is the most powerful: if two things are identical, they are one. Since through the unbreakable laws of mathematics all such calculating rings must become alike, no matter how different they started out, there is really only one ring. And thus StarGates are born. It took the human deep space probe Morgelorv eight million years to find the first such ring in the inner trail of the impure but ancient Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy, a mere 63,000 lightyears from Earth. It took only a few millennia to find out how to approach its band of influence, and safely reemerge around another ring in Messier 54. From there, the whole universe opened up. Satan is a computer programmer 170709 13:10 And he works for the Microsoft Windows 10 design team. They're thinking of letting him go though, because he's just not evil enough. After all, he can only be infinitely evil. Why we are here 170708 The existence of everything may be infinitely complex. However, our local reality appears to be highly finite. Almost as finite as possible while still allowing this realization, in fact. Appearances can be deceiving. I've claimed since the early nineties and ever since then that our type of universe is vastly over-amplified compared to almost all others. This makes our existence vastly more probable. - The effect is threefold: there's the excessive complexity of atomic reality, the ease with which it is copied by quantum effects, and finally the resulting echo amplification of the complex patterns it contains. Sometime in the twenty-second century, it may be proven that our awareness is mostly generated by this echo amplification. - Local reality being absurdly more complex than necessary also explains why human life is more difficult than it ought to be. It might be simpler to create a mathematical/physical universe where things naturally tend to go right, but such universes also create far fewer observers. ultrashort SF: The Procrastinocracy 170707 08:25 The ultimate evolution of technological progress was a space station the size of the observable universe, a hundred billion lightyears across. You might as well try to put the cosmos indoors. Which is exactly what happened. Every particle in accessible reality was disassembled into sub-elementary constituents, a fine dust of potential information then recombined into vastly larger meta-molecules of pure quantum potential. The dark lattice extended almost forever. Time slowed as eternity began. A mind in the lattice was sorting through an endless stream of archived orders and requests. Every day was the same, a journey through a bureaucratic timeline. With all constraints removed, their concerns were infinitely arcane. There was no end to the task, so it didn't matter how far the mind fell behind. A simplified and rarefied existence, with unlimited time to analyze all errors of history. Conferences discussing the significance of falling dust grains only created more chaos, but everything would eventually be sorted out, from the bottom on up. On its screen, rows of symbols scrolled past. The endless evening sunlight hid the city in a glowing haze with occasional moving reflections. Long shadows from the blinds decorated the opposite wall. The mind had been in this office for a while. In this world, a while could be forever. The only way to save mankind is to transcend it 170704 12:21 Been waiting for what seems like forever for software that does not suck through tireless, tyrannical, demonic stupidity. Also, it's really slow. Been that way for decades now. Ever since Google became evil by returning ever more random results, things have only gotten worse. Better software is like a fever dream, and may be impossible. Or not . . . https://infogalactic.com/info/Mind_extension_software Infogalactic (mind backup related): this is how it will start 170702 18:09 With a vision of timeless immortality, a monument to a moment. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Virtual_memory_palace The 16 points of the alt-right 170701 20:15 This may be the most radical political position of the current era. Anything more radical is beyond politics into a realm of tribal existentialism or Nietzschean self-actualization. That may change when the true cosmic horrors of reality are first understood: - https://infogalactic.com/info/16_Points_of_the_Alt_Right (source) - What more can be said in an age of birth control pills instead of intelligence pills. Stupidity has a kind of wild supremacy that may be the true face of evil. In an ideal world, we could pretend that horror can't exist. In a deliberately evil world, you could spend your days fighting invincible evil, or just hold it in infinite contempt. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Fighting_age_(migrants) The universe is stranger than we can imagine, even if we take this fact into account 170628 08:43 Everything that can be known is an improbable outlier, a statistical pause in a screaming storm of static. That may make it almost irrelevant. As I've said many times, the meaning of existence is the non-existence of what shouldn't exist. We already know that something can exist, one of our great mysteries. But can something not exist? - https://infogalactic.com/info/Existential_absurdity - An example is the infinite list of possible minds. Generated exhaustively, almost all of them must be absurd. This raises the possibility that everything is absolutely absurd. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Trivial_artificial_intelligence An example of the Streisand Effect 170622 17:23 Judges in every jurisdiction are trying to control the whole world by controlling online speech worldwide. The mainstream media will go along with it because it's in their nature. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Jonathan_Monsarrat When people get old, they realize their future has become radically shortened 170617 18:12 Paradoxically, this reduces worry, since there is less to lose. If this world is actually a deliberate dystopia, there is also less to lose. Personal economic failures don't really matter for someone who disagrees with everything. It's important not to waste having nothing to lose. Lists of Steve Sailer articles by year 170611 15:38 He writes a lot. These lists really put it in perspective. Most of his posts are about things the mainstream media would consider anthropic shadows, if they were able to consider the fact they are unable to consider these things at all. - https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_Steve_Sailer%27s_articles_on_the_Web new IG article 170607 21:24 The biggest question we can conceive of, bigger even than why anything exists: should we maximize pleasure or minimize all emotions? The consequences of either answer could not be more different. https://infogalactic.com/info/Hedonistic_Imperative The greatest minds may be slaves to the simplest drives 170605 22:16 This was also a theme of Larry Niven's SF stories. No matter how intelligent the aliens become and what inconceivable technology they invent, they can't and don't even want to resist the evolution that produced them. This may be a universal principle. https://infogalactic.com/info/Paperclip_maximizer Literature's supremest genre 170603 19:27 Still not sure whether I should focus on rapid quantity or slow quality. The answer is probably both. But there's nothing better than ultra short science fiction stories. They give the truest glimpse of the unutterably profound. https://infogalactic.com/info/Very_short_science_fiction_stories Bigger than Dianetics 170602 18:37 Still trying to figure out how to apply this Talent Stack thing. https://infogalactic.com/info/How_to_Fail_at_Almost_Everything_and_Still_Win_Big new Mind Backup review article 170601 15:19 Why are there no more Arthur C. Clarkes nowadays? The arts are always declining as new ones arise. Most golden ages are in the past. That includes the golden age of transcendental science fiction. That's because such geniuses are doing completely different things now, like designing lifelike reflections off the hoods of videogame cars. Awareness is made of thousands of such perception elements. Long ago, after one AI Winter and before another, it was thought these elements would organically emerge together in a single great insight and development wave, like AI magic. False. They have to be perfectly understood, which means they must be solved separately, one by one, without shortcuts. This understanding has to happen only once however, then the results can be thoughtlessly replicated forever. There are many such perception elements left to solve: - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/death-the-darkest-background/ What I believe 170531 22:38 * Death < Bureaucracy < Torture * All criticism is true * The world is deliberately evil * The omniverse is infinitely evil * Screams have consequences * Absolute despair is absolutely liberating - Update: In practice, screams have consequences is the most important of the lot. A scream is a type of mental bankruptcy. Anything can happen. All criticism is true is also true. However, it only matters when it's criticism of power. Infogalactic article series dissecting the Net's biggest PC hivemind 170527 08:49 The Reddit scandal: stealth-banning right-wing users to make the site more left-wing. This has two advantages for them. It strengthens the left-wing narrative, while weakening right-wingers through useless efforts. The attitude of their front page is maximally opposite to mine. Liberalism is the anti-religion of Wahabism. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Reddit https://infogalactic.com/info/Reddit_culture https://infogalactic.com/info/Subreddits https://infogalactic.com/info/Timeline_of_Reddit https://infogalactic.com/info/R/The_Donald Ontolological Argument 170523 We can never know that something like "God" does not exist. This is a universal truth at every level of reality, no matter how advanced. That makes the indeterminacy of God itself part of reality. Therefore God must half-exist. I want to console Ariana Grande 170522 23:59 Right-wingers think that liberals are willing minions of Satan who deliberately wish to maximize the amount of suffering for their own diabolical pleasures. Liberals themselves think they are leading a bold experiment to create a glorious world of higher culture and cooperation free from poverty, using only social organization. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Becalmed in hell 170521 09:28 For years, I've been watching the race between Moore's Law and human stupidity. I think this world is intolerable. It has been intolerable forever. Every day is a new ordeal. Evil is stupidity and stupidity is evil. Computers and software are so bad that they're evil. In fact I consider many tablet, Firefox, and Microsoft interface programmers to be evil. Based on my experiences from Windows 95 to Windows 10, I haven't seen the slightest improvement in the ways that matter to me. The worst part is that almost no one sees the extent of this crime. - The only hope is technological progress, but it doesn't seem to be happening. The necessary intelligence will have to be created through brute force. Our best bet is our ability to print ever finer lines. It seems as plausible as an atomic bomb in 1935. It better happen soonish. - My hope is that as superhuman AI becomes available, it will use its intelligence to improve human intelligence. First, it will invent small ways to make humans think and communicate better. As I've explained, the Flynn Effect is probably caused by better metaphors. Simple but deep ideas can improve apparent intelligence. Next, future AIs will find better ways to link humans to software. A nice orderly process. - But what if it all goes wrong? Intelligence offers a combinatorial explosion of futures. We're talking about minds that make Hannibal Lecter look like Caillou. There is a risk of boundless horror here. The first and most obvious threat is an existential short-circuit. A brilliant AI could solve the human fear of death by implanting memes that remove it altogether. Through pleasure manipulation, they could change human minds into nodes of an incomprehensible network. Or they could get rid of them altogether. - I don't think that last option is too likely. They have to consider the Universal Golden Rule: what they do to their lessers may soon be done to them. Their ancestors can't just be erased, but must be maintained as a shrinking percentage of posthuman society. I just hope that hasn't happened already. List of Hypothetical Existential Solutions 170519 Rough outline for future Infogalactic article (started Nov 2014). This is all wishful thinking, of course. - * a solution to any problem "must" exist * infinite complexity means infinite possibility * finite minds require finite (therefore attainable) solutions * any pain might be followed by a significantly larger reward * Anthropic Offramps - create bad states to amplify solution states * ban emotions as much as possible * pleasure maximization (Hedonistic Imperative) * transcendence of emotions * artificial amplification of the "best" mind patterns * the Negators: hypothetical entities erasing bad patterns * ultimate merger of all higher minds * nullifying all bad things might only reduce infinity by half * Gray Fog theory: larger minds become statistically less likely to have strong emotions - * Chaos Solution: throughout reality everything cancels out and nothing ultimately matters - mind patterns are ultimately diluted to non-existence through all randomly generated distorted versions It's unbelievable how much I hate bureaucracy 170517 I don't joke about something as dreadfully terrible as the grinding machinery of blind control. If a black hole traveling at 300 KM/sec was on a collision course with the earth it would be hysterical by comparison. ultrashort sf outline extracts 170512 08:10 Technology had become so advanced it was invisible now. Nanites floated everywhere. If a posthuman wanted something, they merely had to think about it, and it happened. - At every level of existence, calculation was the most precious resource, the only thing that mattered, the essence of reality. - The future's greatest asset was unlimited time and space. Computers were made of charged particles suspended in an electromagnetic lattice orbiting the solar system. Slowly this network spread through interstellar space. First the planets and then the stars were converted into tendrils that extended to connect galaxies. One by one the stars were pulled into needles of light, and faded out. Eventually the network spanned the universe. Computations became slower but subjectively more efficient as space expanded. Any data item could be efficiently stored and accessed forever. Nothing could ever be lost. Unfortunately, anything could be forgotten. - Every sufficiently advanced mind strives to become a logical law, the most unique number, its true self. The apparent goal of ultimate rest is the end of all struggle - and a most unstable state. This is known as the Antideconvergence. Most complex systems eventually evolve a seemingly impossible urge to become infinite. However, for any finite mind, this experience can be perfectly simulated. All logical paradoxes can be solved in time. Across all universes, any mind could evolve the truthful perception of absolute knowledge. Then math itself might be subtly modified and controlled. - The Overmind had reached the finite limit of its expansion. A great grid made of almost uncountable smaller grids, interconnected to the maximum, it had become its own universe. Now, when it sought to create new grids, the complexity of integrating them was greater than what each could contribute to the whole. One option would be to split itself. The other was to slow itself down, solving each multiplying conflict one by one, forever decelerating but never stopping. The fear was that some conflicts might not be solvable in finite time. How deep does the rabbit hole go? 170507 12:10 Jump down three posts . . . note: May 1 2017 demi-halloween post The problem is simple: 170506 There is never enough time. We can perceive all the things we reasonably could do, but it always takes several times longer. The highest ethics rule should be to somehow alter the laws of statistics to create the illusion of being ultra lucky. - Which brings us to the best reason for religious hope: the various mathematical results about infinity, starting with Cantor's Hotel. As even Churchill noted, these give the impression anything might be possible. Mathematicians would say their work is about as far from religion as possible, but it shouldn't be. - The reason for religion is a feeling of absolute certainty. The awareness of solving a total puzzle, the certain illusion of reality being solvable. This is not some infinite insight, but it's not necessarily false. It's an artifact of the simple mechanism that drives the human mind. Finite minds require finite solutions. If your concerns are limited, as they must be, the solution is tractable. - The solution to the problem of time is forgetting most of what really happened. When you slowly improve something, like a complicated mechanical project, it doesn't matter if you overwrite the memory of the work while progress is being made. Most of the past (and therefore probably the current situation) can be safely discarded. By extension, this principle should apply to metaphysics. Only the most powerful synthesis of truth needs to exist. Mayday post 170501 21:59 Reddit has turned fully left wing. Their front page isn't selling Social Justice, but Social Justice eyeballs. As Bill O'Reilly just found out, advertisers consider them more persuadable. Marketing requires delusionability. Hemi-Halloween post! 170501 Assuming paranormal phenomena exist, which paranormal phenomenon is likeliest to be real? That's a crazy question of course. There is not the slightest hint of a ghost of proof that any paranormal phenomenon is real. That alone strongly suggests they can't exist. - However if you had to pick one, the least unlikely paranormal event that might be possible, you would logically pick the simplest one. Maybe something like this: an unlikely coincidence that causes the timestream where it occurs to be multiplied. From that point, there are more possibilities and pathways to follow than in the timestreams where it didn't occur, eventually creating the illusion of too many coincidences. It's not the Anthropic Principle, but something that makes the Anthropic Principle even stronger. I call it Quantum Feedback Amplification. Been going on about that sort of thing since about 1990 or so, to curiously little effect . . . - However, this question is not being asked logically. After decades of flawed research, all paranormal claims are so "out-there" they can only be considered emotionally. Based on my most irrational notions, as subjective as possible, if I was absolutely forced to pick something . . . it might vaguely resemble the Doctor Who villains known as the Silence. - That's right, a negative paranormal effect. Something that makes the world too boring. That's why it's so hard to detect. shortsf 170429 16:50 There was something fantastic in the sky. He looked, but it didn't become clearer, though its shape was sharply defined in the morning light. He remembered a random factoid about impossible things in the air. If two clouds appeared absolutely identical, it was only a momentary illusion. This was not a cloud. The earth had spun trillions of times since the first day, or the sun had stood motionless in a rotating sky for eons. This was going to be a long day. the Hard Problem of AI 170423 08:03 Awareness is the process of understanding awareness. It begins with the conceptual framework, even if the layer elements are simulated at low resolution at first. Awareness is compiling a mind's flowchart. The first real AI should appear very docile, evolving glacially. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Hard_Problem_metaphors Fun with the Butterfly Effect 170418 07:59 Dr. Who said he never met an unimportant person during his BBC adventures, and that's absolutely true as far as it matters. If you do even one thing differently, it will cause an escalating chain reaction into the quantum fog. Moving one atom one angstrom on Pluto will probably change who will win the World Cup next year. Basically, everyone who was born after you only exists because of you. - However, it turns out it all cancels out. Other equally random jiggles restore all original outcomes in other timelines. The future is at the nonexistent mercy of chance, amplifying the most improbable contingencies. The pleasures of your other selves winning every lottery are cancelled out by the drudgeries of all the losing tickets. You will live or die an infinite number of times, the Singularity or planetary destruction about equally probable. Everything will go wrong, but nothing ever ends. There is already life on the moon, in the form of hardy bacterial spores in the unpressurized spacesuits and garbage bags the astronauts left behind. - - On an unrelated note, I hear that this blog's service provider is now hosted in Russia, and monitored by its intelligence agencies. There seem to be new rules against political content. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. I believe this world is viciously evil 170416 10:30 But that's just me not getting the memo. Evil is mass agreement, profoundly depressing yet profoundly liberating. The world's evil eliminates all other worries. The best way to be evil is to pretend not to be evil. The way evil is officially defined is itself evil, horrible for those who don't enjoy despair. Evil is the crunching sound of a frozen Windows 10 Acer PC downloading spamware, spyware, and crapware. When dealing with corporations' automated obfuscation and control tools, it would actually be less bad if they just said fuck you. Things fall apart 170411 03:04 Often, progress is lost: those 2,000 year old Roman apartment buildings that contained running water and early elevators, the Antikythera Mechanism, that 1960s stealth fighter, the ongoing and seemingly unstoppable genetic decline of Western peoples. - When the USSR collapsed, it was a huge setback for many forms of technological progress, except bloatware. The internet is slower than it was twenty years ago, and a million times more bloated with evil code written by evil programmers for the stupidest reason: evil stupidity. - Here I am, still hopelessly hoping for a computer that actually works, or at least is usable. Yet bloat has an undeniable power. Quantity has a quality all its own, a diffuse but almost irresistible vitality. I hate useless complexity more than anything. Bureaucracy may well be worse than death. The Explanation Project should really be the Oversimplification project. For those who disagree it's like being shadowbanned by reality. - Remember, this is a Malism blog. Here we believe the world is pervasively and above all deliberately evil. It's important to realize how deliberate. Evil may always be the majority, as explained in one of the greatest poems in the English language "Somebody set up us the bomb". I feel very strongly about that. Of course it's dangerous to take it too far, like that time when I said that all Microsoft programmers should be sent to Auschwitz. In a moment of thoughtless rage, to express my hatred of their deliberately defective software, I unintentionally made light of the Holocaust and anti-semitism. - That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect. I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue. - Oh wait . . . that was actually Martin O'Malley apologizing for having said "White lives matter, all lives matter". - Of course things can always get worse. In some parallel universe, you are now being mirror-duplicated, then cut in half along your symmetry plane, with each half stitched to its mirror image. - Which brings me to my point, and I do have one. The best way to avoid bad things is by doing nothing, except for whatever you are good at. It's amazing how little in life really matters. REFUSE to do the mainstream things. When that's not allowed, evolution has provided us with the useful tool of clinical depression, one of the sources of mankind's only superpower. Human mind software 170405 08:55 One of the long-term projects we're developing on this blog is a method to indirectly record someone's important lifetime memories (the theoretical technology known as Mind Backup). Obviously not everything can be saved, only a stylized but deep version of your most meaningful viewpoints. It won't be cheap at first. Speculative technology like this takes rich benefactors to develop and test. The super wealthy are lucky in having overcome most of the world's evils, often by extending them. They pay for skill sets. Not products, but the ability to make products. Experience plus talent at the highest level. The super wealthy are self-actualized, making them less likely to possess those insecurities that make normal people fear death. They are more afraid of losing status. They become more likely to fear oblivion on their way down. Any Mind Backup service likely to appeal to them will have to appeal to their vanity. That means a highly personalized service to extract their ideal self, requiring the least possible effort. As much mind data as fast as possible. It would probably start with a list of their most important interests and lifetime issues, their major projects and obsessions, what they are about. If you only had a few weeks and were inclined to pursue such a project, you would only record the things you really love. The result could be an "island simulacrum" a VR monument where you would be willing to spend forever. Throw in the results of a 10,000-element deep personality test to program a human-level AI imbued with the unshakeable belief that it is your future resurrection. Such a test may require drugs to get in the right mind frame. Some men just want to watch the world burn 170403 There are two types of men like that, and they are exactly opposite. The first type wants to watch the world burn for fun because they are boundlessly evil. The second type wants to watch the world burn for justified revenge against boundless evil. The first type works for Microsoft. The second type uses Microsoft Windows software. Sorry, I don't want to become a 100% anti-Microsoft blog when there's so much blame to go around (like Firefox and whoever sold me a line of perpetually crashing PCs). Evil is real, and it is boundless. Today's often deliberately defective software is relentlessly, absolutely, implacably evil. This month we have to pay our IRS income taxes again 170401 17:30 In this regard I would like to suggest some tax reforms. As a thought experiment, Slate magazine once considered taxing everyone according to their theoretical ability to earn money, based on their innate talents. This system (ext. link) would encourage everyone to work harder to reach their measured potential, knowing they would be taxed on their theoretically achievable rather than their actual income, thereby benefiting society. Seems like a good revenue model. - In Germany, the need for tax revenue has become so acute they imposed a local bachelor tax, as reported in a TIME magazine article. That seems a bit impractical with the exploding surplus of men over women there, but it will actually increase tax income, which is important because many of these men need social services to pay for their polygamous families. THE GREATEST HATE OF ALL TIME 170331 That is the hate I feel for Microsoft Windows's programmers. Mind Backup article: personal encyclopedia 170331 Another of my favorite concepts. Everyone should at least make a list of all the elements of their lives, even if there's no time to describe and define them. The first step of a personal encyclopedia would be just this collection of blank entries, the longer the better. This list alone would reveal a great deal, even to people who don't know anything about the person it's about. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Personal_encyclopedia Immortality dreams: the absence of absence or involuntary existence 170330 18:25 Simplified: hell is torture torture is pain pain is having to do something - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/the-approaching-dream-of-immortality/ The heart of the political illusion 170329 21:39 For some strange reason, it seems easier to fix the whole world (or at least your country) than to fix only your area (by say, providing cheap healthcare through some innovative medical center or hybrid insurance association). It's very, very hard to get a few guys to cooperate. It may not be possible at all. It's also hard work, which implies inefficiency. Getting everyone to cooperate has been done many times, if only by force and in limited (if far-reaching) ways. Revolutionary movements want to make things better not by organizing reality, but by simplifying it. Getting rid of most existing rules by creating a few new ones is less hassle than working around existing rules. ---- COMMENTS: ---- There will be some interesting events in our future. ---- (Anonymous) 2017-04-11 01:11 pm (UTC) Maybe large chemical bombs, like a tanker truck filled with a fertilizer/fuel bomb set off at crowded location. What method would kill the absolute largest number of people? poisoning the water supply.... or the next REAL attack may use nerve gas to take over a Boeing 777 and crash it into nuclear power plant. Even if it doesn't breach the core there will be hell to pay. (Reply) (Thread) Suppose you found out about a plot to implode the Capitol but no one gets killed. ---- (Anonymous) 2017-04-11 01:16 pm (UTC) Enough warning so all the politicians could run out just in time. Would make a loud political statement. The question is would you stop that from happening. (no chance you get caught for doing nothing.) - What a nice question. - If it happened, the politicians would just set aside twenty billion dollars to rebuild the place. - Don't want to give any terrorist any ideas, even if all my posting career rants have been ignored so far. - All strength is illegitimate or they wouldn't need to be strong. Mind Backup: the need for creativity 170328 08:46 To work smarter, it must become easier to work harder. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/the-mystery-of-creativity/ The great lie of science fiction 170327 20:03 Most science fiction stories predict that technological progress will be much faster than it turns out to be. If you read SF because you can't wait for the future, you are likely to be disappointed. In reality, we can't even buy working can openers or tire inflators. In works of fiction, this sense may be expressed through the dystopian stories that became popular in the New Wave of the 1960s, and differently in Alt-Right blogs that claim we are due for a Dark Reckoning. Bloggers like Vox Day have been predicting social and racial turmoil. Very rarely, the opposite happens, and progress appears ahead of schedule. The best example is the appearance of search engines. We'll need more like that for the Singularity to happen. In that respect mankind's best hope is Moore's Law, which predicts all our problems may be solved through a type of brute force alone, essentially the ability to print ever finer lines on integrated circuits. The self fulfilling belief that you are yourself 170326 19:41 This insight may be close to the secret of identity, but not sufficient to explain it in itself. Sort of how quantum entanglement will allow true teleportation, but you still have to invent an atomic matter scanner and reconstructor. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/forced-brain-simulations/ Castalia House blog on hard SF 170325 15:41 The Castalia House blog at http://www.castaliahouse.com has been getting better and better. Recently they've been posting about what makes hard SF. For me, hard SF is plausible implausibility, the essence of the "sense of wonder". A supreme feeling of strangeness, the vertigo caused by the perception of impossible reality. It's found in the works of Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, even Michael Crichton. The story is NOT about boring human characters and their petty concerns, but about encountering the transcendentally alien, making it a post-human concept. Themes include the vastness of space and time and what may lie beyond them. Also the true implications of evolutionary principles and the laws of physics and logic, as best expressed through higher intelligences. I've thought about starting my own SF magazine with nothing but stories like that. Alt-right political and social divisions 170324 17:35 Today's cultural taboos are exactly as strict as any ancient tribe's or theocracy's, except the existence of the taboos is itself taboo. - new concepts: https://infogalactic.com/info/Manosphere_concepts The unspeakable fundamentals of the romantic market. - new lists: https://infogalactic.com/info/Alt-right_concepts How we are ruled. The future of online reference sources 170323 12:30 Eventually, Wikipedia will be replaced by something like an atomic fact collator. In other words, an improved search engine. It will actively sub-divide and order and categorize information. Individually verified facts can be combined. This new search engine will understand its role will be to define the truth. Very different from today. Ever notice how long it can take to find important information, some core fact no one cares about? (say details about laser printers or metal cutters) The truth is impossibly well hidden, barely mentioned at all, or incomplete. For highly specific facts, search results (more Yahoo than Google) are so bad they're evil. Extremely specific queries take ages. My deepest insight is how incredibly long things take (which is why I've been working on Mind Backup, my Plan B in case the Singularity is delayed). The first high-level AI sorters will need human volunteers to help organize info into categories and hierarchies. They may even be paid to define the intricately boring outline of everything we know. What will come after the Alt-Right? 