And his relationship with his mama is wholesome af

If I could see any practice from my time working food service make it into the general population, it would be “Behind” and “Heard”.

Oh, she must hear the train coming

We can start talking broadly about third parties in the general election when more of them start winning local and state elections. How many progressives are in Congress? State Governors? State Congress? I’ve checked, it’s not a lot. When that number gets much bigger, people will take them more seriously and consider them for higher office. This Jill Stein coming out of the woodwork every 4 years nonsense ain’t it.

I dunno. Obviously individual LLMs are basically sophisticated parrots and are unlikely to develop to AGI on their own. However, a lot of work is being done in combining multiple specialized LLMs. As unlikely as it is for direct LLM improvement to lead to true AI, I think it’s not terribly unlikely that some particular assemblage of many specialized LLMs could achieve the complexity necessary for AGI.

Reminds me of a joke:

The faculty of the engineering department at a university are gifted a free vacation retreat. Once everyone is in their seats on the plane, the captain announces that the very plane they’re sitting in was designed and built by their own students.

Chaos breaks out as the passengers scramble for the exits, until only one professor remains, calmly and confidently poised in his seat.

Naturally, he is asked why he didn’t panic like his colleagues. With a knowing smile he replies “I know the abilities of my students, I’ve seen what they’re capable of accomplishing when they apply themselves. I can assure you this piece of shit will never start.”

They come from a parallel universe where the lunar month is about 4 days longer than ours.

I’ve heard that it means pints and quarts, referring to beers. I feel like I’ve also heard it was a typesetter thing.

As seems to be the consensus, I still find people in their 20s physically attractive, but the prospect of spending any significant amount of time talking to most people more than 5 or so years separated from my age is pretty exhausting. If we’re talking long term relationships, I’d rather compromise a bit on looks in favor of a roughly contemporary personality than vice versa. And, as I get older, my threshold for “attractive” softens a bit to accommodate that personality.

Book: Illuminatus

Comic: Invisibles

Technically they’re both series, but I read each one bound as a single book so I’m counting it.

The same basic encounter can have different effects in different contexts.

Maybe clearing the bandits is how you find a stolen artifact that helps you clear the forbidden temple. Fighting the same enemy in a back alley has different consequences from doing it in the busy street. The ogre down path A might be mechanically identical to the one down path B, but they’re from rival tribes.

It can definitely be used incorrectly, but there are lots of ways for that non-choice to really be a meaningful choice.

Not explicitly Christian (exclusively, at least) but I went through the belief-atheism-belief path. I came back by the same path I left: reason.

Arbitrary dogma was my reason for leaving. There are so many faiths in the world, which all frame themselves as the True Faith ordained by God, all with equal evidence. If the Muslims and the Hindus and all the other faiths are heathens misguided by Satan, but there’s no objective evidence to support Christianity over them, what makes it different? Additionally, the conception of God as a bearded man in the sky judging you for kissing members of your own sex, or eating shrimp, or not supplicating before some guy in a funny hat, just seemed petty and ridiculous behavior for the Creator of the Universe.

And it’s exceedingly obvious to those with eyes to see that basically every religion has been co-opted over the centuries by power-hungry individuals who recognized the authority available to those who secured influence in the religious hierarchy. Plenty of reason to reject the claims of such a compromised institution.

But, my rational, materialistic atheism hit a snag when confronting consciousness. I leaned heavily toward scientific objectivism, which led me ultimately to two explanations of the subjective experience of consciousness:

1. Consciousness is an emergent property of complex interconnected systems; once a system is sufficiently complex, with connected subsystems dedicated to sensation, analysis, and action, it becomes “aware” of itself and its environment.

2. Consciousness is some external phenomenological “field”, which those sufficiently complex systems develop the ability to “tap into” and channel like a radio.

I cannot conceptualize any other model which doesn’t reduce to one of those. In the first case, the universe as a whole is obviously more complex and interconnected than the human mind, and we should therefore expect the universe itself to exhibit some form of consciousness, which we may as well term “God”. In the second, this field likely permeates the universe, not unlike electromagnetism or the Higgs field. Our “tapping into” it is not unlike the concept of being imbued with the Holy Spirit.

In either case, common base religious ideas of man’s relationship to God are not wholly inaccurate explanations of these interpretations.

While these interpretations may not, in and of themselves, obviously yield a personal relationship with God through prayer and devotion and whatnot, there is another consideration.

In my philosophical wanderings, I’ve explored the concepts of magick and ritual. Psychological study has proved the human mind to be deeply associative and symbolic, and has demonstrated some part of the relationship between the conscious and subconscious aspects (the conscious being our “active” mind dealing with concepts, and the subconscious mind translating raw sensory data into those concepts).

If you’re familiar with “The Secret”, manifestation, or magick, you’re familiar with the basic principle of ritualistically aligning your subconscious with your conscious goals; when you ritualistically establish your desire for a new job, your subconscious assigns higher significance to noticing Help Wanted signs and potential job opportunities in your conversations. It’s the same mechanism which causes you to notice a specific make and model of car everywhere right after you buy one. The trick is approaching it from a position of true belief. Your subconscious can be reprogrammed to believe most things, but if you don’t actually believe it can tell ; you can’t really lie to your own mind.

Even without delving into the cosmological basis of consciousness, “God” is still a useful concept if only as a symbolic stand-in for the subconscious. Pray to God for a new job, and suddenly you’ll see opportunities all around you. Even if there is no God, at least not in a personal sense, the ritual still works.

So, cosmologically and practically, I believe. Even if I don’t ascribe to the particular dogmas of any single individual religious institution.

My dish soap smells like delicious citrus but I know better than to taste it.

On a scale of total novice to master, 1 to 10, I’d say I average about a 3. Handily capable compared to the layperson, but unremarkable compared to other hobbyists. I do have a lot of hobbies though

You can mostly opt out by bugging out to the woods to homestead. Taking advantage of the many amenities of society is opting in. “The state” is just your neighbors, and their neighbors, etc, extrapolated out to the whole country. Despotic governments don’t just appear from the aether, they are established and staffed by someone’s neighbors.

I don’t think “fascist” or “utopia” are accurate descriptions. With Heinlein, his political settings are less “the world should be like this” than “hey what if the world was like this?”. Again, he wrote it in the middle of writing SiaSL, which demonstrates basically the polar opposite worldview. To interpret ST as fascist propaganda seems a bit myopic.

I think “propaganda” is less accurate than “thought experiment”. Heinlein centered his books around a lot of different political backdrops. Pretty sure he wrote Starship Troopers in the middle of writing the free-love-hippie-commune “propaganda” Stranger in a Strange Land.

Still, probably best not to try to hide subtle critique in something that looks like propaganda.

How annoying was that? My last landlord claimed some pretty indefensible justifications for keeping our deposit (among other things, $300 to “sweep and vacuum the attic”) but I’m not convinced that I’ll actually wind up ahead if I’m missing work to go to court.

Both

I believe most religions started as good faith (no pun intended) attempts at roughly the same thing: contextualization of the metaphysical order of the universe.

Like the parable of the unseen elephant, God is a concept beyond true human perception, and every religion is like a man groping in darkness at one aspect of the bigger picture. When we approach the subject with a perspective informed by each of these outlooks, we develop a more diverse and comprehensive conceptualization of Order. Even better when we compare these outlooks to find overlap where most tend to agree.