• 92 Posts
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I think we would already know about them at Hawking's party. That was the best possible instance to limits the effects of any time paradox. I think all the speculation about it is based on incomplete theories and anomalies of abstraction.

    I view our continued reliance on it for story tropes to be one of the prime aspects of literature and culture of our time that will age extremely poorly. Stories about our future will not be so different than our present, just like our past, when closely inspected, is far closer to our present than most realize or believe. Our cultural perspective of the present as any kind of finality or modernity is an absolute fallacy. I feel like FTL is a major mental crutch that is crippling us from reaching for the stars within the scope of the present. The biggest difference between now and the future is the availability of wealth and how far that wealth can reach. Antimatter can take us many places on a one way trip. It is just the most expensive matter in the universe. We probably won’t have access to it in large enough quantities and in a circumstance where we can build a ship and magnetic containment vessels until we are able to build at stellar ring types of scales.

    I see no reason to give the FTL fantasy any kind of attention. I can come up with countless interesting stories about the future and I have no need for FTL. If we can’t travel, what is the relationship dynamic between systems, and what protections would get implemented to prevent a rogue group from forming. I think communication would be streaming constantly in one way broadcasts back to Sol and visa versa. Now that becomes entertainment, like otherworldy gossip. What happens if communication is broken. How does that evolve over time while Sol is still the only system with the infrastructure to produce antimatter. Or shifting gears entirely, science is finite. Even the edge cases that can not be known can still be constrained. Eventually, the age of discovery ends and empirically, science is an engineering corpus. At that point, Biology is fully known and understood. I can absolutely guarantee that almost all human scale technology will be biological and in complete elemental cycles balance. The only industrial technology will be handled autonomously and outside of living environments. Living environments will be in total balance. This has so many far reaching and interesting consequences. You get into cultures, and hierarchical display in humans. Now you need to reject the primitive concept of resource wealth based on the fundamental survival needs of other humans. How does that work, and why are academic reputation, the Olympics, and Hollywood red carpet awards more advanced forms of hierarchical display. But wait, how do we have computers, we’ll be primitive! No. A synthetic computer like a human brain would be trivial if we could overcome the massive hurtle of a complete understanding of biology. If you go looking down this path, at the present we know absolute nothing compared to the scope of what is to come. There are a great many stories to tell, but we need to get past our adolescent fantasies about time travel to find them.

    As with all real science fiction, this is a critique of the present. Such stories are not told by corrupt cultures. One must tell of impossible fantasy and dystopia to make the present seem futuristic or a final eventuality with advancement reserved for an academic elite, and innovation reserved for exceptionalism.


  • It will be so much more complicated than "North" IMO.

    We will use something like XNAV. It becomes a measure of time as much as any measure of location, along with a measure of relative gravity.

    I don’t think space exploration in the current culturally adolescent fantasy of a naval voyage type of experience will ever happen. I believe we will traverse the stars, but it will be long after most of humanity lives in O’Neill cylinder like space habits, primarily in cislunar space. The big shift will come after we have effective infrastructure to access the vast resource wealth, first in near Earth objects, then in other small bodies such as Ceres if it is fully solidified, or other planetesimal cores that are accessible. Gravitational differentiation of heavy elements sequesters almost all of Earth’s resources. We are fighting over the scraps of a billion years or so of smaller collisions on the skin of Earth that happened to remain accessible, and did not get subducted by plate tectonics or buried too deeply to access. Undifferentiated bodies from the early stellar formation should be much more abundant in mineral wealth, and a planetesimal core, should absolutely dwarf most mineral wealth humans have ever scavenged.

    Once we get to this stage, I don’t think we will leave until Sol starts causing problems that harken a coming distant end to Sol. At that point, I believe we will build a massive infrastructure to produce antimatter in quantity and generation ships for one way travel.

