Haig

The past few days I was listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episodes on Word War I, I think I’m just about to finish Blueprint for Armageddon IV, the butchery at the battle of the Somme just happened. So basically my thoughts are about a lot of forgotten dead people, how maybe the world is ripe for another war, and how stupid that would be.

But then maybe it’s also true that all past and present and all we think we currently experience right now is just a fluke that’s happening in one very strange moment, by a universe that through sheer bigness birthed a certainty that such a configuration would arise as to become the collection of information such as everything we experience seem to be, with all its imagined history and lore and future, including us, only to collapse again into randomness thereafter, even though the illusion at the moment is as real as any and all subjective reality could get.

This, of course, is just an intellectual gag reflex to the idea of so many senseless deaths. When in discomfort, think of the Boltzmann brain, I guess.

I remember now, yesterday I was thinking maybe I should write about why I think objectivity doesn’t really exist, and that people are better off being explicitly subjective, but then I forgot, so maybe tomorrow.

Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 01/18/2020:
  • Oh so we’re imagining it the other way around now? From having brains as basis for machine learning, to updating our mental models of brains based on how machines “learn”? Sure. Okay.
  • Timbre-transfer algorithm. The voice-to-violin sample, so evocative.
  • « vous devrez être sur le même réseau wifi avec votre appareil et votre ordinateur. » ngeh.
  • So humans still need apply? (cf. CGP Grey)
  • everything that meets our foolish eyes gives proof sufficient of its vanity.” – What is Life?
  • The designer is Paul Rand, the politician Rand Paul. And no, the presidential candidate was a Paul, but Ron.
  • I’d like to call auto-exclusion monism a certain sect to single-exclusion monism, but there’s already a word for that. 8 letters, starts with p, mostly vowels.
Tech rant:
  • TidalCycles is being such a flimsy contraption. So far I finally took care of the scsynth, sclang, scide part of things; it’s getting tidal to work that’s losing me. Can’t install through cabal, so installed through stack. stack ghci seems to work fine, but then both in atom and vscode extensions for tidalcycles are throwing a fit about ghci being on stack. So it looks like I’m back trying get cabal to work directly.