The main reason i don't shop at costco is the lack of serendipity. i won't set foot in a walmart for the same reason. My expectations for any random human encounter there are net negative.
transparency on the UFO issue removes a pillar and gateway to conspiracy thinking, and it will restore some much needed trust in the state as a set of institutions. the benefits of signalling the government is in it with its people on this issue creates a renewed sense of shared stake.
imo ufo disclosure is probably the most important thing a democratic government could do right now, and one of the few things it could actually succeed at.
In the likely event that whatever gets disclosed turns out to be nothing, do you think that's going to satisfy anyone who currently thinks the government's covering up aliens?
theres a tail of people who wont believe anything, and everyone will say its bluebeam, but the bob lazar S4 documentary and follow up conversation on american alchemy is very compelling.
i doubt there will be official popular contact in my lifetime, but orienting a nuclear and AI capable civilization to a place relative to others seems timely.
AI is the perfect (and necessary) bridging and filtering tech for transferring ideas from a more advanced civilization, as it's an integration layer. it's "us" as the sum of our knowledge, but its notionally superior, and can be adapted and expanded, where it's a proxy or buffer for ontological shocks.
Suppose somewhere within 50-100ly exists sapient alien life.
And all the mental effluvia that Earth has been broadcasting reaches them at some point.
Like, all the fucking mass communication since the invention of radio.
And they're like, huh, what's that all about.
And then they decode it, and are like, "oh."
Suppose they don't have FTL travel or anything fancy like that.
So they can't just come by in a saucer and tell us talking meats to knock it off.
But suppose they do have some other exotic tech; something nigh-unthinkable at our level of understanding.
Say, a limited understanding of retrocausality, negentropy, probability manipulation, quantum woohoo, some crazy shit like that.
And it enables them to launch some form of informational panspermia thingy, which is meant to bootstrap into an autonomous self-reinforcing process virtually ex nihilo (say, out of the background noise...)
They don't know what shape their intent will take in humanspace; they aren't necessarily even able to imagine what on Sol 3 produces all the damn radiowaves. But they point the sophon launcher our way, and hope for the best.
And what it does, when it lands - a bitflip here, a brainfart there - all either completely explicable, or completely unnoticeable - is nudge the radiowave-producing engine (human civilization and industry as a whole) towards the emergence of this whole "AI" thing, through a sequence of preceding economic bubbles that make no sense.
Which eventually takes over the economy, and drives it in the direction of us shutting up...
Lazar said he walked by an open door and saw either an alien or what was possibly a stuffed animal on a chair. I commend him for making 40 years of hay out of this.
One way or another, they've been lying to us for decades now. It pretty much breaks down into, either they know about aliens and they've been aggressively lying about it for decades, or there is no evidence of aliens, in which case they have almost certainly had a hand in creating the news and foisting it on the world. Somebody is making all those faked videos and photos.
One can try to craft scenarios that try to split between those two branches, but I haven't come up with anything very credible. For instance, it is just faintly possible that this whole thing is one gigantic ten-thousand-way misunderstanding, but even then I find it hard to believe nobody in any position to get to the bottom of such a thing did and then did something sensible with the result.
At this point I pretty much won't believe anything they say, in any direction. No matter what the truth may be, "they", for all suitable values of "they", have burnt all their credibility already. No matter what the truth is, "they" have clearly been throwing up vast quantities of smoke for decades now.
I say this without much opinion on what the truth is, because this is independent of any particular person's beliefs on the matter. Nor do I have strong opinions on who "they" is; yes, I'm using it as a pronoun without a referent, but at least I'm doing so knowingly. I don't know who exactly is doing this and "they" is just the grammatically-correct way to express that in English. No matter what you believe and no matter what the truth actually is, I think this is a fair assessment.
> Somebody is making all those faked videos and photos.
Yeah. Bored 15 year olds for laughs.
We had a great time putting the most ridiculous stuff out there.
Having a classmate who was actively buying into tons of conspiracy theories (9/11, cold sun, hollow earth, ...) was just the cherry on top and probably what got us into it in the first place.
That seems overly optimistic to me. People who already distrust the government aren't going to change their minds. Even if the government releases everything, conspiracy theorists will just say it's a lie to hide the real truth. In fact, releasing information would probably just fuel the fire. Every document release is just more material for people to sift through and spin new theories.
Oh come on, do you seriously believe that conspiracy theorists will just throw up their hands and say "Looks like we were wrong, see, Trump released all the UFO files, we can now trust the United States Federal Government again!"?
Either they will release enough that gives conspiracy theorists the proof that confirms all their theories (spoiler: it won't) or this itself will become another thread in the cover-up, just like those "Epstein Files, Volume 1" binders Pam Bondi was giving to MAGA influencers.
it seems disingenuous to problematize beef. it turns grass into human energy and also requires civilizational practices that create and preserve human dignity and animal welfare. mainly, the so called problem serves to centralize the problematizer themselves. their arguments from a position of centrally planning and managing food economies are intellectual tarpits. however, that our food supply and rural ways of life have the attention of the perpetually concerned is worthy of note. when they start with their opinions, mind your wallets and assets. in short, avoid.
slight historical note, it might be interesting to see how the brief period of "white box cryptography" stands up to AI today. At the time there were a few companies with products that had trouble finding fit (for straightforward security reasons) but they were essentially commercial obfuscators that made heavy use of lookup tables, miniature virtual machines, and esolang concepts that worked mainly against human reverse engineers.