    In that scenario, navigation in a human sense is largely irrelevant. When we are interstellar travelers, the destination will be our guiding star. I believe we will likely also create something like kilometers scale self replicating systems for resource acquisition and processing. These will need to navigate within a stellar system. For those use cases, maybe they would use something like XNAV as a backup, but they would likely use two way communications beacons with something like an all talk and listen all the time type of management. I think this kind of communication will likely be critical for all human colonies as well to ensure cultural unity. I don’t think we will ever travel the stars. Space is far too vast. I think FTL or even a substantial percentage of it is pure fantasy. One of our biggest issues with the concept is that we call it FTL. Light is not relevant here, it is just a shortcut term that is not relevant to the real issue of the Speed of Causality. Light can travel at the SoC, but the SoC has no inherent need for or relationship to light as a fundamental property. If no photons are present the SoC marches on.

    I view the present sci-fi navel drama trope like the naïveté of 15th century Europeans saying “We’ll just sail around the world backwards for a new trade route to India.” Reality is far more complicated and beyond the scope of anything these leaders imagined possible. …but that is my $2 comment when you only asked for $0.02. I really like the subject of futurism, and like to expand upon the abstracted ideas. I’m certainly no expert. This is part of a creative writing hobby project and I’m always open to adding complexity or changes with new information.



  • I still vote FreeCAD. I know Blender too, but I can put down FreeCAD for months and focus on other things. When I return to designing on FreeCAD I have very little skills decay. I have to go make the canonical tutorial doughnut (YT) almost every time I do Blender. I also have some stuff saved with notes for manually editing quad mesh objects, and converting to quads, but now that is on my old backup comp.

    This is my primary gripe with renting software. I invest enormous time in learning these things. I am not for sale. I own my time investment and no one has a right to steal that from me. I’ve only used FreeCAD a couple of times in the last year. I’ve spent most of my time on other projects. Printing is not my only hobby or interest. It is a tool and a skill I own, and it complements my other tools and skills well. To me, this is a fundamental part of life as a citizen in a democracy. Once upon a time, around 1k years ago, the average person had no right to own property or their tools. They were called serfs and this societal structure is called feudalism. No ancient citizen of a democracy wanted feudalism. There was no changing of the guard, or coup that started feudalism. People slowly gave up their land and rights to live closer to private security forces of the rich. They trusted them to do the right thing. Eventually they became slaves to those feudal lords with only a theoretical right to recourse from rape and murder.

    The software features of CAD are finite. There is nothing to develop in some ongoing fashion forever. Open source is slower and a bit messy at times, but it has been around for a very long time.



  • Amazon’s pricing I not deterministic. You were likely tracked and information collected to know this was a key item for you. Amazon will market loss leaders to you in an attempt to get you to default to buying on Amazon.

    As a former Buyer for a chain of retail stores, the loss leader is effective marketing. I sell you a popular item at or below my typical cost because statistically, a large percentage of customers are making a special trip to my store to buy that product and will make additional purchases at margin. On the wholesale Buying side, these are tools to get past bulk buying tier discounts for seasonal ordering with smaller scale retail.

    Amazon is using a convoluted front end system of overlapping product categories and a supposed multi seller listings (despite collectivized logistics and warehousing) on the website you see. This is how they perform price fixing where you do not see honest or straight forward determinism. When you repurchase that same item later without making comparisons, the seller will shuffle so that a higher price is presented.

    If you have a well isolated network where device history for social media and internet browsing is totally partitioned from e-commerce you’ll likely see even more of the scam. If you see anyone online show the search results and pricing on Amazon, then try to replicate those search results and product price on a device that is totally partitioned from your viewing of the item/price elsewhere, you’re likely to find it is not possible. If you then go back to the original device and do the same, you’ll magically find the same product and lower price. It is a scam market. This is why they are collecting and paying for all that data about you. We are in an age when automated individual targeting and manipulation is possible and happening. This is why data mining stalkerware is insidious. Scam markets are only the tip of the iceberg and what can be uncovered if you go looking for it. Anyone that has done database or logistics management should have major red flags flying when looking at how Amazon’s website is setup. The front end is absolutely untenable garbage for effective logistics. The only reason it is convoluted and search results are terrible is because it is a price fixing scam. The logistical efficiency proves that there is no connection between the front and back end of the site.



