Creating full posts can be be cumbersome, so I'll try jotting down shorter thoughts here.
I recently read IO.SYS by DataPacRat. There's an element to the story that bothers me. The protagonist proposes that for a sufficiently smart AI, every single bit of information that it could transmit to you halved the odds you’d be able to continue pursuing the fulfillment of your own values, instead of being co-opted to serve whatever the AI valued
. I think this is dumb.
Let's take the extreme case that you have a 100% chance of pursuing your own values. The first bit is supposed to halve your decision space by 50%, then with just one more bit it can reduce that to 25%, and so on. It logically follows that the SAI can co-opt you with just one byte of information (reducing your odds to 0.390625% percent, which I'll consider sufficient for losing). This is clearly absurd. I don't care how super-intelligent this AI is, there is no arbitary byte of information that can do this. In just 16 ASCII characters, the AI can supposedly reduce your odds to 8x10^-31, which is not an outcome that makes sense in the real world. It is techno-babble, and rationalism taken to an absurd degree (as it so often is).
An argument can be made that it's not just the bits the AI transmits, but the context it transmits them in. For example in the story, the protagonist never looks at earth, as even something as simple knowing whether there is artificial light on the dark side could be a bit. Sure, but then we're not talking about single bits anymore, we're talking about tacking an extra bit onto other information. You can't just abstract away the entire system and claim it's now simple.
All that said, my interpretation is that it is a fictional story, and this stance may just be character motivation.
Currently writing a blog post about Half-Life: Alyx's graphics settings. This had turned out to be a much bigger undertaking than I expected. With a dozen settings with multiple levels, fidelity levels, steamVR's scaling, and settings hidden in the console, I'd estimate there are over a thousand different graphics configurations - which will all perform differently on different hardware configurations. I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one.
And now I've updated all headings to be links so it's actually possible to copy a link to a specific microPost. Doubt anyone ever will, but you never know.
Turns out I'm silly. I just shrunk the browser window so I could test links to microPosts work (and they do!). I've also decided to style the names 'microBlog' and 'microPost', ala Mirror's Edge Catalyst (e.g, outCaste, foodDome, etc).
I've updated my insert-datetime plugin so it's also added to the heading ID, like 14-09-2026-14-13. I'm pretty sure this means specific microPosts can be linked to (like this), but as the page is currently still small enough to not scroll, I can't actually test it.
Just found this cool piece of software that adds pretty visualisations to birdnet-go.
I was going to write something, and then I realised not every thought needs to be thrown at the internet.
Just read this blog post, "I'm not happier offline". I find myself agreeing. When I do spend time away from the computer, I'm not any happier for the lack of screentime. It's just different. I like my screens and sometimes I like a break from them. One is not inherently better than the other, it's what you do with them.
writing HTML & managing every file by hand is getting tedious as the site grows. I'm thinking about adding RSS but not sure how that will work without a generator. Maybe I need to make a site generator. 🤔
Just learned you can combine tags in CSS. I'm using h3+p{margin-bottom: 0em;} to help space out these posts.
I've copied this Sublime Text plugin so I can insert the date & time easily.
First post! I'll need to tinker with the format a bit I think.