TAKES
I may be stupid
For many years, this website has been without a true "About Me" page. I still have no mind to make one... but I've realized there's a lot I want to shout into the void, and you, dear visitor, might still want an answer to the following question: "by my standards, is incertae sedis a cool person, odious and evil, or just sort of boring?" I hope to satisfy both our wants here.
- Cold takes: bigotry and mass killings are wrong.
- Worker cooperatives seem like a good start to building a fair economy. Similar efficiency to non-cooperatives, more longevity and happier to be part of? Why are more people not talking about this
- If we lived in a deterministic universe, that would be fine. Sure, you can predict someone's decisions with their initial state, their environment's initial state, and a set of physical laws. But to get exact results, you need an exact model, and the only exact model would be an exact copy of this person and their environment. In which case yeah no shit the person you just made an exact copy of is going to do the same thing as the copy, that's the same person in the same place.
- You may have a definition of free will that requires the copies to be able to make different decisions anyway. That kind of free will is too slippery for me to understand personally but more power to ya if you do.
- However, we do not live in a deterministic universe, at least not in the traditional sense. Thanks a bunch for that, Quantum Mechanics. If wavefunction collapse happens and leads to only one random result, that also would be fine. A little less fine than determinism in my view because something seems fishy about "making decisions" if RNG is an objective contributor but whatever. That's down at the molecular level where everything would be a chaotic mess even if it were deterministic.
- The many-worlds interpretation, the deterministic view of QM, is horrifying. Sometimes I see people comforted by it, interpreting it as giving us the ability to "choose" which world we live in, but is it truly a choice if you choose every option? How is any future worth fighting for if every future is real? No matter your best efforts to do the right thing or meet your goals, there will always be versions of you, no matter how small a slice of the probabilistic world-tree, fucking it up every time and suffering so, so deeply.
- do NOT take that as an "it could be worse" motivational quote that is NOT what i meant
- The many-worlds interpretation, the deterministic view of QM, is horrifying. Sometimes I see people comforted by it, interpreting it as giving us the ability to "choose" which world we live in, but is it truly a choice if you choose every option? How is any future worth fighting for if every future is real? No matter your best efforts to do the right thing or meet your goals, there will always be versions of you, no matter how small a slice of the probabilistic world-tree, fucking it up every time and suffering so, so deeply.
- It's kinda weird religions are sometimes still trying to answer questions like "where did all this life and earth and space come from" when science has that squared away (I still appreciate trying to answer "why did it come from" but that's beside my point). If I were religions I would be going all in on "where do conscious experience and qualia come from," because where the hell is science even supposed to begin with that?
- ChatGPT and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
- Physical copies of media are lovely... an object from which flows sound and light and motion is sure cool, and packaging design is a worthy field. Certainly home media ownership beats streaming, especially in this enshittified world. However I am firmly a digital copy man. Files, infinitely reproducible, feel almost sacred to me. They are a means to preserve human experience as long as there are humans (...and computers.)
- Anyone who makes a new digital copy of a work that could be lost were it to be pulled from streaming or that has never been digitized has performed a saintly act.
- Copyright is too long, too broad in coverage, and too easily signed away to people who did none of the labor.
- I don't know shit about film restoration but I do know that ML upscaling and full Digital Noise Reduction tick me off. Using DNR to match grain levels for modern productions or restorations with multiple sources of different quality seems fine though.
- In general: "Let Old Things Look Old"
- Hey, what's up with monitors and home video standards only supporting a limited set of frame rates? For example, NTSC blu-ray players need to do 59.94i, 30p, 24p, 23.976p (ugh), and so on... Ok, sure, yes, those are the historical formats, but we live in the future and we're not dealing with CRT screens stuck refreshing at the electrical mains rate. The standards admit that by throwing 24fps in there (and giving PAL players NTSC compatibility, too!). So, if display devices are refreshing at some rate their firmware is telling a frequency generator to run at... just let the damn firmware set any rate up to some maximum! This could be simpler!! Am I missing something? Am I stupid??
- Scale models are so fucking cool. If I got the chance to work for a museum building scale models of things, any things, I would probably drop whatever career plans I had and take it.
- Touchscreen keyboards are too damn small and never get the key I'm trying to press right. (Ok this one might be my fault for refusing to buy a phone for more than $100)
- I like to use the Oxford comma but only because I have no understanding of how commas work beyond "if I would pause while talking there is probably a comma here."
- Pineapple on pizza = yes. To each their own, though.
... huh. Maybe this is an "about me".