Oh whale…

Entomologist

Yeah. Been trying to find a non-boring way to visualize the start of the universe for a long time. Most of the time I reach for binary which in retrospect is way less fun than trains 🚂

A lot of people describe the first moment of the big bang as infinitely small, dense, and hot. These descriptions may approximate that first moment of existence, but they slightly miss the mark because in the very first moment of existence, size, density, and temperature didn’t exist. There was nothing to compare anything else against.

Instead, let’s visualize that moment as infinitely same. Erase all thoughts of violent explosions happening very quickly and instead just imagine a single point of light. Not big, because size requires multiple things. Not small because it encompasses everything. Just one infinite same.

Now, since it’s hard for us to visualize change in an infinite void that is simultaneously nothing and everything, imagine that point of light as a magical tank engine at the front of a never-ending train. And our job as conductors of that train is to get to the caboose at the end.

The train cars could theoretically go in any order, but because we conductors are beings of time who need them to arrive on a schedule, we must visit each car in a precise order. And before we can access a car, we must make it unique by showing it something that has never been seen before.

For the first car, this is easy. We simply show it the tank engine at the front of the train. So, the inside of the first car transforms its interior into a copy of the tank engine it’s attached to.

But when we arrive at the second car, things are more complicated. The cars have already seen the tank engine. So, instead, we show the second car the first car. And the second car transforms into a copy of the first car and the tank engine attached to that. And inside the copy of the first car is another copy of the tank engine.

As you can imagine, the further down we get on this train, the more this starts to get out of hand. Copies of copies of copies abound. The magic train is powerful, but as mortal conductors of time, we worry our own powers may have limits. So, to reduce the burden on ourselves, we take some shortcuts. Instead of trying to visualize increasingly long nested copies of trains inside each new car we visit, we start to conceptualize these copies as amounts, or amplitudes. When we open the door to a new car, all of the amplitudes inside resonate and interact, becoming maybe more abstract than they are in reality. They form spatial dimensions and physical properties, as mediated by fundamental forces.

These aren’t set in stone, but determined by the lens through which we view them. And when we look through specific lenses, we see these forces causing certain repeated amplitudes to intermingle and stabilize to the point that even though all of the train copies are further nested when we step into the next car, we can recognize and identify some of the same structures, just shifted slightly in their spatial relationships since we last witnessed them in the previous car. We call these persistent formations matter. And as their shared spatial relationships cause them to cluster and coalesce, we refer to that as gravity.

While in the early cars, this continuum of space and matter is not impossible to conceptualize, the more cars we travel through, the more apparent it becomes that these increasingly complex objects are becoming more and more isolated from each other. At every scale of amplitude, each nested car is attached to its own tank engine. While these engines can interact with each other virtually, at the end of the day, they are all just virtual copies of the train we are on. It is entirely impossible for any one of these tank engines to travel so far that it reaches the edge of its bounding box. Because that bounding box is just a lens through which we imagine overlapping traits of increasingly many very similar objects. And the more of them we imagine, the more space is required to provide the virtual framework of this lens.

So, when we feel like we are experiencing random events in our small subsection of the universe, those events are not truly random, but instead the result of our precise position in the the universal train we’ve been virtually sliding through for over 13 billion years. The universe has become so large that it contains every possible event that could have happened in this span of time. The events are not random but calculated, and duplicated every moment so that every time we enter a new train car, two copies of our observable universe exist at a distance so far apart it’s impossible to comprehend.

And when we observe celestial objects apparently propelled away from each other at increasing speed, they are not really being pushed or pulled anywhere. It is simply an artifact of trying to keep track of the “same” object in rapidly advancing train cars, while each car doubles in size to contain everything the previous car had, as well as everything new that might emerge from the duplication event. The celestial objects year by year, and indeed ourselves from moment to moment, are never the same thing twice. It’s an illusion brought forth by our brains being born into a cosmic flipbook.

Even something as simple as seeing multicolored pixels on this screen is not real, but the result of virtual “tank engines” moving into the same spatial zones occupied by our retinas, which are themselves constructed of virtual trains of varying size. The reason photons move at a set maximum speed which makes them exempt from experiencing time is because they are all just virtual copies of the real locomotive which is driving the whole train. Every photon in our universe is just a make-believe copy of the very first moment of the big bang. A specter of infinite sameness.

