thebardingreen

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

That the many worlds interpretation is sort of correct, but incomplete. Hear me out.

Many worlds isn’t as mind bogglingly ridiculous if the worlds are constantly merging back into each other. Like the universe where a photon bounced left and the universe where it bounced right are functionally identical, then they ARE just the same universe. As long as which way the photon bounced didn’t make a meaningful difference, those two realities aren’t suddenly new separate lines, they’re like a rubber band that stretched in two directions, then bounced back together.

But let’s say you measure the photon and keep records of it. Now there’s two versions of you right? One measuring the photon going left, one measuring it going right. You’re in separate universes that shall never meet right?

No… you’ve stretched the rubber band a little further. Over a timescale that’s totally meaningless compared to the age of the universe, you will die, your records will decay and once the information is effectively scrambled into chaos… the two realities can just snap back together. Two universe… but now one again.

Now for some really mind bendy stuff… this stretching isn’t just localized in time it’s also localized in space. Meaning… if you measure your photon and split into two versions of yourself, but I’m on the other side of the world (or even just down the street from you) and I have no idea that there’s two versions of you, stretched across this temporary universe split… Well, there’s still only one version of me. Up until I encounter one or the other version of you. And if I never do… or if we just cross paths in the local grocery store and your photon experiment doesn’t come up at all… there’s still just one version of me.

And that one version of me can EASILY encounter both versions of you simultaneously without me ever knowing or it making a meaningful difference in my life. So your split reality is localized… possibly even microscopically in your body (like… most of your neurons in your brain didn’t really change at all because of your experiment, only a few of them have to fire differently, the rest don’t have to split… also, wtf) and in the parts of your lab equipment that kept records of the photon measurement.

Now, even whackier… the remerging isn’t perfect, just perfect enough that the universe doesn’t fall apart. Like… you know how sometimes you’re SURE that the neighbor had a red car, but then you look outside and it’s green and your spouse tells you it’s always been green? Stuff that fuels r/glitchinthematrix.

“OK thebardingreen,” you say, “sure, but wouldn’t that mean our records would detect the imperfections all the time and we’d have clear evidence when we go an check the database that it’s impossible to keep consistent records because of this spliting and remerging?”

“NO!” I say, “because of entropy.”

See, if the universe is going to try to flow along the arrow of time to it’s lowest energy state… and as we all know, something stretched (like a rubber band, but ANYTHING really) is in a high energy state. If we found lots of evidence this was going on, well that would keep the universe stretched out more, over longer periods of time. The universe can’t have that, so when you start checking records, things tend to snap to their lowest energy state (possibly even to the point that you realize the neighbor’s car WAS always green, and you just had a dream last night that it was red. But something’s bothering you about that… doesn’t seem quite right. You post on the internet and tell a eerie story about your strange experience and then go on with your life. The feeling fades. Becomes a funny party story.

Decades later, your grand kids remember a story you used to tell… and they retell it, but they don’t quite remember what color you said the car was. There’s no need for them to split into multiple versions (one who says red and one who says green), they just both say “the car was blue, then it turned out to be yellow.” The universe is FULLY collapsed.

(Also, we KNOW that keeping perfect records / taking perfect measurements is actually incredibly hard and we tend to throw out anomalous results as garbage data, especially if we can’t reproduce them, this could be going all the time and we would just consider it statistically insignificant bad data, within our expected margin of error, easily explainable as a common, everyday screw up)

So yes, that means there could be a small infinity of parallel universes where evolution / history went differently. A universe where sapient rat people are squeeking over their version of the internet about weird science facts. Sure… but so what? The sun is going to expand into a red giant and consume the Earth and erase most of that information and then the local planetary stretch collapses back into it’s lowest energy state… one where there might have been rat people, or hairless ape people, but either way, they’re gone.

Ready for MORE whackyness?? THIS is the Great Filter. Sort of.

Intelligent civilizations spreading across the stars will create a HIGH energy state, as all those potential diversions splinter in more and more ways across greater distances. SO the universe will tend to favor outcomes where chaotic, clever and unpredictable life forms DON’T spread out of their own solar system, or travel across vast distances, because THAT would be a high energy stretch state. Although even just spreading across a galaxy is still only a LOCAL stretch as far as the universe is concerned. Heck, beings 100 light years away who never build a huge solar system sized radio telescope to pick up our faint emissions don’t need to cause weird reality splits. They could exist in a weird little myriad of their own stretched realities and NEVER interact with ours in a meaningful way. And if one day one of their radio astronomers detects a strange radio signal from our star that NEVER repeats and is NEVER explained… well it really doesn’t matter to them at all if we sent that signal or the rats did or the sun just hiccuped in way their physical models can’t explain. Our whole solar system becomes a Schrodinger’s cat box in which both us AND the rat people sent that signal existing in a superpositioned state until someone measures it… which they probably won’t and probably CAN’T so the universe maintains it’s low energy state.

