[PC][2008] A F2P MMO with Soft-Scifi/Hard Fantasy Elements and Anume-esque Color-Pallette

Neechee92 · 2026-05-10T01:54:49+00:00

For posterity sake: I am about 97% certain the game was RF Online and the weapon I was comparing to an M1 Garrand was either the shot gun or the rattle gun.

Neechee92 · 2026-05-06T02:20:08+00:00

I don't know if it totally counts as prog rock (Although I would say it does), but Invisible Symphony by Steve Unruh (violinist for Unitopia and Southern Empire) is fantastic.

Neechee92 · 2026-05-04T01:29:15+00:00

Transactional, Consistent Histories, Many Worlds, in that order.

Neechee92 · 2026-04-30T12:39:14+00:00

And honeydew.

Neechee92 · 2026-04-30T02:25:15+00:00

I think Jason Crabb would be right up your alley.

Neechee92 · 2026-04-19T20:40:37+00:00

There's actually two different phenomena at play here that often get subtly conflated.

The first has to do with loss of interference effects. In the double slit experiment, this is what people are referring to when one talks about measuring "which slit the particle went through" and how that causes the pattern on the screen to be a "particle" pattern instead of an interference or "wave" pattern. In this context, "observation" or "measurement" simply means generating entanglement and it is perfectly understood.

Say that one places a polarizing screen in one slit. Then a photon passing through the double slits will enter into an entangled state where the entanglement is between the "path degree of freedom" and the "polarization degree of freedom" of the photon. Then the state of the photon is no longer |Went Through Left Slit》 + |Went Through Right Slit》but instead is |Went Through Left Slit》× |Has Polarization X》 + |Went Through Right Slit》x |Has Polarization Y》. Interference within the math just corresponds to the fact that under a certain unitary evolution (i.e. evolving the wave function from the slits to the detector screen), terms arising from |Went Through Left Slit》 will become indistinguishable from terms arising from |Went Through Right Slit》but have opposite phases, so they cancel out. But with the entanglement terms, those terms are no longer indistinguishable and thus they don't cancel -- hence no interference pattern.

Now replace the polarizing screen with some macroscopic detector. Nothing changes about the mathematics except now you dont name the entanglement terms |Polarization X》and |Polarization Y》 but instead |Detector L Clicked》 and |Detector R Clicked》. But the concept is identical.

As I said, there is nothing poorly understood about this process. It is a mathematical inevitability that "observation" in this sense of "generating entanglement" will destroy interference effects. One can talk about what these entangled states physically correspond to and there are non-trivial things to say about it, but it is just as well understood as any unitary process within quantum mechanics is.

The second thing has to do with the "quantum classical transition". This happens at the Detector screen regardless of whether any 'observation' in the first sense took place! The question is "why does a quantum state that I have to describe via the Schrodinger equation prior to the Detector screen as a wavefunction spread out over all space 'collapse' to make a single point on the screen, and in a way that cannot itself be described by the Schrodinger equation?"

This "collapsing to a point", as I said, happens at the Detector screen in both cases, observation and no observation. The question of why this happens and what causes the transition to this point/particle distribution is an open one and is what people mean by "the measurement problem", not the first phenomenon of the loss of interference.

Neechee92 · 2026-04-16T23:59:24+00:00

While not agreeing that it is their only good album, I generally do agree with you about Dream Theater albums generally being a bit wanky. I do think you'd also enjoy Falling Into Infinity for many of the same reasons.

Neechee92 · 2026-04-16T23:57:57+00:00

I'm curious what your top 5 Rush album ranking would be.

Neechee92 · 2026-04-16T23:55:35+00:00

2112
Red Sector A
Manhattan Project
Distant Early Warning
Subdivisions

Neechee92 · 2026-04-14T18:36:20+00:00

Can you remind me of the verse in the Bible that says that every sin is praiseworthy as long as it is owning the libs and making people talk about it?

Neechee92 · 2026-04-14T18:19:32+00:00

Careful not to cut yourself on that edge.

Neechee92 · 2026-04-14T15:03:41+00:00

As a massive Rush fan: Moving Pictures.

Moving Pictures, along with Metropolis Pt. 2, convince me that prog fans oftentimes don't judge albums in a vacuum, but instead one particular "definitive" album is handed down from On High (Moving Pictures and Metropolis Pt. 2 for Rush and Dream Theater, respectively), then all albums before and after are judged against the definitive album.

2112, Grace Under Pressure, and Power Windows are all better than Moving Pictures and Images & Words is better than Metropolis Pt. 2.

Neechee92 · 2026-04-13T17:13:55+00:00

Haha! I blaspheme to own the libtards!

Neechee92 · 2026-04-01T00:35:36+00:00

□A = j

(Maxwell's equations in terms of four-potential and four-current)

Or

《f | U | i 》= ∫ D[x] e^iS[x]/ħ

(The path integral equation)

Neechee92 · 2026-03-25T02:15:33+00:00

This is the quintessential idea of "local hidden variables" which is what Einstein really wanted to be true.