So, objects in our universe aren’t moving apart as much as the space between them is increasing to account for the overhead of a universe with constantly growing entropy and uniqueness. The extra space represents a boundary which limits how far light can travel and affect matter in its realm of influence. If you’re still reading this, somewhere out there, in a part of our universe so far away that light from our known universe will never even remotely reach, there is an opposite you made of antimatter reading the exact same thing as written by an opposite me. But we are only made of matter because of a virtual compression of sameness, so that antiverse may be the exact place where the curvature of the entire universe loops back around and is overlaid upon itself. And the uncertainty of photons may arise from the fact that there are two identical universes overlapped and constantly exchanging probabilities. And this may be the compressive property which allows the fundamental forces to exist in the first place. So, say hi to yourself. You’re the reason you’re here.

If you want a vacation, don’t insurrect the nation.

Good shout. Been at least a decade since I tried emulating Dreamcast. Just need to make sure I buy a USB adapter for the controller, for the complete experience.

I grew up playing the 3D version of Centipede on the Sega Dreamcast. The game was a fundamental part of my childhood.

For whatever reason, I’ve never spoken to even a single other person who has ever played it (aside from my brother).

The level design was crazy. Tons of replayability, a low barrier to entry, but so difficult in the later worlds I never got close to finishing it. Soundtrack and sound effects I never got tired of hearing. Yet, no one seems to have heard of it.

One thing that they are confirmed to do is when someone you interact with a lot searches for something, that person may be interpreted as a family member and results from their searches may show up in your ads. Devious af.

So multitalented! I can see why they called him Alexander the Great.

Technology Connections - For when you want to know more about turn indicators than you ever thought you could want to know.

Not me, I’m a purist. I drink only hydrogen and oxygen.

It’s an uphill battle for sure. We gain resiliency from decentralization, but you’re right that there is a cost in efficiency. Long-term, we should work to achieve collective ownership of centralized data centers, to literally seize the means of our content production.

But we can’t currently afford the upfront cost such an endeavor takes, even collectively. The ruling class has gone far to ensure our collective means reach not much further than the ends of our own tables. But I still have hope for what we can achieve.

Even if we don’t yet have the resources or the efficiency, one thing we can start working on already is the political infrastructure. Obviously, the official government is laden with corruption. And we can dream about overturning Citizens United, but we shouldn’t be holding our breath. While we must keep fighting that fight, we can simultaneously devote time to learning how to govern ourselves.

What is fair? What are rights? What is the value of a person’s time? Of a person’s life? What is a person? When does an idea stop belonging to an individual and start belonging to everyone?

We can codify these things, and we can even make algorithms that compare our opinions on these subjects and build up logical governing rules over time to maximize fulfillment for everyone. But one thing that’s almost impossible to do is to protect our new society from corruption. We can make the perfect voting system and even if we manage to successfully detect and remove bots, the influence of capitalist ideology penetrates our zeitgeist deeply. Our TV, music, religions, and games while often poking fun at the beast are all intrinsically part of it.

So, what do we do? I think we should accept that part of ourselves. The part that corrupts us, that loves the wars, the pollution, the lack of education. The side of our society that glorifies the billionaire class and will lash out if in mortal danger.

Because I think you’re absolutely right. The more of a threat we appear to be, the more they will come after us. So, we need to make our endeavors look and act like theirs. Real businesses with a real regard for efficiency and profit margins.

But instead of a CEO and a board of directors, we place an artificial intelligence. And instead of trying to maximize profits for investors, we train our AI to maximize profits for workers. And each worker gets a say in the design of the AI, in proportion to the amount of work they do for the company. The work they do is measured as a calculation of how much success they make for the company. Success being a combined metric of estimated financial profit merged with quantifiable improvement in quality of life for our customers.

