Except it’s cold because no one can afford to turn it on now.

“we need a Firefly reboot” is just “make it 1997 again through science and/or magic” in a different dialect

O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’ ‘But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.’ ‘Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.’ ‘But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.’ ‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.’

‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.’ ‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals—mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.’ ‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.’ ‘But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars ! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.’ ‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’

Just re-reading this section and it strikes me that this is the *opposite* of cosmic horror, like, this is like Orwell read Lovecraft and said "nah, the OPPOSITE thing is far more horrible." As I think @rechelon.bsky.social would agree, "nothing is real" is far more horrible than cold materialism.

it’s so cool how $2000 e-bikes are coded as toys for rich elitists while $60,000 SUVs and pickup trucks are viewed as necessities for the working class

I have two pieces of advice:

1) if you are an individual that drives a car, buy an e-scooter/e-bike, fast
2) if you are a country that depends on imported fossil fuels for electricity production, plonk huge stacks for imported chinese solar/batts/inverters, fast

ICE cars in particular!

Turns out stars are actually just cosmic mitochondria

Ah, good, another nail-biting battle between the clicktatorship's reckless AI grifters and Blueskiers who imagine targeting is reading the labels in Google Maps and saying "bomb that school."

this is just a sundial

Sidereal time: pick a star sufficiently far away that its position is fixed. Then noon is when that star is directly overhead at Greenwich.

this kind of smart urbanism is illegal in most US cities

"Look, it would be better if you just quoted me as Nobody."

"You want me to say I interviewed nobody?"

"No, no. Quote me but, y'know, if you could just use the synonym 'Nobody,' because I'm not really comfortable w all Agamemnon's choices & this interview is starting to make me sound pro-Atreus."

VLAs with Long and Short-Term Memory Multi-Scale Embodied Memory (MEM) gives our models both long-term and short-term memory, enabling complex tasks longer than ten minutes.

It's late, post cool robotics research

Of course memory should work this way, it's so intuitive

www.pi.website/research/mem...

the fictional "Berryman-Langford Memetic Kill Agent" from the SCP wiki. It is an orangey fractcal designed to evoke the concept of an engineered visual exposure that I guess, in SCP lore, is meant to kill you instantly if you aren't inoculated. They didn't really think about blind people, did they? Like, presumably you, alt text reader, could just view the article without inoculation because you didn't look at it. Unless just a description of the image is enough, in which case god help you I guess.

mostly the concept of Bernie x Yud Crossover Event makes my brain shut down. real life memetic kill agent

I think if you used only posts as the training material for an LLM it would immediately commit seppuku.

imo there are certain arguments that are true you will never see posted, because the people who have the temperament to find these facts are, in fact, uninterested in posting

eyyyyy a good use case! and it's someone with lots of training and expertise in a complex area being able to use code where normally the learning curve would have made it (nearly) impossible to achieve w/out the tech!

my first thought too. maaaybe Shakespeare

adding to the procgen thread

Doomscrolling is the weaponization of literacy

don't be crabby

Democratic senators only do vertical selfie videos after leaving classified briefings when in serious distress

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I'm not joking or being hyperbolic. In choosing to build out the supercharger network and not focus on getting level 2 charging at apartment complexes, they have perpetuated this idea that electric cars need special equipment to be charged.

They are slowing the transition down at this point.

If it doesn’t come from a supercharger, it’s not electricity: it’s just sparking leptons.

You're watching the hypnotic movements of a flock of Red-billed queleas, taken by Johan Vermeulen in Zambia.

They're the most populous species of non-domesticated bird, with global population estimated at 1.5 billion.

So why move like a rolling cloud?
Let's talk about "Africa's feathered locust."

get an ad blocker, use graphene, etc.

Is there a credible public estimate of actual increases somewhere?