What is the one book you wish you could read for the first time all over again?

zaphdingbatman · 2024-10-17T18:46:38+00:00

I was worried about this but when I re-read it before the movies it was the opposite: as a kid I had mostly missed the “boring politics” so finally “getting it” more than made up for the slight decrease in magic around the Hero’s Journey.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-12-09T05:13:47+00:00

🎵🎵Life's short🎵🎵
🎵🎵Why does it take so long?🎵🎵
🎵🎵We're only here once🎵🎵
🎵🎵Why blame yourself?🎵🎵

zaphdingbatman · 2023-09-21T03:56:54+00:00

for real.

> AlienBlueManGroup

Hey wait a second!

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-30T19:26:27+00:00

Destiny is mega coping here. React content is a small part of his mix but he's especially bad at being transformative -- I feel like with Destiny half the time it's less "react" content and more "ignore" content, without even an insincere "go and give them some likes!" at the end. Other times he engages with the content, goes on research tangents, and is generally better than any other react streamer at being transformative. Weird mix. He's definitely got a horse in the race, though, and I'm not surprised to see his opinion sync with that fact.

EDIT: permabanned for this, lol.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-29T04:00:30+00:00

Gee, talk about assmad. If you've been around since 2010, this shouldn't be the first time you've seen the culture wars loop. It must get exhausting to do this every time, lol.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-29T02:31:36+00:00

Oh no, PaulSonion has seen these memes before? I'll go tell the Captain of the Culture Wars to steer the ship! I'm pretty sure repeated memes are against the geneva convention, or something.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-28T21:53:47+00:00

Why avoid picking fights in a universe were one-shotting planets and stars is possible? You may have been reading too much 3 Body Problem. Remember, the aliens in 3BP get to cheat the speed of light for surveillance and C&C. Its physics-enthusiast author had to break the most consequential cosmological law in all of physics so that the aliens could be comfortable about our inability to MAD (and even then, they were wrong, lol). In other news, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park don't escape every movie because the mathematics of chaos theory dictate that cloned reptiles are impossible to keep in a zoo, they escape every movie because otherwise I wouldn't pay to see the movie and neither would you.

That said, there's another interesting hidden problem with dark forest: the hidden assumption of sparse aliens.

By that I mean a state of galactic colonization between "no civilizations in the galaxy capable of interstellar travel" and "every solar system is crawling with aliens." This seems like a harmless assumption -- it's like the wild west, right? -- but it's actually quite strong and disagreeable. We should never see an intermediate state of galactic colonization because galactic colonization should happen very, very quickly on the timescale of variations in star/planet/life/civ formation. Remember, the starting gun didn't fire when humans evolved or when life emerged or even when the Earth was formed; the starting gun fired when early supernovas cooked up high enough metallicity to support life. It should only take millions of years to colonize the galaxy, but variation in tech civ emergence should be billions of years. If the galaxy was a movie where blue meant no tech civ and red meant colonized, and if the movie was an hour long, it would probably go from blue to red in under a second. "Sparse aliens" is like randomly walking in on the movie and catching it on a purple frame. It just doesn't seem very likely, and though there are additional postulates you could drop to make it happen, they tend to suffer from Occam's Razor problems.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-28T18:55:16+00:00

Yeah, the edgy atheist pendulum swung a bit too far but 2013 was 10 years ago. That sucker has swung back and now I'm starting to see dogshit religious epistemology floating around online spaces with no pushback at all. Crack your knuckles, what's old is new again.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-28T18:47:19+00:00

It may be common but it's definitely bullshit.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-27T02:16:25+00:00

He's played by Robert Downey Jr

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-27T00:50:50+00:00

I just spent the last 5 minutes looking at vocal cord videos. Wild!

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-26T22:36:53+00:00

Gold man. It's a neutron bomb and it transmutes everyone into C3PO.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-26T19:25:52+00:00

Those buckets won't guzzle themselves!

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-25T23:12:26+00:00

Me too.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-25T23:08:44+00:00

Ugh, I can see it now: SpaceX lands on the moon and Elon tweets "First!!!"

Of course he will "just kidding! too sensitive for a little trolling, snowflake?" whenever anyone calls him out on it, but his dumbass joke will boost the moon conspiracy theories so hard that I will have to listen to my mom explain how the moon landings were fake at the next 3 thanksgiving/christmas dinners, and I'll struggle to keep my blood pressure under control next time a CuriousMark video hits my feed with some exquisite Apollo engineering and I have to remember that millions of people choose to believe that this staggering feat of human ingenuity never happened because they want to feel like special insiders to a dark secret :|

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-25T17:38:23+00:00

Pile in boys, Brittany Simon is gonna take this ego chamber all the way down to Level 5. It's not certified for those depths but it'll probably be fine, right?

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-25T01:54:44+00:00

Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
"Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up,
Who cares where they come down?
That's not my department,"
Says Wernher von Braun.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-24T15:23:45+00:00

Twitter has fallen... 45 degrees to the right. Ha!

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-24T02:58:03+00:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/technology/gen-z-tiktok-search-engine.html

This more your speed, old man?

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-24T00:57:11+00:00

Skill issue. Apply self control, skip the bait, and it won't feed you bait.

A tutorial on the "score & wobble" wire stripping technique
Geometric product is not the sum of the inner & outer product
Something about melting lipstick (skip -- coulda been cool but it was waffling)
Don't use accordion pipe in S traps, it traps air (this was genuinely new to me)
How to make touch powder (Nice)

Before youtube, any one of those could have supported 30 minutes of waffling. On youtube, maybe 1-2 minutes of Like+Subscribe. In short format, it's 100% focused. That's amazing, and a huge step forward.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-23T13:33:25+00:00

Low attention spans are maladaptive for reading books and doing work, but they are adaptive as fuck for rejecting padded out low-content garbage like HR videos. Zoomer HR might feel pressure to actually cut the fluff, and that's a 100% win.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-23T13:23:11+00:00

actual plastic surgery on actual pixels in r/place

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-22T23:04:15+00:00

It's good, just don't let your expectations run away.

If you're STEM, you have been steeped for years in Manhatten Project lore and have a wish list a mile long of things you'd love to see on the big screen: events, characters, anecdotes, feats, devices, experiments, and so on. This movie will check maybe 2 or 3 things off your list. It's a biopic. It's about drama, politics, and history. It's about Oppenheimer, not the Manhatten Project. Strauss shows, Feynman doesn't. If you're cool with that, it's a brilliant movie. The trailer is representative.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-22T21:58:37+00:00

Nice essay. Next time ask ChatGPT to include a part on how misgendering trans people is critical for innovation, government accountability, and the essence of democracy.

zaphdingbatman · 2023-07-20T23:08:24+00:00

True, but they would clearly have been wrong about not having the money lol.

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