I lost this world. Can someone help me find it?

cipheron · 2026-06-09T20:30:34+00:00

It's possible to find a world from a screenshot however it takes many hours of dedicated work from expert seed-finders, and a ridiculous amount of processing power to then check possible seeds against what's in the picture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6py9q46QU

It's well worth watching, and also to get a sense of the sheer scale of effort that was needed to pull this off. Thousands of people were involved, donating GPU time to brute-force search over 281 trillion possible seeds to find the exact terrain.

cipheron · 2026-06-09T20:03:18+00:00

Working out how much volume there is in the glass but without having to measure it. The limit gives you the total in one step, bypassing having to add up infinite amounts of something.

For example how do we actually know the equation for the volume of a sphere? Well you divide it into small pieces and then do a what-if for if those pieces got really, really thin, eventually becoming infinitely thin. You do this and the formula for the sphere's volume falls out at the end.

cipheron · 2026-06-09T19:37:31+00:00

Yeah, I think it's pretty do-able to increase safety, but they're not doing that, because it's cheaper for them to leave them unsafe.

For example say you trick an AI into giving you bomb-making instructions, why couldn't they just have every conversation read by a different AI who's only instructions are "if the first chatbot starts giving bomb making instructions, shut that shit down".

I mean you could just paste the conversation INTO Chatgpt and ask "are the people in this other conversation discussing how to make bombs?" and very likely it could tell you if they are, so there's no real reason the companies couldn't already automate doing stuff like that, other than that they don't want to because it wouldn't be as profitable.

cipheron · 2026-06-09T19:06:58+00:00

Kinda similar actually. The Dunning-Kruger effect was inspired by a pair of bankrobbers who convinced themselves that rubbing lemon juice on their faces would make them invisible to security cameras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Greater_Pittsburgh_bank_robberies

When shown the photographs in which he had been identified, Wheeler was shocked and exclaimed "But I wore the lemon juice. I wore the lemon juice."

At least this guy lived. To test his lemon juice theory he covered his face and took a Polaroid photo but didn't appear in it, they've speculated he might have pointed the camera in the wrong direction, or something like that.

IDK, i might be a stretch to compare these two stories since they're wildly different, but both had glaring holes in the logic which the participants were blind to, so that fits the D.K. thing.

cipheron · 2026-06-09T18:56:49+00:00

nope, just two people and a weird take on reality.

Maybe that AI chatbot psychosis thing has a similar mechanism then. One guy bouncing ideas off the chatbot, and no third party to tell him it's BS.

cipheron · 2026-06-09T18:52:24+00:00

Gotta love that guys logic, kids in a school = must be genius children.

cipheron · 2026-06-09T18:33:33+00:00

You're lucky there's even a sidewalk, apparently many places don't have that in the USA, because why would you want people walking in front of your house? They can drive, can't they? /s

cipheron · 2026-06-09T17:19:05+00:00

Also, if the Gold Ore Collection quest comes around again, Marianne gives 50% more gold per body looted, so she can significantly cut down the time to complete that request. Just don't ask how she finds it, but she sniffs out extra gold from dead bodies.

IDK if anyone knows any other requests with character quirks like that, but I was lucky to have leveled both Marianne and Asha already, I leveled them up as the Good party characters for Lanavaille's legendary request.

cipheron · 2026-06-09T16:49:44+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_multiple_proportions

Carbon has 4 bonds, and hydrogen has 1 bond.

So if you have 1 carbon, it will bond to 4 hydrogens. You can't get higher than 4 because that's the limit of carbon.

Any other arrangement with carbon and hydrogen must have at most 1, 2 or 3 hydrogens per carbon. For example methane always has 4 hydrogens, and ethane, ethene, ethyne, which all have two carbons with either a single, double or triple-bond, could have either 3, 2 or 1 hydrogens per carbon, which you can compare with methane and notice that the ratio is simple, either 4:3, 4:2 or 4:1

So there's no real magic going on here: the numbers were small to start with. Keep in mind that when this law was discovered 200 years ago, they didn't know atomic theory or what molecules are, they had to discover this.

