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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The thing with cognitive dissonance is also a bit more subtle than just the duality of conflicting beliefs. It can often arise from unidentified conflicts that are outside of your conscious self awareness.

    One that I am familiar with is religion. I knew a whole lot about the bible and christianity growing up. From an early age I halfway knew things like how, when I looked at road cuts through bedrock, those layers hinted at deep time and held a story that wasn’t well alined with my beliefs. Then there was my love of dinosaurs as a kid and that too did not mesh with my religious narrative. Each little element of conflict was present on some subconscious like level, and my life became partitioned between this narrative belief system and evidence based reality. I had lots of peripheral consequences in life due to this building conflict, but I never allowed the core issue to come to a head in an attempt to rectify the disparity until I was around 30 years old.

    Cognitive dissonance can also be dangerous and is a contributing factor in many crimes and heinous acts humans commit. Alternative expressions of individuality may also have an origin in cognitive dissonance. Identification of these underlying conflicts is reflective of a person’s self awareness and can help one improve one’s mental health by taking productive action to resolve inner conflicts after identification.


  • Comes up and puts a paw on my arm or leg, but only when she feels the problem is serious. It could be water, food, liter box, or just a notion that I need to give attention due to hours working on some project or something; usually when I’m seriously hurting or sleep deprived. I’m always present, only ever leaving for doctors or a physical therapy routine. I’m accessible for both cats most of the time. The older seems to intuit not to abuse the gesture or use it often. When she does put her paw on me like that, I always look into the issue, so we’ve developed it as a form of direct communication that seems to work. I didn’t train her to do this, I did however train her to be quiet using positive reinforcement. We got the older cat about 6 months after I was disabled, so we’ve been through a lot together in the last 10 years.


  • You're asking the wrong questions IMO. No one loves capitalism. Capitalism is an acknowledgment that humans are inherently corrupt and the concentration of power is a primary corrupting force. If anything the capitalist countries are failing at capitalism in the present.

    Capitalism is also an acknowledgement of the true complexity of the world. No overarching human authority can encompass the true complexity of human enterprises. We simply lack the cognitive scope to manage at all scales without some forms of natural selection in play. Real competition drives people like no other force.

    It is a terrible system, but there is no chance that a concentration of power in an alternative system will be better for the average person. Broad scale and scope altruism is not a long term successful form of governance. It is like the best form of governance, altruistic monarchy. However it suffers the same fatal flaw of a succession crisis. The naïveté of idealist is a recipe for authoritarianism.

    No one loves capitalism. If they are intelligent, capitalism is the lesser of evils in the big picture. The alternative is a return to monarchy or feudalism in our conflict strewn past… IMO

    I hate capitalism BTW. I don’t think we are there yet, but I think AGI is our best chance at a broad scale idealist future alternative. An entity that can never die and can plan long term with scalable and nearly infinite attention is the kind of manager that can achieve what we are empirically incapable of achieving. The systems it will take to institute and protect such an AGI are enormous, critical, and unlikely to get it right the first time, but the outcome is inevitable IMO. We will likely never see such a future in our lifetimes, but it will happen eventually. It will start by politicians either publicly or secretly deferring their policy and decisions to an AGI entity. Corporate offices will do the same. Humans can not compete with a true AGI when such a system emerges. We simply lack the cognitive scope and persistence. At present, AI is still orders of magnitude away from AGI. At the present the building blocks required are already in play. We can build a stacked stone wall and a house, but we need a palatial fortress, and that is still a big ask.

    Capitalism sucks for all but a small elite. However, capitalism has an effective hook for people to oust bad actors through a entirely separate government. Such separation and protection does not exist when the government is expected to play some major management role in the market. If the government is such an authority, it will devolve into authoritarianism because nearly all humans are corruptible. There is nothing more dangerous than trust in others to do the right thing. Someone will always take advantage of the opportunity to exploit and pillage their neighbors when they can get away with it. Capitalism is hated by everyone but fools. It is just hated slightly less than succession crises and authoritarianism.


  • Multi threading is parallelism and is poised to scale to a similar factor, the primary issue is simply getting tensors in and out of the ALU. Good enough is the engineering game. Having massive chunks of silicon laying around without use are a mach more serious problem. At the present, the choke point is not the parallelism of the math but actually the L2 to L1 bus width and cycle timing. The ALU can handle the issue. The AVX instruction set is capable of loading 512 bit wide words in a single instruction, the problem is just getting these in and out in larger volume.

    I speculate that the only reason this has not been done already is because pretty much because of the marketability of single thread speeds. Present thread speeds are insane and well into the radio realm of black magic bearded nude virgins wizardry. I don’t think it is possible to make these bus widths wider and maintain the thread speeds because it has too many LCR consequences. I mean, at around 5 GHz the concept of wire connections and gaps as insulators is a fallacy when capacitive coupling can make connections across all small gaps.

    Personally, I think this is a problem that will take on a whole new architectural solution. It is anyone’s game unlike any other time since the late 1970’s. It will likely be the beginning of the real RISC-V age and the death of x86. We are presently at the age of the 20+ thread CPU. If a redesign can make a 50-500 logical core CPU slower for single thread speeds but capable of all workloads, I think it will dominate easily. Choosing the appropriate CPU model will become much more relevant.


  • Mainstream is about to collapse. The exploitation nonsense is faltering. Open source is emerging as the only legitimate player.