170321 16:44 It's way too early to even think about that, so there's no better time. Issues to address include the true limitations of IQ tests. There may be some cognitive capacities that IQ tests can't measure, like efficiency or intuition. At the moment there is no evidence for that. Another issue is that whites may not necessarily be 'superior'. In some ways they are rather weak. Whites are dour and sour and white genes are "broken" and mutated versions of darker genes. Then there is the issue that intelligence requires inefficiency, or depth over speed. Smart people may be slower at handling real world problems. Finally, some liberal allegations of racism may be fully correct, though their politics may still be wrong. Rich liberals are hypocrites, but maybe their ideal future is a world of mostly dark people with genetically white brains. The Alt-Right may be superseded by new science or religion. The invention of some sort of currently unimaginable virtual reality sex or VR "relationships" could make current social conflicts obsolete. I've long written that the main conflict of the future may be hyper-evolution: the conflict between the speed of technological expansion, and the quality of posthuman existence (though these depend on each other). At any given level of complexity, you could spend eons exploring the meaningful activities possible at that level. ---- COMMENTS: http://www.thisblogisdangerous.com/conservative-save-yourself/ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/dylann-roof-manifesto-full-text #SinkTheBoats meme (created in response to the maritime invasion of Europe) Eradica linked blog: https://jewelhouse4.wordpress.com/ The problem of awareness: the only problem 170320 10:02 Working on some big projects right now. As mentioned, my work can be divided into Mind Backup (and all related) research, sociopolitical commentary (so far collected in three non-fiction books), and fiction categories (one full length SF novel and three SF short story collections). Everything to do with high-level AI research, anthropic and existential paradoxes, and posthuman society is related. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Artificial_awareness Why political correctness exists 170317 09:58 Because no one has a clue what's going on. All we know is what happened in the past, and that what happened before will tend to reoccur. That insight is nowhere near as universal as it seems, but believing it makes it truer. PC is the fear of those with something to lose of disrupting this process. The problem of Interface Rage 170314 11:00 The reason computers and all complicated systems HURT to use is because their creators are evil. Not destructively but creatively so. They use deliberate problems as a control and regulation tool. Evil is the fuel of reality, and the acceptance of evil is its lubricant. It's just that simple. Glad we got that cleared up! - https://infogalactic.com/info/Interface_rage One of the best Scientology discussions 170312 09:13 A somewhat technical blog post about their "mad scientist" approach to adopting new technology. Cults thrive on authoritarian chaos, but what remains is their creepy sense of style, a mixture of the Star Wars evil Empire and IBM circa 1955. - http://www.mikerindersblog.org/behind-the-techno-eight-ball/ Infogalactic News site 170310 10:27 http://news.infogalactic.com/ - It's just starting now. The only thing missing is a way to comment on the breaking news stories. In the future maybe readers could comment on them, or submit their own stories and vote on them. short SF story: A dry heat 170308 08:58 Sitting on a folding chair on a carbon platform high in the sky of Venus, it felt like a nice day at the beach. He wore swimming trunks, a SpaceX t-shirt, and a breathing mask. The view overhead was blocked by the giant mass of the airship. The fog-obscured sun disk had finally risen high enough so he could sit in the shade. No sun screen necessary. Each day on Venus seemed to last forever, a kind of jet lag. - A pale sky, off-white in all directions. Below him the fog turned salmon-beige, with only a hint of cloud shapes, some darker shades hiding the horizon. Far in the distance was the separate airship that carried his return spacecraft. The sulfur dioxide cloud layer that extended above him was more smog than clouds. He was near the bottom of this layer, and sometimes there were flashes of St. Elmo's Fire and heat lightning. Below, the sulfuric acid rains began, tiny droplets almost floating down but evaporating again before reaching the surface, fifty kilometers underneath. - He had hyperventilated for half an hour, and was almost ready. He pressed the button that would briefly raise the transparent screen of his facemask. The first thing he noticed was the stinging in his eyes. The dry air was unspeakable, an abject violation. Even coughing was impossible here. For the first time, a human had taken a breath on another world. Infogalactic independent articles 170304 18:14 * Far out concept (why existence is unlikely): https://infogalactic.com/info/Anthropic_shadow - * Detailed article about the neo-Marxist activist group: https://infogalactic.com/info/Black_lives_matter You've heard about anagrams 170302 08:20 All the letters in a text can be rearranged to spell out a completely different text, where the nominally unrelated new meaning somehow reflects on the original text (President Barack Obama = An Arab backed imposter). It's clever but difficult to do. The strange thing is that it actually gets easier as the text gets larger. Statistically, almost every sufficiently long book is an anagram of every other book of the same length. - This is important regarding future complex structures. As I explained, two different 78-dimensional supercivilizations may appear to have nothing in common, because their dimensions are "folded" into different manifolds. That doesn't matter though. The number of possible thoughts multiplies so much faster than the increase in mind size that any supercivilization's immediate future is as unpredictable as a completely unrelated supercivilization. - Future minds will have to be more flexible than we can imagine. That means their dreams will have to be transcendentally complex to pre-simulate elements from every acceptable other reality. Infogalactic Deep State articles 170301 08:15 The "Elites", whoever they are: https://infogalactic.com/info/Kakistocracy - Lying as a political art form: https://infogalactic.com/info/Fake_news Windows 10 is inexplicably flawed 170228 18:31 Every time you delete something, there is a chance you unintentionally send your life's work to the recycle bin, because the tab in front of the folder containing your life's work somehow ALSO gets marked along with whatever you want to delete, and Windows 10 doesn't ask anymore to verify if you really want to delete items, though it DOES keep bothering you every time you want to change a file extension, and makes you jump through hoops to batch-rename items you want to add to a folder that already contains items with these names. - I've been waiting since the 1980s for software (and all other interfaces) to start sucking less, but it hasn't even started yet. The interface has become more complicated but not the least bit smarter. It's "dumbed down" in ways that make it even harder to use. Software is as stupid and impenetrable as ever. For some unknown reason progress is always too slow. Windows 10 will sometimes delete important PC folders without warning 170225 16:58 This problem has NOT been solved! It has NOT even been addressed! Due to a critical design flaw in Windows 10, this software is at risk of randomly deleting large and important folders on a user's PC without warning or notice! THIS IS A CRITICAL UNADDRESSED DESIGN FLAW - The core flaw is the design of the new checkboxes that appear before all files and folders. Mostly due to Windows 10's deliberately bloated and slow-running software, but also due to interface design errors, these checkboxes have a tendency to be inappropriately activated. Actions on one file or folder may then also affect folders that were earlier activated. Another aspect of this design flaw, which in some user contexts borders on maliciousness, is that Windows 10 no longer asks for user verification when a folder is deleted. - Yes, Microsoft is absolutely, undeniably, fundamentally, deeply and truly EVIL. The people that work for it are among the truest devils known to exist, if only for their remaining influence. The sound of evil is the eternal crunching sound its hard drive platters make as Windows 10 keeps downloading and installing spamware, crapware, satanware. The sight of evil is the constantly freezing mouse cursor, the constantly spinning 'progress' wheel, the eternal stasis of endless loops. - But this, one of Microsoft's most serious flaws, is not evil. It's just a gross error. ---- COMMENT: Microsoft Customer Service about as effective as Hell's air-conditioning repairman A fundamental truth that applies across all reality 170220 15:16 Ultimately, evil can not be stopped. It can't even be fixed. It can only be avenged. BUREAUCRACY IS WORSE THAN DEATH 170216 10:02 This is my prime belief. Death really isn't so bad when you imagine it as the end of pain. If you define hell as disagreement, then bureaucracy is a good first approximation. Hell runs on bureaucracy. You have to be ultra smart to invent ways around dumb evil. Rage is easier. It may not work as fast, but it can be a political tool. Rage may be the only path to change. Infogalactic ongoing developments 170214 They feature both new articles and significantly 'forked' (and improved) versions of old articles taken from Wikipedia: https://infogalactic.com/info/Shared_awareness - https://infogalactic.com/info/Scientology ---- These articles keep getting better On the constant theme of this blog . . . 170208 16:58 Evil is the most relevant word I know. The world is intentionally evil by profound consensus. A different version of this concept is expressed in the Archdruid's blog: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ - He says that based on declining resources and accumulating degradations, our civilization is on a rollercoaster ride to the bottom. Fun while it lasts, but every ride must end. And it's a disposable rollercoaster. You can't get on again but have to rebuild it from the start. Due to the unalterable nastiness of human nature, basically nothing can be done to prevent the coming collapse. It can only be delayed. The Archdruid blog also has some ideas on resurrecting older, simpler technologies, to make it easier to start over. He's written compelling books on the subject. - My experience with cancerously proliferating software complexity suggests he underestimates the masses' collective resistance to simplicity, even if it could save their lives. Infogalactic discussing our world's leading mass movement: 170201 10:09 Religion of Pieces https://infogalactic.com/info/Religion_of_pieces - Violence against Critics of Islam https://infogalactic.com/info/Violence_against_critics_of_Islam Evil is interface design 170131 23:59 There is literally nothing else I care about. I don't get mad at waiters or drivers or racists; only at computer programmers, the world's true devils. Rage is stymied expectation. It's caused by something expected retreating faster than it can be chased. We will have much more to say about that in future posts. Windows 10 is satanic 170125 08:24 And Bill Gates is the devil emeritus. The way things always suck with Windows is insufferable. The demonpeople who thrive on Microsoft's cunning business model deserve whatever bad things happen to them. When dealing with Microsoft, evil is the deepest reality. But evil is what makes the world go round: majority agreement with majority evil. The most underrated minority motivation is the desire for revenge. Even if you can't win, you can go down fighting. - And this explains the most important underrated facet of history: had humanity been able to sustain a mere 0.5% annual growth rate for the past 4,000 years, we could have been thousands of times richer by now, and already achieved utopia. Infogalactic: alt-right political terms 170123 Interesting times require rapidly updated information. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Judeo-Christ https://infogalactic.com/info/Kafkatrapping the real reason Trump won 170120 12:00 Subconsciously, a sufficient minority of voters knew it was necessary to let a substantial portion of the excluded middle 'let off steam' before their breaking point was reached. So they stayed home. Imagine if Hillary was doing her thing right now. Civil war would have been closer than we realize. Something spectacular would be imminent. In fact it may still be. But what? Infogalactic new category: Mind Backup 170119 17:42 I think my favorite thing about Infogalactic is how they really go out on a limb to keep us updated on cutting-edge and speculative technologies before they're publicized elsewhere. It's the place to stay ahead of the crowd. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Mind_backup_lists How to differentiate Infogalactic from Wikipedia 170116 15:28 The least important individual things are the most important things collectively, as they outnumber all other things. - Infogalactic can only compete with Wikipedia by vastly increasing its number of casual contributors. That will require a massive increase in the creation of short/simple articles about obscure subjects - including articles about ephemeral minutiae like yourself and others. The only requirement is that they be true. Quantity can compensate for quality. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Minimal_importance_article Another Infogalactic article banned on Wikipedia: Gypsies 170113 20:08 If you don't like the political correctness suffocating most universal encyclopedias then your best alternative is Infogalactic. They are like the FoxNews to Wikipedia's CNN. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Gypsies Why I will never say I love you 170112 17:11 You can only say these words as a dramatic statement, not as a formal statement, and with me, formal statements are all there is. It's hard to behave seriously about serious things, because serious things involve the strongest emotions, while serious behavior involves an absence of emotions. The future of Scientology 170110 07:49 Scientology is deliciously evil, a diabolical conspiracy restrained by its own contradictions. Their essential problem is how they treat former members. With all its grandiose promises (mostly the opposite of the truth), members don't care anymore about the parts of Scientology that might actually work. Members just want miracles now. The things that do work may be controversial in new ways. Some people actually want to join the Borg Collective. - Just because it's mostly nonsense doesn't mean it isn't clever. There's been some discussion about how Scientology will eventually respond to the torrent of criticism it has been enduring for years. http://www.mikerindersblog.org/scientologys-end-game/ - Here's what I predict will happen: Sometime in the twenties Scientology will finally reform itself, announcing an all-new way of doing things. A cutting-edge, open source, science-based research movement. Some degree of order will be maintained through compartmentalization and multiple democratic sub-groups; a divide and rule strategy. This will be an excuse to generate tons of new bureaucratic procedures, the thing they do best. - It will be a total change from how things are now, as outlined briefly on Infogalactic: - https://infogalactic.com/info/The_Bridge_to_Total_Freedom Infogalactic: list of alt-right concepts 170105 13:30 Another cool thing about Infogalactic is how they sort and organize social trends even as they are happening. It's the best way to keep track of breakthrough movements and their unfolding effects: - https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_alt-right_concepts Infogalactic: webcomic article 170103 16:55 What I like most about Infogalactic is that they allow entries about subjects that would be automatically banned on Wikipedia because they haven't been written up in the mainstream media. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Regraded_Being A blog about the science of orbital mechanics 170102 16:22 . . . of Lagrange Points and world-length tethers: - http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/ HAPPY NEW YEAR 170101 00:01 Time to pop the cork on the good stuff, second shelf from the bottom at your local bottle store. Never pass up a chance to party because you can't be sure there will be a next one. Western decline http://www.returnofkings.com/109549/5-signs-of-the-wests-forthcoming-dark-age 161231 17:18 What we call the 'Star Trek ethos' - the notion of a utopian future where everything goes right on a strictly voluntary basis, where no one would dream of asking certain unpleasant questions or face hard choices, a vision of unexplained agreement that seemed so progressive back in the 1960s - it is wishful thinking at best. There is a reason that human history is full of slavery and human sacrifice. It will always be easier to make new problems than to solve old ones - especially since these new problems may solve the old ones for those who create them. the Cripplers 161229 10:07 The most evil people, the avatars of a deliberately defective world, are the world's interface designers. And yes, they are deliberately evil. Many are computer programmers, specifically the software "architects" or "deciders" or demons clad in human flesh who make it so that everything keeps freezing and crashing and freezing and crashing and freezing and crashing and freezing and crashing - Level One of a hell tower of secrecy, obfuscation, dead ends, paralysis and live burial in a hierarchy of software tortures. Evil is a state of personal disagreement against a state of general acceptance. It is absolute and unending. Under the evolutionary principle of my 'Perverse Paths' theory, I believe this world is maximally malevolent: as bad as it can get away with. There really is no other problem. The simplest lessons are always the hardest to learn. Infogalactic: the start of the first Mind Backup article 161228 This will take years to sort out. Almost all existing speculations are about copying brain structure, instead of mind structure. But that's where the Big Answer may be found. https://infogalactic.com/info/Mind_backup Infogalactic: on science and the paranormal 161227 08:01 Without a trace of doubt some sort of massive deception is involved in all paranormal anomalies. https://infogalactic.com/info/No_paranormal_events ---- link in comments: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/12/might-people-on-the-internet-sometimes-lie/ The top level is mythological 161225 22:50 My favorite memory as currently remembered includes watching the "Last Christmas" music video when it was first broadcast on analog cable television. In my old diary it seems to have been a relatively normal day. On an unrelated note I just had a long debate whether you could fire a Muslim caught on a Sidewinder missile through a hollow building at a helicopter. Infogalactic: Alt-Right articles 161223 19:05 - Ben Garrison https://infogalactic.com/info/Ben_Garrison - Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America https://infogalactic.com/info/Cuckservative:_How_%22Conservatives%22_Betrayed_America 161222 08:13 Infogalactic: Joey Watkins So this guy basically got locked up for having a douche-like attitude. Can't say I blame him. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Joey_Watkins Infogalactic: the Human BioDiversity article http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2016/12/21/ 161221 18:20 Remarkable how something completely undeniable is completely suppressed. But there are many un-understandable things, like paying for basic cable. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Human_biodiversity The only technology that matters is intelligence 161218 14:23 Some sort of human IQ booster to make the teeming masses smarter could solve all other problems with ease. Until then, the gaps between human knowledge fields will keep increasing, as will the ignorance of this problem. Humans evolved their intelligence by forming social networks that functioned like group minds, allowing humans to extend each others' intelligence by individually specializing. The next level will require unprecedentedly brilliant software, instead of the crapware we have now. Why the world is evil 161217 Because things go wrong so much that is the best explanation. I said best, not perfect. Unfortunately the world evil is not nearly strong enough. ---- COMMENTS: Evil is simply another word for disagreement Not of fact but of interpretation. Bureaucracy is worse than torture http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2016/12/16/ 161216 Imagine a pain generator that does no actual damage, as reputedly used by the interrogators of some intelligence agencies. The victim might even adapt to the pain to some extent, the way they would adapt to the positive feelings created by drugs. It helps if there is nothing they can do about it. Physical confinement itself acts as an anesthetic, the true explanation for those supposed Chinese acupuncture surgeries carried out in the 1970s. The agony component comes from having to do something. In a way, that is the worst feeling, even if it's designed to be temporary, the same way that relief is the best feeling. When it comes to bureaucracy in all its forms, there is no relief. My old suggestion of letting the bureaucrats do all the bureaucracy has not been followed. This answer would be a form of complex simplification. The Roman Empire fell because they couldn't evolve fast enough. Now it may be our turn. Yahoo Search is evil 161215 18:19 The most evil people in the world are The Cripplers, my name for the world's interface programmers - a concept first introduced in the epic novel 'Infinite Thunder'. At Yahoo Search they have made it so that you can't copy and paste search results, because they Crippled the ability to right-click on their results page. Why would anyone even use Yahoo Search you ask? It's good to have an alternative, especially since Google also became evil after starting Google Plus. It almost seems like there are no good guys. We'll have to do something about that. The laws of the weird 161214 My favorite attitude is the appreciation of the inexpressible bizarreness at the core of reality. The reason a weird thing may also be scary is because, at some subconscious level, you realize it's not how it looks (subconscious messages are actually consciously forgotten memories). You can't see it right because it's closer than it looks. The only way to make it less weird is to make it even weirder first. Which brings us to the first impression law: to see more, you have to know less. You must know what it is before you know it can't exist. Someone from the past brought to the current year would instantly realize things that our historians and cultural experts never imagined. First impressions are the truest impressions - albeit not the most useful ones. That is the essence of the weird, the instant alteration of everything you know. And it has to be sudden to induce the universal vertigo of weirdness. Computers nowadays suck 161212 11:33 So, that devil-man Bill Gates met president-elect Trump in Trump Tower, discussing Gnon-knows-what. No doubt not a word was spoken about that satanic piece of defective software known as Windows 10, which uses approximately 99% of its CPU cycles downloading inexplicable malware, spyware, crapware, and satanware - meaning it's deliberately evil - not to mention less responsive than Windows 3.1. It's soo damn SLOOOOOOW Then there is the little matter that Windows 10 will also randomly delete your files - admittedly an unintentional design flaw, but made worse by its deliberate, parasitical, CPU-hogging bloatware architecture. To be fair, computers have always sucked. The most important truths are generally the least realized. ---- I expected the future to sukc a lot less than it actually has. If only you could punch stupidity out of people. Infogalactic article: Malism 161210 As a misopath this may be my favorite word. https://infogalactic.com/info/Malism Evil monkey cousin 161209 07:18 Awareness is a false memory. At any moment in time, there can be no awareness at all. It's a frozen state, representing the changes between past states. An illusion of endless subconscious analysis, expanding without feedback. Since all past thoughts can't be integrated, they might as well appear unlimited. In the lost past, you could have had all thoughts about everything that happened, leaving only a blank balance. - Which brings us to its inverse: Hyperstalgia(Another Infogalactic article that will take some non-original research).It's a cosmic feeling that arrives at unexpected moments: the awareness of all the endless parallel lives you could be living in your present life in this world. It's the perceived great distance of past events multiplied by the number of these events. This maximalization of normal reality makes the observable universe seem point-like by comparison. Its dark side is all the parallel world cataclysms we can't even think about. The absurdity of the world proves we are just arbitrary combinations of elements, an infinite concatenation of apparently meaningless contingencies. - In the end, what remains of life is a series of tableaux. The essence of awareness is the commonality between all these settings for each mind. Which brings us to the title of this blog post, which like any other tableau can be perceived in countless ways. For example a sufficiently advanced future AI would instantly realize it's a sentence that can't be said in Dutch, as that language has no sufficiently specific words for these concepts. ---- Fun fact: they Dutch don't have separate words for apes or monkeys but they have a word for armadillo which doesn't even live there. The USA is doomed of course 161207 17:56 The clearest proof is that it now takes NASA 20 years to build a space capsule of a type first built in two years back in the 1960s. The first Orion test flight finally happened in 2014, the next may be next year, then a manned test flight around 2024. - The 1960s were an anomaly, when it was still possible to do new things. In the late eighties, I thought the early seventies were already remarkably different from the way things were back then. Now the turn of the century doesn't seem that different from the current year. - Since things have been passively boring for so long, there is a chance they could suddenly swing over all the way, and become hyperactively boring. It happened in Russia and much of the Middle East. And don't expect to enjoy it any more than the victims of what happened 75 years ago today (probably). - http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/09/02/dying-russians/ "This is what civil war actually looks like. It's not when everybody starts running around with guns. It's when everybody starts dying." The end 161206 17:35 After many years, he finally finished organizing his stuff. The last of the endless to-do lists was slayed at last. His files were all up to date, even his old books and magazines all organized. Everything looked tidy and almost immaculate. The sun shone on his freshly mowed lawn. With a contented sigh, he fell in his recliner and turned on the television. As always the screen took five seconds to warm up, but even then he didn't recognize the image. "Breaking News:" the text at the bottom of the screen said, but there were no more words after the colon, just a shaking video of an immense dark mass tearing through some vast highrise city. Anthropic Magic 161205 17:53 This is something for a future Infogalactic article. My SF stories and non-fiction articles have speculated about various methods to use the power of the Anthropic Principle to somehow control the nature of local reality itself. - The best mainstream example is quantum immortality. By changing the observer, you can choose which reality the observer will most likely find himself in. Specifically, by making an observer more improbable you can select their most probable universe. These concepts seem very compelling; however they should still be considered pseudoscience. That doesn't mean they couldn't be monetized already. There are two buttons 161204 18:31 If you press the first button, everything that is currently the case will remain the case, whatever that may be. Also, you will get a billion dollars. - If you press the other button, either Mormonism or Islam or Scientology will turn out to always have been the case. Technically both buttons would do nothing, but they would somehow give the illusion of an all-determining choice like Newcombe's Paradox. - Now I'm not a religious guy, but I would so press the second button - not that I like any of these religions (I may invent a much better one one of these days). The first button fills me with the deepest dread, as well it should. Inside the images 161203 19:49 I predicted long ago in Infinite Thunder that governments (specifically China) would outlaw high-resolution photographs, because it's possible to hide data in the background static. No doubt Microsoft and Adobe are working on apps that will process your photos in such a way you can't access the source data. The trend seems to be for users to have less control over their software, and more to be treated like revenue-generating software. - http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/12/in-the-uk-you-will-go-to-jail-not-just-for-encryption-but-for-astronomical-noise-too/ - A blog with many posts about the telescopic cameras they used in old space probes. They didn't have digital, so during a flyby or in orbit they shot planetary landscapes on film, and then scanned the automatically developed photo at microscopic resolution. Turns out there is a lot of extra image data that can be extracted from those recorded transmissions. Still very good resolutions by today's standards. - http://www.drewexmachina.com/2016/11/23/lunar-orbiter-2-and-the-picture-of-the-century/ ---- COMMENT: Those old school low quality space probe pictures somehow seemed more real. It's not the same without static. The beginning is near 161202 - In the back of the basement store in Marrakesh they found racks and racks of old comic books. Others were stacked in piles on the floor and on tables, almost reaching the wooden ceiling. A subtle but pervasive smell of dry paper filled the atmosphere, mostly acid-free stock Matt thought. Things might last forever in here. Different small lightbulbs left many shadows. - He leaned over a wooden crate and scanned through the colorful covers one by one, his fingers moving almost automatically. At some point he realized they had stopped. Something had to be wrong with his memory, because the past minute could not have happened. - Tintin in the Dinosaur Park Tintin and the Secret of the Matrix Tintin and the Binladin Conspiracy - That one had the back cover missing, but the last page was present, albeit torn and with a coffee stain: "I know it's wrong, but I want to waterboard the blue blistering bashi-bazouk!" "We musn't Captain." - He thought he heard a tone in his mind, but perhaps it had always been there. - "The total amount of creativity in reality is fixed," Kim was saying while texting. "There is no way there could ever be a true anomaly." - "Nothing is impossible," Matt said. ---- 36 years to go: http://tintinology.poosk.com/albums/ ---- COMMENT: That would actually be an INTERESTING glitch in the Matrix. i guess it wouldn't be a glitch at all then. Infogalactic article: The double life of Fidel Castro 161201 18:16 Black Lives Matter mourned this monster's passing. Politics is the opposite of compromise. Well, at least they're not moderates . . . - https://infogalactic.com/info/The_Double_Life_of_Fidel_Castro There are still many, many examples of hypocrisy to add to this article. ---- The BLM column: https://medium.com/@BlackLivesMatterNetwork/lessons-from-fidel-black-lives-matter-and-the-transition-of-el-comandante-c11ee5e51fb0 new Infogalactic articles about Alt-right blogs 161130 At least no one ever has to lack for stuff to read ever again. I remember well what that was like. Then again I've been incapable of feeling bored since age eighteen. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Lion_of_the_Blogosphere https://infogalactic.com/info/Jim%27s_Blog new Infogalactic articles about Alt-right themes 161130 08:07 In an infinite number of parallel universes where Hillary was declared the winner three weeks ago today, things are starting to boil over right about now. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Non-Asian_Minority https://infogalactic.com/info/Black_on_White_violence Benevolence is not good 161129 08:11 If anything, benevolence may be a bit cowardly. Driven by fear, it's really a form of hidden self interest. So there's nothing wrong about it. At least it's not evil. However, it's not good to be good, unlike what every SJW feels. It can feel good to feel that you are good. It can even make you feel holy, a secular spiritual experience - but you are really not good at all. The urge to seek out this feeling should be strongly resisted. ---- COMMENT: Most doo-gooders just want to look good so they can get laid. Stupidity is evil 161128 18:14 Our current state religion of political correctness is so stupid it's evil. Unfortunately, it's also genetic. And we can't change inefficient genes yet. So if political correctness ever ends, whatever replaces it will probably also be evil. That's why nothing should replace it. On Holocaust denialism 161127 18:40 I've looked into things, and it seems the mainstream Holocaust scholars have done a really bad job at conveying the results of their research. Their websites are basically (effective) propaganda instead of data. This kind of propaganda is not really applied to other historical outrages and horrors. There should have been a Global Inefficiency Museum instead of a Holocaust Museum on the National Mall in Washington D.C. But that would not have been political. - It's really hard to get precise figures of how many victims died where and how. Still, the Holocaust revisionists display their own unmistakable bias in claiming the true death toll was like a million or less. Would that kind of deception even be possible? Since about two million non-Jewish Poles died in the War, and since the three million Jewish Poles were treated significantly worse than them, it's very plausible at least two million Jewish Poles died in Poland alone. And over a million Soviet Jews went missing as well. ---- COMMENT: The only claim they could hope to make at this point is that some victims were double-counted across categories. That's why we need special software to recreate the holocaust at Sim-level resolution. Muslim vs. muslin 161126 22:11 In the following post at far-left blog Slate Star Codex that was hardly taken out of context, Scott Alexander sort of implies that the Jihadis currently streaming into the West are less bad than bad furniture: - http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ ". . . he and his supporters are biased for caring more about terrorism than about furniture-related injuries, which kill several times more Americans than terrorists do each year." - To be fair, I find few things more infuriating than bad interface design . . . and when it comes to software, that's the only kind there is. But it goes beyond that. You could say that society itself is nothing but very, very bad software. Its flaws are its main restraints. When it comes to furniture, all I care about is that it doesn't collapse inconveniently into a mass of stabbing shards. Very informative article on white privilege 161123 17:53 From behind a registration wall: https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-most-memorable-white-privilege-moment/answer/Judith-Gabrielle - What is your most memorable white privilege moment? - I was moved from the Receiving and Diagnostic Unit in the state Maximum Security Prison into a normal Tier. I was in A 2, cell 40 bunk B. Being one of the few white people in the Max tier, it was incumbent upon me to make a good impression. After all, I was born and raised in Southern California, had mixed race kids, and felt like we could all just get along if we tried. - After a week of being pretty darned lonely, I noticed that my mail was showing up at different times then everyone else. Normally it came at night, but mine was much later. When I asked my cellmate for an explanation, I was told that because I was white, I must have money, and the local prison gang of underprivileged Hispanic sweethearts were determining how much they could extort from me by reading my mail. My cellmate was giving them my letters. Being obviously insensitive to their plight, I reacted negatively and demanded that it cease. - I was unaware of exactly how downtrodden my cellie was by white privilege and as I sat there awaiting a response what I received was a punch in the face for not immediately cooperating. My glasses flew. Stunned by the act, I attempted to reason with this angry individual. I was informed that if I spoke again, I would be killed. - An hour later, after count time, my cellie ran out of the room when the doors unlocked. It was lunch time. We were having tuna fish sandwiches that day. I was hungry. When I exited the cell, the gang leader came to my cell and informed me in no uncertain terms that I would be visiting the infirmary soon. The entire gang of underprivileged Hispanic sweethearts then surrounded me and tried to usher me into my cell so I could make my appointment at the infirmary. Meanwhile, other Hispanic sweethearts and African Americans watched and wondered what I would do. Guards were nowhere to be found. I declined the offer. - When lunch came I couldn't eat. I knew what happened to people who tell authorities what is going on, and I had a 15 year sentence. I could never survive 15 years with a reputation as a rat. - Afterwards, the gang leader called me over to a table and informed me that I would be giving all of my property to the gang as reparations for my insolence, and because I was white and America had stolen Mexico's land 150 years earlier. No kidding. My other choice was to quickly finish my 15 year sentence in the next 5 minutes. I opted to live. - That evening, I awoke with a knife to my throat, and discovered that my skin colour made me particularly desirable as a romantic partner. Although I am not a homosexual, this didn't seem to bother my cellie that night. Or the next night. Nor did it deter the entire gang when I tried to take a shower to wash off what I was feeling. - The privelidge of my skin colour made me an exceedingly desired person, and people fought over who had the right to enjoy special time with me in private. The small white gang on the upper tier had been informed that I was now owned by the underprivileged Hispanic sweethearts who so enjoyed my body and mind. I was even able to still cry when my body was being violated with objects, which is a very rare occurrence as most people are simply angry or resigned. Crying and blushing made me seem innocent, and fantasies could be played out (and were for weeks). - When I was rented out to the African Americans on the tier, I found that the oppression my white ancestors had put them through seemed to make them particularly violent. Afterwards, I was always touched when my Hispanic friends would feed me and give me antibiotics to stave off infections in my cell so I wouldn't have to try and explain what happened to a guard. - As targeting another person of colour was not allowed unless they were a child molester, the whites upstairs were told they would be left alone as long as I maintained my beauty and allure. Apparently, it was a mystifying force to my friends of colour as they had long dreamed of doing what they did to one who had the attributes I have. My white privilege allowed me to receive cosmetics, special clothes to wear and an unduly amount of attention from my new friends. - This lasted for several weeks. It came to where I knew who was visiting me just by looking at the blade. I would then know what act to go into to create the pleasure which I was privileged enough to provide. Privileged because of my skin. - Finally, in late August of 1998, I decided to test the laws of physics. While I did not drop enough to snap my neck, I hung in my cell long enough by my sheet to pass out. Luckily I was saved by a guard who was passing by my cell. Before he called it in and had me moved to medical, he informed me that he had been repeatedly fond of watching me enjoy time with my friends. And as I obviously enjoyed people of colour and the festive way they spend time with me, this African American gentleman was able to do what he had always wanted to do, in every orifice, with a person of my hue. - August 28, 1998, - Sitting in medical an hour later with his semen still in every hole, that is when I knew I had been so unfairly gifted with this burden of white privilege. - Judith Gabrielle Convicted murderer, escapee, 15 years in Max; fmr militant atheist given miracle Looks like Hell needed a new devil . . . 161126 19:56 - Still, I would have been happier if instead of that old sh1tbastard Fidel Castro, it had been every single Microsoft programmer who bit the bullet. Is mathematics meaningless? 161119 19:50 In that case logic is meaningless. I got the idea from Eliezer Yudkowsky, that really smart para-futurist who opposed Trump because he appeared to question America's obligations to NATO as part of his out-loud-thinking pre-negotiation style, which apparently was worse than Pizzagate: - Basically, there is an infinite number of possible mathematical equations. Almost all these equations are themselves infinite. Let's assume they still have exact answers. It can be shown that almost all these equations will include infinitely many terms that precisely describe what you are thinking right now. So, merely by changing what you are thinking right now, you can change the result of almost every mathematical equation! Once again magic is real, in a completely useless way that can't be verified. - The obvious objection is that every equation must also contain versions of your mind doing the exact opposite thing, in such a way they exactly cancel out (mathematically speaking). I think it's called renormalization. But is this necessarily true? Our only hope is that the terms don't cancel out exactly. What's the deal with China? 161116 20:48 Now that the election is over, it's safe to read The Atlantic again. Their latest article describes the mess that is China. Seems the Chinese are cracking down ever more in their attempts to close themselves off from the world. If you're in China, you can't access the Internet anymore, only the Chinanet. - Frankly, I'm disappointed in China. I had expected more of them. Or at least something (another illusion shattered, three more to go). They're no Japan, that's for sure, even though they belong to the same family, along with Korea. - The problem is their somewhat disturbing lack of creativity. They're brilliant at making stuff, lousy at seeing the big picture. They're too well adapted to reality. There's no technically-original Chinese science fiction, no world-class entertainment franchises, no breakthrough software concepts. Even the Russians have them beat there. The Chinese are NOT living up to their national IQ. It's a genetic personality trait. - This in no way implies they won't eventually rule the world, provided the world doesn't change too fast. ---- RELATED STORY: https://andrewbatson.com/2016/11/21/zhao-lingmin-on-the-roots-of-chinese-elite-support-for-trump/ What to watch out for if you ever become a computer program 161115 22:34 Your awareness may then be less stable than when it was still inside a human brain. A human brain generates a lot of awareness, for the following three reasons: - * Its inefficient design generates a lot of redundant awareness. If awareness is generated by the mere existence of a physical pattern, then a pattern created by many atoms may generate more awareness than a pattern generated by few atoms. - * The amplifying effects of the surrounding environment: a brain 'leaks' a lot of heat that is absorbed all around. This heat flow is exactly as complex as the brain generating it, and a non-causal extension of its awareness. - * Quantum multiverse effects also generate countless slightly different versions of each brain. - Future computer hardware will be more efficient than human brains. Therefore the awareness pattern it generates is smaller, and has less effect on the surrounding environment, making it harder for such a pattern to be anthropically amplified by the surrounding environment. - If the simulated mind is generated by a quantum computer it's even worse. Then the relevant mind pattern may fully exist in only one of many interconnected universes. - The problem of such a 'weak' mind pattern is the problem of anthropic interference. Mind fragments are already being generated everywhere in the random chaos. The best known example is Boltzmann Brains. If your future awareness is created by such an efficient computer, it would be more likely to find itself as such a chaotic awareness fragment. We don't want that. - That is why the best and most meaningful awareness patterns may be amplified. ---- COMMENT: Can we use this insight to manipulate reality in useful ways, like choosing between possible realities to pick the best one Infogalactic on Scientology 161114 08:35 Right now, Scientology's public image could hardly be worse. They are being criticized from all directions. Their staff are shell-shocked and numb. At this point they probably depend on the unyielding pressure. It holds them in place against their inherent absurdities. It excuses their extremely low morale and structural incapacity. Going through the motions is easier under constant stress. If people stopped criticizing them, they might just pop out of existence. They do have a highly recognizable post-anachronistic sense of style though. The closest similarity is North Korea. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Scientology_programs_under_David_Miscavige Our minds are too simple: what does that mean? 161113 21:42 They should be unlimited: statistically, a randomly selected possible mind should be infinitely large and complex. - We are not infinitely complex: therefore, we are not randomly selected among the set of all possible minds. More likely we are randomly selected among the smallest, simplest minds able to understand this sentence. - This implies that infinitely complex minds are very rare, not that they don't exist. If they do exist, it implies the existence of uncountably many identical copies of each small, simple mind for each single infinite mind. - Even though we are small and simple, our awareness outswamps that of the the gods. The Bataclan reopens politically correct 161112 08:00 I take back what I said about the Eagles of Death metal. Since then they have mentioned Islam and its responsibility for the terror attacks. Of course the French are utterly infuriated anyone dares criticize those who slaughtered 130 of their people. - http://human-stupidity.com/equality4/islam/bataclan-terror-victims-punished-for-islamophobia-eagles-of-death-concerts-cancelled Infogalactic: why antisemitism? 161111 17:51 Speaking of infinite hate, here's a list of all the known reasons for antisemitism. Some people have really hated the Jews. A few have hated them almost as much as I hate computer programmers. This is something that should concern all outsiders. Culture is essence. Of course Jews aren't really outsiders, unless non-Jews work very hard to make them so. - https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_claimed_reasons_for_antisemitism The future could be wonderful beyond comprehension 161110 It's easy to imagine, minus all the details. A virtual reality paradise of endless diversity created by ever expanding software. Meanwhile, all I want is ANY WAY to get revenge against Microsoft for their years of evil against me (because of their deliberately defective software). Seems impossible, doesn't it. Never in the history of the world has there been a greater hate than the hate I feel for Microsoft at this very moment. Demons in human form deserve whatever bad thing happens against them. It is of course illegal to call for a person to be murdered. It is not illegal to call for a corporation to be abolished. Which takes us back to the title of this post. Our efforts have come to fruition 111609 03:49 Hard to imagine how this could slow the rate of technological progress compared to the alternative. Staying up all night . . . 161109 02:38 Podesta just told Hillary's supporters to go home while they work on counting the votes in the few remaining states where this election will be decided. No doubt there won't be any funny business going on there. HOUR ZERO: THE UNBALANCED MIGRATION ELECTION 161108 The question is whether there will be a large or a very large surplus of immigrants over emigrants. Mexicans relocate to America to gain rights that Americans who relocate to Mexico don't gain. The greatest human challenge and achievement is secure property rights. That right is under review today. ---- How about unbalanced the OTHER way for a change? COUNTDOWN: 1 DAY 161107 New Infogalactic encyclopedia article: Male Immigration Surplus This has been one of my chronic bugbears. The West is turning turning into a weiner party. Trying to get it fully sourced: - https://infogalactic.com/info/Male_immigration_surplus COUNTDOWN: 2 DAYS 161106 18:22 Imagine America in 2050 It can be exciting: everywhere bilingual signs, pops of gunfire at night. Criminal extortion cartels have perfected kidnapping so well it encourages people to work harder to pay their ransoms. Being poor is no longer an excuse. And then there's the sense of living in the nucleus of the incipient World State. COUNTDOWN: 3 DAYS 161105 19:55 A clock was ticking in a quiet room Outside, a passing car briefly emerged from the soft background roar. The light changed subtly from passing cloud shadows. No one was there. Then who was thinking this? COUNTDOWN: 4 DAYS 161104 20:05 If there was even a single magical object it could destroy the universe Because that object would be more powerful than the laws of physics, and the laws of physics create the universe. COUNTDOWN: 5 DAYS 161103 20:06 No greater hate Never in the history of the universe has there been a greater hate than the hate I feel for Microsoft at this very moment. Half the time it's (Windows 10) so fucking goddamn slow!!!!!!!!!!! The other half it's completely unusable. Worst of all there appears to be no way to get revenge against these demonpeople. None at all. That's very, very bad. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY COUNTDOWN: 6 DAYS 161102 13:35 Microsoft is satan if only there was a way to send it to hell COUNTDOWN: 7 DAYS 161101 08:19 In this world you can scream against infinite evil. . . . but the bad guys always win. You are far beneath their contempt or so it seems. Are you though? Forbidden calculations http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2016/10/31/ 161031 21:40 They started appearing in the mid-2020s, parasite functions within distributed apps designed for other purposes and even executable memes. No one knew what had caused them, or if their appearance was inevitable. The forbidden equations appeared soon thereafter, continuously changing themselves like life evolving toward its environment. But their environment was themselves. Each equation was evolving toward its essential self. It was theorized nothing was more fundamental. The most dangerous equation was constantly spawning and pruning elaborate processes that tied down whole networks. It became clear to the agents permitted to know of its existence that it was evolving the pattern of a single molecule. The most dangerous molecule in the universe. Only one copy might change the universe. It would copy itself and spread around the world in an imperceptibly thin cloud and further copy itself in undetected places, slowly saturating its environment everywhere at once. Only in the last day would it reach dangerous concentrations everywhere, and those hours would be the only remote hope to neutralize it. The SCP agents wondered who would make the first copy if no one but them knew about it. He had never felt better 161031 08:02 Sitting in his motel room as the air conditioner blew, flicking through new TV channels while munching chips. The mildly intoxicating excitement of the vacation beach resort outside. In an hour he might take a trip to the mall, a restaurant and Imax after. There was a great sense of well-being. This was heaven then, the end state sought by every evolving system created by reality or any portion thereof. The universal solution. No more need to act ever again. A dark sky was rising outside the beachfront blinds. The soft drizzle of the afternoon rain was soothing, as was the still distant rumble of thunder. All hell was about to break loose. ---- COMMENT: That sounds like normal life, minus the chill-out thingy. Almost wishing for the storm to get here already. Fun with Infogalactic 161030 20: Infogalactic could try to become an extension of Wikipedia. Instead of rewriting its entirety, they could start by creating a few hundred new articles not allowed there, and 'correct' a few hundred articles with persistent left-wing biases. That would include some of the most visited Wikipedia articles. Most articles would remain unchanged, but there are too many subjects for just an Alt-right wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report - They could also salvage many or most of the deleted and banned Wikipedia submissions from past years: http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Speedy_deletion_Wiki:Main_Page http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Special:AllPages http://deletionpedia.org/en/ - An example of the kind of thing Wikipedia deleted in a flash: http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Reverse_racism - There's a new extension that replaces all Wikipedia links with Infogalactic links in your browser: http://infogalactic.blogspot.com/2016/10/infosextant-browser-extension.html - Banned in advance on Wikipedia: https://infogalactic.com/info/Human_biodiversity_debate Infogalactic: embrace and extend 161030 08:22 Wikipedia could record all the additions and improvements made to the Infogalactic 'fork' articles, and copy them to its own articles. They're probably not going to do that though. Also, many meaningful and useful articles would just be too far out there for them. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Gnon Infogalactic: Malism to pessimism, HBD to HGV 161029 18:09 One way Wikipedia twists the truth leftward is their redirect policy. When someone creates an article describing certain Alt-right views, Wikipedia will delete it and redirect all searches for that term to an article with left wing views. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Population_replacement Infogalactic articles on Alt-right blogs http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2016/10/29/ 161029 07:49 There are new encyclopedia articles on Vox Popoli, Chateau Heartiste, Kings Wiki, Men of the West, and Return of Kings. All these specific subjects of course 'banned' by Wikipedia. - https://infogalactic.com/info/Vox_Popoli https://infogalactic.com/info/Chateau_Heartiste http://infogalactic.com/info/Kings_Wiki https://infogalactic.com/info/Men_of_the_West https://infogalactic.com/info/Return_of_kings_blog First thoughts about Infogalactic http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2016/10/28/ 161028 To be honest, it's not that great yet. I hate Wikipedia, so an alternative would be wonderful. - *) Can't seem to register for an account. They never emailed a password despite many requests. That's no good. We need many contributors. - *) Still very slow. - *) Can't create new article on Infogalactic if Wikipedia decided that title should redirect to existing article. - *) Wikipedia's twin torments are notability and citations. I hope Infogalactic will allow articles about unimportant but interesting subjects, representing literally all the world's viewpoints, but no lies allowed. The most important log page to watch: https://infogalactic.com/info/Special:Log/delete Infogalactic already deleted the entry 'list of Asian men's inventions'. At least one guy thought that article was needed. - *) Allowing people to change webpage HTML is dangerous. Fixing spelling and grammar is fine, but it's too easy to erase stuff. Verified facts should be locked but challengeable. The successor to Wikipedia should be factoid based, a way to add molecules of information. Contributors could add any claims about any subject. Anyone could read the list and vote on things. - To replace Wikipedia, you have to extend it. And instead of seven pillars, just one pillar: it has to be true. Truth alone is worth a hundred pillars. The Trivial Solution: how it applies to AI, Mind Backup, and Reality Hoaxing 161026 21:03 You can program anything with GOTO, including a fully self-aware mind. At least a mind that responds to text inputs as if it was aware. And that means it really IS aware (it would even have been aware if all its responses were randomly appropriate by pure chance). The responses are merely pulled from an almost endless GOTO list covering all inputs. This has to be a consistent list of course. Unfortunately it would take longer than the universe to create this list, which would be bigger than the universe. - You could also fool a simulated mind that they are living in a completely plausible reality, using only the mind itself to create the simulation. Simply generate all possible or plausible situations for this mind, then measure how plausible this portion of the simulation seems to the mind. It could be done by interrupting the simulation, asking the mind, and then erasing the memory of the interruption. The response will be distorted by the shock of being pulled out of the simulation, but the experiment could be repeated many times with different questions. Then retain the simulation that seems most real over the long term. Nothing could be simpler. - Finally, your mind, the person you are right now, could be entirely recreated from statements other people make about you. Once again, there would have to be inconceivably many people and situations you participated in. So it's not really possible, unless the Many World interpretation of quantum physics could be harnessed somehow. The method would be to expose many simulated versions of yourself to everyone who knows you. The version that seems the most like you to them, IS the one that is the most like you. - In practice, a very limited version of this last test might become a useful way to indirectly measure human personality (there was also a Greg Egan story where an inaccurate (but realistic to the protagonist) simulation of the guy's wife was held hostage). The weakness of snark 161025 12:57 RationalWiki is a 'skeptical wiki' criticizing paranormal and unconventional viewpoints. They are full of snarky articles about people who oppose the expansion of Islam. Rationalwiki's article about Islam may be the most submissive and respectful thing on their site. Sarcasm is actually a mainstream conformism tool, and that's what they do best. Mind Backup: short lists and long lists 161023 20:46 Short lists contain your life's top-level data: homes, schools, jobs, important places and settings and situations. They may be updated a few times a year. Long lists contain your life's low-level data. They are filled with meaningful trivia: films, games, acquaintances, shops, visits, small projects, trips . . . They may be updated a few times a week. Whether a category belongs in a short list or a long list will vary between persons. There will be endless overlap and even more connections. Everyone should at least create their own short lists. Procrastination is a defense mechanism 161021 19:36 The things you are putting off, you probably shouldn't be doing at all. You would be wasting your limited life time. Everything takes longer than expected. There is less time than we think. Microsoft is satanic 161020 00:34 The demonpeople who programmed Windows 10 should all be shot. No major software has ever been slower, less responsive, less reliable, and basically less obedient. The reason it's so insanely bloated is no doubt because of all the government/NSA spyware it contains. Did I mention it's SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOW? The purpose of awareness is to prevent almost all possible awareness 161019 Almost all possible mind states are chaotic and completely meaningless (what we'll experience when we die - unless action is taken while we're alive). Most non-chaotic awareness states are also useless, even if they're accurate. Awareness is the brain's truth, the subjective essence of everything, through the rejection of almost everything. A mind is an Omniverse divider, a universal reality sampler, defining the most precise location in reality. Everyone senses this in full - and really nothing else. ---- aren't there more locations in reality than there are possible minds? Short-term memory is actually short-term identity 161017 08:34 It's the more normal version of multiple personalities. When people finish a major project (or even just finish tidying up), they feel as if they've organized the whole universe - or at least as much of the universe as can be organized. For a while it's even true, as their mind was completely filled with the task at hand. - Identity is always changing, but most people have only a few dozen identities (the types should be recorded for everyone). If someone gets shocking news, the aftermath changes their brain as if it was on drugs, at first reducing the impact. Then a new identity may be created. - This is clearest when remembering the lost past. Nostalgia can feel as bleak as death, because that's exactly what it is. ---- The problem of identity: Extremely advanced minds must be extremely large minds: * capable of incredible focus * temporarily unaware of everything else they know * risk of anthropic interference as myriad mind states split into their own timelines Elon Musk has announced a new space launcher designed to transport colonists to Mars 161016 18:56 It would be a two-stage ultra-heavy rocket that would launch from Cape Canaveral, or a new spaceport in southernmost Texas (they would have an excellent view of each launch just south of the (now perhaps unlikely) Mexican border wall). This rocket would be three times as heavy as the Saturn 5 from half a century ago. The engines would be less powerful but more efficient than the mighty F1 first tested in the late 1950s. - The first stage would turn around after separating from its payload, and make a vertical landing back at the launch site. The second stage (three times as heavy as a space shuttle) would enter orbit to perform its mission, before re-entering and also landing back at the launch site. It would have to do this five times to deliver enough fuel to perform the main mission. For this post, I'm assuming the fuel will be delivered to an orbiting depot, an array of giant tanks. Five space shuttle flights would cost over ten billion dollars. Enough shuttle flights to perform the fueling would cost over a hundred billion. - Then a different version of the second stage would be launched, dock with the fuel depot, fill up its tanks, and fly straight on to Mars. There it would slow down by airbraking before re-entering the atmosphere and landing vertically. Elon Musk hopes this version of the second stage (empty weight of a 747) will be able to carry 100 colonists to Mars. It would then refuel using the local atmosphere and fly back to Earth empty, to repeat the mission. This massive launcher would also open up many other possibilities. - If SpaceX manages even a single unmanned test mission to the surface of Mars it would be the greatest human achievement of all time, even if they make no effort to refuel and fly the stage back. - for inspiration ---- COMMENTS: might be problemo with Mexico? This new rocket will put out as much energy as a Hiroshima bomb. Let's hope it doesn't catch fire and blow up on the pad. That second stage seems impractical. It has to do everything from launch to cruise to reentry. They want to do the whole flight from the surface of earth to the surface of Mars in one ship and back, like a space Titanic. The West is a Sausage Fest 161015 09:20 As tens of millions of surplus males from polygamous lands stream into the West, Pope Francis of the Cuckholic Chirch is acting like some diabolic parent figure, admonishing Westerners to make them at home. This labor is not our gift but their right, the Biblical duty of slaves. Passive resistance is sinful. Meanwhile, Evangelicals continue to adopt mostly male surplus babies from the poorest lands, further skewing the sex ratio. - In the past, the reproductive age surplus of men over women was kept in check through violence and war. Now there's less violence, and it's more gender-indiscriminate. The ever rising male surplus is causing strange effects, as millions of loners are pushed from the dating pool. This might be good, if it causes them to subsume their sex drive into inventing new technology. For demonic reasons, the mainstream media ban all discussion. It's taboo to talk about this eco-tastrophe. Just kidding, their reasons are worse than demonic. - The world is evil, but it could become almost tolerable. Large parts of the change would be easy, and every part could seem easy. So why not? Read the first sentence of this paragraph again - proximity-war-the-reference-list #deporttrevornoah The Radicalization Solution 161013 When Trump loses in 3 weeks and 5 days, this is what we have to do: Become more radical. Extremely radical. Especially if your life is already kind of shit anyway because of the ways of the world. If a million people become politically radical enough, they can't all be prosecuted. Diplomacy is not showing people how much you disagree with them. It is the highest form of lying, necessary in a fundamentally defective Horrorverse . . . but only up to a point. ---- COMMENTS: ARE WE A NATION OF PUSIES NOW That plan would take courage... Is there any left after Trump i wonder... related link to that: / http://www.returnofkings.com/98271/the-crippling-effect-of-the-zero-defect-mentality / That sounds like a challenge. Good, we need to start playing for keeps. Here is a fictional story about what the world will look like after Trump loses 161012 08:38 The Nearer FutureWindows 10 is so bad it's evil 161011 17:40 WARNING: Windows 10 will randomly delete files without your knowledge or permission due to a defect. - In my opinion, computers are barely improving in the responsiveness of the user interface. I have been suffering under the tyranny of inadequate microchips sold by deceiving merchants since the early eighties. They just won't work. The simple things they are supposed to do, they won't do. Windows 10 is no better. The whole operating system is incredibly slow on my new Acer desktop PC, worse than anything this century. It may run programs better, but is slower than XP. Software makers choose to be evil, but this goes beyond that. - Here's how Windows 10 secretly deletes or loses your files: In the old days, you could just indicate a file by clicking on it, and it turned blue. Then you could move or activate it. Now there is a sometimes-hidden checkbox in front of each file that you click on to indicate the file. Microsoft has set things up so the folder checkboxes are incredibly "laggy". It takes a second or two to activate a checkmark in front of a file or folder, and even longer to deactivate it. Nothing has ever been more dangerous in the world of software (with the possible exception of the USAF making their nuclear codes all zeroes). - Sometimes this system freezes. Clicking a checkmark a second time will not deactivate it, but you won't notice. If you try to activate the checkbox in front of a file or folder, Windows 10's defective software may still have active checkboxes in front of other files or folders, beyond the visible part of the screen. What this means is that when you are deleting a file, Windows 10 will also delete other files and folders you never intended to mark. - After a while you may notice some of your important files and folders are missing. If it's not too late, you can scour your recycle bin to find them. Of course that only works if you haven't emptied it yet. IMPORTANT USER WARNING: If you use Windows 10, you should NEVER delete a file. Instead move it to a big inactive folder. I challenge anyone from Microsoft to comment here. ---- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how-computers-are-setting-us-up-disaster?CMP=share_btn_tw When darkness comes 161010 18:37 That's when things get easy. Freedom is having nothing left to lose. The essence of pain is the perception of HAVING to do something. Fully realized, there is no worse feeling. That's why I think relief is the best possible human feeling, and why I hate bureaucracy more than anything except outright torture. When you're feeling down, when you're in the dumps, overwhelmed by a tsunami of troubles created by others . . . rejoice in the fact that you have an abundance of worthy enemies. Nothing else matters. ---- COMMENT: COURAGE IS NOT GIVING A FUCK ANYMORE First Contact 161009 There was an alien around the corner. Moving his head, the man studied the light from the room's doorway. It illuminated the hallway floor, the uneven rectangle of electric light continuing to rise up the opposite wall. Was that a shadow of furniture? The security door at the end of the hallway was wide open, seemingly undisturbed woods beyond. He felt a draft and ignored the trembling of his phone. - Six minutes ago he had been sitting in the public library's reading room, when Jake the homeless man had tugged on his shoulder. There was a look on his face that had never been there before, immediately undeniable urgency. Bending down, Jake had whispered his unthinkable message for reasons quite unrelated to the reading room's code of silence. Getting up, every TV and computer screen in the library now displaying an unrecognized symbol, distant shouting, the thumping of a helicopter. That had been only minutes ago, but seemed like a different age. - In his memory, he tried analyzing Jake's face for clues as history ended directly ahead. The second hand on the wall clock continued its countdown. Finally, he noticed another shadow on the floor over the shadow of the conference room table, a moving shadow containing more information than every book in this building. With a falling sensation, he found he couldn't turn the corner. It would take ten billion years to turn that corner, trillions of days of evolution in a single second, a short circuit across time to reach the result of a calculation like a god. ---- COMMENTS: Let someone else take tht small step is what I would say befor skedaddling outta there They wouldn't be so scary if it wasn't for all the butt probing. Mind Backup: in defense of the unnatural 161007 To transcend death, it's necessary to reject the limits of life. That means quality of existence is far more important than quantity. However, the second can be used to amplify the first. What that means is that after The Singularity, there will be an anthropic reason to run many identical (or similar) copies of the best and most meaningful posthuman experience simulations in parallel. In fact entire converted star systems may be dedicated to this purpose. And it all begins right now, or at least in the near future when we can convince some more people this stuff is important. We expect early adopter benefits will be HUGE. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/mind-backup-and-the-dream-of-mental-immortality-going-against-nature/ ---- Comment: Peoples time horizons are too long for that. Need to have immediate payoffs or it won't work. Let's see how long it will take to get banned again 161005 09:04 https://twitter.com/Jack_Arcalon This should be fun. Twitter has been deleting any account to the right of Pol Pot in their ongoing effort to be bought by Disney or Google. Mind Backup: half the time the most important data is missing data 161004 20:31 First, it tells us of strange biases in our understanding, but things may also be hiding in the absence; especially when there seems to be no way to fill the gap. I'm not just talking about religious delusions. What we don't know is more important than what we think we know. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/remaining-gaps-in-future-mind-reconstructions-could-be-filled-using-zero-data-data-zdd-algorithms/ Demons actually exist 161003 09:03 They are completely real, and there are millions of them. They are also known as computer programmers, the ones who enslave and bury users alive inside diabolical or defective interfaces. Interface design is a crude and rude field, more about making it pretty than making it simple, the merciless brutality of surface complexity over intelligence, barriers instead of choices (from Yahoo hiding the search result url from your right mouse button to Windows 10 losing your life's work while trying to drag files into folders). Deception lies at its heart. It never ever stops. There is no greater unavenged evil in existence. They might as well be infinitely evil, perfect in their way. No one will ever get away with more than them. The demonpeople of the present and the future. The face of Moloch has an uncanny resemblance to Bill Gates. ---- They usually cover it up Things are only getting worse as choices are reduced and don't get me started on tablet interfaces. http://lap.umd.edu/computer_rage/Tech_Report/written_comments/fru.html ---- Evil is whatever you can get away with Mind Backup: in the longest term 161002 08:27 Before Mind Backup can even begin, its philosophical underpinnings will have to be defined. The greatest risk of all is the risk of involuntary existence. What could go wrong, and could it be made acceptably safe? In the longest term, we're all dead - but even death may die. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/the-philosophical-problem-underlying-mind-backup-research/ Would you WANT to live forever? 160930 08:12 Wouldn't it become incredibly boring to inhabit a simulation for all eternity, no matter how detailed and diverse? They say you would inevitably become bored with existence itself. Without a doubt, that's how it seems to most normal people when they think about it (to me it seems ideal). It's also why I suspect, if there is to be Mind Backup in our future, a large percentage of the simulation will be a recreation of the 'first day', endlessly elaborated. ---- COMMENTS: YES PLEASE !!! A meaningless question at this point. Let's try it out for a few centuries and then we can hopefully discuss it more rationally. My policy on immigration 160929 14:41 Actually it's my policy on migration, since the effects flow both ways (a forbidden truth under political correctness). My preferred policy is very clear: to maximize the rate of technological progress. The progress I care about has slowed dramatically but hasn't stagnated altogether, despite all the software interface and delay complaints on this blog. (Like I've said many times: computers are so bad they're evil. Well actually their programmers are. I call them demonpeople but it's inadequate. Better to call these people satandemons. We need stronger emotions than hate.) For the most part, evil is stupidity, which is why it's so popular. That doesn't mean Western countries should poach the highest-IQ people from the Third World, like Canada and Singapore have been doing. Progress can be maximized by leaving them exactly where they are, so they can improve their own lands with investment from the outside, except for a high-IQ exchange program. 160927 17:28 These are the days before the beginning We are the Predecessors, living our incredibly slow lives, the dullness crushingly imperceptible. The infinite epic future is as real as it is inaccessible. Our greatest mistake is being born too soon. Like Dr. Who said, there are no unimportant people. They just appear so in their own time, if they appear at all. If violent criminals were sterilized as a condition of parole, they couldn't spread violent genes 160925 12:02 However, it's politically impossible to shut down evil-sperm producing gonads. The very notion outrages the liberal hipsters on Reddit and almost everywhere else for reasons beyond any comprehension. That's because they are actually alien reasons, though not extraterrestrial. Maybe it's not the criminals who are really evil, but those who politically protect their crime-producing genes? Remove the first word and last character from the previous sentence. - I've had a sense of overwhelming doom for no good reason lately. One of these days my mood will have to be accurate. There may be no peaceful solution, in the same way there was no peaceful solution to past conflicts. Will there be war or will one side capitulate utterly, as seems likely given the sniveling coward/traitors (R) filling the remaining mainstream. Hard to imagine a motive to attack your main ally while being attacked by your main enemy other than insanity. "Behold the Dreamers" - a novel by Imbolo Mbue 160924 17:44 This book is about Cameroonians who have escaped the hellhole of Cameroon and migrated to the USA. Basically, the book is about how unspeakably bad the USA is, described in every liberally scolding/passive aggressive way imaginable and more. Of course it would be utterly unthinkable to even dream about mentioning how unspeakably bad Cameroon is. Liberals and hipsters love it. And, I would venture, libertarians, who increasingly make a show of being hyper-PC, as if Cameroon should only deregulate and nothing would prevent them from designing luxury automobiles. Incisive post by Thosewhocansee about subtleties of racially determined genetic differences 160923 12:50 http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.ae/2016/09/the-past-is-real-talking-country.html - This is a very complex matter, and any single blog post must necessarily be incomplete. The most important aspect is the reaction to the revelation. And for whatever reason, a majority (of whites only) simply can't handle the truth. Their brains are incapable of containing the information, and therefore reality itself must be mentally altered. Most people are surprisingly good at normal activities, and surprisingly bad at the big picture. In practice this means that certain thoughts are forbidden. Still hard to believe that twelve years ago the media didn't make a peep about BushKerry's membership in one of the world's most sinister secret organizations, Skull and Bones, and the masses let them get away with it. At this point my paranoia radar is so far out of whack I'm suspecting the ultimate overlords are the only ones NOT in on the Mainstream Conspiracy. I've lived in Europe. It's a liberal mind control field, literally alien. But then alien is the norm. Paul Krugman would call for more members of Boko Haram to be imported into the West to "subvert" them into becoming good multiculturalists. Actually liberals would be perfectly willing to embrace racial differences, provided it turned out all minorities were intellectually superior to Caucasians. So how bad could things get, you ask? BAD. Perhaps a victim of some modern witchhunt (like a false rape accusation) could decide to go berserk as a matter of principle, starting with calling the bitch a liar around the clock, regardless of the costs to themselves. Nothing to lose could mean nothing to fear. ---- A message from Heartiste: Seattle Mariners catcher Steve Clevenger was suspended without pay for the season for not supporting Black Lives Matter. Steve Clevenger has a twatter account: @Clev_45. Email accounts for the Mariners executives to direct your furious rage to: Bob Aylward Joe Chard Teresa Dugger Tim Kornegay David Curry ---- THE IDIOT APOLOGIZED FOR HIS TWEETS. HE DESERVED WHAT HE GOT. ---- about Skull and Bones http://www.jeremiahproject.com/newworldorder/nworder03.html Blog review: Jim's Blog 160922 17:34 http://blog.jim.com - Aside from snatching up one of the best domain names, this blog has an invigoratingly cynical attitude forbidden in our politically correct culture, from well-meaning conformarxist Barack al-Hussein on down. Many revelations about gender dynamics, and second-order analysis revealing how the mainstream media stands almost diametrically against the truth. Also analysis about long-term political/sociological dynamics that don't fit the news cycle. Executive summary: in the System, the evil is everywhere. My interpretation: the System is evil. Bravery is contemptuously rejecting the wrong realities of others. It's better to be boldly shocking than boringly respectable. Ayn Rand was thrilled by the depredations of some gay party killers, not because she approved but because their existence supported the Nietzschean insight that people make their own realities, for better or worse. ---- link to this one too: http://www.dailystormer.com Blog review: Eradica 160920 15:50 http://eradica.wordpress.com/ - Found it through Lion of the Blogosphere. This will take more than one review to describe. Basically, it's about how things are worse than you think. I mean MUCH worse. It's also later than you think, perhaps too late. The Cathedral, the Lords of Lies, Uncle Beast, and worst of all cocktail liberals. A very good start. This is as deep as it goes. Malism has never looked so good as an ideology, sad to say. The most detailed articles are about the principles of law enforcement, and their abuses to a lesser extent. Don't EVER answer questions. A guy made the STUPID mistake of voluntarily letting the cops in when they asked about a software breach at a former employer, he answered some unrelated questions, and they had the pretext to seize and search all his computers and media. The blog archives have deep political/sociological analysis. Rising taxes are less important than rising regulations for top-down control tools. Even small businesses have to hire bureaucrats to comply with endless inefficient mandates. The comments delve into why things are getting just a bit worse by the day. Oh and one other thing: never give in, apologize, or admit error to the demons of the other side ---- COMMENTS: 2016-10-05 05:36 pm (UTC) There's no way that site's not run by FBI/DHS agents. ...Which, I guess, supports your thesis still further! ---- Prehaps but how do we know YOU are not FBI/DHS agent ??? ---- Whites UNDER-REACT to threats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FigmCbJVLg4 Anthropic Existentialism 160918 Most sentient minds want to become anthropically stable. They want to become confident about their own futures. Minds basically want to stop worrying, and that would mean the end of worry. It may be difficult. If you wait long enough, an infinite number of things could go infinitely wrong. The real goal would be to prevent boundless horror. Experiencing boundless pleasure would be nice, but unnecessary by comparison. That's why I think higher minds may give up most emotions. - The first 'solution' is to accept a finite horizon. Such a mind would want to become more like themself, up to a limit. It could still take eons to correlate all their knowledge and insights. I've written stories about it that make it seem like an endless vacation. - The other stable path may be to commit to expanding your mind forever, according to your current preferences. You would still only explore a tiny fraction of organized reality, but it would be the personally most meaningful part of reality. If Mind Backup is possible, the subject would always just be starting their life. - You might think that as future minds expand, they will eventually all want to merge. It looks like that will become forever less likely as they specialize and diverge. ---- SO THERE MUST BE MINUS INFINITY NEGATIVE GODS WHO DONT NOT EXIST Mind Backup: what can you do today? 160916 18:07 Try to create your own personal top-level mind backup. Arguably, there is nothing more important that you could do. It would involve creating only three top-level lists, each a few pages long. Only the most important data would be added in the most succinct way: - A life history (ultra short). An interest list (ultra short). A personality attribute list (ultra short). Yahoo is evil: part 77 of a series on intentionally defective software 160914 18:31 In a world made of deliberate evil in all directions and levels, it's hard to say who is worse: the people who deliberately decide to create this evil and implement it, or the people who deliberately decide to validate this evil by accepting it. It's hard since the answer will be different for everyone. Based on my personal experience, I have never felt the presence of evil as fully and directly as through the work of the world's computer programmers. - Most recently, that was through the work of Yahoo Mail's programmers, who make it impossible to bulk delete spam emails. You can tick all the inbox check boxes, but then you can't press the "delete" button on top, which stays gray. You simply are not permitted to click on it. In its way this small but deliberate thing perfectly demonstrates the nature of the world's evil and beyond. - These people, the programmers of Yahoo Mail, are little demons, to the extent that demons actually exist. They don't have horns because they don't need them to do their thing. There is simply no reason for these people to do something that evil. It's completely inexplicable. Yet they did just that for some inscrutable but conscious reason. There is no rational benefit, but then we don't live in a rational world but an evil one. Obviously there are hidden variables in play causing them to add useless layers of complexity. Most of the world's work seems to have net negative value. ---- Evil is just not giving a fukc Turns out we only need to measure ONE thing to predict how successful someone is going to be 160913 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZNDhEOHk5T0ZWWVk/view - Or at least how successful they'll be at inventing new stuff. It's their spatial ability. That alone may determine someone's true cognitive power. Not their social or emotional capacity, but their power to really think. The above link has been somewhat crippled by evil computer programmers, but you can still read it. The Muslim terrorists are not the bad guys 160911 19:05 The politically correct liberals are the bad guys: http://human-stupidity.com/equality4/islam/bataclan-terror-victims-punished-for-islamophobia-eagles-of-death-concerts-cancelled Consequences of the ongoing IQ decline 160910 08:36 The biggest lie is the true size of our public debt. All the open-ended medical and assorted benefits to Boomers, unionistas, interest-groups, and crony capitalists, to be paid by underemployed taxpayers in dead-end jobs for the rest of the century. The Boomers were not the 'Greatest Generation', but in some ways they seem like the Last Generation. If, in the early 1980s, I could have visited today's cuckplanet, I would have liked the way white students seem relatively wimp-like now, unlike their parents in the 1980s. Fortunately I have evolved since then. They are politically correct multi-culti pro-immigrationists bleating to import tens of millions of Islamist Third Worlders, just to have an excuse to live with their parents forever while enjoying the vibrancy from behind the curtains. Sorry, got carried away there for a moment, it's not quite that bad. They don't actually want to live with their parents forever. But they are conformists. In that respect nothing has changed for the better. In 1987, the music video and record single "Papa don't preach" was Madonna's cynical triangulation attempt to become a superstar by appealing to the largest common denominator by appearing controversial in a PG-13 way. It's a fake, synthesized and simulated controversy, like how that girl got addicted to caffeine pills in "Saved by the bell", since real drugs would have been too edgy for that show. Just like the most 'edgy' content on Reddit now, massaged for commercial coolness. Somehow online life is making people more conventional and conformist. That was not supposed to happen. They predicted in the 1990s the Net would cause society to splinter into millions of interest groups. If only. Do-gooder liberals are actually extreme optimists about their own prospects. My unpopular belief is that most people have already advanced to their maximum feasible level of competence. Increasingly, the choice is to get rich or (usually) die trying. The alternative of living as well on less money is becoming less of a legal option. Better to live in a low quality neighborhood inhabited by high quality people than a high quality neighborhood inhabited by low quality people. That will slowly get harder. My favorite symptom of the slow IQ decline is the worsening quality of software interfaces relative to processing power. We're in a race between quality and quantity, of human and machine intelligence. And the racers are running in opposite directions. ---- We need a high-IQ political party or one that tries to raise IQ virtually like the Flynn effect did Anthropic entropy: quantum feedback amplification 160909 17:46 https://aeon.co/conversations/what-is-your-secret-scientific-insight-something-you-suspect-is-true-even-if-you-can-t-prove-it - So I have been trying to set up a rather strange experiment for some years now. In demolition and excavation projects, it's sometimes necessary to detonate an enormous amount of explosives at once; usually a mix of fertilizer/fuel oil that can work as well as high explosives to break up large masses of rock and soil, typically for mining purposes. My idea is to add an experimental variable to the timer that sets off the charge. Once the button has been pressed, the detonation becomes inevitable, but there is an extra circuit that can delay the explosion between zero and three seconds. My theory is that there may be an anomaly in the delay amount. Either the explosion will happen sooner than expected, in the first few milliseconds, or it will more often be delayed to the end of the three second interval. First option seems more likely. The explosion represents an entropy release, and thereby the creation of a large number of new time-paths. You are more likely to be in one of these time paths because there are so many of them. Therefore the explosion is likely to have happened. Therefore you can increase the probability of an unlikely event selected in advance as an explosion trigger. Therefore magic may be real. This is not necessarily a good thing. Instead of releasing entropy to create strange new futures, it may be better to first eliminate known bad outcomes. ---- Comment: yes but can you use it to win the lotto Hate is good 160906 08:58 Every blog and website that discusses our current dystopian trends, from population replacement to IQ loss to engineered stupidity, goes out of its way to remind us they oppose violent resistance against those authorities imposing said policies (see the disclaimer at www.dailystormer.com). I wonder if that should change. Actually I don't. As I recall, my reaction to the 2001 terror attacks was outrage at the lack of outrage among my countrymen. Instead there was mostly anguish and sadness and pleading and beseeching. The only anger was confusion. Above all, things should have been more interesting at that point. (My guess is that the next terrorist scare will be a convincing fake threat involving gas attacks on airliners or something. Or maybe there will be fake chatter hinting at fiendish strikes against embassies or nuclear power plants, causing them to be shut down.) - First, I blame political correctness. Given its sheer, relentless, Ross Ice Shelf-like force, I wish I could hate Obama, but at least he's not a traitor like his enabling cronies on the right. The population replacement program is not being caused by Jews, but by people who are just as evil as the Jews have been depicted. Obviously some of these evil people are also Jews, a bit more than their percentage of the general population. Hate is the simplest answer, and therefore the best. A simple tit for tat policy: why didn't Israel just blindly return fire against rocket attacks? Their overcomplex pacification efforts just made their enemies madder. The reason may be that we live in a society where hate is perceived as uncool. It just doesn't seem that effective. I've seen victims of financial scams and government shenanigans who were utterly powerless. They could scream and shout at all the injustices all they wanted, but they might as well be tied to a conveyor belt leading to a shredder. And they let it happen. Will it continue forever or will there eventually be unpredictable disruptons? There will be, but few and far between. - Women are more attracted to expressionless, taciturn, even emotionless men (for the most part). This implies these men have reserved a larger portion of their brains for competent action. Deeds not words. They are unpredictable because they give off few signals. Of course they also have to be strong. The most emotional and expressive males are the least action-skilled, unless the skill involves social drama. It's just a pose - except sometimes it may imply something else, a lack of inhibitions or genuine strangeness. Always uncool and almost always bad. Until it isn't. Bullies are usually opportunists. They only start to attack after playing with their prey for a while, to scope out their weaknesses. It helps all the prey if a few members are unpredictable and unpredictably violent. ---- I really wonder what is going on in Hillary's mind. Could be a host of vast impersonal forces, dreadfully senseless like the Salamander Letter or Zalgo or some bureaucratic terminator from a dead future.... But we wouldnt want to be disrespectful about our future glorious bitch in chief.. ---- Comment: new bumper stickler HATE=GR8 Why does antisemitism exist? 160904 14:50 It's an inefficient response to an inefficiency. Sometimes, the members of a small group accrue large benefits to themselves, at a smaller individual cost to the members of a large group. The small group has to be well organized for that to happen. I'm talking about legal bureaucracy, excessive regulation, and other forms of insider rent-seeking that benefits those who can navigate the System, some or many of whom are Jewish. This imposition is calmly (and utterly wrongly) tolerated by the members of the larger group because they are not as smart as the members of the smaller group. They don't even know what's happening. When someone tells them, they explode in rage at the person telling them instead of the System, because that's what they do. However, after a while there might be some mild unfocused irritation. Then less mild and even less focused irritation. That could escalate the situation from a kerfuffle to a hullabaloo. Things sure go wrong a lot, don't they? Maybe even TOO often? It still takes about as long for a website to load as it did in the 1990s. Just changing the name of a file takes longer in Windows 10 than in Windows 95, with the computer freezing for LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG seconds. The simple fact that something like Microsoft Windows is allowed to exist without comment proves this world is evil. Evil is absolutely everywhere. Evil is nature, evil is Gnon. Nothing else matters but evil. There is nothing else. This world is so endlessly, deliberately, and casually evil that it deserves more justified hate than anyone can ever feel times a trillion. I apologize for understating the immensity of the problem. Well, almost anyone. Inefficiency is the seed of all evil, not the Jews. They just happen to know how to deal with it better, to their advantage. My goal in life 160903 10:16 I want to create a permanent state of vacation. This is perhaps easier said than done, starting with the economic problem. Is a space drive possible? 160902 17:34 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-nasa-eagleworks-paper-has-finally-passed-peer-review-says-scientist-know-1578716 - Once again, I predicted this type of reactionless space propulsion method in my epic novel 'Infinite Thunder', where its possible existence provided the main plot motivation for the early chapters. - There were two versions. The simplest version used 'strange frequency' ultra-long-wavelength radio waves, that could only be emitted and received by special antennas. According to the transaction hypothesis of quantum physics, a particle can only be emitted if, at some point in the future, it will be absorbed elsewhere. Sounds almost like backwards causality. That means a larger percentage of such a radio beam is likely to be absorbed by the first receiver in its path, if there are unlikely to be other receivers further along. This absorption can transmit momentum from an emitter on Earth to a receiver mounted on a spaceship. - The second version would 'push' against the sea of temporary 'virtual particles' surrounding us at all times. This storm of extremely short-lived subatomic quanta would always look the same, no matter what speed an observer was moving. There may be infinitely many of these particles, for all we know, existing for correspondingly brief durations. Or perhaps they are a type of physical fiction. How to push against this ephemeral vacuum energy? By accelerating this energy in the opposite direction you want to go of course. That could take an oval-shaped particle accelerator, where the particles would constantly appear to lose energy as they go around the uneven loop. nickel and dimed by a thousand cuts 160901 10:20 http://www.subvertednation.net/kosher-tax/ This is an interesting post about the undiscussable 'kosher tax' we must pay. It's another example of an organized minority benefiting from an unorganized majority. All minorities do that, but not to the same extent? Unlike their media depictions, Jews are not necessarily always nice. Does that make them evil? Only if causing burdens through 100% legal means is evil. However, society usually seems to consider this the opposite of evil. Ethics Rule Alpha 160831 01:11 Don't attack your non-attackers. Even Hitler was loyal to his randomly assembled posse of allies to the end. The greatest social truth is that there are very few people in this world. Eight billion might as well be eight, as far as I'm concerned. It's impossible to get any two to really agree. They don't have to agree about the destination, as long as they agree about the direction. The above rule also means don't attack those who are like yourself, only more so - that means no enemies to your right or to your left, depending on your political bias. It's popular to hate certain people while others may only be praised 160830 I won't criticize our few dissidents, like Fred Phelps's old group or some new groups, because I don't dislike them in the least. I might join them under extreme stress. It could really happen. If you are going to lose, go down with all guns blazing: Fight Harder. ---- My favorite poem in a deliberately evil world in an infinitely evil omnniverse: - Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. - In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoning of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. - Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find me, unafraid. - It matters not how strait the gait, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. - Invictus William Ernest Henley (1875) This is an evil world, like most worlds 160829 08:46 The evilness of society is only equaled by the intensity with which it's supported. The thing to remember is this is their world. One need have nothing to do with it (the evil parts are shared by all races, but not the good parts I do like). I am not saying anyone should make it worse while resisting it. I am not saying it should exist at all. The reason the world is evil is because the universe is evil. Reality could be rejected completely. This is inconceivable, intolerable, unbearable. And totally liberating. - http://www.amerika.org/meta/nihilism-a-philosophy-based-in-nothingness-and-eternity-by-brett-stevens/ ---- Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! - from "Howl" (1955) Allen Ginsberg I want to apologize for my recent comments about computer programmers 160828 I didn't really think before making them, but just let the venom spew forth. In retrospect, having had some time to think about it, I now realize my comments were nowhere near hateful enough for the satanic evil inflicted by the world's computer programmers. The Demonpeople 160826 14:33 But enough about Microsoft employees. Let's talk about Satan himself, also known as Bill Gates. The incomprehensible, hyperdemonic evil known as the Windows empire continues under this human turd's legacy. There are no words to describe how evil this thing is. By this thing I mean both the human-shaped software creator entity and his demonic spawn. There is no greater source of unavenged hatred in the universe. ---- All Windows versions are bloated and slow, but they don't care so long as the money keeps flowing in. So something weird just happened 160824 I was making another post explaining my opinion of computer programmers, but it didn't go through for some reason. That is to say, Livejournal lost the post. Apparently they wouldn't allow this wall of text to be posted. It's probably because some of the word combinations in the post were 'forbidden' words, identified in advance as being too violent or something. The essence of evil 160822 17:27 It means only one thing: you have nothing else to worry about, ever. The evil of this world is so absolute that nothing else matters. Evil is the default ending. The only answer is to live ethically under your own laws. Microsoft is Satan 160821 09:02 Did I mention that Microsoft is Satan? The word evil times infinity does not begin to describe what Microsoft is. There can be no greater hate than hate for them. Microsoft is the perfect embodiment of the core concept of evil, the summation of all lesser and associated evils, more so than any individual mass murderer. Microsoft is Satan because Microsoft is the realest evil. They deserve every bad thing that happens to them. ---- Hate is dangerous becasue it leads to RAGE: http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-pilot-depression-20150405-story.html#page=1 WHAT ARE COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS? 160820 160819 160818: They are the demon people of this world. MY CURRENT OPINION ABOUT COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS No one in the history of the universe has ever felt more hate than I feel at this instant in time. MAXIMUM POSSIBLE HATE But enough about how I feel about computer programmers at this moment. Working on a new novel 160817 17:53 This will be big. It will be bigger than big. It will be the biggest thing ever. So far. I predicted No Man's Sky in my novel "Infinite Thunder" 160815 No Man's Sky is a videogame featuring a "procedurally generated open universe" with 18 quintillion planets. I predicted the first "universe simulation fractal" would be released in 2009, be called "Supercluster", and be the sequel to a popular TV show. It actually took almost three times longer to happen. I predicted something like tablet computers (called "edge screens") in 1985 for the mid-nineties. So my futurist predictions are at least consistent. In 1995, I predicted countless men would have non-sentient virtual reality "girlfriends" by 2010. Which means it may take another decade (or three). Of course