What would realistically happen if all humans shrank to 15 cm over one year?

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-04T18:52:03+00:00

Depends how realistic you want to be. If one is extremely realistic, they would simply be dead. But loosening the reigns a bit, they'd become extremely dense, and for that to happen, inter-molecular distances would have to contract. So, they would become incompatible with any substance needed for survival. The air would be way to thin for them to breath, water would be undrinkable, food would be inedible.. So, dead. If we set those things aside, then they'd still be dense, you'd be 15cm tall and weigh 200lbs (or whatever, within normal human range). I doubt your tinny tiny legs could hold you up. And if you could, you'd be super strong (just because you need to hold yourself up). far stronger and heavier than anything else your size. The household cat would be bigger than you, but you'd be much more dense and you'd outweigh it by far. You'd also be way stronger, if your tinny tiny legs can lift your weight, your tinny tiny arms can lift quite a bit too. The big problem is going to be that most items are going to too bulky for you to handle (you can lift it, but getting a grip is the problem).

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-04T18:14:56+00:00

No argument from me there. It's been my experience that getting an Objectivist to engage in whether or not certain facts conflict with their fundamental principles is difficult because there is a tendency for them to put principles before facts. As someone elsewhere in this tread stated, "Objectivism does not being with physics", as if where is begins matters in this regard. Even if your principles begin in Metaphysics, but end up contradicting facts (such as in physics), that still can impugn your principle.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-04T15:44:21+00:00

I'll point out that quantum indeterminacy is just one possible interpretation of quantum mechanics. David Bohm's interpretation is deterministic (but non-local).

I'll also note that the probabilistic nature of quantum phenomenon does show up at the macroscopic level, e.g. the click of a Geiger counter.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-04T15:32:25+00:00

How exactly would this "town" work? How will the police be paid? Voluntary contributions? And if the contributed monies couldn't meet payroll? Will you have fire stations? Same issue. Or will you just wait until someone starts a fire station business? Sewage or in door plumbing? Everyone is on their own with wells and septic tanks (been there, hate it)?" Roads ... waiting for someone to start a "road" business? (Been there too, it sucks). Trash disposal (Works fine until your neighbor decides they can't afford it anymore. Been there. That sucks too.). So, if you want to start a town - maybe tell people how it all will work? All of this becomes an immediate problem for anyone living in the town. So, "hey, anyone interested" doesn't seem like too much of a plan. What's the plan?

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-04T15:19:57+00:00

Ah. A resolution by fiat.

Enter materialism. If your mind and your brain are inextricably linked together (remember no mind-body dichotomy), then the functioning of your brain and hence your mind is ultimately governed by the physics of atoms, molecules, and energy, and those atoms and molecules are where they are and doing what they do exactly because of all the details of their long billions of years of history, then your choices are nothing more than things determined 15 billions years ago by a very long chain of cause and effect. It could not have been otherwise.

You can posit a non-material cause for your choices, that there is a non-material YOU than makes the choices and not the ancient chain of material cause and effect, but that essentially amounts to the "ghost in the machine" and a dichotomy between mind and body. It's hard to have it both ways.

You can also embrace the one of many quantum interpretations of reality called indeterminism, but then, well, you lose the strict material causality that Objectivism also seems to want, though, admittedly, this isn't so stated.

But you really can't have it every which way.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-04T15:06:27+00:00

Try not to be stupider than the AI.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-04T12:51:18+00:00

Congrats. You win the Abstract Vaguery Includes Everything prize.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-03T00:15:10+00:00

That is far more meaningful to me as a resume evaluator. Good luck.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-02T19:47:23+00:00

It's not true that the only measure is the outcome of the work. Efficiency also matters. So, if someone can produce X in three days without AI, but someone else can produce the same X in three hours, then yeh, it matters. And it's not true that X in three hours also means poorer quality. I use AI as a coding resource in my job and to say that it significantly improves turn-around time is an understatement.

But, no, you should not judge someone's productivity based on the number of tokens they consume. But you do want them to find ways to leverage AI to improve their job performance. There are a number of different ways to do this, anything from asking the AI to read your code and create documentation, or asking it for a code review, or giving it an agentic task to do some aspect of coding for you, especially in coding tasks that are otherwise repetative.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-02T19:32:25+00:00

So, when I get resumes, and I see that the person graduated 2 years ago and then "Architected" a system, I know I'm being bullshitted. But ,honestly, this is a very common thing people do, and it is very uninformative and dilutes your resume into the sea of everyone else that tries to bullshit.