    Nvidia is just playing conservative because it was massively overvalued by the market. The GPU use for AI is a stopover hack until hardware can be developed from scratch. The real life cycle of hardware is 10 years from initial idea to first consumer availability. The issue with the CPU in AI is quite simple. It will be solved in a future iteration, and this means the GPU will get relegated back to graphics or it might even become redundant entirely. Once upon a time the CPU needed a math coprocessor to handle floating point precision. That experiment failed. It proved that a general monolithic solution is far more successful. No data center operator wants two types of processors for dedicated workloads when one type can accomplish nearly the same task. The CPU must be restructured for a wider bandwidth memory cache. This will likely require slower thread speeds overall, but it is the most likely solution in the long term. Solving this issue is likely to accompany more threading parallelism and therefore has the potential to render the GPU redundant in favor of a broader range of CPU scaling.

    Human persistence of vision is not capable of matching higher speeds that are ultimately only marketing. The hardware will likely never support this stuff because no billionaire is putting up the funding to back up the marketing with tangible hardware investments. … IMO.

    Neo Feudalism is well worth abandoning. Most of us are entirely uninterested in this business model. I have zero faith in the present market. I have AAA capable hardware for AI. I play and mod open source games. I could easily be a customer in this space, but there are no game manufacturers. I do not make compromises in ownership. If I buy a product, my terms of purchase are full ownership with no strings attached whatsoever. I don’t care about what everyone else does. I am not for sale and I will not sell myself for anyone’s legalise nonsense or pay ownership costs to rent from some neo feudal overlord.









  • We have no data for an Earth analog around a G-type star, like absolutely nothing. I highly doubt there is some universal life around such a star, but out of a sample size of 1, who could rule them out? Kepler was barely supposed to be able to survey at this resolution, but totally failed at that objective. They claimed success for politically criminal reasons, but go look at the actual data and you’ll see the random noise they cherry picked to make that claim and how they are massive outliers from the rest of the data. None of those data points are remotely scientifically relevant or taken seriously. No other survey to date has come close to an Earth like resolution.

    Researching for my book, there several G-type stars within 7 parsecs. I find them most interesting, but I do not believe complex life is likely anywhere in this galaxy at the present point in time.


  • There were some talks on Harvard’s CfA colloquium that went into the evidence for a prior generation of Jovian moons and that these were likely larger. I’ve long speculated that this event is by far the most likely to produce a Theia like object on a potential Earth collision course.

    Earth’s hotspots are from a paper this year on the mantle anomalies and ongoing research that correlates them. I watch a range of qualified academic sources with valid and current credentials. This is like my casual entertainment. I don’t care to argue, act like chimps in a zoo throwing party favors, their academic equivalent, or the bottom tier of Dante’s Reddit. You can find most of this through Anton Petrov and Fraser Cain in the last few years. Moat of these ideas are published and the rest are abstraction and speculation that fits the more broad strokes of what I have seen.

    I really don’t care who is right or wrong. I enjoy my abstractions in observation from the sidelines. I do not take sides except those that seem more compelling and place no value on tenure or those that appear to build blind careers on poor intuition that makes no sense outside of a narrow frame of reference.

    If you take offense at such a casual interest I apologize. Feel free to block me. I do the same to rudeness online as I do in public to my face.



  • j4k3@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldDo aliens exist in our planet?
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    15 days ago

    The only remote chance is panspermia. There is absolutely no chance that complex life exists within 1 astronomical unit of Earth, or within a few parsecs for that matter.

    Simple life is likely common, but not complex. The most likely large filter for Earth, appears to be the Theia collision that lead to the moon’s formation, Earth’s hotspots, a likely source of nitrogen and water of the correct isotopes, and the vital plate tectonics that enable elemental cycles beyond anything seen on other terrestrial worlds.

    The real question is not what makes Earth unique; it is what makes Venus and Mars so similar, any why Earth is not an average intermediate. The obvious answer is Luna.




  • Thoracic spinal damage is super rare. The thoracic region is the area where your ribs connect. It isn’t like the lumbar spine you likely associate with back problems. It usually requires external sources of traumatic injury to cause problems. Unlike typical back problems, thoracic damage can greatly impact posture; not just in the sense of ‘hold your shoulders back and don’t slouch’ bad posture. This is more like, what you associate with bad posture is somewhat related to fatigue, but you’re likely unaware of how much continuous strength you actually have that underpins your ability to remain upright. These muscles are still engaged even when you are reclining above around a 45° angle, just to a lesser extent, and certainly in use while sitting upright or standing. When the thoracic spinal region is chronically damaged, holding posture above 45° can become like lifting a 1 kg dumbbell in your outstretched arm at shoulder height. I can hold posture and situp or stand, but it hurts from the moment I start. By 30 minutes it is painful enough for me to lose the focus to read and comprehend well. By 1 hour in, I’m unable to think clearly over the background noise of the pain. Taking pain meds and muscle relaxers doesn’t change anything about my condition. It just makes me care less or less self aware. I am here most often because there is a position I can sit in that allows me to fully relax my back while holding a phone. I spend my up time doing other things, I can sit with my computer in bed longer or hold up a novel size book okay. This is a profoundly lonely existence to deal with long term. I’m often hurting too much to really talk anyways. I need the filter of text to piece my thoughts together and feel like I am myself. In a lot of ways I let this place fill a fundamental social need. I don’t expect people to understand. I simply have no access to escape this situation and be myself.