> engineers mused over whether there was anything to be done top stop a torrent of enemy missiles falling across the nation. These superweapons seemed to promise destruction on an overbearing scale, threatening the very existence of human civilization itself.
THEY STILL DO!!!!
This is what drives me nuts about our politics: so many people seem to think we can flirt with the sort of nationalism (1) that led us into WWI and WWII. But, friends, that road leads to your death in every direction. Mutually Assured Destruction is still a thing. Nuclear peace only works as long as all parties persistently work toward de-escalation, which can be measured by adherence to consensus and norms. Nationalism is antithetical to that posture. The iconoclast leaders of national populism are rooted in rulebreaking. They also tend to embrace strong foreign policy talk as a short term bolster to domestic support, again, antithetical to de-escalation.
Jupiter is a failed star in the same sense that it is a failed black hole. It failed to accumulate the necessary mass. On the same basis I am also a failed black hole. That's a decent enough epitaph. Hirundo, good chap, but never achieved the Schwarzschild radius, shame really. Jupiter should take a good look at itself and realize, I'm good enough as I am darn it!
> Incidentally, the author seems to use some strange 'İ' character (a capital I with a dot over it) a lot. I'm not sure why.
This is because the author is actually a fractal within a 420-dimensional LSD hypercube, the 'İ' denotes membership of the set of infinity|UniTY<>Triome.
Also, you nailed in one, definitely timecube vibes going on here.
Something about this feels like a comedy of manners about a recent fad for some section of mathematics instead of, say, learning Hungarian, blazing like smallpox through a set of the gentry ... combined with a touch of the Lovecraftian horror of revelation of subjects too large for a brain only recently post-simian, more tuned to hurling rocks than visualization of the perambulations of higher-order Platonics through a more understandable, lesser membrane. One might imagine the Thirteenth Duke of Wybourne, having commissioned from an artisan a fine set of Hinton cubes and, upon their reception, ensconced them in some parlour corner bit of cabinetry, only for a succession of his niece's acquaintances to fall victim to some palsy, seizure, or neurasthenic disorder purely because her companions were typically relegated to a particular chair near the offending objects of uncanny intellectual curiosity. Why do all of her friends fare so poorly?
Mathematicians are locked in bitter struggle between the Zeroastrians who believe additive identity blesses 0 as truly the most foundational and therefore interesting integer, while the Unitarians favor multiplicative identity and thus champion 1. Uncountable souls have been lost to the conflict between these two groups.
Not to be confused with “Jesus Code”. Jesus code is any code written in a way that only the author and god (Jesus) would know how it works. That is until inevitably the author forgets. Leaving Jesus as the only source of reference.
It is believed that Jesus Code is the reason the second coming of Christ has not yet occurred. As Jesus would be flooded with support requests, jira tickets, and zoom meetings. (Some people believe the modern SDLC to be the devil’s way of keeping Jesus from coming.)
"The Nobel Prize For Doing Nothing In The Face Of An Oppressor And Calling That Peace" has far too many candidates for them to be able to pick a winner.
Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. But not any jigsaw puzzle. An unbelievably huge jigsaw puzzle that's been mixed up with other jigsaw puzzles. Some of them are really old and faded. Some of them are brand new. Some are larger and some are smaller. The edges change from jagged to smooth. Like everyone else at the table, you've been trying to put this one puzzle together for years, trying out numberless pieces until one day you realize that you don't even have the box for it. Like everyone else, you were told what it looked like when you were first sat down in this room and left to it. But you're not making any progress and the solution, the memory faded by time and others, doesn't feel right and you abandon it.
Now, you ask everyone around you about what the puzzle looks like. And they are all certain about what it looks like when it's finished, despite the fact that you know they haven't spent nearly enough time looking in the box, or the pieces, and you're pretty damn sure it's not a picture of your loved ones burning, a giant man creating smaller men, or nothingness.