So if you’re ever like “If I go back in time and kill my grandfather, does that mean I never existed”, what if you just created a weird stretch reality that will paradoxically persist for a while and then all collapse back together as soon as the universe can get away with it?

In this thought experiment, it’s possible that a small infinity of time travelers showed up to Stephen Hawking’s time travel party. BUT, that would cause a high energy stretch over a weird knot in time… so the universe will TOTALLY favor outcomes in which no one showed up, so in the vast majority of universes, NO time travelers show up to hang out with Stephen Hawking, BECAUSE that’s less stretching for the universe to do before it snaps back to a low energy state.

So, the many worlds interpretation doesn’t mean that infinities of universes are being created constantly, it means there’s JUST one universe, but multiple pocket realities can exist in it, localized in both space and time, and these pocket realities are constantly snapping back and merging with each other, sometimes inconsistently. Which is EXACTLY what we’d expect from an energetic system progressing through time, experiencing entropy.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

Yeah… it’s very clickbatey to NOT include that detail.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

It’s probably less about telling off the UN and more about sound bites / video clips that will play well with his bosses and their political base back home.

Historically, right wing isolationist ideologues of all nationalities seem to cheer and double down when faced with international criticism. They know it’s them and their beliefs against the world and they have a fantasy that they can win, right up until an overwhelming number of them die for it.

Israel as a nation is not in a mood for self reflection and definitely doesn’t want to understand the hole their digging themselves into.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

Regional Lemmies. Not holding my breath.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

I googled this and that’s enough internet for today.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

As someone who does cybersecurity consulting for govt. contractors, companies invest in security when some external force forces them to, and then they spend the bare minimum to meet whatever that force requires (and they try to get away with less at every opportunity).

Right now in government contracting we’re experiencing this paradigm shift where the NIST-800-171 standard (which everyone was required to follow, but kind of on the honor system) is going to be replaced in 21 months or so by something called CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification). But, CMMC is basically just the same requirements as NIST-800-171, so why?

BECAUSE, everyone just SAYS they’re NIST-800-171 compliant on all their contracts. Everyone self scores themselves on it and gets a WAY higher score than they do when being scored by a 3rd party, and then reports their self scores up the chain. The way this works in both DoD and NASA projects, which is what I’m familiar with, is the big players like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc, have thousands of smaller suppliers and those suppliers have smaller suppliers, so the requirements flow down from the govt to the big contractors to the small subcontractors and each link in the chain is responsible for making sure the upstream links are compliant… which they NEVER are, but they all say they are!

Of course, the government KNOWS this is happening, but lacks the resources to do anything about it. So the solution is to make everyone get third party certified that they are compliant. Half that industry is setting themselves up for failure to meet that deadline (which, of course, has already been delayed and pushed back multiple times) and I have a feeling that when small companies start failing their CMMC certs, they’re going to get stern warnings instead of losing their contracts because the government has to buy shit from someone.

When I talk to the money / business people at my clients, this goes in one ear and out the other.

There are wide spread (willful) misconceptions among those folks that cybersecurity is something IT people do and everyone else just does their jobs without having to think about it. I’ve had CEOs say things like “No, we’re not doing that, we can’t work that way.” when I educate them about their requirements… and then look to me to provide the solution where they don’t have to change anything about the way they work and when I can’t, they get frustrated with me and my team. I’ve had them ask me “Well what do the big companies do?” and I say “Look, they actually TRY to do all these things they require you to do and they fail at it ALL the time, but I’ve heard you complain about how their bureaucracy and rules slow everything down and make working with them difficult. A bunch of that stuff IS what they do to deal with this.” And they just don’t believe me. I’ve had CFOs say “We don’t have the budget to do all of this, so which parts are the most important?” and I’ve said “This is the LAW. You’re supposed to do all of it!” But they know and I know that for the time being no one will hold them accountable.

Right now, tons of companies just say “We’re NIST-800-171 compliant” or “We’re working towards NIST-800-171 compliance” and their contracts go forward and they hire someone like me to tell them what to do and then they don’t do 60% of it and delay doing 20% of it.

This is in an industry that is required by law to try extra hard on their security. In industries where there are no such requirements, or less requirements… good luck.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

Nuke hurling trebuchets are an underexplored fantasy tech.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

I’ve written more than enough words to win, while failing to finish my story. I’ve also played a lot with local LLMs. Can confirm on all counts.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

Are you an old lady? That was his thing.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

I have watched those exact guys eat an organization I worked for alive. At the end, they had like… 10 business consultants and 1 junior engineer. At an electronics engineering company.

i.natgeofe.com/…/NationalGeographic_1742512_3x2.j…

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

All my machines are named after Autobots.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

Humans starting with the Venerable trait is OP.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

I began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.

I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).

There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.

It was a kind of disaster of a living situation… like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.

Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy’s friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.

(yes… this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I’m getting there).

So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he’s like “Hey, this dude who’s a server there needs a place to live.”

Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl’s 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don’t just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don’t clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.

The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I’m not around. Here’s how we caught him.

Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that… for some goddamn reason… AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who’s also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps… a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who’s used condoms I’m cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I’m not there jerking off.

SO… my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.

Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I’m not kidding)

• dir
• win
• win.exe
• windows
• start windows
• motherfucker!

That’s the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.

thebardingreen , 1 month ago

IKR? XD

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

I would not be surprised if the real target market is rich preppers who want this thing to patrol their bunker.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Hear someone powerful told Musk off for being arrogant. :D

Hear it’s about government’s right to censor content they don’t like. D:

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Given your requirements, why not just accept Bitcoin or other crypto? It sounds like you want to self host it semi anonymously.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Typed “rm -r” in “/home/myuser” instead of “/home/myuser/Documents/ThingINoLongerNeed”

Used gparted to wipe and format the device mounted at “/” instead of the external drive I meant to reformat. I’ve done this one TWO WHOLE TIMES in my life, three if you count wiping a device that was mounted at “/home/myuser/MyTwoTBDrive4DocsPicsMusicGamesEtc”.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

We gave my son a smart phone at 8, because his mother and I lived in different states and he flew as an unaccompanied minor a LOT. I also lived in Oakland and I wanted to be able to reach him and to know where he was when he was with me.

We had strict rules about when he was allowed to have it on and when he was not allowed to NOT have it. We also didn’t get him a data plan and made him use Wifi.

As a result of him actually being impressively responsible with that phone, we turned on the data and relaxed the rules probably years earlier than we would have under other circumstances.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I disliked the books and haven’t tried to watch the show.

But I think I disagree that our civilization is no longer capable of solving it’s own problems. Rather, I think our civilization is going through one of the crappy parts of common cycles that civilizations go through. Frighteningly, this part usually comes right before really scary crappy parts.

Civilizations aren’t static and the patterns don’t always happen the same way, but I think we can predict that

1. Things get really shitty. People pull together for survival and build to a place of stability and prosperity.
2. The rich and powerful (being short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but ALSO insulated from and out of touch with reality), start looting society for their own selfish, short term benefit. This destabilizes the institutions and systems creating the stability and prosperity. The population at large doesn’t really understand what’s happening or why, but they DO know that while they’re still relatively comfortable, they’re scared and they don’t like it. They get more conservative and eventually turn to fascists, strongmen and authoritarians to try to get stability back.
3. This doesn’t work out. It exacerbates the existing problems, makes things even more scary and less stable. Eventually war and rebellion break out.
4. When the dust settles, things are really shitty. People pull together for survival and build back to a place of stability and prosperity.

These steps aren’t exact. They’re trends. Lots of things can disrupt them (including famine, plague and barbarian invasions). But in step 1/4, we (humans) are actually REALLY good at collectively solving problems. In step 2 we’re TERRIBLE at collectively doing anything. In step 3 we (collectively) are trying to solve all the WRONG problems… then back to step 1/4.

We seem to globally be right at the tail end of step 2. Which SUCKS.

tl:dr; This has all happened before and will surely happen again. Hostile aliens are just a modern take on the “barbarian invasion” disrupter. Beware of strangers bearing gifts.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Drink her essence!

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

“Don’t be evil.”

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Indeed.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Graham Hancock has entered the chat.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

fifth-element.fandom.com/wiki/Ruby_Rhod

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Goood Cheeekan.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Hey now, I read Jumper as a teenager and it was one of my favorite books… Admittedly, adult me has never gone back and read it so maybe you’re right, but I have read the sequels and I thought they were okay. The fourth one has Danny and Millie’s daughter teleporting into Low Earth Orbit and using a bunch of real life space and satellite communications technology, which was cool because I consult in that industry and so it was like “Hey! I know what she’s doing and that would work!” or even “I have a client who’s working on something just like that!”

---

It doesn’t fit the prompt because they’re actually both really good, but the movie Contact is better than the book. Carl Sagan wrote in a very rambley, wordy way (kinda like how he talked). He spends like two and a half pages describing Palmer Joss’s tattoos or Ellie Arroway’s hair. So much of the stuff in it is so cool, but it’s very hard to read. I’ve tried three or four times in my life, and I’ve ended up skipping around and just reading random parts of the story.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

I haven’t tried to watch Three Body Problem, because I disliked the book so much. I’m not surprised it’s better, but I still probably won’t watch it.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

I think I’d rather hang out with Romulans, but if I’m seeking some kind of professional service, Vulcans every time.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Easy. I have servers that are only available on my local network and lots of different devices that I MIGHT want to use to access those servers. I haven’t bothered to make sure my key is on EVERY SINGLE DEVICE and some of them, I might not actually even WANT my key on as they’re not terribly well secured and they might leave my house (my Windows gaming laptop I haven’t used in six months comes to mind).

