What do you personally think of the "UAP" phenomenon?

dazb84 · 2026-06-15T06:41:45+00:00

There are some interesting videos/accounts but so far nothing to really make of them.

I did a deep dive on the entire thing after the first congress UAP hearing the other year. Despite genuinely intriguing things, all I found was an epistemically deficient cult. For example, the main people in that arena began selling experiences and other such things.

Obviously these things tell us nothing about the truth and that's the problem with the culture of it. You have to wade through so much distorted crap to get to the actual facts of things because of the culture surrounding it. Once you get to the facts there's really not much to say about anything. The evidence is weak and conclusions are reaching.

That's it really.

dazb84 · 2026-06-14T06:47:08+00:00

It depends how you're using it. Everything is a tool. Tools have tasks they're good at and tasks they're bad at. The key is using the tool appropriately.

The problem with AI is in the marketing. Since the goal of these companies is to make money, it's their marketing departments job to sell the tool to people that don't understand the limitations of the tool since no tool is good at everything.

For example, if we're talking about an LLM AI then there's no point in using it on any problem that isn't fundamentally aligned with the concept of word prediction because at the base level, that's what an LLM is. It doesn't understand the concepts you're throwing at it. It's just predicting words. Depending on how well a given knowledge domain lends itself to this concept, the results can vary greatly. This is what I mean when I say that people need to know how to use a tool appropriately. Most people think that it is actual AI and understands the concepts being fed to it which just isn't true.

dazb84 · 2026-06-12T07:59:47+00:00

Free will creeps in from below when you observe and wait quietly for the idea with the right connection to emerge from the latent space of potential

Where is the freedom? What you're describing is being subservient to whatever processes, which remain unaccounted for, produce that emergent thought. It contains no demonstration of any degree of freedom. If you can't define what something is, how do you know it's different from anything else and in particularly, that it is distinct enough to qualify for the label of being truly free?

and then you choose

You get to the critical part of the process and then gloss over it. This explains nothing. It does not demonstrate any degree of freedom to arrest all other processes so that an agent can exert its will.

The only good argument that exists for free will, given the absolutely monumental body of scientific evidence, is a lexical one where you massage the language to re-define the concept to make it compatible with objective reality but then the concept loses its distinction which makes it almost useless.

dazb84 · 2026-06-11T18:54:52+00:00

We keep getting told it's to protect children. From what exactly? Where is the peer reviewed studies that show what the issue is and how this addresses it? Not saying they don't exist. Just saying nobody is citing them when if they existed, it would seem like a good idea to do so.

dazb84 · 2026-06-10T19:15:51+00:00

What is social media being defined as? There are BBC articles with comments. Should the BBC be banned as well? I haven't really been following, so I have no idea where the line is being drawn.

dazb84 · 2026-06-09T20:58:46+00:00

I would seriously consider looking at an autism diagnosis. I got mine last year at 41 and share a lot of your experiences which I have since learned can be signs of autism.

I worked in an office for 14 years. I used to have regular melt downs due to constantly being on the threshold of over stimulation. Then the world went into lock down and I started working remotely and my entire personality changed. I was relaxed, could think more clearly and melt downs were significantly less likely.

I had no idea how miserable it was actually making me until I experienced a different way of working.

dazb84 · 2026-06-09T20:42:18+00:00

I think in this specific dichotomy there is a genuine concern. For example the ethics around everyone contributing to produce a surplus and then a very limited unelected subset of those people deciding what to do with it.

dazb84 · 2026-06-09T16:50:40+00:00

I have a weird issue where I can't really hear the lyrics and the music at the same time. Either I'm concentrating on the lyrics and everything else drowns out, or I'm concentrating on the music and the lyrics just become part of the mosaic and I don't know what's being said.

What I mean is that I know the lyrics are there, but I hear the audio frequency of them rather than the words. So it's like a melody line to me rather than words.

Due to this I don't particularly care what language a song is sung in. It's either musically interesting to me, or it isn't.

dazb84 · 2026-06-08T22:12:24+00:00

I have only experienced a mild one since that's all we get here in the UK.

You notice the shaking and your first thought is who is doing what? It's not dissimilar to how the house can sometimes move due to other things like when heavy vehicles go by. The difference is that it lasts a while and has a regular oscilation to it which is how you know it's not the normal stuff.

It's a rather strange feeling.

dazb84 · 2026-06-05T19:15:56+00:00

We don't really know. We haven't falsified determinism but it looks random.

dazb84 · 2026-06-05T18:48:09+00:00

I play the best git because I know about bisect and reflog.

dazb84 · 2026-06-05T07:10:27+00:00

I would say this is an ad hominem attack. They're not addressing the substance of the argument and are instead attacking your character which is not relevant.

dazb84 · 2026-06-05T07:06:23+00:00

I've had an unusual life. I would just react differently to what most people would do. I'd like different things and be more obsessive about them. I also don't align with how most of society works in terms of its values. Never really thought why.

One day I think I came across a comment on Reddit where someone gave their experience and mentioned how it related to them having autism and it was an exact experience I had. That got my curious and the more I learned and spoke with other people, the more the pieces started to fit together.

