You can create an AI avatar before your death that will haunt them on your behalf.

Reducing Google’s monopoly on search is at least a marginal improvement in its own right, even if Apple’s search ends up being equally shitty.

Hopefully that just means using AI to find and index existing content, not to fabricate its own results.

One person making all the decisions is a dictatorship, which is distinct from both fascism and monarchy.

Unless we replace the meanings of distinct words with the principle that all bad things are the same thing.

No doubt Proton’s CEO will use this to justify his “Trump is better for regulating big tech” claim, while ignoring that the judge is an Obama appointee.

While speaking the proper expositional incantations.

Cryptography in movies is more akin to magic than to actual cryptography.

We started cultivating grain about twenty thousand years ago. We can identify stone tools from over three million years ago.

Or—they were different concurrent simulations using overlapping memory locations.

I’m using Wheeler’s version of the MWI, because it currently seems to be the most common one—but I think Wheeler’s version is a misunderstanding of Everett’s. So if that’s what you mean, I agree (although in that case I’d say “the Everettian interpretation” instead of “many worlds theory”).

According to the quantum many-worlds interpretation, such a world would only exist if it could arise due to a random quantum fluctuation at some point in the past history of our own world—which doesn’t seem plausible in this case.

The password to my home server is a salted hash of my primary (memorized) password, so I can recover it from any computer that can run the hash function. From there I can access the rest of my saved passwords, bookmarks, etc.

Whether apple stems are perpendicular or parallel to the surface of the fruit.

CasaOS is not an operating system and more like a GUI for Docker

So it’s more like Portainer?

If I make a typo, rather than autocorrecting or deleting a few characters I delete the whole word and re-type it from the beginning. That way the correct spelling gets into my muscle memory and I’m much less likely to make the typo again in the future.

The scientific method is only used to validate provisional models of reality against observation—it makes no ontological claim about the nature of reality itself.

Even if every human on earth had their own pet since dogs were first domesticated ten or twenty thousand years ago, their ancestors were facing the stress of migrating into new and unfamiliar environments for several hundred thousand years prior to that.

Beneficial mutations are random, but the odds of them persisting are proportional to the frequency of the events in which they affect our fitness. And the proportion of stressful events in which pets were available would have been only a fraction of the total number of stressful events our ancestors experienced.

If pets are available in 10% of stressful events, the selection pressure for stress reduction that doesn’t require pets would be ten times greater.

That’s a personal benefit, but it’s not necessarily an evolutionary benefit. If it were an evolutionary benefit, the selection pressure would have been for our bodies to generate that response spontaneously without needing an external stimulus that wouldn’t have been available to many of our ancestors.

Accept that there’s going to be political diversity and social change (for better and worse) in spite of anything I might impose, and instead try to create an overarching framework to channel it into something other than violent conflict. One idea:

Let societies do whatever they want, but institute a “risk mitigation” tax (or other form of resource redistribution) based on size and similarity: if a social strategy is popular and widely adopted, it’s taxed at a marginally increasing rate until it reaches an equilibrium level; and the revenue is used to fund other, more experimental social strategies. This flips the historical dynamic on its head: instead of each society trying to forcibly convert the rest of the world to its own system, each society has an interest in discouraging others from following its example and trying something new instead.