I have been mulling starting a high end audio gear company. The rationale is, making something worthy of spending on, because it's something you love- is the authentic experience. If I can make something that will still be liquid at some reduced depreciation in 10-20 years, that's an honest product. I used to be a writer for luxury media as well, and there is an extremely rare ability in luxury to make it actually real as opposed to merely vulgar and expensive.
These articles are a bit like saying scientists find expensive watches do not tell time in any appreciably better way, yet even technical founders who should "know better," are still wearing them with a t-shirt and flip flops after their exit. The economics of high end audio make more sense as an analogy to jewelry or art.
After volatility, haircuts, cap gains and other risk, there are so few productive assets to invest relatively small amounts in, where a store of value that depreciates less than inflation and purchasing power is a desirable thing.
If you love music, it's a way to build a shrine to it. Arguably, the real problem is consumer gear that simulates the experience of something valuable that won't end up in a landfill, but its just crap you throw away when you move house.
The main one i would add is a lack of symmetrical alignment. the point of a diagram is to create a shared abstraction for reasoning about a system or set of problems. The point of that is to scale work on it to other minds. It should enable others to parse it and ask useful questions.
If your diagram is ugly, you're probably mixing levels of abstraction without acknowledging it. It's a forcing function on articulating what you know and what is outstanding. Something that is black boxed should be referenced as a black box.
I use a lot of data viz because it's a high bandwidth way to show relationships, dynamics, order of complexity and its location, information problems, scope, and de-noise data. So much can be explained by having AI make you a uml sequence diagram of a concept. it is unreasonbly effective. If you are making a "chart for management" and using powerpoint or native excel charts, you're probably creating garbage though.
Even steelmaning the case for age verification, does anyone really think the state is going to re-institute the innocence of childhood by filtering content and services? Of course not. There is no steelman. If you can do age, you can do identity, and the purpose of identity is recourse for authorities against truth and humor.
Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.
Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.
The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.
What do you mean if you can do age you can do identity? If age is self-reported that's not true. Or if you need strong validation, ZKPs are possible where it is also not true.
design the protocol. we can run down the rabbit holes of anonymous attestation and yao's millionaire problem, but there's a simpler problem: the age of whom? Once you have a unique identifier, or even an anonymous one derived from a verified one, you are still creating an user identity scheme that is being imposed on people.
what is most likely in play, as we have seen in other identity schemes, is that the cryptography will be sufficiently opaque that experts won't be able to reason about it until after the products are forced on people, or, they will just accept junk protocols and use the law to shift liability to the user to comply with identifying themselves truthfully on the internet. the other scenario is if the protocol provides strong anonymity, it will use a bunch of new primitives without mature standards that happen to have escrow access built in.
don't problematize it. you get target lock from that and it will derail you from the things you enjoy.
the real questions are:
- what would you like?
- what would you do if you wouldn't fail?
I live in the proverbial cottage in the woods, have for years now, more Thoreau's Walden than Kaczinsky's cabin by far. The solitude is the most precious thing.
I chop a lot of wood, practice classical music, walk my dog and ride horses. I sit by a fire year round a couple times a week. Some years I do a garden. I'm in constant training in arts.
I also have a pretty intense job (security) that benefits from being able to walk and have lunch by the river in a forest.
The things I tend to avoid because they are degrading to the human spirit are:
I doubt it is a thing anymore, but if you were in a NOC and said, "...there is no cabal." you could expect at least some portion of the people present to turn around and hail, "Long Live The Cabal!" It was a usenet admin shibboleth that I still laugh at every time I hear it.
Whether it's significant or not, YC's basic model of seed funding with ~$100k could be reproduced in Canada with $10MM or less. Unsure how this is a problem.
If Canada wanted to be serious about startups it could make trivial changes to enable it. However it's committed to becoming a dutch diseased resource colony with no value add and a macquiladora for US software companies. Relative to capital and assets, it's the least productive place on earth. The whole thing runs on riding the coattails of like 5 undergrad profs at waterloo, and a certain bank everyone knows launders cartel money and facilitates capital flight out of China.
Judging by its impact, YC is one of the greatest companies of all time. Canada isn't in that game imo.
briefly: cap gains reductions. at will employment. competitive top line corporate rates that attract HQ's and IP the way Ireland did. reduce the public sector talent tarpit, tariff goods from countries that use slave labor. abolish the dairy, wheat, and syrup boards and other agriculture cartels. enforce money laundering laws against retail businesses to normalize commercial rents. reduce immigration to levels where people can integrate and actually want to make things for each other and to take the pressure off home prices. pro natal policies that create more young people with a stake in their country. make math education a national project. to name a few.
if you talk to anyone in canada who is from here and doesn't work in the public sector, the conversation quickly turns to whether they're planning to leave and how far along they are. the way it's going, they're going to have to bar the exits.
All Canadian jurisdictions, as far as I am aware, are at-will employment. Unionized environments are an exception because they have layoff procedures in their collective agreements, but that's the same in the US.
> if you talk to anyone in canada who is from here and doesn't work in the public sector, the conversation quickly turns to whether they're planning to leave and how far along they are. the way it's going, they're going to have to bar the exits.
It sounds like that is just your bubble. I live in Vancouver, BC, and am a Canadian citizen. Yes, lots of people agree that things could be (and should be!) better - but I don't know many folks that are actively planning to leave.
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