But for cloud accessible servers… yeah.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

They only lived east of the Great Plains until we started building cities and planting trees, as they need high, safe perches for nesting and sleeping. When humans created that for them, they expanded westward all the way to California and started competing with (and killing) other species of owl.

So, yes.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Came here to say Tauri.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

It will?? When??

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Didn’t we try that and it was an absolute disaster?

thebardingreen , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

For example rabbits shouldn’t be alone.

This is why I got a hamster, instead of rats. They LIKE being alone.

And SO MANY HAMSTER CAGES you buy in pet stores, recommended by pet store employees are WAY too small for them. So many of the wheels you can get for them are too small and give them back problems. If you buy something retail for a rodent, get the thing for a one size bigger rodent! Some of the things PetSmart markets for Syrian hamsters for instance are criminally small, enough to amount to cruelty.

But taking my hamster and putting him in the wild would be like taking a dude who lives in a five bedroom condo with a private swimming pool and an indoor gym and free door dash twice a day and sending him to live in a cave in the woods and telling him he should be grateful he gets to live free, the way he was meant to.

Pictures to prove my money is where my mouth is:

…starlightkel.xyz/…/1c88b11b-6824-47a3-8d32-341a9…

lemmy.starlightkel.xyz/post/128358

That’s all for ONE hamster.

EDIT: Also… fuck hamster balls. Hamster’s have very very poor vision, so they can’t really see anything outside the ball. They’re rolling around in a confusing environment with very poor ability to gauge the outside world. If you put a hamster in one of these, you have no idea if it’s freaking out or stressed out or having a good time… but it IS rolling around in absolute ignorance of where it’s going or what it’s bumping into and if you pick it up and move it around it has very little understanding of what’s happening.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Even worse in a Business to Employee context.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

No, I want you to vote AGAINST the insane vampires. Stop thinking of the US electoral system as something where you vote FOR somebody. We haven’t had an option that truely represented us in literal lifetimes. You have a button for bullshit as usual and you have a button for “FUCK WOMEN, FUCK TRANS PEOPLE, FUCK IMMIGRANTS, HAHAHAHAH JESUS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS BABY.” If you DON’T push the first button… that IS in fact a reality fail and LOTS of vulnerable people will suffer for the sake of your principals.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Agreed. You can have a stubborn goat who won’t change or White Jesus with an AK-47 riding a dragon, leading a glorious army to put women and transpeople back in their place. It’s a STUPID choice, but there IS a right answer.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

I mean… don’t look now, but how many times has American “business as usual” been culpable?

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Actually… great! Tell me how. Tell me your plan. Tell me your end game. Tell me what you plan to do about all the gleeful idiots who want to watch the goat die and then shoot you in the back while they pray to Trump and Jesus?

Again, also not advocating for anything. We ARE just talking about goats.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Look… let’s be straight. Who is worse FOR ACTUAL VULNERABLE PEOPLE HERE AND ABROAD. Out of touch, arrogant and pro big business neo liberals or Trumpian Christofascist Republicans. If we’re comparing them to fantasy horror creatures… which one has more hit dice and is more destructive and aggressive?

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

No, I described BIDEN as bullshit as usual.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

I basically agreed with everything you say here… Except that I think the fascist right is scary organized and well-funded compared to anything going on on the left… And the goat is the only thing standing between them and everything that they want.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Yeah yeah, go spend this energy on someone who’s actually a genocide denier.

I’m done here.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

I call that “throw away the little power I have and get a participation trophy to help me sleep better at night” You do you, but I think we’re clear on what I think of your stance.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

Look around. The two party system is entrenched. It’s rooted.

As long as we have an electoral college and a first pass the post system, This will not change no matter how many times you throw your vote away. You don’t have to like it, I personally hate it, but it’s real and present and with us and it’s winning.

What would change this? Ranked choice voting? National popular vote? You know who’s never ever ever going to change those things? Republicans. Not ever.

The system actually uses third parties to blunt the power of the far right and the far left. Don’t take my word for it, just look at election outcomes and the media and follow the money. This is massively backfired, because the far right has seized control of the Republican party. THAT is the cause of the Democrats pulling farther and farther right every year.

Voting third party is not a service, it doesn’t do anything. It gives you an illusion. It’s a comforting drug. I can’t stop you from indulging it, but I’m sure as hell never going to join you in it again. I did that in my younger days when I didn’t understand what was going on.

thebardingreen , 2 months ago

I see nothing in you worth saving.

Ok bye.