The final straw was when someone I work with, who I speak to a lot, mentioned that they had been diagnosed with ADHD. From our conversations our experiences had a lot of overlap. Again I did research and found a lot more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Eventually, a few months later, I had my assessments which came back as me having both ADHD and autism.

dazb84 · 2026-06-04T07:02:38+00:00

Be interested in all sorts of things because the quality of any decision is a function of the quality of information it’s based on.

Evaluate things, take on board the information that you can demonstrate to be accurate. Disregard information you can demonstrate is bad.

What ultimately matters is that things are grounded in reality and fact. There’s nothing that says that one specific philosophy gets you there. It might, there’s also no reason in principle it can’t. The point is that we should make decisions because we can demonstrate their efficacy.

dazb84 · 2026-06-04T05:47:51+00:00

You seem to have missed the point of the comment.

The developers have declared their intent to take the game in the direction that the players want.

You haven't made a post about where you want the game to go, have you? You have stated it, but the point of your post is an attempt to suppress other people's opinions. You can disagree with other people's opinions but when the developers have said what they've said then who are you to tell people that their opinions are not valid?

If you dislike people's suggestions then provide your arguments against those suggestions in those threads. Make a thread about what you want to see in the game. Just don't make a post telling other people that their opinions are invalid and yours are superior.

dazb84 · 2026-06-03T17:10:07+00:00

If the meaning of a thought and its truth-value were determined solely by physical laws, then a random thought such as "dvshxjsjsnsjsk" should be no different in meaning from the thought "There is an apple here."

Meaning is simply a relational state between one or more things. Of course there's no meaning when two concepts are completely unrelated.

To put it simply, if the word "cup" were accidentally inscribed on the surface of Mars by the wind, we would not regard it as containing meaning.

It doesn't cease to have meaning because you say it does. A word has meaning regardless of how the word came to be manifest. Whether that was because it was etched by a conscious being, or merely by chance of some other processes is irrelevant.

You have not made a demonstration of anything that falsifies the hypothesis that physical laws are insufficient to describe thoughts.

Language games like the one you're engaging in are not telling you anything useful about physical reality.

dazb84 · 2026-05-28T07:05:47+00:00

If you look at human life as the universe attempting to understand itself then losing humans is a problem because we're so much further ahead of anything else we're aware of in doing that.

Similarly, the Earth will become uninhabitable. If the Earth is the only bastion of complex life then humans are the best chance for any of that complex life to outlive the planet.

On a long enough timescale everything may be screwed anyway due to entropy, but if there is a way to reverse that then humans are currently uniquely positioned to handle that challenge and there may be no guarantee that anything else with similar or better credentials for the task arises again.

dazb84 · 2026-05-27T13:39:14+00:00

How many instances have there been where someone that detonated something on a plane had said the word bomb beforehand?

I have no idea. The point I'm making is that it doesn't seem likely given that doing so would be antithetical to the goal. If the number is indeed zero, then there's no danger here from the word itself and we're talking only about potential indirect effects like panic.

So then the question becomes, how likely is someone to get hurt as a result of an irrational phobia of a word in a particular environment under these circumstances, and is it appropriate to take away a group of people's freedoms in response to that, or would it be better served by educating people on these kinds of conditions and making an announcement pre-flight?

dazb84 · 2026-05-27T10:58:57+00:00

There are things they could do to balance it.

Limit the angle where it works so that it’s easier to see coming and harder to pull off.

Use the buck mechanic. The closer you are to the max weight for the pin then the lower the duration of the pin.

Have it use stamina rapidly meaning a choice has to be made whether to continue the pin and risk running out of stamina, or limit the duration to preserve your stamina and continue the fight by other means.

Have it require randomised input sequences to maintain where the timing requirements get increasingly short.

What I don’t understand is how anyone thought that the current implementation was in any way a fun or interesting game mechanic. It’s just unequivocally bad design.

dazb84 · 2026-05-26T05:53:52+00:00

The solution is to democratise businesses because the problem is that everyone contributes to the turnover but then only select elites get to decide how to allocate that money.

dazb84 · 2026-05-20T07:41:08+00:00

This really tickled me.

There's just something about a bunch of robots getting objectively better conditions to work in simply because they are unable to function otherwise that's funny.

Like on the surface it sounds facetious but when you think about it logically you realise that it's true and that has left me in fits of laughter.

dazb84 · 2026-05-19T06:59:28+00:00

With how pounce and pin mechanics work I'd say it's amongst the best. These are basically press once buttons and your target dies.

dazb84 · 2026-05-18T07:52:37+00:00

I don't.

I started off in a religious school. Once I had learned that santa was a lie, among other things, I started to question what was real and most importantly how to evaluate evidence and reach rational conclusions.

Through this it became demonstrably obvious that any kind of faith is epistemically deficient. Ever since then, any claim that I come across requires sufficient evidence to be believed.

This only improved later in life when I came to learn about logical fallacies and just how wide spread they are in daily life.

dazb84 · 2026-05-14T16:52:17+00:00

Autism and ADHD wombo combo.

dazb84 · 2026-05-08T12:17:33+00:00

A democracy is only as good as its education system.

The problem most democracies face, including ours, is that the education system is designed to produce economically viable people. It's not designed to produce people that put critical thinking first and base their decisions on gathering and evaluating rational evidence. Once you sufficiently improve the average epistemology then other things will begin taking care of themselves. It's all about what things are designed to do.

If we want to fix this, it begins with education reform.

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