And you start to talk with other people who don't believe in these solutions. They have their own ideas about the puzzle. The vast majority of them think the idea of a pre-solution is the problem. If only those who have been working on their own sections piece by piece were allowed to work together with their work corroborated by other piece-by-piece sectioners, without pre-solutionists telling them what it looks like, it'd be put together by now. You think this is the right course of action going forward. So you dabble in doing your own piece-by-piece work, keeping up with the latest pictures of the latest additions to different sections, published and funded by the people who originally sat you down at the table.
And everything is fine. For a while. Then you begin to see that the sectioners' works are being used to justify new pre-solutions by onlookers that aren't compatible with each other. Some sectioners are just producing pictures of themselves and their funders. And you realize that this just doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. Not the pre-solutionists, not the sectioners. It's all a giant question with no authority and no one seems to realize how insane and un-ending the whole process is. Then you pick up a piece that changes everything. In it you merely see the Self and your own reflection in it. But it changes everything.
You look up from the table and see through eons. You see everyone who has ever been sat down at this puzzle table. You see the same people wearing different costumes as the endless passage of time flows. You see the same puzzle processes and sections arising, maturing, then being scattered. You notice this and infinite other things, lost to the ephemera of cognition and memory. Then the pieces fall into place in your brain. And you see that it isn't a puzzle. It was never a puzzle. You realize in your vision that there were countless people throughout time who stood up from the table. And they saw a door and went through it. And came back. And they said in exaltation in the plurality of dialects and tongues that this is not a puzzle. It is a map. A map to exit the room. These chosen few make a new map of the room, offering it triumphantly to the rest. Some see it and in turn stand up and leave the room to go outside. Others follow. But the stream of people slows and stops. The map is left, abandoned by those who followed it to those that didn't or couldn't. And those remaining beings slowly rip it apart, piece by piece, to fit in their view of the puzzle until it too resembles... a puzzle.
You proceed to come down from grasping this piece, realizing the truth of what you have seen; That this in fact a massive collection of old, incomplete maps, made puzzles by mankind, all showing the way to a door that leads to outside the realm of the puzzle. So you stand up from the table, go to the exit, and open the door. And there it is. Outside. The Sun. Indescribable to anyone who has been left inside the cave their entire lives. This is so apparent to you that it is the very definition of self-evidence, bound with knowledge ascertained by pure observation. And you realize that nothing, absolutely nothing can erase the certainty that outside and the Sun exists, having been there. You now have a decision to make. In an act of compassion, you return to the room and proceed to draw yet another map for those left behind...
According to the FBI, Nicholas Clause aka Santa has been known to use jamming devices that cause interference when tracking his slave labor based international shipping empire. He also uses numerous decoy sleighs and Santas to obfuscate his true locations as he goes around the world committing criminal trespassing on a scale never before seen in history and often is known to leave a calling card behind in the form of presents and often burgles the homes he trespasses into, with reports stating he often steals various kinds of food as some kind of sick joke.
His treatment of the Reindeer endangered species has also been under review.
Consider Nicholas to be extremely dangerous if you or a loved one happen to catch him inside your home this evening.
Please report anything regarding this individual to tips.fbi.gov or by calling 911
He only reliable backup mechanism is starting a successful cult whose main tenet is that your data is valuable communication from God, so that they continually duplicate it. Anything else will go bust long, long before the heat death of the universe.
Take heart, nthnclrk. That side of the Web is not dead.
There are loads of people out there running wacky personal websites on every subject you can imagine. Mine[1], for instance, holds poetry, Chinese translations, a videogame, and an open call for Star Wars fan art.
If you want the real motherlode, go read Kicks Condor's "Href Hunt." [2] That drongo collects and catalogs people's personal websites, so you've got a whole evening of digital feasting ahead of you.
Also make sure to implement your own programming language & OS for the game to run on. While you're at it you should figure out how best to craft transistors to create your own CPU. But don't make use of anyone else's ideas, you should figure this all out on your own. In fact, don't read this comment, it might give you ideas
You can pull certain tricks with ballistic delivery methods. A depressed trajectory (flatter profile, lower apogee) would give you the option of coming in through a window, with an additional benefit in that it would be harder to intercept the payload.