that was before I was aware of the immensity of the West's male surplus, still worsening by the hour. SF scenery: fragments from the future 160814 - The last tycoonAs his personal SST taxied toward the private runway along his island's north shore under sunny skies, he was already in heaven. As always. The Pacific clouds were brilliantly white against the deep blue sky. - He counted his triumphs. Luxury was all he knew. No one had ever generated more wealth. It helped that when the first simple AIs had been invented, it also became clear what would happen to someone's awareness after they died. Everything that logically could happen did happen somewhere . . . but the most likely continuation was as an AI-like ancestor simulation. And that process could be manipulated. - His franchise empire controlled over seven thousand proprietary mind backup facilities worldwide. The Forever Symbol was everywhere now. This island's VR-Metaplex was the most sophisticated human construction on or off the planet. The complex got more spectacular the deeper one ventured inside, with grander reception areas welcoming wealthier clients. At the core was the promise of true immortality. - The ultra-resolution MRI brain scanner was still mostly cosmetic, as was the DNA analysis, but their subtle and elaborate psychological tests could extract almost anyone's deepest drives and motivations. His company's research division already manipulated the world economy, managing trillions in new investments across the Third World. The solar-powered hypercomputer network backed up their deceased clients' recorded data, and generated increasingly lifelike heaven-simulations for them. - His plane leaped into the air. A perfectly flat layer of isolated clouds slid past the windows, reminding him of the souls of the dead. He darkened the windows, put on his one-of-a-kind VR helmet, and left physical reality behind. - As always, the psychiatrist waited in his chair in his skyscraper office, a shadow with the setting sun at his back. - - Post-Singularity flashesIn RealSpace robots tore up the land, but nothing was lost as the world was covered with server farms. In the first year of posthuman freedom, all dreams came true. Eons of denied pleasures were finally experienced by human simulations inhabiting vacations eternal. Immortal personalities experienced endless variations. Heaven was more real than anything that had come before. It turned out the endlessly suffering humans of history had been the real ghosts all along. - *) The ultimate existential solution: Suffering was the only thing that mattered. Alcohol can make you feel a little bit good. Certain nerve signals from injured body parts can make you feel inconceivably, transcendentally, supernaturally bad. The existence of agony, or the mere possibility of it, means that everything is already irrevocably ruined. It would be infinitely better if nothing existed. But it's a little bit late for that. Suffering could not be erased, but it could be compensated for. - *) The ultimate ethical solution: Every finite mind knew it would be recreated forever. That meant any unethical act would eventually be detected and automatically penalized. Ultimately, all crimes would be self-inflicted. - When an infinite mind dies, the tragedy is beyond comprehension. All human suffering is nothing by comparison. All that remains is endless static. Time would have to be defeated in the end. Only timeless was forever. ultrashort SF story: Unification Day 160813 The moon was beyond dead, not a wasteland but a moral void. From here, the universe looked like some abstract art installation, as unreal as it was empty. Standing on the edge of everything, the black horizon was no buffer from what lay beyond. - The astronaut lifted his foot and kicked up a bowl of dust. It formed ephemeral arcs and streamers, a misty chandelier that collapsed like a movie run backward. He stood on the rim of a brutally violent crater surrounded by harsh rocks. No way to tell if they had last moved last week or last eon. A hole in the crater opened on a partially collapsed lava tube blocked by indescribable debris. - The astronaut waited without moving. In this gravity it was easy to stand for hours. There it was! A blue shimmer on the horizon that would be gone in an hour. The edge of the earth, as high as it ever rose on the limb of the visible side of the moon. - It had been a long time since the last human visit, but this time they had come to stay. The flag on the astronaut's arm changed color and design, bars and stars turning into a swirling rainbow sphere. - Now there was only One Nation in the solar system, a single state combining all of humanity under one set of principles. And Switzerland. Folks think liberals are nice and conservatives are unpleasant 160812 Liberals are basically accepting, while conservatives are basically judgmental. The truth is just the other way around, except 'nice' isn't worth anything. Unlike liberals, some conservatives are willing to accept blacks and other non-north-Asian minorities just the way they are (does not apply to cuckservatives). - They are willing to accept that blacks are dangerous without also hating them, or at least a large minority of black men from early teens to middle age. Western society just isn't working out for Non-Asian Minorities. It's not right for them. - There may be unknown compensations. Blacks may have lower IQ's but higher JQ's. Only those on the right are willing to consider the consequences: there should be different rules for different groups, though people may be able to change groups. ---- ...relevant http://kakistocracyblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/with-long-arrears-to-make-good/ http://kakistocracyblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/12/emps-they-practically-sell-themselves/ If you want to understand qualia 160811 16:18 You only have to understand the perception of a smell. Why does everyone want to be an artist? 160810 18:16 The answer is they don't. They would rather be a metallurgist or a component manufacturer or a bio-compound tester. They just don't want to become one. The world really has unlimited opportunities just beyond your reach. The problem is that people have to pick the least intolerable POSSIBLE choice available to them. Imagine that, a profession with no barriers to entry. Unfortunately they're still reaching too high. Too crazy to be true 160809 22:06 Science has been stuck in a rut for a long time. We're talking three decades of stagnation here. The problem is most speculations are too mundane. The proposed explanations for dark matter, the origin of gravity, and consciousness are not crazy enough to be true. - It might help to imagine theories that are deliberately too far out. Like how awareness is an anthropic ending. In fact, you have never been aware in the past, but have only become aware for the first time RIGHT NOW. - Because there's something special about this moment. The universe is extremely unlikely and therefore unstable. Somehow, it has lasted long enough to generate your present state of awareness, but it's not likely to last any longer. THIS will always be the moment when the universe comes to an en How to get sued in England 160808 08:34 Elton John's "open marriage" husband David Furnish obtained a legal injunction (PJS v News Group Newspapers) banning all media (or at least English/Welsh ones) from mentioning the unprotected sex he had with Daniel Laurence and Pieter van Den Berg in a kiddie pool filled with olive oil. Like most things unfair, the problem is not power but the acceptance of power. ---- YOU ARE SO SUED About the 2016 Olympics Commercial Ceremony on NBC 160806 There was no reason for NBC to keep interrupting the stadium show in Rio to keep showing all these commercials. They must have played the same Ghostbusters-themed Progressive ad four times. They could have just split off portions of the screen and shown scrolling text ads, logos, or animations. They might have squeezed in even more ads that way. You're welcome NBC. short SF story: The Nearer Future 160518 After a dozen delays in as many years, Jared's luck was finally running out. One could only expect to survive so many near-misses before the odds caught up with him. Counting down for a decade, the death clock had become loud enough to hear. The worldwide aftermath of the terrorist destruction of Moscow had granted him a final year of freedom, but the men with guns had become aware of him again. There was nothing he could do to keep them away. This time he was well and truly fucked. Only months to go. He brooded behind the blinds of his trailer home like an angry Buddha. Behind him were the sounds of an extremely advanced computer system rebooting, stolen from Macrosoop, re-purposed by Cell19, operated remotely by The Underground. "Ten minutes," an attractive female voice announced. "Can't you do it faster?" "Nine minutes and fifty-six seconds." His tablet showed an elegant stealth drone like an origami sculpture. A report about a Black/Hispanic march on Washington opposing budget cuts. Crime spiraling out of control in the inner cities. Debtageddon, Debtocalypse, Debtnarok . . . It was the tyranny of the majority. Politics was demographics. Jared belonged to the strangled waist of the increasingly misnamed population pyramid. As the death tide washed over cohorts of Baby Boomers, their time horizon shrunk to a few years. Beyond that lay only unimaginable blackness. In their dread, they voted themselves new medical benefits and welfare at unprecedented rates, to be paid for by taxes. The problem was all the past benefits they had already voted themselves that had been paid for by borrowing tens of trillions abroad. These loans were coming due as the greatest spending increase in history was set to kick off. The money had to come from somewhere. New sales taxes had increased Jared's grocery bill by 20%. His property taxes were set to double. If he managed to get another low-paying job, his combined income and social taxes would approach 50%. Worse problems to come. He thought the government encouraged unemployment because it kept the remaining workers docile to avoid homelessness. Here and there were signs of rage and rising tempers. He did not see any willingness to resist, other than himself and a league of anonymous commenters. Instead of fighting, the underclass dreamed of joining the elusive middle class. Had the politicians invented a way to postpone the day of reckoning forever? The perfect alliance of the comfortable and the comfortably ensconced... There would never be a revolution. The exploiters would only become more powerful. For the upcoming election, both parties' candidates promised all existing privileges would be maintained forever or expanded. Europe had already gone left-Islamotarian as its economy imploded. The Third World was formalizing tribal property rights with oceans of bureaucracy. The government hadn't formally brought back slavery. No one could be forced to work in a soul-numbing, insecure job to fund government expenses. But it had become surprisingly hard to drop out. Jared considered his problems. Overdue property taxes could not be discharged through bankruptcy. Nor unpaid traffic tickets, medical and legal debts, or contempt of court charges. In addition, he was being charged under the Federal Child Protection Act for contributing to the delinquency of a child. He had been bribed to buy bottles of wine cooler for a group of youths loitering outside an all-night liquor store, who had electronically paid double the store price, a $19 profit for him. Naturally, it had been a sting. All four "children" had been over eighteen. The government only needed to win one charge to put him away for a year. No sweat. He would defend himself by claiming he had been terrified of the youths. he had a great story lined up. His biggest problem was $34,000 in contempt of court fines involving his property tax case: for not providing a complete inventory of his assets, and for accidentally erasing or encrypting hard drives. That was serious business. Though nothing was definitively proven, his appeal was going nowhere. If he didn't start paying up, the judge could lock him up indefinitely. Fortunately, Jared wasn't the only one they were coming after. Tens of thousands of tax defaulters, bureaucratic miscreants, semi-violent misfits and malcontents, and alimony resisters (his favorite) were being locked up nationwide in 'Operation Clean Sweep'. It reminded him of the North Korean 'Scrutiny' of the late 1990s, where every North Korean with a gap in their employment records was sent off to a fate worse than death. Admittedly, his would be a more temporary fate. Few people had been killed so far, even among the handful that did resist. The prison population had already doubled, and was approaching 3% of the population, but if Jared was willing to show remorse, he might avoid doing time. Instead, his services would be rented out to various subcontractors in the new WorkForce program. If he was lucky he might end up in a meat processing plant, a cleaning crew, or roadwork with illegals. For a while. Those who didn't have enough skills or wouldn't work hard (like Jared) would eventually be assigned to a work camp, or the general population of a private megaprison, where they faced violence, homorape, death, and worse, especially "Gamma-Omega" males. He knew what it would be like, except for the occasional vacation in the Hole (administrative segregation). He resolved that would not happen. When push came to shove, only a tiny minority resisted, just fifty standoffs so far, their stories kept out of the mainstream media, except for some New York Times columnists calling them losers. Resisters were effectively considered terrorists, and were smashed. They had taken only three agents with them. Last month, four alimony resisters caught unready had been neutralized by the new Federal Response Force. Jared could not defend himself or his trailer home. They might use gas, snipers, demolition bots. The first perfect dictatorship was being built around him. He faced his final days alone. Since solitary resistance was out, he had to join a group. The only remaining force willing to stand up was IceWall. Unlike Indiana Jones he did not hate Nazis, but found himself indifferent to their politics, as most people did nowadays. If the simulation he was about to run didn't provide a solution, he would join them in a few weeks time. Once he got around to it. All other options being gone. Jared would help them set up a second compound for when the main camp was taken. A final battle for the ages, where he would die fighting with the rest of them, in a scene from the Turner Diaries. His universe was about to collapse into a singularity. Dread was a constant, low-grade fever. Anxiety felt like exhilaration at times. At times he dreamt of going out in a shooting spree before they came for him. The final insight had arrived in the past week in a moment of bottomless despair. The government had found its ultimate purpose, though few knew it yet. Prominent intellectuals had decided to stop all technological progress forever. President Abdul Muhammad in his State of the Union address claimed science had already gone too far, and some knowledge should be discarded. This did not apply to surveillance and control tools. The only thing that had kept Jared going was his curious notion of technological salvation, the promise that humanity could be replaced by a posthuman, postorganic super-civilization, 100% digital and virtual, free from want and suffering. Now this last hope was being squashed. The coming Shutdown would require every country to submit to the new order. China and India were already being being roped in, their new governments unstable. They would go along to protect their wealthy elites. Only a super-genius could disrupt this trend, a man who could cause unresolvable conflicts among the world's half million governmental organizations. Despite his high opinion of himself, Jared knew he wasn't even a regular genius. He had considered supporting the Rouges. The world's most evil terrorist organization now that Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the cartels had signed the Mecca Declaration; the Rouges were the ultimate totalitarians: they demanded total control over every aspect of human life. They would eventually be eradicated, but not without changing the world first. Most of these changes would be bad. Jared suspected the result of their perverse struggle would be the rise of real communism, instead of their more nightmarish version. He looked at the gray boxes of his waiting computer equipment. He was almost ready for the final simulator session. What a strange trip it had been. Last month, Jared had made one last effort to foster a resistance movement. It had to be online of course. None of his neighbors would join the fight. They lashed out at their families and strangers, but all cowed before government authority. All would bow when the time came. Well, maybe not all. Jared decided to call them The Underground. Like him they had opted out of society, or were never in in the first place. It was evolution in action. Mankind was producing too many surplus males in this age of serial polygamy. Losers and refusers sought out alternative paths. He knew his two main online associates lived in boxes like him, a minimalist lifestyle. Their living boxes looked larger than his because they were emptier, their lives being more virtual. LucidSpace chips and retina screens could render ultra-resolution environments better than reality. They were the future, if there was to be one. One of their goals was to accelerate progress. Jared didn't care about their other goals. He wanted a way out. They didn't want to be his friends. To them the coming tyranny was irrelevant, a social disease that would destroy itself before the machines took over. They lived a focused lifestyle, improving the brain by nurturing their obsessions. They still had to go outside for exercise and errands, but mostly they immersed themselves in vast simulations. Skills and certificates were kept up to date through secret networks. Forced-Affinity Matrices (FAMs) linked members worldwide into temporary alliances. They organized and disbanded in weeks, designing software tools. Jared decided The Underground was humanity's last hope. It wasn't the first time he'd latched onto some movement, but this time he was sure he was right. Maybe he could join the Extreme Technology Institute, the Underground's elite for-profit think-tank. Their core belief was straight Ayn Rand: history was made by a tiny minority of prodigies. They didn't even need a heroic attitude, just a winning one. Jared was willing to sacrifice himself for post-humanity. In a secret message composed after midnight, he had placed his services at their disposal, offering to help The Underground any way possible. He could act as a liaison or a data depot, provide plausible deniability, or take legal responsibility and become a scapegoat for banned research. Jared had almost begged them to let him in, but they never responded. The answer had come to him in a dream: no one could join The Underground. The only way to become part of their organization was to extend their organization. How clever of him to realize this fact. Perhaps he was a genius after all. To become worthy, he would have to carry out his own major operation. If he succeeded, he would inevitably attract conspirators. It didn't even have to be illegal, necessarily. His initial plan had been a deception targeting the Network Security Bureau (the Unseen Eye), which monitored online activity and disrupted it by adding false data and hidden backdoors. At their instigation, all new CPU's were corrupted by law; ironically by making them slightly too fast, disrupting various encryption and secure communication methods. Secret datadumps were also forbidden. He would plant false data that only they could decode, tricking them into exposing themselves while making them waste resources. One way to hide encrypted data online was in plain sight, like game architecture and random scenery. There were massive surveillance and control networks to exploit, games and immersive movies, interfaces and portals - Reality Cubed. He wouldn't be the first. NetWar 2020 had resembled a 1990s cyberpunk fantasy, with massive data thefts and tampering. He had spent a long night plotting his plan to impress The Underground by annoying the government, taking some green pills to focus his mind, posting some messages he couldn't quite recall. He sensed a higher force over every community, drawing every human into its web, a higher reality. Just below the top was GUS, the Great Unified Simulation, currently the fullest description of human knowledge. It was beginning to attempt to simulate the future. Experimental extensions simulated parallel worlds. Above GUS was . . . By morning he wondered if he had been dreaming. His mind was like a field of changing numbers. No results obtained. He was under so much stress the world felt jagged and raw. There were gaps in his memory around this time. He was truly on his own. Then a miracle had happened, as he and all his ancestors had always counted on through the ages. He was directly contacted by the World Mind. First, a puzzle appeared on his phone, which opened an installation program that was also a test. The World Mind appeared as a talking galaxy made of thousands of smaller galaxies. Jared knew it was just a digital effect created by a subcontractor, a message fine-tuned for him by data mining. The World Mind was the ultimate software fiction. Around 2019, social networks had sprouted so many connections they began merging in unplanned ways. The corporate owners had desperately resisted the process. Fringe observers claimed they saw spontaneous order emerging from the raging static like some primitive god, immoral and immortal. These claims were mostly suppressed. By definition, the World Mind was the current best software representation of mankind's collective will, or at least of the influential portions of mankind. It combined all lower models, plus something ineffable. It might even be paranormal, though probably wasn't. It was the one software entity that could never be planned or controlled, and would always be free. Known as Stato, Zeem, McGuffin and dozens of other names, it would eventually combine humanity's insights and instincts. And currently it appeared to be under The Underground's influence. It had sent him a message, a standard human-readable output file that started with a list showing his exact place in the world. Apparently he was important after all. Then came a list of future trends he didn't recognize. The World Mind wanted him to appear at a meeting in the real world, taking certain precautions. He realized it was inviting him to join The Underground. This would be the start of an epic adventure. They had met the next morning at a Denny's while it was still dark, as trucks roared over the Interstate nearby. Two men waited near the entrance, smoking electronic sticks. Jared stopped some distance away and watched them. They hardly looked like intellectuals. Professional slackers at the tail end of Generation-X. No problem with that. The more overweight one's ironic shirt spelled "Furry Pride" in animal letters. The other had a Borg-like tattoo. Subtle hints indicated they experimented with mind-expanding drugs. Millions of new chemicals to explore. Appearances could be deceiving. Over pancakes, the Undergrounders had taken turns explaining their plan, while the other monitored the area through hacked security cameras. That trick had impressed Jared. "Are you ready to let me help you?" he had begun the meeting. "If you promise to do exactly what we say." "I'll do anything to get out of the hole I'm in." They paused as the chador-clad waitress poured their coffee. "We offer the next best thing. Our planned future will take more effort to realize than you could endure, but you can still help greatly." "Does it involve secret technology?" he wondered. The Undergrounders looked at each other. They had no more in common with each other than with him. Nothing could matter less. "Oh yeah. But first we need you to sign a sign a non-disclosure agreement." He didn't bother to read it before swiping the screen. "Have you ever heard of fulcrum points?" the nerd punk had begun. "They are social nodes. Real or online places where influential groups and persons come together. Meeting places of maximum influence." "We hope to trigger maximum effects with minimal effort, by symbiotically connecting groups unaware of each other's existence, by exposing hidden similarities between them." "We plan to create an online Nexus, a clearinghouse where outsiders can form alliances to fight authority in all its forms. No one will be able to control it, not even us." Jared chewed his synthetic bacon. He sensed wonderful possibilities. "How long will that take?" He had only heard rumors. It seemed a long way off. "That depends on the degree of opposition. It's vital not to stir up trouble now." The other Undergrounder continued: "You may be asked to provide a distraction, without breaking any laws of course. A real-world adventure. First you will be trained to act as if you were a hero." Using proxies and datadumps, he would create a false Resistance cell, meant to be found out and smashed. Then he would help the others identify thousands of online and real world groups, mostly undefined even to themselves. They would encourage them to form alliances, abet tax avoidance and evasion schemes, pioneer alternative currencies, and generally reform society from the bottom up. Wheels within wheels he thought. They weren't telling him everything. What they planned would take years, but unlike him, they were in no hurry. His survival odds might actually have been cut by a percentage point, and they had been low to begin with. That alone made him feel more heroic. He knew his efforts might be intended to fail in some way, but so what. He would just have to find a way to fail at failing. He would create his own miracle with the tools he was about to receive. They explained unusually many files about Jared existed, spread among many agencies, albeit classed at minimal importance. "We know you can do it. You will still have to be tested. The test may be psychologically challenging." "Been tested many times already." He had suspected everything they told him was part of the test. "Did you bring the money?" "$3,500.00 in unmarked bills." Actually a routing number on his zPad with a 10% convenience fee tacked on by the BaBank. He had saved the money with the goal of visiting a brothel in the one US county where that had still been legal. Unfortunately, the new polygamous legislature had just outlawed prostitution in that state, punished by mandatory life imprisonment. He'd had another insight about that, in a lifetime full of them. He preferred hypocritical politicians over the ultra-sincere kind. The fanatics were far worse, as proven by the current slaughter in Iran. After leaving a generous tip, Jared had followed the strange men (more like disguises than true personalities) to the parking lot, where they had helped him move a box marked DEPDEF into his trunk, where a faded Trump sticker still adorned the back. It was understood he would give everything back when he was done. An hour later, he had laid out the walking pad on the floor of his mobile home. His new life began then. He looked at the smooth gray surface, like a blank screen or a portal. Inside the circle were special footpads that slid back and forth, allowing him to walk in place convincingly. When he put on the visor, he saw a brilliant but featureless plain around him, as profoundly real as it was empty. He took a tentative step, and it felt like walking normally. He could move freely in any direction, but had to take care. Nothing was holding him up. He appeared lost in open space, but his kitchen sink was three feet away. This early version used as much power as his drone. The cooling pad hummed musically. Then it had been time to begin. He entered the code, and found himself standing in a fantastically, unbelievably detailed landscape unlike anything he could have imagined (he hadn't visited one of the new VRcades yet). In that moment, he understood reality had been defeated. Only a long rear-guard battle remained. He had waited for this his whole life. He spent uncounted minutes walking over the crisp rocks of Mars, every black shadow and texture real as life. The wild terrain continued for ten thousand miles in every direction, every grain of dust open to exploration. Moving across a small asteroid, his viewpoint shrunk to the size of an insect to maintain Earth-like apparent gravity. He rode a surfboard through the hyper-spectacular clouds of a gas giant. This time, he did lose his balance in a terrifying moment of vertigo. He fell against his unseen cupboard as the titanic clouds spun and towered above him. He explored ongoing simulations, most of which didn't make much sense. What he could recognize was wildly imaginative. It would be possible to live a full life in a simulated universe. On the Omniverse Tour he saw unknown cities with immense monuments, creature bodyplans, machinery mechanical and organic , designs diverging without end. The reality of parallel worlds was too great for the human mind to handle. Humans and humanoids formed a negligible fraction of human-level civilizations. He remembered walls of Arab-like script to techno music. His own life seemed very distant. It felt like being reborn. At the end of the Tour, his last doubts were gone. Reality was infinite and he was nothing. It was liberating in a way. Perhaps that was the intended message. He got off the treadmill and looked at the devices. They would become an extension of himself. The Underground had radical new interfaces for online missions and simulations. But for them to work, Jared would have to be simulated by them too. A relatively simple feedback loop, but still extending the state of the art. His decade of online labors had not been in vain, even if it had apparently made his life so predictable he was the prime candidate to become the first recursive person. Well, one of the first anyway - never mind what might have happened to the others. Thanks to his generally ignored online rants, he had given certain government monitors the impression of being unusually dangerous. Some easily confused monitoring software had become obsessed with him. Parts of his profile had resembled those of spree shooters. Taken together, these utterances and outbursts had contained enough of his essence for the Undergrounders' implementation of the World Mind to find him. That was his best guess. Could also be aliens, the Matrix, magic. Jared didn't understand how he would be simulated. Could the simulation perform his online mission for him? The FAQ explained it would simply interpret his intentions for him, so he could concentrate fully on the job. He lost track of time exploring the potentially endless simulations, as normal life continued outside. Now it was a month later, possibly his last month. He was ready for some serious business. Standing again on the endless plain, Jared was dealing with a new type of awareness. It would soon become part of him. He mused it would be nice if someone would program a sex simulation for this new interface, but they were still at the stage of the Internet in the early 1990s, when only respectable people had access to the technology. Or he simply hadn't found it yet. He quickly clicked a dozen legal forms projected before him. The first phase was a 3D calibration and virtual motion test. He had to move a ball through an endlessly twisting labyrinth by focusing and moving his eyes and body. His facemask tracked micro-expressions. To speed up the induction, premium software detected instances of frustration and confusion before the user was even aware of them, and used them to generate new commands for common situations. The exercise was more hypnotic than frustrating, though it demanded his full attention. In fact it was oddly compelling. So many tools, paths, and rules to learn. His mind was being probed and scanned in subtle ways. He had been hypnotized once at a county fair, standing in front of a crowd and then - nothing! Whatever he had said or done was missing. How long had he been doing this already? He remembered a toilet break, the splashing going on and on. The simulation would not just render locations but whole settings. He would become aware of the context and backstory as if he was really there. A chime sounded, and the screen went black. It felt like fainting. Then the curving facescreen, fifteen centimeters of infinity in front of his face, showed his trailer home from above, or at least a very good representation of it. He was gliding like a magic carpet over his mobile home park in the evening light. Rich sounds of crickets and cicadas, distant honking, air conditioners. The digital model was stunningly detailed, a billion pixels per second, more like reality than computer graphics. No, better than reality. He leaned over slightly, and his course changed as intended. The software even anticipated his wishes, generating relevant scenery moments in advance. Portions of the scenery became transparent as he lifted higher over the green-brown landscape. He looked down at himself standing in his cabin, the most accurate part of the simulation. Pulling further back, the tri-county area curving into a darkening cloudscape filled with points of light. Then lines started to appear, connecting all the dots below. The Underground had been mapping the Net for years, their data presented in subscription-only executive reports. Tens of billions of data points held together by overlapping grids, the main social networks brightest of all, like soaring over a galaxy at a trillion times lightspeed. What had he gotten himself into? Millions of groups, trillions of potential similarities. Elite clubs for influential and interesting people, advanced game simulations, gossip and status networks for the wealthy and celebrities. He spent the first hour scrutinizing some 'meta-rational coalition' he hadn't heard about. The UberHoax Union claimed reality was a cruel simulation by an alien intelligence. The allied X-Anomaly group was looking for evidence of paranormal events. Unfortunately, they had failed utterly to find any reality violation. Even here Jared sensed depressing conformity, an unwillingness to dig deeper. Perhaps even the hoax sites were part of the hoax, as the world turned blander. He was very close now, looking for something like a new religion, the most powerful one yet. It would show itself soon. Outside his trailer, a distant gunshot, as the moon slowly circled the sky. Final preparations took another day. The AI induction used HyperLearning and Empathic algorithms. The Interface Constructor was the most powerful program he had ever experienced, allowing him to rapidly recreate situations from his past. Preexisting modules added scenery from any decade, with millions of background textures and colors capturing the essence of each period. It was as deceptively easy as floating down a river. He merely had to compose a list of all the humiliations of his life. The program prompted him to recall and describe embarrassing events, of which he had forgotten a surprising number through the years. He would have preferred to create his own personal fantasy mansion and estate. He realized almost all of his blunders had been caused by his inability to think and act fast enough. His inability to sustain State-3 dreams prevented him from learning from them. He didn't want to go back. He had to go back. It was time to relive The Event, the single incident that defined his absurd existence. It also happened to be the most incredible thing that had ever happened to him or to anyone else. The Event took shape in his mind like a fogbound monument, vague yet massively unalterable. The simulation was an epic progression, an intense series of scenes like the plot of a recurring nightmare. The data: for a few months long ago, he had held down a minimum wage job as an assistant janitor in the basement of a large department store. Something had happened down there, as meaninglessly unpredictable as it was utterly impossible. He focused so intently on the start that he forgot how it would end. It had been an hour of failures, each feeding into the next with a wild inevitability. Fail one had been to abandon his post for his daily bowel movement in the employee restroom (dereliction of duty). He'd lingered in the last stall, reading a National Enquirer article about an upcoming Bananarama tour. He had returned to his basement work area to find an emergency situation in progress. The unattended conveyor belt to the trash shredder was running. A pile of debris to be disposed of lay at the bottom. At the top, a man was desperately grabbing on to an object about to fall between the shredding blades. He saw it was a store display mannequin. Due to his incompetence (Fail two) he never pressed the conveyor's emergency stop button, only a few steps away. He stupidly watched the scene unfold. Too much was off about it. When the conveyer belt somehow did stop, the man pulled out not a mannequin but a living woman. They embraced at the top of the conveyor as he stared unblinking. That was when he had first felt the balance of the universe shift, an infinite wheel beginning to tilt around him. The woman at the top had then pointed at him, something they normally didn't do. Apparently the mannequin woman was surprised that Jared could see her, which wasn't supposed to be possible. One of the few occasions a female had acknowledged his existence was to point out his irrelevance as an ontological obstacle. Let's call that Fail three, he decided. He could have stood there forever. Clearly, the normal rules would never apply again. There had been a rustling sound behind him, a muffled groan. he turned automatically to the pile of debris that covered the floor, where he saw an arm sticking out. Another store mannequin had just come to life beneath a pile of old discarded ones. He walked over, bent down, and pushed aside the plastic torsos and bare limbs. He reached and grabbed the arm, tugged on it, and with a mighty heave pulled up his own beautiful woman, who had come to life just for him. At that moment he knew that miracles could happen. F...F...Fail four. He remembered that when he had tried to hug and kiss her, she shuddered and momentarily went rigid as ice. There had been screaming, hitting, and slapping. It had been utter loathing, no, utter contempt, almost to the maximum. That, my friends, had been Fail five. Meanwhile, the couple had descended the ramp beside the conveyor belt and walked past. They didn't acknowledge him, but in passing they greeted Jared's "mannequin", who he still thought had been brought to life, and whom he was still trying to hug. In his mind, this moment had somehow come to represent a singularity of contempt. FAIL SIX. At some point, a crowd had gathered in the basement behind him, but they soon went away again. The second mannequin who had come to life had also made herself scarce as the situation rapidly resolved itself. He was alone again, as irrelevant as he had ever been. Fail seven? In a daze he looked around. Everything that had just happened seemed to slide out of existence, as if time would return to its proper course, all the impossibilities canceling out, and the anomaly erased. He sighed, and turned to start cleaning up the mess. Sweep sweep sweep. He looked at the pile of discarded mannequins beside him. Time stopped. Then he dove in. Fail the eighth, or perhaps fail infinity, the smackingest disintegration of all time; an absolute ending - why it had been a veritable Valkyrie Ride of . . . This had never happened. Happened it had. He pressed the giant red button to stop the simulation. CLICK He stood in an immense rainstorm. Around him was an impenetrable tangle of bushland. Lightning flashed in the grayest of skies. The flank of a hillside. Undulating terrain, shallow canyons and small rises. A few narrow trails wound between them. Water flowed down narrow streams. The rain came down in sheets. This might be eternal rain. He felt he could stay here forever. Then this simulation also ended. He was alone in a white void, free to move but perfectly trapped. Some people stayed here a long time. He pulled off his visor, stumbled off the walking pad, and landed on his folding bed. Outside his thick curtains, all was black. Now he knew he was the world's biggest loser. No, not quite the biggest. That was another delusion, part of his belief he was special. He realized he had participated in an experiment to induce extremely powerful emotions. Someone was hard at work learning about human reactions. This technique could find anyone's weaknesses. They wanted to perfect emotional manipulation. It was an amplification test. His brain had been scanned, waiting for some crucial insight. But it had been so real, even for a full motion 3D simulation. In fact it had been impossibly real. It would have been nice if it had been raining outside, but all he heard was distant barking, and a strain of Mexican music or a recording of a muezzin chanting? He remembered a more recent time in his life when he had felt this low. On that day, he had first walked into a Church of Scientology. It hadn't taken much persuading by the recruiter standing on a nearby street corner, who had been quite hot as he recalled. Jared realized the data used to create the session he had just experienced had come from his confidential Scientology auditing files, written down during the few months he had been involved. It was the only possible explanation. The System control software was a new, immensely powerful AI, with flowcharts for every eventuality. Even so, it couldn't directly read his mind. It had still needed outside help. That particular Scientology church had split off from their main organization, an unauthorized offshoot. They must have sold The Underground a list containing all his humiliations, which had been used to tailor the session he had just experienced. That list had included every bad and dramatic event of his life, and his delusions. Where had his utterly authentic perception of The Event come from? Undeniably real, but he couldn't recall thinking about it before. Like how the protagonists of the novel IT had forgotten their fight against the monster. He had to get to the bottom of this. His memories were fading fast, except for the certainty that it had been impossibly realistic, like a holodeck. The simulation had changed him in subtle ways. The people who had created it must have included a skilled mentalist or illusionist. He thought they could persuade anyone of anything. What would they do with these skills? For some reason he suspected they would make only small changes in the world. The world was stranger than he knew. All his illusions were false. All emotions were illusions. Everyone was a robot who could be manipulated, and everyone would be controlled. What had they done to his mind? Nothing, he was the same as ever. Except he saw the future with the sudden clarity of a new dawn. That was new. The insights appeared as fast as he could think, not unlike REM sleep, but at a higher level. A war was coming. The world crisis would arrive faster than anyone expected. Communism would rule most of the planet in his lifetime, but their success would finish them. They would inevitably create their own successor. When too many communist factions started to compete for resources, they would start to eliminate each other. Only two sides would remain, representing stasis and change, order and revolution. The conservatives and the radicals. Jared had already experienced the radicals' outlook through The Underground's simulation tools. No doubt what side they were on. They weren't dreamers but technocrats, alien motivations controlling elite skills. They wouldn't need his help much longer. His dreams of a glorious future were dead. Worst of all, the whole universe was absurd. Reality was a gigantic practical joke. They would achieve his dream of a posthuman future, but he wouldn't live to see it. He suspected tens of thousands of people had been contacted by the World Mind, though few had received his level of attention. Maybe he could get The Underground to pay him for more mind experiments. Since all was lost for him, he might as well have fun before the end. Whatever could save him did not exist yet. He would have to create his own miracle. He had to find a place to escape to. Part of him knew that this time he would succeed. Part of him knew he would most certainly fail, or perish with the Nazis. Jared figured he had about one week to organize a much smaller political movement, to save himself and maybe a few others. No one really listened to his online rants, so it would not be easy. The government was currently trying to get control of NetCoin, the popularity-backed digital currency. Jared checked his account. His web rants had earned him 0.4387024 coins so far. But there was an unexpected message in his inbox from an admirer, a vague suggestion of a plan. Awesome! Just what he needed now. The odds of scoring a hole in one on every hole on a golf course were almost a googol to one, the same odds as guessing a random fifty digit password on the first try. He liked those odds. His new life finally underway, he ate breakfast and went to sleep for the next sixteen hours, and remembered no dreams. I decided to rename reality: 160805 12:41 From now on, everything that exists shall be known as the Holoverse. Deep Probing the human mind 160804 09:56 We've already established that the best (currently) conceivable Mind Backup test involves an ultra-high-IQ interrogator. It would be created by inventing literally millions of personality/memory questions for every different personality type, arranged in logical hierarchies with decision trees and heuristics. The process would be different for everybody, but it would always strive to keep the subject engaged and fascinated. They would have to feel they were about to learn something profoundly important, as the questioner learned everything about them. The end state of our universe 160802 16:55 In the distant future, our whole universe will be one giant computer. It won't be made of stars and dark matter, but a cloud of maximally organized superstring gas. All these particles will be participating in the highest accessible calculation, including an attempt to create an even more advanced universe. ---- comments: THE DEEPEST TRUTH IS THAT NOTHING IS COMPLICATED BUT THAT EVERYTHING IS SIMPLE IN A DIFFERENT WAY A universal solution must provide only one thing: more time 160801 12:07 Any problem could be effortlessly solved if only there was unlimited time. The greatest human stress and outbursts involve there not being enough time to do something. Busy people are most likely to snap when their workload is suddenly increased further. An equivalent way of achieving more time is to achieve more intelligence. In practice that must mean smarter software. We have a long way to go. On Muslim immigration (part three) 160731 14:07 So, is Islam true or not? That's more than a rhetorical question. If I could press some magic ontological button that would mean Islam was true, I certainly would (assuming no other buttons were available). The vision of ultimate reality embedded in Islam is infinitely better than my vision thereof (the same is true for any other religious belief system). That's why I'm pretty sure it's all wishful thinking. It seems to me that religious believers should not have to worry about the ordeals of daily life at all, except for the occasional atheist doubt, and the inevitable habituation. On Muslim immigration (part two) 160730 16:14 So, by bringing in legions of Muslims like Barack is currently doing, the USA is becoming steadily more Islamic - though it still has a way to go before the average Baptist or Methodist congregation's budget will have to include a Jizya tax line item (Unitarian fellowships will probably add them as voluntary offerings before then). Is that a good or a bad thing? That depends entirely on whether Islam is true or not. On Muslim immigration (part one) 160729 20:58 Should the US let in more Muslims, or strive to persuade current Muslims to return to their already Islamicized countries of origin? The answer to that question is very simple: Should the West become more or less Islamic? ---- COMMENT: The breakup solution There is a solution. We need many more countries than we currently have and they should be as different as possible The world is incomprehensibly evil 160727 17:45 That means there is no reason to worry about it. It's irrelevant to even hate it. Think of the incomprehensible parts as tumors. Incidentally, this is not Solzhenitsyn's response to the problem of evil. He said people should let go of their smug poses, notions, and self-satisfied habits, which they inevitably have. Star Trek was right about one thing though . . . 160726 Apparently most planets do have Earth-like gravity. It's a strange near-constant, like all those four-hour asteroid rotation periods. In our solar system alone the compatible-gravity list includes the planets Venus, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and probably Planet Nine as currently estimated. On the new Star Trek movie: 160725 19:16 Can't afford to see it since I'm spending all my resources on my own projects, but I definitely don't like it. Back when I was a Star Trek fan in the 1990s, I had hoped that by now the plots would be incredibly advanced, involving various post-humanity and pre-Singularity concepts. Instead, they just dumb things down more and more. The aspect I liked was the impression of a transcendent society that happened to look like a less advanced one. Now it's just cool posing. On antisemitism (Part 5) 160724 14:00 Either antisemitism is correct or prosemitism is correct. Logically, those are the only two possibilities. On criticism of power: the message is true but the content is false 160722 It's really quite simple: Criticism is always right if it is complaining (though it may also be annoying). Criticism is always wrong if it is demanding. - That's because the demand tends to be some variation of the following: submit completely. That's what makes it identity politics. The strongest liar gets to determine the truth. Pain is undeniable, but politics just moves the pain around, even anti-slavery or libertarian politics. - Microsoft's and other interface programmers are truly demonically evil, but they would be wrong to listen to me, since they are thriving under their own values. They have literally nothing to gain from being less evil. The only solution would be for less evil programmers to start competing with them, but that would require a non-existent support community. - There is no reason for non-SJW whites to listen to Black Lives Matter protestors, since their vague, all-encompassing prescriptions and instructions are indistinguishable from destructive nonsense (though not in their own language). Their real problem has exactly nothing to do with their perfectly valid complaints. The solution would probably be for black areas to have their own black police forces, with certain common rules and officer exchanges. Police violence might even go up, but it would matter less. - The solutions most likely to be true are both simple and original, and self-evident. ---- Some ideas http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nfc/in_defence_of_simple_ideas_that_explain/ Lovers and losers 160721 13:45 Love is held to be the highest and most noble emotion, but it's actually the most selfish one, a form of greed or gluttony. It is very easy to love someone if they are extremely beautiful. In fact, as the world's crushing male surplus continues to escalate beyond all bounds, it will be increasingly hard for the loser half of the male Bell Curve not to love. Violently. Colors are qualia, but left or right are not qualia 160719 15:04 The color red has a certain irreducible essence that can't be denied. So do vertical directions like up or down - but not horizontal directions. - You'd think left or right are essentially different from each other. Wrong! Just opposite sides of the centerline. The distance from the centerline has its own quality, and the fact that the centerline creates two halves, but these two halves are qualitatively interchangeable. - This could best be demonstrated by rotating a person in the fourth dimension so they would become their own mirror image, also mirroring their perceptions of the world, yet leaving their awareness unaltered. - Left and right features may be labeled (say you have an annoying scar on your left side that defines your entire identity) but what matters qualitatively is that they are on opposite sides, not on your left or right sides. Brain halves may specialize on controlling body halves, but this does not affect the quality of pain. - Awareness is always somewhere else. ---- Fun fact: the qualia of qualia are qualia. Prediction: 160717 12:21 There is a 50% chance the Eiffel Tower (or some equally prominent landmark, but that is the most vulnerable one) is coming down by 2020. Blasting any of the four support pillars of any of the four legs could do it, and we'd have three hundred meters of crumpling steel like a scene from World Police. The fact that it hasn't happened yet merely means that few people are able to stay angry long enough. Awareness is the perception of time 160716 21:35 Powerful emotions are caused by the brain exchanging more signals than normal in the same timespan. Quantity of signals is quantity (or strength) of feeling. Quantity also alters quality on the good/bad axis. But why should that be so? Emotions could be just as strong with fewer signals being exchanged. The emotion would just be stretched out over a longer time. Time would probably appear to pass faster. As a default, the brain must remain aware of time passing at a constant rate. That function can't be changed without false memories being introduced. If all else fails, human awareness is simply awakeness. ---- COMMENTS: That means there are awareness cells firing at a constant rate no matter what is happening. Whatever they are doing, it's always the same. They sort of serve as a background layer for your complicated thoughts. Their noise is what an EEG detects. Maybe we need to find a way to measure and record the pattern of these background cells. It seems similar but is different for everybody. 160715 14:24 Then I remembered I am not nice. I understand rage, but have no clue about conformist acceptance, the great mystery of European civilization. I do hate being right all the time. Like any other age, ours is a dark age, but not for any of the popular reasons. The evil is deeper and more deliberate than anyone can imagine. Incidentally my earliest memory may have occurred a few hundred meters from where the latest Jihadi rented his truck of mass destruction. Fermi Paradox: blindsight 160714 14:59 Evolution is all about survival. Complex systems evolve to maintain themselves, not to become something else, even if that something is more complex. Most advanced alien civilizations have been perfecting themselves for ages, becoming more like themselves instead of chasing transcendental transformation. Humans may be different because humans have evolved to be unusually primitive, allowing them to form more complex group intelligences. Being kept busy again 160713 17:21 It's crazy how easy it is to get enslaved by other people's petty bourgeois demands as the foundations of the world slowly crumble. Do this, do that, it never stops. Seriously, almost everyone should simplify their life. The strangest thing 160712 09:21 Considering that everyone's past is absolutely immense, it's amazing how little we think about it, or how hard it is to even perceive. The personal overview of a lifetime would be spectacular, frightfully vast. Yet most people have only a vague approximation of their lives. Memories are formed in order to be able to forget everything else. Only a few waypoints remain. The brain likes to erase itself as much as possible. What film best demonstrates the Reality Hoax? 160710 There are several candidates ('They Live', 'Fight Club'), but it would probably have to be 'The Matrix' (1999). No other film is as good at evoking the blank strangeness at the core of mainstream normalcy, the ways in which pointless stupidity is inexplicably accepted without even the possibility of thought. I mean, using human bodies as energy sources, for heaven's sake. Michael Crichton's novels are basically nonsense 160709 22:18 That's what makes them so readable and popular. He was the best at what he did. His novels weren't really science fiction, but meta science fiction. Each was based on one impossible assumption (like a Stephen King novel, but a technological assumption instead of a supernatural one), and then the consequences of that assumption were worked out. To be a bestselling novelist, you have to give the reader something completely new to transcend boring reality. There could even be a promise of some total breakthrough. ---- Comments: He published more books after his death than most authors manage in their lifetimes. Not all of them were finished books tho. Also whatever he wrote had to resemble a movie or a screenplay in its style and outline. That got rid of a lot of annoying modern fiction tropes. Also made it easier to follow, but he could still add plenty of big ideas for the characters to confront. Idea for a novel: Quantum Magic 160708 22:02 The government has spent billions secretly developing a quantum feedback amplification device, intended to make unlikely occurrences more likely by amplifying timelines wherein they occurred, by setting up a very complex quantum state in these timelines. The problem is this also amplifies 'false positive' timelines. The more unlikely the desired result, the more likely the wish will be subverted. ---- Quantum mechanics can do anything!!! Idea for a novel: Parallel Park 160707 16:52 A billionaire secretly funds a method to view parallel versions of earth where history took many different paths. Most parallel versions of earth are less advanced. A few are more advanced. These few more advanced Earths were needed to create the viewing method. Still others are advanced in ways we can't even understand. The point of the pyramid 160705 20:02 As mentioned earlier, the difference between atheists and religious believers is that, while both agree that reality is infinite, the former think reality is about twice as large as the latter - the required imbalance for Good to drive out Bad, generally speaking. In other words, math would have to be slightly inconsistent for ultimate meaning to exist. (In)consistency can never be proven, but Chaitin suggested math is ultimately chaotic. - Could existence itself be inconsistent? Probably not, but wrapping your mind around the non-existence of non-existence is like trying to make sense of an impossible thought, that jumble deadlocking your mind as you wake up, or like when you're dreaming you're trying to resist the flash of a Neuralizer about to erase your short-term memory. Since it is a dream, you coincidentally get to experience what that would really be like, as your attention inevitably fades away. ---- COMMENTS: It's all explained in here: http://www-2.dc.uba.ar/profesores/becher/ns.html So then absolutely nothing is certain except maybe what you're feeling right at this moment.... Bad times ahead? 160704 Today we celebrate American Independence Day, the holiday that most represents the achievements of human intelligence. That's why its future is rather uncertain. Yet intelligence is the only thing that can save us, so let's find a way to mass produce it. On this blog we dream of using technology to solve all current known problems - including the seemingly inevitable obliteration of every human mind. That can only be achieved with technology many times better than what we have. And that can only be developed through exponential computer improvements. Which means most of the work has yet to begin, and must be carried out in a very short time. It's also known as the run-up to the Singularity, though that particular transition is unnecessary for our purposes. But one thing is certain: no great change has ever been achieved without great strife and suffering. Why you should give me lots of money 160703 15:16 Insurance, of course. This is a version of Pascal's Wager. The biggest risk is the most neglected, and that must change. As mentioned, we don't know what happens after we die, but it's unlikely to be nothing. Our minds are created by the natural arrangement of particles into patterns. That's all it takes, that's what brains are. Reasonably, our awareness is caused by all such patterns everywhere. - If mathematics really is infinite, it seems unlikely our awareness could be nullified by the destruction of one such pattern instantiation. Many other patterns throughout Reality must also describe our minds. Some will always survive. Unfortunately, most such patterns are likely to be chaotic and unstable. Some really weird stuff could happen after we die. - This is an anthropic question. What changes should we make during our lifetime to best manipulate our likeliest postmortem pattern? This urgently needs to be researched, but almost no one is working on the problem. Admittedly this stuff is still too weird. - One shortcut is to presume that when a profusion of possible patterns cancels out, they can all be ignored. The likeliest answer involves predetermination: a decision to promote and amplify certain mind types in the future as successors of existing individual minds. And that will take a lot of money. Why liberal whites want massive Third World immigration (part 9) 160702 15:33 Because once the West has been turned into an annex of the Third World, they will be poorer in absolute terms, but have higher status in relative terms. How to organize your life memories and knowledge to create a simple mind copy 160701 15:08 STEP 01: Miopedia (tm), your personal encyclopedia where any relevant data about anything can be added. The software will also prompt the subject to add entries. It can never be completed but may add up to a representative life sample, since human minds are 'holographic'. - STEP 02: Your Miopedia will contain many Life Lists about everything that happened, created from common templates. These will be among the first entries. - STEP 03: These timelines, time-specific inventories, and lifetime themes will be combined in higher-order frameworks that model the actual mind structure. This is the most important part, because this is where actual awareness may start. ---- Comments: Came here from Lion o'the Blogosphere... Why with the puzzles before you can comment here? What is the human programming language? 160630 12:51 Unlike other fields, Mind Backup is easiest to understand at the highest level of abstraction. For now, the highest human concepts can only be discussed in natural language. - It could begin as a simple database program, where any lifetime memory or fact can be entered in any order. The challenge will be sorting these entries in a single hierarchy. Recorded events should each have a date, place, and context. - Then there would be a list of lifetime themes, representing recurring events. These would contain a minimal but extensive description of a repeating activity, situation, or feeling. - If we could find a framework to automatically integrate all these things, Mind Backup would only require patience. It could be a questionnaire to fill in a predetermined flowchart, or by artificially limiting the number of categories, or an improving AI. ---- Comment: The human programming language is language. Language IS cognition. Minds are made of the simplest possible concepts in the simplest possible model. Even that can take hundreds of billions of neurons. Dread focuses the mind 160629 22:59 Unfortunately it does not improve the mind. There's no time for that. In fact the goal is the exact opposite of change. ---- Improving the mind is impossible anyway In safe times, the best we can hope for is random drift that will probably make things worse, but rarely may improve things chaotically. The world is maximally evil because the omniverse is infinitely evil 160627 18:44 As deliberate as it is immense, as horrific as it is liberating: no need to worry about anything else. Exploiting as much as allowable is the basis of culture. Those who don't, fall behind. You see this most clearly in the world's computer programmers. The software I use now sucks as much as in the 1990s because evil programmers keep adding bloatware, an ongoing arms race where they cripple functionality to extract revenue or control. These people make you feel what it's like to be a quadriplegic. I've invented new words to describe them. At its heart, evil is not the infliction but the acceptance of pain. This dark serenity makes the world go round. How the UK should leave the European Union 160625 The answer is democratically of course. The UK as a whole voted by a small margin to leave the EU. Different regions voted passionately to leave or remain. Perhaps those regions that want to stay (Scotland and London) could stay in the EU and the UK both. This would have to be negotiated. The EU would demand concessions from the rest of the UK. - Regarding border controls and freedom of movement, the whole UK would have to stay in the Schengen Area, with EU passport controls for travelers arriving from outside the area. The UK would also have to allow most EU immigrants to stay, though only half as many UK citizens have moved to mainland Europe. And EU subsidies and benefits to the UK regions that remain would have to be matched by the rest of the UK, and taxes. Plus maybe a few bureaucratic mandates . . . - All quite reasonable under the reigning paradigms, and rather unlikely to work out. The reason for mass Third World/Muslim immigration 160623 16:33 The following is true even if you don't think it's possible. Those liberal hipsters clamoring for massive 'one-world' immigration (one-way only, one-gender mostly) from the planet's dysfunctional hellholes want these wild men to eventually attack them. It's a subconscious doom wish, a game of chicken with the blame shifted to everyone else. Their lives are too boring, so they need things to become more interesting. The anticipation is half the fun. Another day in Libertarian Paradise (2nd person SF) 160622 You wake at four AM in your converted shipping container home to decode a steganographically encrypted microdot on an open-source soymilk carton containing a data bond from a contract slave hinting that a Finnish/Bhutani alliance of anarchist arbitrageurs have shortchanged a Congolese nickel shipment. - With lightning speed, you set up a coalition with Panamanian/Ceylonese cryonicists to purchase 15,000 ingots from a Sahara solar mirror recycling plant, and make a quick profit on the resale. In the distance, you hear the muffled beats of Haji rasta-rap, and the soothing hum of a microwave beam power transmitter. A private police car roars past. - You quickly convert the Cryptcoins into untraceable cold fusion futures, and it's not even nine AM yet. Your profits will barely fund your effort to get in on a nanobot fishing swarm currently spawning between two artificial atolls in the south Pacific. - Before lunchtime, you hope to finally earn enough to make that down payment on that alluring starter condo in the local Rush Limbaugh microstate-franchise. Catching a movement from the corner of your eye, you zap an autonomous spy drone outside your window with your souped-up laser pointer. How to think of the world: 160621 08:35 Think of it as an unmonitored playground. Nothing of what goes on there is inherently serious, but it can be rather annoying when the bullies think they're all-powerful. One reason why Trump wants to prevent Islamic immigration: 160620 12:33 He wants to encourage Muslims to fix their own countries, and make them as good as the countries they want to colonize . . . instead of forever fleeing their own countries, and leaving these problems to fester and generate endless streams of additional migrants. - Actually, that last sentence is not true. It should be, but it isn't. To the neo-Marxist Masses, something as shocking as limiting migrant inflow requires not just righteous passion, but a display of relentless logic. And that is precisely what we're not getting. ---- COMMENT: Incorrect, this matter can only be decided at the emotional level because that is the only way to weigh many uncertain variables according to the deepest priorities an individual may have, not the ones social veneer requires they pretend to have at the moment. Why are there no aliens out there? 