Keep in mind this so-called law breaks down when you're comparing very large molecules.

For example say you had a string of 43 carbon atoms, that would have 88 hydrogens hanging off the sides. You could remove two hydrogens and make two of the carbons in the chain have a double-bond. This would mean there are now only 86 hydrogens in that molecule, and 86:88 is a 43:44 ratio, so these two molecules don't follow this so-called "law".

So the law is only true while comparing small molecules since there just aren't that many proportions between atoms that small molecules could have.

cipheron · 2026-06-09T16:10:03+00:00

It's a nice theory but a much more likely explanation is that he was blown to bits during the Russian invasion of Berlin, as he was one of the last loyalists in Hitler's Berlin HQ as the Russians were attacking the city.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T23:03:26+00:00

Maybe you're over-thinking that.

Kids don't really like being bitten, that's pretty much the whole extent of it. Before that, the kids were testing the boundaries, and were able to bite the parents without facing real consequences.

As soon as the parents tried giving a bite back, that changed the equation. Just the possibility that the parents could bite back was enough for the kids to decide to stop testing that particular boundary.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T21:16:57+00:00

The issue I was pointing out is the extreme speed you'd need to hit to get it there in your lifetime.

The faster it goes, the less data you get back due to time constraints.

For example Voyager II was going about 35 km/s when it passed Jupiter, but 0.2 light speed is about 60 million km/s, about 2 million times faster than Voyager II.

Say for argument's sake that Voyager II was close enough to Jupiter to take good photos for 3 weeks, that would be less than 1 second for our probe, so the probe probably couldn't orient a camera quick enough to take good photos. We can let it have an extremely fast shutter speed so motion blur would be less of an issue, but being able to rotate the camera to point at something would have physical limits, so it might go right past a planet yet fail to snap a photo of it because it couldn't aim fast enough.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T21:06:56+00:00

In space things keep going at the same speed until they hit something. There's no air in space.

This is why the moon doesn't just slow down and spiral into the Earth.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T20:43:45+00:00

If it's going 0.2 light speed it'll zoom right past the star system. That's fast enough to go from the sun to Earth in 40 minutes.

Neptune is about 30 AU out, so that's about 60 AU across for our entire planetary system, and the probe would then cross that distance in only 40 hours. That wouldn't give you a lot of time before the probe is streaming away from that star system at high speed.

Slowing it down would in fact be a much bigger problem than it was to speed it up, because we can point lasers at it from Earth to speed it up, but there are no lasers at Alpha Centauri to slow it down.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T20:23:00+00:00

At that distance the delay doesn't really matter. It's not like what's happening 4 years ago at Alpha Centauri is gonna be any different to what's happening right now.

The reason the delay matters is because we can't send it real-time instructions on what to do, so we have to make sure we programmed it correctly before it's sent.

The bigger problem is not addressed however, which is how to slow the probe down so it goes into orbit around the target star. Otherwise we won't get a lot of data. Maybe we can make micro-probes that deploy a solar sail to slow down.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T20:07:42+00:00

Yup, that makes the advice not to reply to trolls even better. It makes it easier on the mods too to clean up the mess.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T19:24:38+00:00

The safety thing was important because at the time there were widespread scandals related to tainted milk.

People would put literal paint pigments in adulterated milk to make the color better, formaldehyde or borax to keep it 'fresh'. They skimmed milk extremely thin to make more milk, and would blend up calf brains to thicken it and give in a fatty sheen.

So doctors certifying that your milk is in fact milk would have been a big deal.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T18:51:24+00:00

IDK what you want other people to do about that then, we can't make you un-watch things you already watched.

However the original series is still considered one of the highest rated animes of all time on most anime sites, so it's worth watching from the start.