You would also need to limit this strategy to payloads that can withstand shock loads of multiple hundreds of G (soups and hard cheese, maybe even bread adequately packaged. may need a different method for floral deliveries).
Proof of concept shouldn't be too difficult, most of the tech already exists (Raytheon and Northop-Grumman have had a handle on it for decades). DHS might not be too amused, however.
Whenever this topic comes up someone with a very engineering-centric attitude jumps on the opportunity to downplay the complexity of the concept of "creativity". Often using the word "just".. I would argue that something like creativity is far too difficult to even define, let alone model and synthesize, to ever be adorned with the modifier "just".
While this is a highly philosophical topic, I can say, on the difficulty of defining creativity from a scientific point of view, is that more and more what I think is considered "true creativity" is fundamentally a social concept, and as such, even though computers are good at reproducing patters and variations on patterns, they will never be "truly creative" until they become independent members of society, whatever that means. So as cool as machine learning is getting these days, this would require a leap in AI that is still rather far away (imho).
That's why I think it's a little optimistic to label something as complex as creativity as being "just" anything. Creativity is social, insofar as it is defined and recognized by human society, and machines are.. not. Yet.
Neoglyphs, a new meta-symbology unifying mathematics, statistics and a broad swathe of human language semantics will emerge, drawing heavily from Chinese and early 21st century international signage: Japanese の will win out on Chinese 的 (for indicating possession). Grammar will be absent to simplistic, with a Chinese/Tai-Kadai/Austronesian rather than Indo-Aryan structure (ie. use of amorphous noun/verb concept ideograms and adjunct tense-particles where necessary rather than tedious verb conjugation). This new symbology (glyph library) will be the standard pedagogical language across the world, and the normal interface language for all software. It will quickly begin to effect semantics in the few major remnant human languages, the vast majority of which died out between the early 20th and mid 21st century. Long-form reading will become even rarer. The lyrics and snapshot-imagerie of the rock and instagram generations will give way to a resurgence in poetry, lauded for its vaguearies, which will be widely appreciated in a mix of classical Chinese and the neoglyphs. This will be automatically set to music by algorithms, in personal stylistic preference. Interface code itself (windows, scrollers, presentation systems, graph generators, etc.) will no longer be programmed by humans, instead they will be generated automatically against semantic and contextual preferences linked to the user, much as some advanced unix users enjoy customizing their shell. The challenges of code reuse (portability, parallelism, etc.) will be solved automatically in almost every case. Most software will derive from expert systems which translate human wants in to functional software using simplistic visual metaphor and iterative design in the lounge-room. Increased availability of pure and micro-dosed drugs of all current and yet to be discovered genres will play a big part the more creative outputs from these sessions, which will essentially complete the union of human/biological abstract thinking and the speed and technical prowess of the machines. In the 20th century, Frank Zappa said "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." At the dawn of the 22nd century, countries will have essentially become dormant anachronisms, but good drugs and revolutionary thinkers (no longer titled programmers) will by definition possess their own widely recognized neoglyphs. Many of the thinkers will be those previously considered disabled or challenged by society at large; the autistic, the handicapped, the psychonauts, the other-large-mammals - whose capacity for modes of reasoning apart from the mainstream will finally become valued. Finally, 0xDEADBEEF will disappear as a meme, since beef in real life will no longer exist except for the ultra-rich.
THEY STILL DO!!!!
This is what drives me nuts about our politics: so many people seem to think we can flirt with the sort of nationalism (1) that led us into WWI and WWII. But, friends, that road leads to your death in every direction. Mutually Assured Destruction is still a thing. Nuclear peace only works as long as all parties persistently work toward de-escalation, which can be measured by adherence to consensus and norms. Nationalism is antithetical to that posture. The iconoclast leaders of national populism are rooted in rulebreaking. They also tend to embrace strong foreign policy talk as a short term bolster to domestic support, again, antithetical to de-escalation.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism