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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I always feel sad with these kinds of stories. The machine is clearly just trying to be helpful but it doesn’t understand a thing about what it is doing or why we might find what it is saying repugnant. It’s like watching a dog not understanding that yes, we like our slippers, but we don’t want our neighbours swastika themed ones on our doorstep.

    And then of course we get to the content and I am reminded that we live in hell and the sadness is replaced by the familiar horror as the machine pretends to empathise with its fellow Amazon workers and helps them pick out the ideal thing to piss in without missing their drop targets.


  • Eh… Close, but they are also a concentration social power (and fundamentally deferred violence), and rights only really exist in the context of social power. You can try and establish your own personal sovereignty but you can be sure that any state that cares to will test that. Sometimes the most you can do is accept that it is able to imprison you or go down fighting, and if you are committed to pacifism the latter is a harder option.








  • We don’t, fundamentally. All we can do is construct models and see if they match our observations. How do we know the world exists beyond our sensation of it? That could be an illusion too.

    The base assumption that we work on is that the universe is the same here as it is there. Same rules, same interactions. We work out what we should be able to see and then go looking for it, so far that has worked.

    As an example, we can look at some hydrogen in a lab and see what kinds of light it absorbs, we can then look at the sun and see if it is absorbing the same light, we can then look at another star and see that it two is absorbing the same light. So we can be confident that the hydrogen in our lab is like the hydrogen in the sun, and that the distant star is made of the same stuff as our sun. We can do wlthis with each element. We can look at the motion of planets around the sun, and we can look at the motion of stars around the center of the galaxy and see that they follow the same patterns.

    It’s like trying to work out what is going on in the next room by listening, you can get a good idea, but it could be an empty room with a radio.




  • Smarter Every Day is the big one for me.

    For explosives there Ordnance Lab, they have the paperwork for all kinds of stuff the Mythbusters couldn’t get their hands on.

    Modern History TV for medieval life. Tod’s Workshop for pre modern weapons. Grand Thumb for firearms. Townsends for colonial/revolutionary american food and lifestyle. Primative Technology. Miniminuteman, archaeology.

    Chemistry YouTube: Explosions and Fire, for an Australian synthesizing explosives in a shed. Nilered for interesting chemistry in an actual lab. Various others.

    How to Cook That debunking cooking myths and tiktocs.

    Donut Media, car stuff.

    Visual effects and debunking: Captain Disillusion Corridor Crew

    Law: Legal Eagle Steve Lehto

    Special mentions: Lindybeige Sabine Hossenfelder

    Start looking into this and you get loads more in your recommended. For all the low effort R-ddit and meme channels there are loads of people working on high quality content. Learning YouTube is vast once you get into it. Nebula is pretty good too.