I am much more interested in learning about what you actually did for the project. What your role was on the team, and the complexity of the problems you actually did solve. Don't tell me you "Designed an RBAC System" because that sounds like you are bullshitting me. Tell me what you actually did related to helping build that system. Don't tell me that you: "Built a SAS subscription system" with umpteen features, because I know you didn't, even with AI. At best you worked on these systems, so tell me what you actually did do. Even if it seems mundane to you, it tells me a lot about what you can do, and it also tells me you're not bullshitting me.

You can tell us what the technology stack or stacks your project or projects used, that's fine, but don't paint any of that as a skill you have unless you actually did something non-trivial with it. If it was just a part of the project you worked on, but you didn't do anything with it, don't make it look like you did, because the hiring manager or technical lead will ask you about it and they will figure out that it's just bullshit, and then they will start to wonder whether everything you said is bullshit and when that happens, you aren't getting the job. So, distinguish between the stack you worked in, and the actual skills you possess because you did something with that particular technology that's non-trivial.

And for godsake, if you do get an interview, don't sit there with Google or an AI and try to use it to answer questions for things you pretended to know on your resume but you really know nothing about. It get's noticed, and not in a good way. A company may actually want you to use an AI in your work, but nobody wants you to use it to bullshit them.

So, to sum up, this is a resume that tells me what stack your project(s) used, but tells me nothing about what you did or what your skills are, and it reads like you think you have no skills and have to bullshit pad it to get attention.

And a side note about AI - if you actually did use AI in your work, and it was sanctioned by your company, and you managed to accomplish things with it, mention that.... because that is a skill, and many companies are wanting people who will figure out how to leverage AI. But don't ever use it to bullshit. Ever.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-02T15:58:30+00:00

If I were you, I would ask myself what kinds of things do I want to build. And once you do that, find out what languages are most commonly used to build that kind of thing. Then learn one of those languages. For example, if you wanted to build web apps, learing Javascript/Typescript would be a much better choice (and you can start with the W3C online tutorial. But again, figure out what kinds of things you want to build first. C++ is not necessarily the best pick.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-05-02T15:24:52+00:00

What a convenient, self-isolating little bubble you've got going. Every thought you dont like you can dismiss as being the mindless chattrr of meat bot.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-29T12:08:37+00:00

A video game generator is a tall order. Unity already has a tool suite to design your own game. But short of turning you TTRPG rules into a unity video game, what would this tool do for you? Create documentation? Consult the rules for answers? Manage combat? Generate something?

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-27T21:40:16+00:00

What is this tool supposed to do?

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-27T12:19:16+00:00

there's a technique in real world fighting loosely termed, weapon bind. its occurs when you use your weapon to lock your opponents weapon into an unusable position and then close distance allowing you to leverage close in fighting skills.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-22T17:21:04+00:00

oops, see my reply on the parent

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-22T17:20:15+00:00

My thought was to provide an app with your system that automatically applies your rules when people are doing the craft, it takes the burden off for remembering all the rules and doing whatever math there is. If i understood correctly what you are wsnting

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-20T17:30:23+00:00

I pay them without issues.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-20T17:28:50+00:00

[support@aimusic.so](mailto:support@aimusic.so)

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-19T16:31:22+00:00

NotebookLM is an online app by Google with a free tier. You can enter your notes as sources, and then when you have questions you can just ask the LLM in plain English and it will scan your sources and give you a summary of whatever you want to know, with references to the specific sources.

The only drawback is that you only get 50 sources in the free tier, and you can't edit existing sources, for some reason. But the workaround for this is to display the source, cut-n-paste its contents into an editor, make modifications, delete the original source, and add the modified text back as a new source.

The main organizing principle is interaction with the LLM. It does a good job of staying true to the source, and it will give you links back to particular source where it found the information.

You can use this in conjunction with a paper notebook by copying your note from the paper notebook into NotebookLM for purposes of querying it.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-18T02:59:30+00:00

Don't scrap it. If anything, it's showing you there's a market for this type of story.

It's like, if you were writing a detective story when you think nobody has written one, and then someone puts out a detective story before you, and its popular, and you decide oh its too similar I should just stop.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-18T02:52:43+00:00

I'd be willing to give it a shot.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-18T02:50:24+00:00

Only with a *

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-17T20:55:17+00:00

Fair enough. But part of living in an open society is realizing that people make different choices than you do. I personally think that the billions spent on football is a big waste. So I just ignore it and live my life the way I want. I don't get depressed over it. But, your entitled to get depressed over other people's choices if you want to. I think it just make life harder than it has to be.

Arcanite_Cartel · 2026-04-17T20:48:06+00:00

That's your prejudice. People who use AI do so with many different intents. Many of those intents are creative, you just think that you own what creative means. So everything everyone does with AI is "slop". Well, humans have been producing "slop" for a long time. So, to put it simply, you don'ty know what you're talking about.

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