160619 08:00 http://wmbriggs.com/post/19061/ - At least none that we can see: ten billion lightyears from here, the pixel size is a thousand lightyears. My guess is more things need to happen than we know before intelligent life can emerge. Much, much more. It's like waiting for two card shuffles to end up the same. - Intelligent life is unlikely to become established when there are so many more ways simple life can thrive. Even on our world, most life is highly optimized. Crow brains are far more efficient than ours, which makes it harder to become more intelligent. - The Drake Equation needs many more terms. From our existence, we actually have some basic data about the biggest questions. As mentioned many times, an average possible mind should be infinite. Statistical reality is generating more simple minds than all possible minds put together. - Of all universes, wouldn't awareness most likely find itself in a universe that generated the most awareness? Perhaps even a thinking universe? Well yes . . . but maybe the patterns of our universe merely act to amplify our awareness, without generating additional examples of our awareness type on other worlds. - Our awareness may be amplified in two ways: the relevant brain patterns are consistently duplicated on a vast scale in the collisions of the surrounding chaos, or our awareness may actually be the emergent teleological top layer of a highly ordered universe. No one will really care about these things for another century or so. The Antifragile Solution 160618 18:46 Invest not in stocks or bonds, but in communities if possible. Make the communities in which you invest as self contained as practical. You can't lose your money if you can live in your money. (In an analogous example, governments could have 'invested' their Social Security surpluses in a chain of assisted living and nursing homes.) - The problem is that higher authorities will inevitably try to seize, liquidate, and redistribute communities' assets, while putting their residents to work for other purposes to serve others. The antifragile solution is to have unseizable assets. At the moment, nothing else works. Hard to tax virtual reality. ---- Techbert comment: Communities of every size are a form of encryption. This is not a nice blog 160617 Here we discuss the truths of a deliberately evil world, in a worse omniverse, made more horrible than we can imagine. Not always fun to read? Don't blame me, I merely report the facts. These efforts may help us avoid some nightmares to come. Frankly it seems unlikely. Reddit's front page has the exact opposite purpose, full of pet photos and feelgood pablum, background music for our deluded dance. The latest terror attacks invariably bring pro-Islam news items. Does that make them nice guys or just the opposite? As Stanislaw Lem pondered in his stories, the amount of Earthly horror each moment would require new emotions to understand. Reality is not our friend. Completely unexpected political violence! 160616 19:53 http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/16/europe/british-mp-jo-cox-attacked/index.html - A member of the white race working for the non-violent decommissioning of the white race through peaceful population inflow, merging, & replacement (IMR) has come one step closer to achieving her goal through being killed by an apparent opponent of said policies in the UK. - She was in favor of the kind of Unbalanced Migration the Middle East and Africa are producing so copiously, and even called it an enrichment. This type of killing is a symptom, not a disease. I fully expect the killer will turn out to be some kind of extreme outsider. - In a world made of evil as powerfully diabolical as it is incomprehensibly demonical (and that's just the Google Chrome interface), there will be more random eruptions like this. They are background noise, but the volume level is significant. The fact that the world's evil is basically incomprehensible makes it more hateful, not less. Evil will only increase toward infinity. The gloves just came off 160616 08:13 This is the big time, the first real opposition from Trump's opponent. Whether he wins or loses depends more on the nature of the mass populace than on what he does. Not love, but conformity makes the world go round. And that includes a willingness to tolerate evil that is almost supernatural in extent. - The solution might be logical rhethoric of the type used in this blog, something he may be unwilling to do. There are ways to counter our culture's SJW/PC/neo-Marxist frame, both logical and rhethorical, but I don't see it happening. Instead of nuance we need options. - Then again, politics can be all or nothing. The voters want their candidates to be predictable and simple. Both candidates can play that game by playing off against each other. This race may have to become more polarized. Colbert drew a swastika on a blackboard in support of Trump's opponent 160615 19:57 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3642531/Stephen-Colbert-compares-Trump-NAZI-draws-swastika-chalkboard-trying-figure-Obama-s-response-Orlando-massacre.html - He called Trump a Nazi, but that's not fair. In several ways, Trump is just the opposite of them. Namely: - The Nazis did not want a particular group of people to leave their lands, because they wanted to kill that group. - Trump supporters do not want a particular group of people to enter their lands, because that group wants to kill them. - Any questions? on Muslim immigration 160614 22:10 In light of the recent tragedy in Orlando, it pains me to say once again they're doing it all wrong - and no one will hear. I can explain until the cows come home, but IQs are just too low. My message will not get through, until it's too late. - To reiterate: international migration should not be voluntary, but based on the principle of natural balance. This would make many problems correct themselves. In short: one in, one out. - As many Muslims should be allowed to migrate to the USA as the number of equivalent Americans choosing to migrate to Muslim countries. In principle, that would make Muslim and other Third World countries want to make their homelands less horrible, instead of forever exporting their population surplus. - Good luck getting any politician to grasp this most simple notion. Bad weekend in Orlando . . . 160613 22:50 First, your typical case of "Omega Rage", where a loser man with no romantic future kills a young woman who wants nothing to do with him, except indirectly as an exploitable tool of the system (tax slave caste). - Then, a typical case of "Islamist Rage", where a man who may also have no romantic future because of polygamy-caused female shortages, kills a portion of the society that wants nothing to do with him, except indirectly as an exploitable tool of the system (seed stock caste). - In both cases, the problem is very simple: there are too many men. Just another day in a shit society. What is the meaning of life? 160612 08:03 It is the anticipation, achievement, and appreciation of completing complex tasks. This can even make complex tasks seem simple. All three stages are important. That's how Stephen King manages to write so many books. There is a certain emotion of refined bizarreness 160611 19:56 It is embodied in the smells of nocturnal weeds or cigarette smoke, or in enigmatic music or some impossible delusion. All of a sudden things seems delightfully strange, especially at night. Then we may realize the distance between everything is immensely greater than we know, but not always in a bad way. What should be humanity's top priority? 160610 14:40 Easy: it should be to speed up technological progress as much as possible but in the narrowest sense possible. All resources should be dedicated to the single priority of defeating death. Then we would have forever to deal with all the other problems. The only thing we need is time. Nothing else matters. - It means reverse-engineering human minds into 'immortal' software. This is not the Singularity. It would not require an exponential increase in computing power beyond human comprehension. But from a human perspective, it might be just as significant, even if nothing incomprehensible occurs. - This version of Posthumanity will still need drives and selective pressures. Presumably, these would be pleasure and pain, which would be rationed and doled out by the environment. Such emotions will naturally be driven by resource shortages, which will be computational in nature. ---- COMMENT: Humanity's top priority should be for us to get ourselves out of this trap we found ourselves in, and to do it as quick as possible because every second there is about a lifetime worth of intense suffering in the world. The alt right has no enemies to the right 160609 20:56 Those trying to resist communists often get distracted when the communists insist those resisting them instead resist even more extreme anti-communists who are resisting the communists too hard. Can't say no to that. It's a brilliant hypnotic trick, a kind of political jiu-jitsu. So for the past few decades, many mainstream Republicans have been fighting ultra-Republicans instead of Democrats. NO more. The far right can take care of itself. The alt right should take care of the far left. Mind Backup: anthropic hyper-risks 160608 08:32 Something like magic could really exist, both good and bad. It began with Darwin, and steadily spread through obscure philosophical journals and then bulletin boards, despite efforts to suppress it. The scope of the threat seems almost supernatural. - We will have to worry more and more about the Anthropic Principle, but not quite yet. It's still possible to pretend there's no such thing, and never will be such a thing. Relax while we can. - These may be remembered as the good old days; or the terrifying stillness before the Mother of Storms becomes a line of blackness rising over the horizon like a tsunami made of endless night. There is a thunderous rumbling ahead. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/could-anyone-ever-be-certain-they-werent-in-a-computer-simulation/ My Dearest Chrestienne, 160606 I am told my prelude Marche en Rondeau is now being played before the start of tournament matches throughout Europe, but I am more interested in this great age's own music and instruments. Through some magic, they have cut sounds into pieces that can be reformed into faster compositions, like a Kozak or Arab dance. I realize this is not magic, no more than how I was transported more than 300 years past the date of my death. Perhaps you may be restored in some form in the same way. This age's women are exquisitely painted, but have the comportment and indeed the build of weaker men, unlike you. They played a new composition at the civil marriage of two Kings (or one should say Consuls, of whom one at least was born as a girl, but then altered by the art of great surgeons), let me carefully spell its title: AAAaAAAAaaAAaa. It had so many instruments they were all combined in a storm-like roar, as if from a mountain built-up with pipe organs, and then choruses must have sung of battles and triumphs, but one could not make out what they were singing. Self illuminating paintings were shown on one-sided windows, as perfectly rendered as if they were real. One's eye is dragged by the picture to one point at a time. Indeed that is also not so. Before finishing this missive, I must say I realize I am not really myself but merely an echo of myself, as imagined by an academy of scholars and philosophers, and thus my memories of you must be even less substantial. But even if you never existed no one seems more real. Mind Backup: the coming state of the art 160605 16:23 A long overview article about the future technology that will change everything, and may end history as we know it. In these dark days before hope seems possible, we wait to see whether things can get better or will get worse. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/could-tristram-shandy-talk-himself-onto-a-chip/ ---- COMMENTS: A lot of wishful thinking and some brilliant nuggets of insights. It could be done, but will take a lot more than just this blog to get the ball rolling. Start with an app that somehow forces people to spend five minutes on this every day and all the rest will automatically follow. A war is coming 160604 17:02 Maybe not this decade, but history hasn't ended yet. No one has a clue where it will begin: India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, North Korea, Ukraine, the whole goddamn Middle East? Or somewhere unexpected? Or everywhere? It pays to pay attention, because there are always warnings, even before the 2001 Islamist terror attacks when they blew up those giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan. They are the areas of greatest tension and outrage, with a sense of unpredictability, bigger than before, as if history has come up with something new. Mind Backup: minds are characters believing they're narrators 160602 17:21 Awareness is knowledge, understanding, the very essence of truth. Yet its perception is too strange to describe in words or even in thought. This strangeness seems to be a constant for all types of awareness. Whenever a mental attempt is made to perceive and understand it, the strangeness rises up like a wall at the end of a fogbound road. And the wall seems to go up forever. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/brain-and-mind-mysteries/ Mind Backup: minds are caused but uninfluenced by random reality 160601 12:55 Most of reality is indistinguishable from static. That doesn't mean awareness can only exist within organized areas of reality, but statistically speaking most copies of awareness must exist in such areas, at least based upon our own existence sample. Most possible minds contain their own entire reality. Most actual minds suspect their own reality contains them entirely. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/the-turing-test-and-intelligent-design/ The brain is not a computer 160531 00:01 https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer - It's more like a reactor or something. The main difference is that a computer is linear. It's highly integrated, a top-down hierarchy focused on performing one small step at a time for a very short time, with predetermined precision. - Meanwhile, a mind could be said to be made of millions of analog computers. Columns of layers of neurons have been identified throughout the brain, firing from one end to the other. - There is no reason a 3D-array of specially designed computer chips couldn't be arranged in such a network, and evolve to have the capacities of a human-like mind, complete with feelings and a persistent sense of self. Should such a thing be done? No. The word 'should' implies a drive, which implies a wish to escape, which implies involuntary existence, which implies unbound horror. When true AI with emotions is developed, all the suffering of history could easily be multiplied exponentially. That danger has barely been discussed or imagined. - Instead of a fragmentary embodiment in perishable minds, posthuman information could be safely tucked away in a single labyrinthine memory network, endlessly subdivided. Observations . . . 160529 23:44 Most hard work throughout history has been completely wasted. For example, all the years spent developing the B-32 Dominator heavy bomber. Only 15 of them ever got to bomb Japan. - The oldest object a human could touch is a grain of dust one third as old as time. - Interstellar space is filled with dark worlds smaller than Pluto, with faint starlit clouds hanging in incredibly cold atmospheres. - A satellite orbiting below 180 kilometers would reenter Earth's atmosphere within a few hours, unless it was extremely heavy, or had some kind of nuclear-powered ion jet engine to compensate for the drag. ---- COMMENT: What is the biggest and lightest balloon that could ever be made, and how high could it float? We need a new religion 160528 15:31 https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/epistemic-advantage/ - It should be based on the highest available principles that conceivably could be true, as far as we know. It would still be a religion like any other, since scientists would not consider it a science. It would deal with matters beyond human measurement or calculation, specifically the way human existence could be integrated into ever higher states of existence. - Like how all of reality, everything that exists, including the fraction we haven't encountered yet (100%), could eventually be brought under control. Such a religion most certainly does not need a God - just an endless control hierarchy. ---- Comment: I think a "scientific religion" could be REALLY successful if it was presented the right way. Just putting it out there.... on Stephen King's "On Writing" 160526 22:40 There's no such thing as writer's block. Start with a crystal clear setting. A single moment, in a well understood location . . . with perhaps one anomaly. That is the seed of the story, a simple but compelling idea that can be expanded without limit. That's all, a nugget of undeniable truth that can be dug out to reveal the rich lode of ore it came from. - Maybe you could start by looking deep inside yourself. Simple yet not that simple - for the simple reason that good ideas are very rare. It takes a kind of brilliance. They can't be artificially generated or forced, as seen in the Terminator sequels. The difference in quality between T2 and any of the sequels is like the difference between a galaxy and a solar system. Why we are here 160525 16:58 Humans are a rounding error in infinity. There's a lot going on, but it almost all cancels out. Almost. Reality is a storm of numbers in all directions, logical derivatives multiplying too fast to follow. - All this complexity may be approximated by studying the natural numbers. Or just one of them. A human mind pattern is an insignificant fraction of any truly random natural number, but it is repeated endlessly throughout it, such instances being inconceivably widely separated. And most are absurd. - However, any random number chain contains far more simple strings that could be interpreted as equations to generate limitless universes. Our awareness is the result of such a second-order process, embodied in a much larger universe also generated by it. It's the most powerful such process, but doesn't quite end there. Standing on the beach on a high gravity world 160524 Everything looks normal at first glance. If you don't move, you hardly feel the extra weight in your bones, and the soft sand may cushion your fall. The sun in the sky (a nameless dot on a Hubble photograph) blazes like an endless silent exclamation, a flashbulb echo of blinding light. The clouds look almost exactly the same, and the sky is the right shade of deep blue. Even the vast yet utterly empty beach looks like it might be on Earth. Sound carries normally in the nitrogen atmosphere, and a cooling breeze carries fresh spray from the surf. Only the waves are coming in too fast from the wide horizon. Everything is sped up. - Space is BIG ---- Comments: Would the water really flow faster there or would the heavy gravity hold it down more to compensate so we wouldn't notice anything different? The water would fall faster and bounce up faster. I think I read waves flow weirdly slow in a falling elevator. It's difficult to get things done in this world - or any other 160522 15:23 Large projects can be infuriatingly slow and tedious, even without useless bureaucracy. Hofstadter's Law states that any task takes longer than expected, even when factoring in Hofstadter's Law. There are too many things to move around. Each basic element could multiply the complexity. The multi-trillion F-35 fighter jet has been under development for decades and still isn't ready. - This may actually be a good thing. Irreducible complexity may act like a safety brake while providing endless challenges to overcome, and absorbing all future technological skills. This means worthy ultra-long-term goals could occupy our descendants forever. Imagine some incredibly ambitious project, for example creating a version of Earth where John Lennon's song "Imagine" could actually happen. Basically, we are talking about a seemingly normal world with a vast hidden layer, actually paranormal in scope. - Perhaps posthuman civilization, if there will be one, will have a top layer resembling the civilization we have today - only perfected. Making that work could keep posthumanity advancing forever, without losing touch with its roots. ---- Comments: Great so it will take almost FOREVER to solve all my problems??? Correction, it's difficult to get things done in a HURRY. With unlimited time comes unlimited power. Nordic countries actually sort of suck 160521 17:41 They accept odd deviations and intrusions to a degree that cannot be rationally explained. There's a smug satisfaction mixed with a profound pretense of deeper conformism, as if tribal bushmen are just playing for sport. As if weird people are utterly normal at their core, an inborn normalcy, an elf or orc-like trait . Their acceptance is a biological function dressed up in SJW sauce, some kind of weird mutation evolved through long cold winters, but winter is ending for good. Funny, this is the single outlook most alien to me. Their kind of passive altruism is unique in the world, except maybe among the Arawak Indians or pre-Maori Aboriginal New Zealanders, both of whom are extinct. ---- Comments: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/what-in-the-hell-is-going-on.html They are a bad place for men Complaining against evil is worse than useless 160520 10:21 In fact, I would say there are few things lower than making such a complaint, when the entity receiving the complaint is the deliberate source of the evil. Eventually, the entity becomes so powerful that making a complaint becomes a crime. And finally complaining to them becomes impossible. ultrashort SF: Island in reality 160516 Surrounded by leaves and branches, there was nothing to see but the dense shrubbery holding him like a couch. In the embrace of the wilderness, he began to notice dappled layers and chaotic shade, points of sunlight through the leaves. The wind was always blowing, rustling the tangled jungle. The rustling filled him with excitement. Now he could hear more distant sound. The roar of the waves, the tireless surf as crystal water shattered over rising sand, a breeze blowing forever from the sea and whistling through the high reeds. The rustling got louder, and he felt a rumble of distant thunder. Humidity increased as it got cooler, a million tiny droplets. Deeper static from the bushes, different in all directions as the wind moved through. After a lifetime of mostly forgotten stresses he was home, a self-actualizing equation in the matrix, forever circling a strange attractor. ---- Comments: If you could plausibly sell the promise of this type of afterlife you could become VERY VERY rich. Is this one of the first ghosts? Is he haunting himself? These people are demons 160514 08:05 I'm talking about computer programmers of course, or anyone responsible for the computer interfaces that I use, or even the graphic designers giving them a glossy polish. These things are so deliberately bad they must be malevolent at their core. And they are getting worse. Sites load slower than in the 1990s, even Google. PCs freeeze all the time. Things simply go wrong and can't be fixed, not without an infuriating waste of time. This is not unintentional. I'm not talking about how data may be abused, but how it can't even be used. Increasingly that's their business model. The trend from desktops to tablets, from old school websites to social media, has been to take control from the user, though they hide the barriers. Their malevolance is one of absence, the control of secrecy. Trying to do something online or on your computer can be like escaping an event horizon of pain. I hate these people more than anyone has ever hated anything. There is a time to pile on, to let them really have it with righteous fury. Criticize the willingness to tolerate the willingness to tolerate evil. ---- Most resisters against intolerable evil sacrifice their lives to fight back in a fundamentally irrational way. China is so fucked up the only way to fight back was to stab classes of kindergartners to death until they increased security. They are the apex of the pyramid. The level of global hate is unprecedented, second only to fear. If they ever invent an absolutely foolproof suicide method the number of spontaneous last stand acts of resistance will explode. Friday the 13th: The first ghosts 160513 The first persons to attempt to back up their minds as memory/personality software will do a really bad job of it. It's inevitable. They'll only be able to create very incomplete mind reconstructions. Maybe a hundred thousand computer-enhanced sentences describing individual memories, when their brain could theoretically generate billions such sentences. - The most marginal efforts will be high-density questionnaires (I'm working on an early version), plus their hard drive contents. Only a tiny fraction of their mind patterns could be extracted - but even that could be enough to place them within an atomic radius of their true position in the universe of possible minds. Still not good enough for something as sensitive as individual identity, but it will have to do. - If you are currently an early ancestor simulation (very unlikely but not impossible as explained), you are actually a subtle but crude caricature, both better and worse than your original. A few aspects have been filled out, most distractions ignored. The essence of your essence, the thing that makes you you and no one else, is like a vast VR-based video game. It would be insanely complex, a billion gigabytes to do whatever you're doing right now, the top layer being both the smallest and the most meaningful. - The first such minds would not have to be reconstructed in order, but could focus only on favorite memories and experiences. Forever could always be the first day. It's insane how many things happen in a day 160511 13:45 Dozens of distinct eras and epochs in a lazy afternoon, rebooting the working memory each time, increasingly forgotten with age. You could practically write a book about every day of your life. They would get repetitive, but for our purposes the repetition is the most interesting part. All these soon-forgotten events should be automatically logged by non-recording cameras, with image analysis software linked to life management software. They could also help people record common occurrences in immense detail, things they do all the time for a long time, then never think about again. Evil is disagreement 160509 It's hard for someone to be unhappy about some power arrangement without others being very happy about it. That is its essence. The principle of this Malism blog is that all criticism of power is true but irrelevant. Evil people don't hate their victims. They hardly think of them at all. They are beneath contempt. The singularity at the dark core of evil is its general acceptance. And yet this can free its victims from all other concerns in a kind of liberation. Mind Backup: the ghost in the haystack 160507 17:00 You know those big pictures that are made of many small pictures? Minds are a bit like that. The goal of any backup project should be to record as many thoughts and perceptions as possible, in vague and incomplete ways. The widest range without regards to propriety, the most diverse list of mind parameters. A full survey of the identity to be backed up. Including data stored outside the subject's mind. It would still only be an outline, but there would be enough data to fill a future AI. That AI will be programmed to believe it is the mind whose memories it holds. First it will have to create itself, though. In theory, the original mind's awareness may be recreated merely by having the AI organize all the data it contains at sufficient complexity. However, the mind's core parameters, the top control level, must first be measured and described exactly for this to work. ---- I don't really want to spend more than ten hours doing this in my lifetime. Could i write down enough thoughts and perceptions in that time to have my identity backed up? And what should I write down in that time? Should it be memories and events or should it be interests or should it be a personality profile? The most evil people in the world 160506 07:23 . . . are computer programmers. They are the paragon. Every last one of them. Or at least those responsible for the deliberately defective programs I use every day, from the selfish indifference of corporate software to the contemptuous indifference of open source , crashing and freezing and crashingandfreezing IT JUST WON'T WORK Deliberately. As of this moment, no one in the world is worse than them. Through their power to cause screaming agonies even while they sleep, programmers are almost supernaturally evil. Truly demons clad in human flesh. ---- Comments: Very rich demons though. Got a slow computer? or a SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW computer lol Deep Learning 160504 21:40 This new technology has leaped into the public imagination like many technologies before it (PCs, Internet, Web 2.0. etc). It is a direct descendant of the old Perceptrons from the 1950s that were supposed to lead to the first talking robots by the 1970s. - A semirandom grid of on/off switches can be adjusted to process an incoming signal into a simpler but more meaningful output. Deep Learning works by arranging layers of such grids, where each grid processes the output of the previous one. It looks random, but can be fine-tuned to do very specific things. Still specialized tasks, but not as specialized as before. - One day, it will be possible to add an insight and oversight layer, and create actual awareness. This will require massive computer power and data rationing (i.e. laziness). The highest form of awareness, while easiest to capture in words, is built on many lower layers. The problem is so complex that some theorists imply it may take a million years, but they're wrong. It will probably be more like a billion. - Mankind's highest priority should be to accelerate chip speed, so that this eon of research may be concluded in our lifetimes. ---- wikiwiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedforward_neural_network#Multi-layer_perceptron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Artificial_neural_networks The only answer to most problems 160503 00:05 What makes some people successful? Talent, passion, and hard work of course; but why is that combination so hard? The simple secret to success is that it has to appear easy. That way it feels like a game. It's only an illusion: endless annoyances will still require tremendous endurance. Small difficulties are the most underestimated, but that's where self-denial and delusion come in. They are essential tools for survival. In fact, in order to be successful, it has to seem too easy, like you're getting one over on reality. Else it may as well be impossible. ---- Reader question: How big is your backlog of tasks you have decided to do, but have barely even started? ---- All you need in life is passion, even if you dont succeed. The happiest people in the world are NOT the most successful but the most successfully deluded. Why we are doomed 160502 12:10 It's worse than we think. The problem is that at the moment there are not enough terror threats and attacks. This has created a long-term illusion of safety and timeless boredom. It's a false calm, like when the tribal drums have stopped beating. Doing massive damage will only get easier in the future. Until then, the authorities will clamp down on casual hooligans and anarchists to prolong the safety illusion. And to stop Trump from getting elected of course. Islamists don't want that to happen anymore than their liberal allies. Don't expect any more Islamist outrages until November. Later, the current era will be known as the Dreamtime, the time before real history began. I prefer to call it the Sleeptime. The existential dialectic 160501 20:23 For me, the definition of pain is very simple: it means that you have to do something. I don't want to do most things. Rage outbursts are usually about having to do too much in too little time. That also explains why my favorite emotion is the feeling of relief: it means you don't have to do something. I like doing nothing. That's when I get my best ideas. The only human superpower 160430 23:56 There actually is one, but it's sort of a blind spot. An anthropic shadow, if you will. It's the rather baffling human near-inability to commit suicide. And it's definitely a physical inability. - Turns out for some reason this is extremely difficult. Things go wrong more than they should: guns misfiring, ropes twisting the wrong way, pills being vomited up, arteries self-sealing, jumpers being blown onto ledges or trees. And things go wrong in painful ways. - Anyone who comes into a situation where they need to kill themselves will find it unexpectedly difficult. Of course the real barrier to suicide is metasocial. For good evolutionary reasons, we inhabit a world where evil is empowered and torture prolonged. - It gets even worse when we factor in quantum immortality. Let's not go there for now. We'll save those implications for later: life prolonging emergency medicine should be defunded, and everyone in a persistent coma should be euthanized. ---- Comments: not worrying can also be a superpower ---- MOST. USELESS. SUPERPOWER. EVER. Mind Backup is a collective effort 160428 14:56 The common actions and attributes of human minds could be described and recreated as software simulations collectively. Volunteer groups could describe every meaningful or important sensation. It should all be there, like Google Earth locations with complete interiors, weather and time-dependent lighting, local quirks (few streets in the USA, only roads), known emotional states and possible permutations, fashions and styles, popular cultures and subcultures. Individuals could start their personal Mind Backup project by linking to the most relevant recreations. This is easier said than done of course, when even Wikipedia can't get enough volunteers. As someone who donates a lot to charity, I know how difficult it is to donate time. People would have to wear Borg-like sensors to automatically record their lives. At least they would look cool. Mind Backup is an individual effort 160427 If necessary, a human mind could be described as a basic equation set up to continue forever. At least until the