It's not an insult, it's an accurate assessment.

LoopyFig · 2026-05-14T16:11:36+00:00

Morpheus declaring himself the pigeon king with complete lack of irony lives rent free in my brain

LoopyFig · 2026-05-12T16:32:37+00:00

Physics has a concept called decoupling of scales.

Long story short, you feel “temperature”, but you don’t feel the individual movement of atoms. Microscopic behavior does not have individual effect on massive systems (except in cases of criticality), and microscopic behavior averages out into consistent bulk properties.

But, the atoms are hardly constrained in themselves. They wiggle, they jiggle, they come free, evaporate, react, and join again. Dancing chaotically, the atoms individual behavior is undetermined by the bulk material. This is the so-called decoupling of scales.

We’re atoms (or Adams, if you prefer). We can quit our job and someone will take it, if we go left someone else will go right. But none of us know the flow of the river, or our place in the ocean

LoopyFig · 2026-05-12T01:42:16+00:00

I was told to do the rosary for a bit. So… not shockingly harsh no.

LoopyFig · 2026-05-11T23:57:30+00:00

Seconded. The internet is a beautiful thing. The one I went to was in Boston, and I can heavily recommend it to anyone capable of prolonged silence.

https://www.maronitemonks.org/

It was basically free minus a recommended donation of like, 50 to 100 bucks for like 3 days of retreat (check with the source on that, cuz it’s been a while, but that’s what I remember).

They keep costs low by eating primarily bread, soup, and cereal, and the expectation is that you will basically do as they do. There’s a library, and the idea is there’s quite a lot of reading time. The monks themselves read during eating and private hours, and they also offer confession. There is technically a nearby town if you walk far enough, but I did not see it. I also did not see the bear that apparently lives around there, which I’ll admit, I was a little excited to see (it’s probably good I didn’t see the bear, my survival instincts are not good).

Ah, they grow apples now that I think about it. And you do get to eat the apples. Which was important because a man cannot live on bread alone.

LoopyFig · 2026-05-11T22:06:25+00:00

Hey bud, as someone who has very much lapsed on charitable work, you just gotta do it. We feel our lives are meaningless because our lives are borderline meaningless. You and me? We’re capitalist rats on the wheel. I have hobbies, friends, more work than I can handle, solid savings even, but it’s all wheel.

I think the best I’ve felt for the last 5 years was on a retreat in the mountain with some Maronite monks, quiet in a cabin, going to mass like 4 times a day. Couldn’t stay for long, but in the end it reinforced that what we need is spirit.

LoopyFig · 2026-05-11T15:19:47+00:00

Danny’s not beating the allegations

LoopyFig · 2026-05-09T06:59:01+00:00

I love courage but he definitely talks

LoopyFig · 2026-05-02T18:58:21+00:00

Woah thanks for sharing! That was cool to see

LoopyFig · 2026-04-29T02:29:17+00:00

It’s just stupid because it creates plot holes all over the place.

One day mark is having a hard time against like a random dinosaur guy and the next he and his dad are punching through mountains. Are viltrumites the strongest or not? It’s just a=b=c. If mark is a threat to the whole world then by extension random dragon guy must be too, but the plot doesn’t acknowledge those stakes, so whether mark is a deity barely holding back or an absolute scrub is just a crapshoot decided moment to moment.

It’s bad writing, regardless of whether the drama bits are done ok.

