Oh the author here is absolutely a piece of work.

Here’s an interview where he’s talking about the biblical support for all of this and the ancient Greek origins of blah blah blah.

I can’t definitely predict this guy’s career trajectory, but one of those cults where they have to wear togas is not out of the question.

You’re missing the most obvious implication, though. If it’s all simulated or there’s a Cartesian demon afflicting me then none of you have any moral weight. Even more importantly if we assume that the SH is true then it means I’m smarter than you because I thought of it first (neener neener).

This feels like quackery but I can’t find a goal…

But if they both hold up to scrutiny, this is perhaps the first time scientific evidence supporting this theory has been produced – as explored in my recent book.

There it is.

Edit: oh God it’s worse than I thought

The web design almost makes me nostalgic for geocities fan pages. The citations that include himself ~10 times and the greatest hits of the last 50 years of physics, biology, and computer science, and Baudrillard of course. The journal of which this author is the lead editor and which includes the phrase “information as the fifth state of matter” in the scope description.

Oh God the deeper I dig the weirder it gets. Trying to confirm whether the Information Physics Institute is legit at all and found their list of members, one of whom listed their relevant expertise as “Writer, Roleplayer, Singer, Actor, Gamer”. Another lists “Hyperspace and machine elves”. One very honestly simply says “N/A”

I am not making this up.

The Gmail address also lends the whole thing an air of authority. Like, you’ve already paid for the domain, guys.

How sneerable is the entire “infodynamics” field? Because it seems like it should be pretty sneerable. The first referenced paper on the “second law of infodynamics” seems to indicate that information has some kind of concrete energy which brings to mind that experiment where they tried to weigh someone as they died to identify the mass of the human soul. Also it feels like a gross misunderstanding to describe a physical system as gaining or losing information in the Shannon framework since unless the total size of the possibility space is changing there’s not a change in total information. Like, all strings of 100 characters have the same level of information even though only a very few actually mean anything in a given language. I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about the amount of information in a system increasing or decreasing naturally outside of data loss in transmission? IDK I’m way out of my depth here but it smells like BS and the limited pool of citations doesn’t build confidence.

Anyone remember when Chrome had that issue with validating nested URL-encoded characters? Anyone for John%%80%80 Doe?

I was watching an old Day9 stream today and this story is bouncing off of some comments he made about the importance of degenerate players to competitive design. Like, this is a pretty dumb outcome of regulation, but at the same time if you try to define regulations to create an exception for what “everybody knows” is in something suddenly that process gets taken advantage of by self-interested manufacturers who will figure out how to convincingly argue that “everybody knows” their generic shampoo contains peanuts and shellfish or whatever. And in the context of this kind of regulation that degenerate play will get people killed.

I mean, up until this year they would both have been beat by Clallum County, WA, which had matched the National winner since Gerald Ford. So way to identify the best of the losers I guess?

On a related note, shout-out to the banner image of a neatly spaced rectangular grid of trees, the one part of the book that if I remember right Scooter did actually read and sort of understand, even if he was unable to generalize beyond early modern forestry.

Ironically that review was where I first encountered the work of the late James Scott.

There’s also a common argument that the problem in AV accidents is primarily the other human drivers, which is a classic case of “if everyone just immediately changed over to doing things this way it would solve the problem!”

Honestly the most surprising and interesting part of that episode of Power(projection)Points with Perun was the idea of simple land mines as autonomous lethal systems.

Once again, the concept isn’t as new as they want you to think, moral and regulatory frameworks already exist, and the biggest contribution of the AI component is doing more complicated things than existing mechanisms but doing them badly.

Because project 2025 and the mass deportations won’t actually solve the problems his base is feeling, and at a certain point this kind of scandal will either be his downfall or his only option to scapegoat someone else.

I know we’re trying to cut back on the US politics for the sake of everyone’s sanity, but Musk getting sneered by his own confabulator is still pretty good.

I mean, it sounds like they did ask how much it would cost, he just bulldozed through the question instead of seriously engaging with it and legacy media is too chickenshit to report it as “Trump apathetic about costs of deportation plan” or “Mass Deportation to Cost Billions Despite Trump’s Claims” because putting the things he says in context makes him sound like the madman he is and apparently truth is no longer sufficient defense from defamation.

Yeah, everyone in the traditional media seems to be even more committed to sane-washing than they were in the lead up to the election.

Though the spike doge got today is definitely in the “laugh to avoid screaming” column.

See, if you just learn about this shit when you’re in high school and slowly read and occasionally reread the essays over the course of a decade or so it doesn’t seem overwhelming at all!

Yeah. It’s not the mole people you’ve got to worry about, it’s the moles, man.

I mean, I think actually having to interact with these loons would be a strong incentive to liberalize their theology which would be a good thing.

Wait hang on you only read 2? I’m disappointed, I put a solid fifteen minutes into googling to find those 11 separate links.

I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but this makes a lot of sense. Especially in a 2-party system the election is inevitably going to be a vibe check on the status quo as much as it is a specific election focusing on specific candidates and policies. I’d like to look more closely at the margins to get a feel for whether the Republicans could have run a ham sandwich and still been successful as opposed to the specific appeal of Trumpism.

Not that that changes how rough the next 4 years are going to get for a lot of people.

You ever have that moment where you hear about a song and only then realize that you had liked 2 or 3 from the same band from radio or recommendations over the years without connecting that it was the same group? Because yeah that just hit me.