Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Hum of the Universe (or an auditory hallucination?)

    I'm hearing a hum. Sometimes. Or well, a hum. Maybe more like a very low drone that fades in and out, a rumbling perhaps. But let's call it a hum anyway.

    It started when we moved out of the city into a small town where the nights were quiet, devoid of screeching tram wheels, cars speeding through streets and sirens left and right.

  • We are (not) living in a simulation

    I watched the video “If Your Parents Planned Your Birth, You're Not Fake, You're Kayfabe” on Paul Vanderklay's channel. It made me realize the scale on which we create the scripts of our lives. We plan them, to the point where even our children's lives become part of the script, and so we start, and often continue, to live as part of our parents' plan. I started thinking about what comes out of this, and that's how this post came about.

    It will be about why the Matrix movie was a near-perfect lie, because it hit the real problem but gave an incomplete, false solution to it, even though, consciously or not, we wanted to believe it was true and it seemed very real to us.

    I'm going to write a lot about “us,” but if you don't feel that it's about you as well, then of course don't feel lumped in where you don’t belong. I write about those of us who have walked a similar path to mine. I'm writing about myself.

    Keyfabe (after wikipedia): "in wrestling, it means creating the illusion that everything presented to the audience during galas is authentic, including characters, storylines and rivalries between competitors. When a wrestler behaves in a different way than the character he is playing would behave in a given situation, he is said to be breaking kayfabe."

  • Food Forest Update #2 (Exciting!)

    First off I thought I'd follow up on that Geoff Lawton quote I published in my last update. I can't find the post now but somebody that read that update mentioned that they couldn't confirm the validity of that quote being attributed to Geoff Lawton. So I figured I'd clear that up and provide the source for where I got that quote. A youtube channel called The Weedy Garden out of Australia did a video with Geoff Lawton which is where I got the quote straight from the horse's mouth. Link below.

  • Conspirituality

    My relatives would probably all agree to define me as someone that does not get angry easily, more prompt to laugh something off rather than get grumpy on it, and generally trying to stay open-minded in all situations and conversations. But for some reason, the world of new age spirituality just set me off REALLY good. I can get, like, extremely pissed, and yell at someone for being so brain-melted and stupid and wrong and get out of my face. Why? I wonder.

    I'm not an anti-religious person (anymore), everyone is free to believe in what they want. But if you start talking to me about, say, acupuncture, reiki, the law of attraction, energy, quantum shite, 5D, light vs shadow or good vs evil, homeopathy, anthroposophy, astrology, reflexology, etc etc etc, oh boy does something dark start to flow. Pseudoscience infuriates me. I know all the mechanisms of cognitive biases, placebo, how it can truly help people feel better, I'm an empathetic person as much as I can and I definitely do not want to judge beliefs. All of this does not matter, I'm fucking mad already. We should not have started this conversation, I'm already trying to stop it before I say things I will regret.

  • Emergence of social cohesion in a model society of greedy, mobile individuals (by ~say)

    The history of civilizations displays a recurrent pattern of development and collapse of both medium-sized cultures and large empires.

    Although cooperation and agglomeration provide the fabric that allows civilizations to emerge and thrive, they are also subject to strong destabilizing forces.

    Destabilizing forces are modeled by means of social dilemma situations, particularly public goods games, which exemplify the joint but discretionary contribution to a common good.

  • I Visited My Old University

    This last weekend I was traveling out of town for a wedding. On Monday before my flight out I had some extra time, and with my old university campus on the way to the airport anyway I decided to visit.

    It was nice just walking around in “free roam” mode with no objectives. There’s plenty that’s changed in the short two years since I’ve graduated, but plenty more that was still the same.

    My favorite part was popping into my old campus job office and saying hi. I didn’t recognize anyone but my old boss, but we had a good few minutes catching up. I learned that the Easter egg I hid on the school homepage survived a redesign which was a pleasant surprise!

    The topic of AI came up. I graduated at the interesting time when ChatGPT had just gone mainstream and everyone was still only starting to figure out what they could use it for. Today it sounds like the development team at my old job is integrating LLMs into quite a lot that they do. I’d say I’m pretty firmly in the AI critic camp, but I’m thinking that’s not a terrible idea.

• Technology and Free Software

  • AI image generation fail that is funny only if you're local

    "A view of downtown Portland, Oregon, seen from the other side of the Willamette River, but is drawn in the style of Japanese printmaker Ando Hiroshige and his famous series '53 Stations of Tokaido'."