It’s not a corruption-proof system, but I think allowing real workers to collectively train an AI boss is a good way of combating the effects of corruption in realtime. If I were a worker in such a system, I would implore our AI CEO to classify any livestock in our farms as customers and workers with rights proportional to their brain sizes when compared with our own. So, making lives better for cattle on farms would directly affect the perceived value of the worker who made those changes. This might make our products more expensive when compared to a capitalist model, but if a worker implements the innovation of livestreams from all our livestock to show how fulfilled they are, and the biodiversity/ carbon capture solutions we have crafted into their environments, customers may be willing to pay for a food with less attached guilt, especially if they are entitled to larger profit shares from their own AI employers than in the capitalist model. And if our customers are perceived to be happier as a result, the workers who implemented the livestreams would be rewarded in kind.

If capitalists can game that system by creating bots which produce quantifiable work and are compensated in kind, we can still utilize that labor. If we set the initial conditions correctly, this should result in a workless society where no human has or needs money. Because at the end of that road, no humans can find any appreciable amount of work to do, so the only purpose they serve is to be customers for the perfected AI companies. And because all efficiencies have already been carved out by the capitalist bots, the only way for the bots to make additional profit is to make quality of life improvements for the customers. We become the livestock, with all our needs met. The rich become the workers, toiling to find something to do with their money.

And that may not seem like the perfect end, but maybe it’s the best we can hope for. The capitalists finally have all the money. But they’ve unwittingly taken part in our utopia. And we didn’t have to eat them after all. We just have to find a way of quantifying fairness.

If we can train an AI to determine what compensation is a fair reward for any given task, both now and in the future, everything else falls in line. But maybe that’s as tautological as saying if we could only root out corruption from the US government, we could get rid of Citizens United. The horse isn’t anywhere near that cart. But hey, it’s fun to dream.

It’s funny, I thought of the exact same metaphor to describe tech giants, just a few weeks ago. It was in the lead-up to reddit pulling the plug on their API, as I was thinking about the ideal alternative to the current model of social media. Sometime around March, I saw this video: https://www.tiktok.com/@endangeredecosystems/video/7226846526713171205?lang=en

I thought about how current platforms quash diversity similar to how huge sections of rainforest are replaced with endlessly mundane tree farms that produce only palm oil. Instead of different levels of canopy for big communities, medium communities, and small communities, the tree farm just has one level which uniformly blocks almost all the light from making it to the forest floor.

In old growth forests, the biggest and oldest trees naturally fall and leave gaps in the canopy for new life to emerge. Right now, we have some new trees reclaiming portions of the homogeneous zones. Where parts of Facebook are burning, we have Friendica moving in. Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube are slowly being encroached upon by Lemmy, Mastodon, and PeerTube.

I think that ActivityPub is a big step in the right direction, but it’s also just the first step of many. In the future, I want to see a full ecosystem of applications that are not just replacements of existing platforms, but living, growing, and evolving platforms of their own. We have pieces of that now, but communication between different fediverse platforms is not fully integrated. It would be great to eventually have an online world where the barriers between platforms are largely symbolic and any idea can spread anywhere with minimal effort.

Meaning, we’ll all be passing around snippets of code, digital assets, and textual ideas, allowing us to create new subplatforms on demand, which naturally intermingle and breed with everyone else’s subplatforms to produce dynamic macroplatforms capable of delivering desired content and behaviors quickly, accurately, and securely. We can crowdsource efficiency into every action in our society and everyone can benefit from our collective successes, while still programmatically rewarding those who work to push the progress bar forward.

Ultimately, I think that is the way to beat both climate change and income inequality. Find ways to achieve rampant decentralized success, so that resource hoarders cannot game the system to the detriment of others, but they can use their resources to take part in building a better society if they so wish. And if they don’t opt in, the rest of us will get it done behind their backs, and we’ll just have to find out whether capitalism or technosocialism works better.

Fine, I’ll stop talking about 9gag. Sheesh.

I work in devops as well and while Windows is easier and more convenient for many things, some processing-heavy tasks are better left to Linux. Doing generative AI stuff, for example, I don’t want to be loading a bulky OS on top of the task at hand.

I thought about dual booting, but it would make multitasking nearly impossible. So, instead, I’m using Linux whenever possible and I have a Windows VM I can enter at a moment’s notice or hibernate if I need the resources. And then there’s the MacBook, but we don’t talk about the MacBook.

Team of bodybuilders

And take off your shoes.