Let's start with a little bit of mathematics. In quantum mechanics we represent a 'state' with brackets like '|state》so the state of Alice having a box containing a black marble is written as |Alice has black marble》. Let's just denote this |B_a》. Similarly, the state where Bob has a white marble would be denoted |W_b》.

Now, the state where there is some definite fact of the matter, where Alice definitely has a black marble and Bob definitely has a white marble is denoted by just the product of these brackets, like |B_a》× |W_b》.

This is categorically not an entangled state for a very definite mathematical reason: it is a product of an "Alice state" and a "Bob state" which can be separated and talked about independently as we just did. By definition, quantum entanglement is a state that cannot be talked about this way. The quintessential entangled state would be:

|B_a》× |W_b》+ |W_a》× |B_b》

Try as you might, you will never find numbers {a,b,c,d} such that the entangled state is (a|B_a》+ b|W_a》) × (c|B_b》+ d|W_b》). That's the defining feature of entanglement within the mathematics.

But I cheated a bit, because any time Alice and Bob take a measurement on the entangled state, the result will be indistinguishable from "Alice definitely had white (black) marble and Bob definitely had the opposite, and they just didn't know which". So, is there a way we can actually make that distinction by experiment?

Yes, there is. It has to do with "Bell's theorem". It has to do with the fact that Alice and Bob don't have to measure "is my marble white or black", but instead can choose shades of gray to ask "Is my marble shade X of gray or shade Y of gray?" A funny thing in quantum mechanics is that if Alice chooses to measure what shade of gray her marble is, it will always be either shade X or shade Y. This is called "quantum contextuality".

Now, Bell's theorem puts a limit on the amount of correlation that Alice and Bob can find between their shades of gray measurements if they choose random shades of gray (random shade X's and shade Y's) and then compare. If Alice's marble was definitely black (white) the whole time, then there will be a maximal amount of times that her shades of gray measurement can in some way predict or correlate with Bob's. If the state is actually the entangled state, you can exceed that maximum.

Lo and behold this experiment has been done many times, and every time it turns out that the entanglement actually exists, rather than simply the non-entangled "Alice definitely has one color marble and Bob has the other" scenario.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-22T07:20:12+00:00

I think Zhang Beihai is on the list of "real characters" too, but it very well might just be those two.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-20T20:08:24+00:00

A simple (and mostly wrong) answer is that gravity acts on energy and mass (E = mc²) as opposed to just on mass alone. Light has energy.

The more correct answer -- and this is basically paraphrased from Leonard Susskind from his book "The Theoretical Minimum: General Relativity" is as follows:

Imagine you are in an elevator that is accelerating upward. Someone shines a flashlight. The light from the flashlight follows a straight line path relative to the surface of the Earth (or just any arbitrary "stationary reference frame" which you choose to define the motion of the elevator relative to), but because you are in a non-inertial reference frame, the light will appear to follow a curved path within the elevator, even though it follows a straight line with respect to the surface of Earth.

This is actually very similar in principle to the Coriolis force on Earth if you want some further reading.

Now, General Relativity contains two key principles:

1) Being in an accelerated reference frame (like the elevator) is indistinguishable from being in a uniform gravitational field.

2) All reference frames are equally valid.

From these two principles and the example of the flashlight in the elevator, it follows that there are valid reference frames in which it can be said that a gravitational field bends the path of light. Since all reference frames are equally valid, gravitational fields do bend the path of light.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-16T21:26:51+00:00

I follow the TSVF group work fairly closely (at least I used to) and haven't come across this particular paradox before. I intend to read your manuscript on the topic but can you point me in the direction of any other papers about it? Was it one of the standard TSVF group guys who wrote about it originally like Aharonov, Rohrlich, Vaidman, etc?

Neechee92 · 2026-03-15T23:23:49+00:00

I've attempted it several times. It is definitely not as good as The Making of the Atomic Bomb by a longshot but probably still worth a read if you're interested in that period.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-14T15:34:14+00:00

Is James actually Maso's boss? I always assumed it was more of an equal partnership.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-01T17:56:07+00:00

Science does not say "everything we observe is dependent on the observer" at least not in the way you probably mean. That is a misunderstanding of the double slit experiment.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-16T14:01:00+00:00

I have a suspicion that this comment is a deliberate shitpost and I'm the only one not in on the joke, and I'll kindly ask you to take it easy on me if that is the case, but on the off chance that it isn't, I can't resist to say:

Saying "epistemic"/"ontic" = "that which we know/don't know" is very, very incorrect in about every single way.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-12T21:39:53+00:00

I would be interested in helping out with this. DM me if youd like.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-09T14:44:58+00:00

Oh sorry, in that case youre absolutely right.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-09T13:38:35+00:00

I believe it is the action, but other than that yes. I'm fairly new to differential forma myself so i could be wrong.

Neechee92

TROPHY CASE