  • From me specifically? When I was first disabled, I still used most corporate social media and stalkerware. In an isolated environment like I’ve been stuck in for a long time, it became clear that the user retention through suggested content manipulation algorithms and notifications were not able to compensate for someone in my condition and availability. What had always seemed like minor manipulative annoyances, became obvious manipulative annoyances. I started to see how the interruptions had altered my behavior. There were some interests I sought out on my own, but many pointless and frivolous distractions and things or projects I bought into because I felt like I had found or discovered something on the internet. Over the years of isolation, I can more clearly see the pattern of what was really my interests and what was suggested to me in manipulative contexts. One of the prime ways it happens is when I’m frustrated with something I’m working on and getting no where. Suddenly I get a seemingly unrelated suggestion or start getting what seem like random notifications. Those seem to target my emotional state specifically in a targeted way to tended to push me into new things or areas I didn’t really expect or want to pursue prior.

    I could write off that kind of thing. I became alarmed most around 2018 when Dave Jones showed some search results on YT and was talking about them. I could not reproduce his search or even find the reference at all. A week or so later, it came up. I had it happen again a couple of months later. No matter what or how I searched I could not find the correct results. It is because google was being paid to funnel me into another website some imbeciles thought was related to my search results but the website in question is a garbage third party referral linking middleman. When they showed up in my search results, I couldn’t find anything I was looking for. They were quite literally paying so that I could not find what I needed. It wasn’t ads placement. It the top 20 pages of google, the results were simply not present at all for what I was looking for. In this situation, I could empirically check and see what was happening. Any company that can do such a thing with what I can see should never be trusted with what I cannot see. That type of manipulation is world changing and extremely dangerous. There are only two relevant web crawlers by size, Microsoft and Google. Every search provider goes through these two crawlers either directly or indirectly. When google failed to work, so did DDG, Bing, and most of the rest. At the time, Yandex still worked.

    Since I have offline independent AI running, I’ve been able to test this a bit further. If I start searching for certain niche products in a search engine I will get steered in bad manipulative directions. I do not fit the typical mold for the scope of experience and information I know about going back over two decades ago. When I search for something commercial and industry niche specific, I’ve seen many times when relevant products and information are obfuscated as I am steered to consumer land garbage due to what I shouldn’t know. These are situations where I may have forgotten some brand name, but when searching for all of its relevant properties and use cases, the things never come up in search results. I can chat about the product with a decent AI for a few sentences and it gives me the answer. After I plug that into search results, suddenly I start seeing all kinds of related products in other places popping up like it is some kind of organic thing. It isn’t limited to search results either, it was YT, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and even reddit I noticed similar anomalies. If this kind of connection works in one direction, it must work in both directions, meaning my information bubble is influenced directly by all corporate platforms. It makes me question what interests and ideas are truly my own. I primarily find it deeply offensive that, as a citizen, any corporate shit can cause me to question my informed reality in such a way. Any stranger that asks you to trust them, is nothing more than a thief and con. They are an irresponsible gatekeeper. That is the prima issue.


  • I would agree more if the thing was a product purchased and operated by the establishment, but these things are always run by a third party and their interests and affiliations have no oversight or accountability. What happens when there is an abortion clinic with one of these present. What happens when the controlling company is in KKK christo-jihad hell where women have no rights like Florida, Texas, or Alabama? What about when the police execute someone at random, who loses that recording? No one knows any of these factors or should need to when they wish to walk into a store. This device is stealing your right to autonomy and citizenship as a result.


  • It is not like I fail to understand the use case. My issue is that data mining me is stealing from me. It is taking a part of my digital entity to manipulate me. It is digital slavery. To be okay with such a thing is to enslave one’s self; it is to fail at a fundamental understand of the three pillars of democracy and the role of freedom of information and the press. Forfeiting your right to ownership over your digital self undermines the entire democratic system of governance and is an enormous sociopolitical regression to the backwardness of feudalism.

    No ancient citizen of a democracy wanted feudalism. These things do not have a parade to welcome them, a coup, or a changing of the guard. This change is a killer in your sleep and a small amount of poison added to each of your meals. Every little concession is a forfeit of future people’s rights. This is that poison. I will go hungry. Enjoy your meal, I respect your right to eat it; after you’ve been warned of its contents. I reserve my right to speak of the poison to any that will listen.