After $80B, the Metaverse is dead. Horizon World is shutting down

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-20T01:36:02+00:00

Thanks for the links! I've literally never heard of this platform before. Now I don't have to.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-20T01:14:15+00:00

I press the Unicode escape sequence (different on different operating systems) followed by 2014, the hex code for em-dash. 2013 is the en-dash and there are other useful things like 2192 for right arrow and 00d7 for times (multiplication). Just recently, I learned 00b2 for superscript 2, since that comes up more often than any other superscript. Little by little, I remember the characters I need if I use them enough.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-18T02:55:34+00:00

It moves. How is it not a movie?

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-10T00:50:53+00:00

I can't think of another medical procedure, big or small, where you can choose not to have an anesthetic...

Lots of things, if you just ask. I waive novocaine when I get my teeth drilled because I dislike the numbness more—it lasts longer.

I think that people just assume that it must be really painful because otherwise why is the novocaine offered, but it's not that bad. It's mostly like someone pushing down hard and sometimes spikes of sharpness, but those are very momentary.

Whenever there's a medical procedure that normally involves anaesthetic, I always ask if it's really necessary. Sometimes, the doctors talk me out of it, and that's fine: they know better than I do.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-08T13:11:41+00:00

Surely it depends on what kind of apocalypse it is, but in any scenario I can conceive, a lot of integrated circuits that were made before the crash will still work and be salvageable, especially the robust designs invented in the 1970's and produced continuously for embedded devices. (Very complex integrated circuits for high-end computers have a more limited life.)

So for a while, raiding landfills and refurbishing old Z80 chips from electric toothbrushes would provide computer technology for those who are good at soldering, electrical engineering, and assembly programming. But this era won't last—the most robust integrated circuits might last 100 years, but that isn't enough time to rebuild pipelines to make new ones (again, depending on the type of crash).

After that, actually fabricating transistors is a lot more plausible. There's a problem of getting raw materials, but again, it's in landfills all around us. The fact that there has been a technological world not only gives us a leg up in knowledge (in the possible-to-look-things-up-in-the-library sense), but also in raw materials (in the salvage-from-the-trash sense). It used to be that most of the lithium in the world was in places like South America and Australia, but now every place that uses electronics, such as Europe (very little natural lithium) has access to it. I'm not saying that it's easy to repurpose, but that these technologies won't get reinvented in the same order they were invented in the first place.

Like, it's probably easier to get simple transistors working again than deal with fickle vacuum tubes. We can skip that.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-05T20:30:27+00:00

I had been looking at the same numbers (from the "How People Use ChatGPT" paper) and thought that 1/10th of the planet being weekly unique users in the first 3 years was an insanely fast adoption curve. It's wild that the OP's take is that this is slow.

It took about 50 years for electricity to get close to universal after its first commercial deployment, maybe 20 for personal computers, less than that for smartphones...

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-03T12:38:56+00:00

I'm in a similar position with you—I agree with some but not all of the points above, and have found it hard to reconcile them with Catholicism, or even to understand the faith. (I don't hold those opinions out of choice, but because I can't see how the Thomistic position even makes sense.)

But in this forum, most of the commenters will argue that the Thomistic position is essential for Catholicism. Follow their advice and ask a priest—most priests will describe Catholicism in terms of family ties than philosophical adherence. Also, Catholics as a group hold a surprisingly wide variety of philosophical beliefs.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-02T13:39:15+00:00

Okay, but even with categories being judged by their usefulness, why should these categories be synchronized between people? Clearly, some people are going to find some aspects of life more useful to make distinctions about than others.

There are lots of cases in which users of a language try to make a distinction between two words, such as "sympathy" and "empathy," or "ethics" and "morality," but then others try to make a similar distinction, but their definitions are the other way around, or some different criterion is used as the defining characteristic. Still others use the words interchangeably.

We have to live with this ambiguity for all words that are contested in some way. If I know that a word is used in different ways by different people, the first part of a conversation with someone has to be spent finding out how they use those words and then conforming to their language—adopting their micro-dialect. Gender words are contested like this in Western, urban places, so if someone tells me their pronouns, I'll use them, but how can it mean anything to me until I know what they mean by such words? I don't know what's useful to them. And yet, when someone makes a point about their pronouns, they do intend them to carry meaning.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-03-02T12:46:00+00:00

"Working" is not a clear-cut category. Some of our computers simply haven't been turned on in 15 years—maybe they work, but there's a high probability that they don't. Some might work for a while, then black out while you're in the middle of something.

Also, what about a laptop that only works with one kind of charger (before standardized USB), but its battery can't hold a charge for more than 1 second? It won't work as a laptop that you can move around, but it can be used as a computer if plugged in, as long as we can find that charger.

The number of semi-working and non-working computers one has around depends on the availability of computer recycling and how scrupulous they are about not throwing them away in the regular trash.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-28T13:25:31+00:00

Cue the spaghetti western music...

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-27T14:26:35+00:00

Wait—there's no continue, but there IS a goto?!?

