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2024

Entropy and Consciousness

Video in question

The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics by Veritasium (Youtube)

In this video, Veritasium mentions a statement about how at the heat death of the universe things will get so "boring" that it wont matter if time is going forwards or backwards, and I thought it was really neat because that is the same concept found in Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" wherein people ask an ever-increasingly-intelligent supercomputer how to reverse entropy, and at the last time it is asked, it says it will process until it figures it out, and then after the heat death of the universe it learns it and BOOM the big bang and everything starts over.

AI, General AI, and other thoughts on the current state of AI

Note

This video is somewhat pertinent

AI is really starting to take off in a big way. You cannot find anything anywhere without AI shoehorned in, for better or worse. Google has AI chatbots serving up nonsense in search that you cannot turn off, Shopify has AI "helpdesk" bots that provide no better solution than just searching their database, and the only thing ChatGPT is useful for is generating code quickly (and boy howdy is it good at that).

Mummy Groaning

Archive Disclaimer

This was taken from a research paper that was hilariously funny. Found here

Direct Link

Me and my dad thought this was hilarious, and so it was his text message tone in my phone until the day he died. I remember fondly when he would text me at a random time and my phone groaned. Very funny!

A Short Introspection on the nickname 'Timber Tom'

This is extra short, but just a fun little explanation either way: I never really knew my dad as Timber Tom. That was a nickname he used as a forester and parks service worker, which he was never during my "memory years" (>10 years old). It was also his IRC name along with friends Tor (who may or may not have something to do with Tor Browser, TBD) and some others in the Mt. Shasta IRC groups that I may eventually find logs or names from/about. The reason I always refer to him as Timber Tom is because I believe that it is important to speak about someone that you think is great in a great way. You don't call Superman "some dude", you call him a superhero, or the Hero of Metropolis. You don't call Master Chief "John", you call him MASTER CHIEF, or THE CHIEF. Someone's nickname, especially in their legacy, is so important because it gives future people a glimpse into the world that they were apart of, as well as reminds you of what others thought about them. It signifies or represents the best parts of a person, or the most interesting or important.

While I don't think that the most important thing about Timber Tom was how good he was with a chainsaw, I do think the nickname properly represents how fucking cool he was. Who else has a nickname as catchy as TIMBER TOM?!

BASIC and the Timber Tom 'Beep Boop'

Info

This post was a voice recording transcribed by my Pixel 8 Pro, then cleaned up, proofread, and formatted by Google Gemini. It has been carefully scrutinized to make sure that it still accurately conveys my original message, and is less than 2% different outside of grammatical changes. (as a side note, as of 2/11/24, Gemini will actively refuse to correct anything with a cussword in it. The second paragraph had 'fuck' in it, and when it got there it would delete the response and say "I'm just a chatbot and can't help with this" Frankly, that is quite fucking lame.)

So, I was going through Y Combinator and saw a post about this dude who created a free version of BASIC (freebasic.net). BASIC is one of those really old programming languages, so it seems kind of pointless in this day and age because basically any modern programming language can do the same stuff easier, better, and faster.

Differences in LLMs

Info

This is gonna be a long post filled mainly with documentation. Not really gonna be a page turner, but interesting to think about the differences as time passes.

PDFs are literally the worst thing ever

They fucking suck. Possibly the worst PC invention of all time. We have this arbitrary file type that exists only to be rendered EXACTLY the same on all computers. That is a novel and purposeful idea, but when it is monopolized by a single company (Adobe) and requires sketchy 3rd party software (Foxit) or expensive first party software to do ANYTHING with them, they are really a pain. Top that off with the fact that basically everything requires a PDF and it is really easy to create them (microsoft print to PDF, export) so as long as you have the files for it, all is well. But when you have to update one or fill one that isn't set as fillable, you essentially have fight God himself to move a picture two inches and match a font.

'Girl Dinner', Mental Illness, and MySpace

A while ago, there was a meme on TikTok of a girl sing-talking the phrase 'Girl Dinner' alongside what this girl ate for dinner, and the dinner was always very low quality and unhealthy (originally nicotine vape and iced coffee). In my lifetime, I have met a lot of girls that seem to be perpetually ill or sickly, usually with some form of vitamin deficiency and other issues, and only one time have I met one that could actually say they went to a doctor to determine that they are indeed fucked up in the health department.

I am really starting to believe that a lot of the illness in society is based on low quality food: obesity? probably eat high sugar, high seed oil, high fat, high carb diet, indicative of very processed foods. Malnutrition? Probably don't eat enough or have some kind of eating disorder that stops you from eating healthy quantities of food. Or, you eat girl dinner. It seems like a funny concept, but I honestly believe that girl dinner as a concept stems from social media and some form of mass hysteria or collective illness.

Tom Petty is really great (and other core memories)

I think it is really interesting how a single moment in your life can make such a profound impact, even when, at the time, it really didn't seem very significant. I had just broken up with a long term girlfriend and found my rebound in a really nice girl that lived like 50mi from my house. It took a fairly significant (for young me) drive to get to her house, and, given the fact that I didn't have a stable job, took a significant toll on my finances. But, I made it work because I thought she was pretty cool. We went to a big concert in Tuscon (my first ever big solo experience without my parents or financial help from my parents, very memorable). Once we got home, we hung out for a while and then went to bed. The next day, she said her mom was asking when she was going to be home, and I (to my mind) very clearly joked that she needed to find her own ride back. It was something along the lines of "you think I am gonna bring you home? Hahah, get a load of this!" in a very sarcastic tone. She did not get the memo that I was joking, and things kinda went wild.