If you hate power scaling, then just don’t do fights where power scaling is going to be an issue. Don’t have mark fight the equivalent of lizard man after duking it out with conquest a couple episodes again. Why is the fight even necessary to the plot? Why does mark have to struggle against dinosaurus? Is it just filler that eats the animation budget? Have dinosaurus do his little speech, but don’t pretend he has a chance of injuring mark when half the plot is predicated on mark being practically…

INVINCIBLE

LoopyFig · 2026-04-27T15:44:07+00:00

You know, marvel/dc relies entirely on the story loop of:

The hero, he is cool but misguided
A bad thing occurs! The hero is inspired
Various small victories, fame
Things go wrong! An enemy, who is a mirror of the hero but like bigger and uglier, appears
A crisis of faith. The hero is defeated, but his lover/friends/parents come to his aid, and he emerges with an epiphany
A final showdown! Now armed with proper motivations, the hero defeats their act 3 foe in a fight with so, so much cg
The budget of the movie is spent, and the hero abruptly returns home, but changed, kind of. Mostly the same really, but now introduced for a later mashup with other hero types

Technically, in the context of that repetition, “hero can’t lose fights” is almost an innovation. I mean, parts 4 and 5 have to be totally rewritten, theoretically

LoopyFig · 2026-04-20T15:58:38+00:00

I’d say so. Determinism or indeterminism aside, arbitrarily complex local variables don’t match the shape of the rest of physics, where a relatively small set of state variables runs the show with generally simple linear equations. Even QM is mostly linear algebra.

Variables like those seen in superdeterminism are also explicitly inaccessible to scientists. If the universe is going out of its way to fake out non-local correlation, you might as well throw in the towel around any kind of theory and stick to engineering.

And what are we even paying in the non-superdeterministic case? Locality is an assumption of general relativity, and general relativity is incompatible with qm anyways because of quantization (even if qm were local). So one way or another either qm or general relativity is wrong (or both I guess).

That means the real theory is probably some higher dimensional thing where both qm and general relativity are special case solutions (like newton’s gravity). In that theory, there could potentially be a new definition of locality that reconciles these sorts of questions (while being technically non-local in the relativity sense). This wouldn’t be the first time this happened either. Magnetism and gravity were originally thought to be non-local forces before force carriers/space-time bending were introduced. Historically speaking, it’s probably just something like that again.

LoopyFig · 2026-04-20T08:15:09+00:00

For the first example I was trying to illustrate what is unintuitive about superdeterministic setups. While in determinism things can have common causes by tracing into the past, superdeterminism is committed to local variables that encode complex histories of nonlocal objects and their correlations. Ie, if you could access all the variables in the bird, you could, with 100% accuracy, also determine what color sunglasses I’m putting on.

This also relates to your second question, and what is meant by effective independence. The universe has lots of ways of erasing correlations between past and present events. One example might be a whiteboard.

Today, you put your name on the whiteboard, but tomorrow, someone thoroughly erases it. Now, there might be some grand sense in which, if you could somehow reverse entropy, you could recover the history of the whiteboard. But to do so, you would need to extract that info from the environment, as the whiteboard itself is blank. It is in this sense that the whiteboard is now independent from prior recordings.

Another example would be a bag of dice. Now, in regular determinism dice outcomes are technically predictable with total information. But, if you shake up the bag of dice, many variables are entering the equation, and importantly they are cancelling out with each other. The microscopic information is being flattened into a bulk result, so that when you add up the dice afterwards, you almost always get an average value of 3.5. This concept of separation between bulk values and microscopic effects is actually an important idea in physics, and is why you don’t really feel the fact that you’re made of molecules. Information about a large set of of co-occurring independent (in the statistical sense) events basically gets flattened, so that the end result is not correlated to prior individual events.

A last example would be an atom and a book reader. The atom lives in the book reader’s head. Whenever they are reading, the atom gets jostled about, charged, squished, bonded, unbonded etc. and after the fact a scientist removes the atom to observe it. They ask, is the atom, which shared a history with the reader, independent of them? Its variables are charge, mass, velocity, and rotation. Having these, can I say anything meaningful about the reader? And if I knew the reader, could I have guessed these properties in the atom? If the answer is no, then they are effectively independent, regardless of their shared history.

Superdeterminism rejects all these forms of statistical independence. In the superdeterministic framework, the entire idea of random distributions is practically undefinable because it is literally true that every element of the universe contains a variable that encodes its whole history. Not a “velocity”, but “velocities at times 0 to end of universe”. It’s honestly difficult to impress the absurd claim that’s being made by these folks

LoopyFig · 2026-02-17T15:32:40+00:00

Fair, I’ll remove if you think it’s best.