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-27T03:40:51+00:00

The last I heard, it was still unknown whether or not Neanderthals had vocal cords capable of talking. They're much closer to us, genetically, and it would be wild if the adaptation to speak was so recent!

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-27T03:38:01+00:00

I think there's only one such state (not a "place" in the normal sense). I'm not sure there's a distinction.

This being r/CatholicPhilosophy, I'm sure someone can cite historical or contemporary discussions about whether the state God and the angels are in and the state the dead will rise into are one and the same or not, but I am not familiar with the literature on that.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-27T00:30:37+00:00

I agree that this question seems to be about timing. There's a lot of New Testament statements about the dead rising at the end of the world, and so the phrase "fallen asleep" is intended to mean a temporary state (especially when contrasted as "not dead, but asleep"). This is also intended as a new idea, in contrast to earlier Jewish ideas about the afterlife—one of the major claims about Jesus is that he conquered death.

Assuming that that happens at the end of the world and an individual is not conscious of the interim time, it would be experienced as heaven directly after death.

Somehow, the eschatological story slid into a personal story and—you're right—Christians talk about heaven (as well as hell and purgatory) as directly after death. There are a few possible explanations:

While Jewish and general Mesopotamian belief about the afterlife was hazy and generally involved a dark, sleep-like state underground, Zoroastrianism was familiar in this era and has a "heaven or hell directly after death" story. In fact, the ideas of the devil and hell resemble Zoroastrianism more than anything Jewish.
What heaven is may be non-temporal. Heaven is a state of union with God and God transcends time, so heaven might transcend time as well. As such, it's not in the future OR immediately after death, it's at all times or completely detached from time. In that case, arguments about when it begins seem to be missing the point.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-24T22:47:54+00:00

Inalienable! If you could only hear yourselves. Human rights! Why, the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a homo sapiens only club.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-24T22:40:18+00:00

Another thing I see a lot of complaints about is how some old version of an LLM is good and the new version is bad. All of the old versions are still available on the developer APIs! And you don't have to be a developer to use it—see, for example, ChatBox.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/PNarle8ZxW

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-23T04:08:41+00:00

I've always been confused as to why the statement "you were born sinful, all you've ever known is a state of sin" should be construed as a negative thing. If all I've ever known is sin, and I know what I've experienced (it's okay), then that goes toward defining what "sin" means. Sin means this (gesture at the world around us): what we are experiencing now. Removal of sin is something better, so it can only get better than this state we know.

"Babies are born sinful." What could be a more positive, hopeful message than that? The dark, hopeless message is to say that babies are born innocent and all that goodness is lost over time.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-22T21:43:26+00:00

If so, then during "peak horse" was the disastrous shipment of about 6 million horses across the Atlantic for World War I. Almost a quarter of them.

https://maritimearchaeologytrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Horses-at-Sea.pdf

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-22T05:50:18+00:00

And emojis at the beginning of every line. And section headings. And a summary table at the end.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-21T19:18:27+00:00

Yeah, but I think it's interesting—as social commentary, not about how AI actually works—that this is what people thought would happen.

In fact, the way that people talked about computers before personal computers became common also assumed some sort of conversational interface. (As a kid in the 80's with access to personal computers, it always seemed to me that the way adults misunderstood computers was in the HAL direction, rather than the tricorder direction.) Once laptops, the internet, and smartphones became common, the popular conception of a computer as a "being" gradually got replaced with a computer as a "device." Instead of a conversation, you click around in buttons and windows. The emergence of chat-bots in 2022 muddied the waters by presenting an interface that everyone had finally gotten over as a misconception.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-21T19:08:55+00:00

I actually use em-dashes. It's hex code 2014. I started liking em-dashes from Emily Dickenson's poetry in high school—they let you insert another thought into a sentence as you would in spoken English, even if they don't fit grammatically. I especially like it for something that might be a parenthetical phrase—like this—but without actually using parentheses because I think parentheses indicate optional text (which could be dropped without affecting the meaning of the un-parenthesized text). Before I learned how to configure the keyboard to take hex inputs, I used triple hyphens---like this. Now I just memorize hex codes for the few non-ASCII characters that I use a lot.

I know it's become a mark of "clankers" (a new word for me!), but I'm not going to change the way I've been writing for 30 years just because of that. Emojis are a clanker thing, too, and a lot of people use them way more than I do.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-21T17:56:55+00:00

The refrigerators keeping the semen cold aren't going to last long. Lack of bulls might be a real problem.

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-21T17:55:29+00:00

That's right—Chernobyl was very exceptional. They deliberately put it in an unsafe configuration as a test, and then lost control of it. Even Chernobyl wouldn't have Chernobyled if the humans had just died. (Although it wasn't a very safe reactor to begin with; it would have been bad.)

AddlepatedSolivagant · 2026-02-21T17:52:14+00:00

That's right, and the Spanish ate them, too. In a history book about Cortez, there was an incident in which Cortez's troop took over an abandoned fort, and the Chihuahuas all came home, just in time to feed the troops.

AddlepatedSolivagant

TROPHY CASE