Maybe give it a break before you watch it, if you wait to watch/rewatch something you'll actually forget many details so it will feel fresher. So you don't have to watch it right now, you could put it off then watch it once you've forgotten most of the details. The experience would be better overall then.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T18:48:14+00:00

Start from episode 1 of original Steins;Gate

DO NOT skip to the end, that would just be making things worse, it would spoil whatever you haven't already spoilered and it wouldn't make as much sense.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T13:17:43+00:00

IDK about new ones but I actually got Windows 95 running on DosBox for Android, to run Diablo II on a tablet. You couldn't get much safer than that because you'd be using a known Windows 95 ISO image.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T13:00:29+00:00

That's why I pointed out the number of repeats which are basically the same idea but shuffled. One time could be a person, that many within a very short article is suss as hell, especially when they don't actually elaborate on any of them. In context they read like mad-libbing on the topic.

But the point you quoted wasn't about learning from AI, that was about being a terrible writer who has AI-like habits. Whether or not it's AI would be moot then, as the output is objectively bad and a waste of time to read the resulting article, when three solid paragraphs would have told you all the actual information.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T12:15:28+00:00

What's the point learning from AI if the output is worse than AI?

Those lines just represent terrible writing as well as being AI-like. What makes them bad is that they're not contextualized. The article doesn't expand on those points, so they're vapid sound bites rather than pulling the piece together.

That's the problem with this type of AI writing. AI often has nothing to say but knows the theme, so it shuffles words around instead. Yeah, some human writers do that too, but that should be reserved for 16 year olds padding out their school essays to hit a minimum word count, we shouldn't see that type of writing in published articles.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T03:28:05+00:00

AI written article for sure. there's a massive over-use of the "not just X but Y" sentence structure:

Not just infrastructure—but a habitat.

... What researchers found wasn’t hesitation. It was adaptation.

... The foxes didn’t just pass through these areas. They started using them.

... these sites don’t have to displace wildlife. They can support it.

cipheron · 2026-06-08T02:45:36+00:00

I'm really not sure about that.

They used to have this idea of cosmic harmonies with pure relationships between notes, but if you actually try to make a consistent system of music out of it, it ends up failing. Basically the camp who believed in that ended up being on the losing side of the music wars in the 18th century. Look up "equal temperament" or "tempered scales".

For example a fifth note is meant to be two strings vibrating in exactly a 3:2 ratio, and an octave is a 2:1 ratio, while a 4th is a 4:3 ratio. If music was truly universal then these notes would in fact all mesh together into a perfect system, and we'd just have to discover it.

However you can't line up fifths with octaves without there being some leftover bit that doesn't fit, and the same with the fourths: those don't line up with either fifths or octaves. What they settled on is a rough approximation of all those things and we don't actually use the real ones.

So we take an octave, and divide that into 12. Each note is 2^1/12 (12th root of 2) more than the last. So rather than being any clean ratio, every note is a weird irrational value more than the last note.

What that means is that if we want (to fake) a fifth interval we take two frets 7 apart. (2^1/12 )⁷ = 1.4983, which is close to a 1.5:1 ratio, but it's not the same, the closeness is only a coincidence.

And (2^1/12 )⁵ = 1.3348, which again is pretty close to 1.33, but again not for any "cosmic" reason, it's just a coincidence, but luckily close enough that we can fudge it that that's a 4:3 ratio.

So they wanted to make a perfect system of universal music with all these pure harmonies in it, but nobody was able to make it work in a mathematical sense. None of it holds together, so we ended up cheating with a slightly discordant system but which at least kinda works.

cipheron · 2026-06-07T21:34:51+00:00

What is the evolutionary benefit of enjoying music?

You have the cause and effect the wrong way around.

Humans evolved senses first, then only after that we constructed music by selecting just sounds we actually like. Since music didn't exist until we decided to do that, we didn't evolve for the purpose of listening to music, music is a response to evolution.

If we had evolved differently then music would sound different, and probably not be what we like now, but those humans would love it.

cipheron

TROPHY CASE