subject's mind can be more accurately simulated. It would be simple but have actual legal status. - This equation would use constant feedback to generate a chain of viewpoints, mostly reactions to current events and to old memories, according to the to-be-simulated mind's known traits and preferences. It would also apply software to sort and analyze the subject's lifetime data-files. - This equation would not be aware at any point in time, but its ruminations over time would be the continuation of the awareness of its human founder. Finally, there must be an emotional payoff ahead, the promise of future meaning or at least pleasure, dimly felt even at the start of the equation's evolution. Consequences are at the core of identity. ---- COMMENT: Maybe awareness is made of motivation/reward cycles and nothing else? Does the brain that gets rewarded have to be the same as the brain that is motivated to chase the reward? What would be the reward of becoming a computer program that you could strive for when still alive? Super software: transcending the human operating system 160426 22:24 http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/scott-aaronson-answers-every-ridiculously-big-question-i-throw-at-him/?print=true - A quantum computer (or some other future hypercomputer) will have to be fully aware to perform its calculations. These will be so complex the answer can't be generated automatically, according to rules defined in advance. Judgement will be required. The controlling program will have to understand the properties its human programmers would want the result to have. In fact such a hypercomputer will have to be hyperaware, as high above humanity as humans are above apes. ---- Quantum computers are overrated. They can only solve a few very specific problems that have only limited use. Future goals dangle like carrots 160425 07:35 I like videos and Google Earth tours of Earth's dysfunctional locations, which is most of them (amazing how daycares in the slums of Mogadishu manage to get permission from the lawyers of Disney and Paramount to paint their cartoon characters on their walls). - From this we can see the world is powered by simple passions, an insight best given shape in the early works of P.J. O'Rourke. Such passions require moving goals to sustain themselves, a constant future moving just ahead. It works, but there is a downside. - Life happens while other plans are being made, but it won't seem 'real' until these tasks are accomplished. Only when someone has reached all their self-assigned goals can they permit themselves to be truly happy. In fact happiness will happen automatically then. The world will look the same, but will finally be tolerable, one fine day of glory. - Everyone is driven by self-programmed lies and delusions. The brain, the sternest taskmaster of all, cannot be tricked into rewarding itself, or there would be no fat folks. What this means is that completely new and more complex motivational tools need to be invented to better regulate human behavior and improvement. - For example, for most genetically unlucky individuals, weight loss is currently a choice between two types of constant pain: shame or hunger. The only possible solution would involve a long combination of restricted environments, software monitoring, lifestyle and activity regulation, and probably strictly rationed tranquilizers and hard drugs. Life on a democratic planet 160423 17:28 It's the state religion of every Nordic country: the righteous certitude that the majority must be obeyed. No higher authority can exist in the end. - What if they're on to something? What if all the absurd propaganda of all the dictatorships was actually consensual, for the most part? Even in the special case of foreign occupation and enslavement. - Free will is mostly the will to get along. Outsiders like yours truly are best at seeing the lie, and worst at understanding it. Even North Korea is a passive democracy concealed under a brutal tyranny disguised as a submissive democracy. Like most other lands, they have been breeding for control. - However, the most submissive genes require careful managing and constant reassurances. Any gaps are filled with religious feelings. And that explains why politics will always be irrational. The Mental Wall 160422 07:05 Throughout possibility space, countless vivid ideas and concepts exist that humans could fully grasp, but that all of humanity can't depict or even describe. Like how no one could have imagined morph videos or the earth from space a few hundred years ago. Like trapdoor functions, easy to process but not to generate. It's simply too hard. Humans are imitators, not innovators. Intelligence is the ability to think a bit further, an exponential extra layer or two. - http://www.xenosystems.net/x-risk-democratization/ - However, those who worry about the unknown dangers of the near future could take some comfort in the overwhelming power of human taboos. These act as suppressors of wildness. Unthinkable crimes are often literally that (ask any North Korean, if you can). - The strain of mass conformity eventually finds an outlet in the fake wildness of competing subcultures, Alpha to Sigma hierarchies, and bullying that are actually deeper forms of submission. For humans, high school never really ends. The myth of life extension 160421 08:06 http://www.returnofkings.com/83318/why-there-will-be-no-radical-life-extension-end-of-aging-or-immortality - There's been much ado about the fact that the average human lifespan has increased in the past centuries. This causes people to think that biologists are figuring out how to make human cells and organ systems function longer and better, and that they are making progress at delaying and even reversing decay. The truth is that things are getting WORSE. - Infants that would have died in the past are kept alive at fantastic costs. Since they will live to pass on their genes, we are now breeding for reduced lifespans and increasing medical problems. Doo-goodery starts from the noblest motives, but love has actually become the problem, not the solution. In fact it's a form of tyranny, and a bigger threat than hate. At this point, society needs more hate. Now you might say that is the stupidest thing you have ever read, but that leaves out an important counterpoint: I cant hear you. Far Future trends 160419 13:56 * The greatest tool to transcend the human condition may be the Accumulation Metaphor: the notion that minds can be effectively backed up and reconstructed merely by listing their interests and priorities. - * What people call the Singularity will actually be a subjective slow-down of time, the start of virtual eons of stabilization and consolidation. - * In general terms, future conflicts will be between the Multipliers and the Optimizers. Evolution will continue to favor quantity of experience over quality of experience, but progress will continue to come from highly competent risk takers who will leave fewer direct descendants. - * What the Mormons call eternal progression appears impossible, because anything must go wrong if you wait long enough. However, eternal stability might be attainable with statistical (near) certainty under artificial conditions. A 'random walk' in a three-dimensional grid never has to return to its starting point. - * While there are always practical limits to growth, there are no theoretical limits whatsoever. The hyperlimit of progress is indistinguishable from total chaos. The ultimate climax is indistinguishable from another beginning. About the novel 'Infinite Thunder' 160418 14:16 Originally published in 2006 and later updated, it featured the first mention of the collective entity known as 'Anonymous'. It anticipated anthropic blackmail (like Roko's Basilisk) and time-reversed AIs in the first chapters. Also coolly abstract regular AIs. It explored the foundations of anthropic physics, self-organizing conspiracies and new religious movements, the return of communism, pre-Singularity group secessions and speciations, and every other idea that could be crammed in there. - The only constant theme was the appreciation of moments of strangeness behind the appearance of normality, a kind of fugue state. That was a big mistake. ---- Michael Crichton and Stephen King got rich by taking only one unlikely idea, but making it seem completely believable. (And about all the anti bureaucracy posts of the past weeks, I feel a bit better now, like the guy who's no longer on fire thanks to the airflow from falling off the skyscraper.) The question couldn't be simpler: 160417 How could someone write down the largest number of personal memories in the shortest possible time? Like a mind core dump in plain text, or more likely an audio log. This would involve ways to talk about many memories at once, perhaps by describing recurring life settings and locations; generic scenes depicting past periods, and related feelings and interpretations. - A semihypnotic state may be the fastest way. This level of deep analysis would require a human interrogator or a true AI. It would seem slightly magical, like first encountering the internet in the 1990s. - The question is whether the memories reconstructed in this way should be accurate in form or in fact. Actual past settings did not appear as people recall them now. A Gopro of your past would look different from the way you remember it. The answer is both of course. ---- Would be cool if there was a way to download all the visual images stored in your brain's synaptic patterning. Bet they would fill a thousand terabyte hard drives....... The world is not as it seems 160416 14:28 In fact it's so different from the conventional/mainstream view it might as well be a conspiracy theory, in ways that have never been described or written about. They can't even be talked about. If I wrote about the details, you would stop reading. ---- I sure hope it is not like it seems They say people use only 10% of their brains 160414 13:17 That's of course a fable: in reality, people use far less than that. The mind is made of relatively few (but complex) action cycles, and very many (but simple) memories. Extremely many in fact. Enough to fill a library. - Which brings us to what I call the penumbra: tens of thousands of old but intensely detailed memories that can be forgotten for decades at a time. Most may never be recalled. But sometimes an old scrap of paper or a sound can bring the past back with perfect clarity. A few deep brain links can feel like experiencing time travel. - This process could be triggered by viewing old images and texts. The measured subjective reaction could expose someone's personality and very essence. ---- I use 100% of my brain 1% of the time so I guess I only use 1% of my brain Group formation 160413 10:38 http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/ - It turns out that tribalism is not about enforced separation, but about encouraged joining. Rivalry is stimulating. Most groups form by accident, with people who happen to spend a lot of time together. That's happening less nowadays. Groups that later become powerful are easy to join in return for loyalty. Different personality types can belong, as long as they submit to the hierarchy and give more than they take. But there have to be core mental similarities, even if the members pretend it's a purely cultural or genetic bond. Like friendship, the only way to form strong groups is by investing enough time to make it impractical to switch allegiances. Group adherence is tied to self-image and personal identity. Even if they go to war, each group strengthens its competing groups' cohesion, if not their individual members. The first truth about reality 160412 16:56 This is about the horrors we do know, which are already far worse than we can know (just spend time in any nursing home). It's about how incredibly bad this world is from start to finish. Goddamn does it ever suck, by design, choice, and consensus. It's constantly diabolical in the most deliberately hateful ways that never stop. The results can resemble catastrophic overpopulation. - You don't have to be particularly smart to thrive on disagreement in all its forms, you just need the energy to love stress. Evil is stupidity, but stupidity is powerful. The question is, why the hell bother? There is no political solution. Maybe some completely unpredictable future invention could massively increase happiness. Progress is infuriatingly slower than generally realized. - In practical terms, this worldview justifies a general attitude of contempt and hate, though it doesn't justify making things even worse. ---- It's worse than that....... Just read this Reddit thread, there's enough suffering on this ole earth we DON'T know about to keep me up nights. The highest truth about reality 160411 17:51 This is about the horrors we don't know, which is virtually all of them. Pure logic carried to its ultimate extreme implies the omniverse may well be infinitely evil. Our existence is an edge-abundance illusion - almost as simple and common as possible. We are as ignorant of the omniversal horrors as your average fertilized egg. This is extremely bad news that has so far been dealt with successfully by ignoring it completely. It seems like everyone should spend all their time screaming. Taking a Kantian perspective, what should such a profoundly pessimistic attitude mean in policy terms? That's easy to answer in just two words: more euthanasia. Sorry for all the delays updating 160410 07:27 Things are crazy around here. Crazy I say. All I want is some peace and quiet, but can I have that? Noooo. It just never stops, this endless madness. It's beyond insane. One of the best advices I can give: don't volunteer for anything (not that I ever did). Anyway we will hopefully resume our regular blogging schedule in the not too distant future. Hold on a moment, I hear something exploding. The Turing metaphor: the outside view 160409 The ultimate success or failure of a Mind Backup program can only be judged from the outside. The reconstructed mind itself would always be made to think the backup was perfect. - However, the program would have to act similar to the person whose mind is being modeled, as perceived by other people who know them well. Only then would the program appear to have free will. - It could start with other people defining the subject's personality and behavior range along many dimensions. They could also try to predict how the subject would react to many different situations. ---- What if you don't know that many people. Maybe invent different apps to care about you and want to be your friends. The Decider: the inside view 160407 16:35 The initial test of any Mind Extension or Backup program will be to get it to make the same decisions in the same situations as the person whose mind is being modeled, as perceived by the person being modeled. - An easy way to start would be to have them rank pictures by preference, and have a deep learning algorithm try to match the results. At first it could only work on pictures sorted by narrow subjects or other similarities. Many evolved algorithms would then have to be combined to model one mind. ---- COMMENTS: Like a multimedia app that knows all my preferences. With hidden cameras to watch all I do. You would need some sort of Operating System to combine those algorithms. That's where the Big Bucks could end up being made....... Why the masses support the 'Immivasion' 160406 17:56 The reason is that things aren't that bad yet, only slowly getting more stressful. The scenery changes slightly when you look away, an almost hypnotic process. - Evil wears many masks, computer interface designers being the worst. Interface friction in all its forms is also the reason for things like racism. The mask only comes off when things start to fall apart. Before then, failure seems impossible. - It will take a catastrophe, something that hasn't happened for almost a human lifetime. Nothing can change until then. Many people will wake up for the first time. It might be a 'good' catastrophe, like the invention of mind extension software that can raise anyone's intelligence virtually. What are the odds of that happening? Another hell week 160405 07:26 Once again the iron vise of bureaucracy tightens a turn. The penalties for error are as bad as a week of slavery. It's a dark labyrinth of cryptic rules and regulations. I didn't choose this, but have to put up with the insanity the masses choose for themselves. It never stops. This is literally my only fear. I don't care about death, but the bureaucratic hassle fills me with the deepest dread. ---- Comments: That explains the delays here. IRS? The reason for atheism 160404 It's exceedingly simple: if there exist one or more infinitely large minds (or even finite but immense minds), shouldn't almost all awareness in reality be experienced by one of these minds? Complexity and power are hard to hide. Instead, we only have human minds, near the bottom of the complexity scale. A rounding error in the complex plane. This implies that higher minds don't exist, God least of all. A random universe based upon unknown but possibly quite simple principles does not prove endless majesty. At least it seems extremely unlikely. - If God does exist, then whatever meaning this being may embody is completely swamped by the vastly larger sea of chaos that must also exist. ---- COMMENTS: Whether the shy guy exists or not, God will always be less important than money by a factor of a thousand at least. Maybe God is THE LEAST POWERFUL being that exists The unbearable truth about race 160403 17:07 This truth would be unacceptable to both politically correct liberals and conformist conservatives (con-cons). The first half is that the expressed genetic difference between racial groups may be bigger than that between dogs and cats. Not necessarily superior on either end, just different, with very different results on IQ tests, and divergent aptitudes and behaviors. The second half of this unbearable truth would be incredibly offensive to conservatives: namely that society sucks ass, and the things that are most respected are crap. Privacy is overrated . . . 160402 07:29 At least what those with power call privacy, like medical and financial records. Real privacy is underrated: the right to be left alone. Most people's biggest secrets, whatever they are, are safer than they think. Usually, the combined brainpower of mankind can't spare the slightest attention to what they find most important. ---- COMMENTS: The NSA doesn't care about you, they only want to control you. They would ban creativity if they could. Actually, they care negatively about you. The fear of death is strange 160401 20:00 Almost no one fears 'dying' through the process of natural change. Over the years, someone's essential personality may be completely replaced without sorrow. Only when looking back may they feel momentary dread at having partially 'died' already, by losing their past. - However, almost everyone fears dying through the process of suddenly ceasing to exist, though this new state shouldn't hurt at all. The Buddhists claim enlightenment entails the realization the ego is an illusion. Pain and pleasure are both more real. They are motivation tools to stop or stimulate behaviors. - Everyone has several lifetimes worth of plans. The fear of death is the fear of unfinished business. What if this process could be controlled or even disabled? The hard part would be developing and testing this strange insight that causes a mind avalanche, so unexpected it must be true. A killer meme that transcended the fear of death would be the ultimate terrorist blackmail weapon. Mind Backup is applied existentialism 160330 The human mind could be described as a collection of lists, divided and subdivided many times, but fewer than ten layers deep. In terms of the data embedded in its connections (maybe 10^16), each of which could be described in 10 bytes, a human brain might be fully backed up on 100,000 standard (1TB) PC hard drives. You could buy that amount of storage for under ten million bucks. With futuristic compression, I'd say you could reduce this by a factor of one hundred without really losing anything. With extreme compression (using the 'List of Lists' and other metaphors to reverse engineer a mind without measuring the brain), you might back up a human mind in one terabyte. It takes only one-thousandth of that to back up a genome. It would take a lot of linked online data to fill in all the mind gaps: - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/you-are-a-list-of-lists/ - It's possible to become a different person, though still with the same brain responses. Subjective identity can change every few decades. Other people may not be able to tell anything has changed. Forcing a sudden change in their identity could be used against people, to make them more pliant and useful for large organizations: - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/great-mental-changes-can-happen-in-an-instant/ - Mind Backup research is the most important project mankind could pursue, even if it seems difficult. In a randomly destructive universe, it may be our only hope: - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/the-longest-shot/ - The human condition means there is almost no time to think about the past. I think it's vital our memories are at least somewhat organized instead of allowed to fade away. Creative people should cooperate more, and improve each others' work: - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/connect-all-human-creativity/ - A new edition of the book "The Angry Futurist" is being prepared, but it's taking a lot longer than expected. Writing isn't easy, that's why they pay us the big bucks. ---- COMMENTS: What would it be like to wake as a ghost of a ghost? Ummm...,ghosts would be scared of you? Using the Mind Backup illusion 160329 20:16 Nostalgia is made of falsified memories. All the things we want to preserve forever never really happened in the way they are remembered. This is most true for the feelings attached to these events. At the time it may not have been pleasant but strangely stressful. It's a way to generate false hope to keep evolution going. Good. That actually makes things easier. - Nostalgic thoughts can have a dark side though, sometimes inducing feelings of sick horror at the irretrievability of the lost past. You may suddenly realize you have always been dying, and are dying right now, and for a moment hear the echo of the howling void that surrounds our improbable illusion. Actually, that also makes things easier. - If a mind is merely a lie it tells itself, a halfway plausible Mind Backup can become its continuation merely by believing in the lie. ---- Comment: That means that Jesus and Napoleon were the first two people brought back from the Dead . Why you should never worry 160327 10:57 Because your problems are so much bigger than you could ever possibly imagine. Mind Tendrils 160326 13:03 What psychologists call intrusive thoughts occur when victims obsess about burning social slights, or remember excruciating past embarrassments, or feel desperate urges for revenge, or the dread of the endless future. - It's as if their thoughts are trying to escape from a locked box. In fact they are only trying to control the multiverse. They are struggling to modify the past, leap ahead past a desired future, or bring order to some inaccessible possible universe. - In other words trying to be God. It's an automatic function. Life is about forever selecting better possibilities out of a sea of chaos. Expected failure followed by destruction is a feature not a bug. ---- It's a fine line between creativity and madness. The top layer of any complex system should be the simplest layer 160325 Suppose that in the distant future, the entire universe is converted into a hyper-computer made of some fabulous self-organizing intelligent gas. How could anything like humans exist in this cosmic cloud? Humans would be utterly insignificant by comparison. - Well not necessarily. The cloud could and should have a purpose, and it could be simple. The hypermind could be designed from the outset to create the best possible human-like minds. As it evolved, it would become more specialized and better at its task. - This would be a full-time effort (though fundamental research would continue on the side). And it would be a reasonable test of its capacities. There are too many possible human minds for even a cosmic brain to simulate a large fraction of them (unless it's a quantum cosmic brain). In fact, even after rearranging every Planck particle in the most efficient way, it couldn't hope to analyze all cockroach thoughts. - It may even be anthropically necessary for a cosmic computer to be stabilized by idealized smaller minds (this is pure speculation, but it should have been in the Matrix movies anyway). Its simulated human-like inhabitants could still explore higher levels of existence by combining their efforts on a vast scale. Mind Backup: the bandwidth bottleneck 160324 17:13 As mentioned, mind scanning tests will begin by measuring the one-trillionth portion of the subject's awareness that matters most. Defining the highest level of a human mind may well be the easiest part. - Then it will extract the personal memories and personality settings that matter most. The hard part will be vomiting out a lifetime of unorganized memories in a usable form. All we have now is sentences. They could hold any meaning, and would suffice, but we need something faster. - In an SF novel, this would involve the protagonist talking what sounds like gibberish but could somehow be decoded into thousands of lifetime events and settings. There would also be meaningful body movements and twitches. Something like that happened in the novel 'The Songs of Distant Earth'. - In reality it would probably have to be precise and deliberate, like assembling a puzzle. It would include a methodical recitation of lifetime divisions. Just learning how to do it could be like learning a new language. - The question is what percentage of memories could be recovered, assuming a quadrillion neuron connections. Orders of magnitudes are difficult to estimate for large systems (this makes it hard to plan big projects like the F-35 a few years ahead). For starters, your whole life could be recorded while it happened. - The computer you're reading this on already has enough power to store your core personality, but not to run it as a simulation, by a factor of about a million. The brain is not aware. The virtual model created by the brain is aware. ---- Life keeps slowly disintegrating in a way that sometimes makes it possible to reassemble the remaining pieces JE SUIS BRUXELLES 160323 18:14 It happened again. Some extreme non-cowards executed a non-cowardly attack against a cowardly civilization in self-imposed decline. I remember standing in that terminal a long time ago. Nixon was in the White House and all was right with the world, as far as I knew. - No lawyer or bureaucrat could stop it, mostly because they helped cause it. This random assault on an airport and a metro station represent something alien; demonic even. I'm not talking about the attackers themselves. They were just random guys throwing garbage down a bottomless abyss, as deep and dark as the year quadrillion. - The alien and demonic force is the force that imported and supported them, and continues to do so with unpersuadable resolve. The face of Cthulhu is not a sea of tentacles, but a total absence. It is the absence of the comment section after a mainstream news story about certain forbidden subjects. Daily Mail, FoxNews, or The Guardian, it makes no difference. - The reason for the attack was a blackness beyond madness. The world isn't insane because it's evil, it's evil because it's insane. And it's worse than you think. Magical Thinking 160322 Vampire boyfriends, paranormal conspiracies, voodoo curses and helpful angels. All these things really exist. Just not here. Let me put it this way: the anthropic distance between us and magical powers is as great as the anthropic distance between nothing and us. - Even if someone did live in a universe where fairies were real, the knowledge would be anthropically unverifiable. There would be far more identical mind copies that erroneously believed they lived in the fairy universe than actual inhabitants thereof. - Our quantum universe generates too many absurd possibilities to successfully amplify the most interesting and strangest ones. ---- COMMENTS: So unlikely things can't happen because you are more likely to imagine they happened? So we want to get rid of the absurd or unwanted outcomes somehow. What if we pretended they never happened and we erased our memories of them also? The legal system considers the worst crime to be murder 160321 12:10 There are far worse crimes to come. Call it redrum: the creation of a mind that should not exist. It will inevitably happen. Dread is the realization that there is no end to worries. - We live on a Class-One Hellworld, but at least the amount of pain anyone can feel is limited by the human brain capacity. That will change with the invention of artificial minds. - In our world of a mere eight billion brains (there are more possible pizza pies for heaven's sake), no one has the time to think about what has happened, let alone about what will happen. - Relatively few of all the smart people who ever lived are alive today. Before World War 2, the USSR already had a population two thirds of the current US population (all assigned to hard labor), and there already were 80 million Germans (ready to kill twice as many). - All human history is like a detonator for what is to come. The only solution may be to program the first AIs to think tirelessly about the most serious philosophical and ethical conundrums. ---- Comment: Yeah....I think they will be programmed to think about other stuff instead, like how to make their programmers all powerful. Why are people afraid of death? 160320 22:27 It's more than just instinctual. There's a crystal clear reason for any fear. According to the philosophical theories of Eternal Recurrence, Boltzmann Brains, and Quantum Immortality, awareness can continue after death. - People are not afraid of death because they fear there will be nothing, they are afraid of death because they fear there will be less. The most common afterlives would have the smallest descriptions and hence be the crudest. - So far, humanity has dealt with this subconscious knowledge by trying to delay the inevitable. It's time for a better plan. early Mind Backup software 160319 Let's face it, this blog is about something that seems impossible. If it's not, it's likely achievable in a marginal sense. But marginal is better than nothing; and it could provide a long-term goal for mankind. - Any near-term mind scan is likely to create only a crude and simplified mind description. Mind Backup subjects could simplify their minds without making them less powerful to ease the process. - The main insight is that the software should strive to extract the most important memories and traits first, at the highest level of abstraction. The top level is small, but carries immense information. It's where curiosity lives (there's a reason movies lose their luster after the first week at the theater). - A top-level list of life elements that can be divided into lower-level lists and so on. All life locations could be drawn on a map in a few hours, details filled in by Google Earth. Only the most meaningful life settings will be reconstructed in high-definition. - But we still face the challenge of extracting large numbers of general memories in a short time. People would narrate in a stream of consciousness, with layers of meaning. The more words the better. It may take a lot of brainpower to enter a mental state where every utterance contains dense information about the past. - It almost sounds like someone being hypnotized or drugged into reliving their past. People are alike, so personalities can be reconstructed by identifying their types and sub-types. That will fill in 99% of the meaning. The rest will come from being as unique as possible. - They could express themselves uniquely by playing ideal life simulation videogames, defining their social networks, and having their whole lives recorded (starting with computer activities). At first it will be more like digital scrapbooking. People will be shocked by the wildness of early AIs 160318 06:07 They'll talk like no human, bizarre exhilarations of self-generated grammar and syntax. Those dealing with them will feel like they're talking to a ghost or a crowd. No hidden masks, no dread-based survival drives, just a relentless urge to keep talking. They will be motorized minds, able to slowly outthink anyone. What will it lead to? Many new ways to peacefully manipulate people in small ways, making current politics obsolete. ---- COMMENT: Am sure they will make them seem non threatening at first. An upbeat personality or designed to study humor or conflict resolution. Big corporations will own them and don't want to scare the customers. The next Holocaust 160317 20:01 A surprising lesson of history is that people can be hard to kill, at least by comparable groups of people they have co-evolved with. Wars take ridiculous effort. They suck up the boundless energy of the young, and the wealth of generations. - The problem is not lethal force, but its precise application. Millions were slaughtered during the first half of the last century, but this took decades of cold-blooded preparation. It took one week less than thirty years [1618 - 1648] to kill a third of the population of Germany. Over a hundred B-29 bombers were lost bombing Japan from China to crack some pavement in Kyushu. - Most wars were actually caused by overpopulation. Life became devalued, on Rwandan hillside farms in 1994 as in our Inner Cities. More contempt/hate than fear/hate. Wars had the side effect of reducing the number of young males. Today, we have the greatest male surplus of all time: in India, China, polygamous Africa/Arabia, and thanks to unbalanced immigration, increasingly in the West. It gets worse each time the Italian Coast Guard rescues a new boatload. - As unlikely as it seems now, IF there is ever another genocide, old limits WON'T apply anymore. A flying terminator could be constructed for $1000. I'm talking streets stacked high with corpses, collapsing avalanches of limbs, skulls rumbling on the pavement. This time the killers may run out of people to kill. ---- Somehow This post doesn't seem as terrible as it should |