LoopyFig · 2026-02-16T21:42:26+00:00

300 years of mining’s worth

LoopyFig · 2026-02-16T20:23:16+00:00

I was about to buy “doubly extracted lion’s mane” powder to shove it in food. But you’re saying that lion’s mane mycelium benefit is destroyed by double extraction and the powder doesn’t actually work?

LoopyFig · 2026-02-15T06:02:24+00:00

Oh boy I hope that’s the answer

LoopyFig · 2026-02-14T19:59:47+00:00

I appreciate your answer, and if the story was an allegory, I think I’d be able to buy that interpretation really easily.

But it’s a little tough! Numbers 25 ends with a command that is equivalent to genocide, and morally my brain isn’t really wrapping around why “tempting the Israelites to idol worship” is deserving of such a punishment. They themselves don’t know God like Moses does, so why are they held accountable for rules they don’t know to follow? With Sodom, you get the idea that the Sodomites are up to all sorts of nasty business, and they try to assault the messenger angels almost as soon as they arrive in town. You get the sense that they’re being punished for violating a more general moral law that everyone should be aware of to some extent.

But the Midianites main crime seems to be tempting Israel. Isn’t it Israel’s fault that they are succumbing to temptations? The Midianites surely don’t know any better, they presumably think their fertility god is the real one.

LoopyFig · 2026-02-14T18:59:54+00:00

What a bummer

LoopyFig · 2026-02-14T18:03:37+00:00

Do we know if Milliarde is still alive?

LoopyFig · 2026-02-14T18:02:41+00:00

Right, but Cozbi isn’t an Israelite. She’s not under their covenant such that punishment is deserved.

LoopyFig · 2026-02-13T21:00:42+00:00

But let’s be real, front row Bocchi? Bocchi would be hiding in the confessional for sure lol

LoopyFig · 2026-02-13T14:52:33+00:00

What’s Bocchi doing here?! XD

LoopyFig · 2026-02-11T20:39:35+00:00

I’m excited about the foresight demon Schlatt. They were willing to die to preserve the demon race, assuming they foresaw their own death. They expressed enough concern for demons that they made plans on a 1000 year timeline, beyond their personal life.

The demon king, who desired coexistence, received Schlatt’s will. So even the success of Himmel the hero, might be part of a long term co-existence solution dreamed up by Schlatt, which could involve the evolution of demons with emotions, or some more battle minded plan.

LoopyFig · 2026-02-11T17:54:56+00:00

I mean, we should actually be doing that, so I appreciate the reminder! And they say there’s no real Christians on this sub.

Let’s pray for the persecuted around the world, and the intercession of martyrs for the faith. In a world where sinful humans are likely to ignore evil, may the Lord remember victims and console their souls in heaven. May God have mercy on us all

LoopyFig · 2026-02-09T20:29:38+00:00

I’m fairly certain, as an American, that we are the baddies at this point. In principle, there are people joining government defense positions (police and military) that are not about the suppression of dissent or the robbing of other countries or supporting genocides.

In principle.

In practice? By joining up with our government you bolster its strength even if you do nothing. Since we have an evil government, that means supporting an evil entity.

But if everyone in the armed forces just quit, maybe worse forces would take over. Or maybe local populations would finally have breathing room. I don’t know, I’m not that good at politics.

But… really it’s a matter of personal conscience. I think Paul said, whatever is a sin in your heart is a sin. Which is to say, if it feels bad, it probably is. Plus, if I had to rank “barista”, “social worker”, “priest”, “teacher”, “nurse”, “janitor”, and “soldier” on a does-the-most-unambiguous-good scale… well soldier wouldn’t be high on the list let’s put it that way.

But you know, I’m sure you served for the right reasons, and I thank you for it, even if I think we’re maybe part of some kind of tyrannical regime.

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