Knusper @ Knusper @feddit.de

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4 yr. ago

And you wouldn't have to reverse causality to travel backwards in time. You would just have to travel faster than the speed of light.

If you can travel faster than the speed of light then you can arrive at a destination before you left.

I know practically nothing about all the wormhole theories, because I just don't consider them relevant, but from a logical standpoint, the above does not feel correct to me.

The thing is, you would arrive at your destination before the light would arrive there from where you started. So, you could take out your telescope and potentially watch your own launch.

But that doesn't actually put you into the past. It just looks like it when looking into the direction you came from. Light from the other direction will look like you've fast-forwarded through time, because you now get more recent imagery.

I don't have another explanation why someone might think, this might put you into the past...

Hmm, but why do you think these things haven't occurred yet?

As far as I can tell, the speed of causality means things can have occurred in a certain location in the universe, but it takes time until the effects have permeated into the rest of the universe.

So, it's like a shockwave from an explosion. The explosion happens, but it takes a few seconds until you feel the shockwave.
Well, with the difference that you can see an explosion before the shockwave. When we're at the speed of causality, literally no evidence will have arrived in your position until it does.

So, one could go meta-philosophical with basically "If a tree falls in a forest and no one has heard it yet, did it actually already happen?", but yeah, I don't think that's terribly useful here.

And well, if we treat it like a shockwave, let's say you detonate some TNT and step through a wormhole to somewhere 20 km away. You would know that the shockwave will arrive soon, but does that matter? The shockwave will still just continue pushing on.

And I guess, crucially, it did already happen, so you can't do the usual time travel paradox of preventing that it would happen.

I certainly don't want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
At some point, they'll ask themselves questions like "Why do we need privacy?" and everyone else in the room will agree that they've never needed it either and then they'll found Google.

I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don't completely miss the ball on what users actually need.

And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.

I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
If you've ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?

Wow, it's been a while since I've been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it's filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you'll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.

That's actually not as obvious as it might sound. The thing is, as far as we know, light seems to have no mass¹. No mass means no inertia. So, if it accelerates at all, it should immediately be at infinite speed. But for some reason, it actually doesn't go faster than what we typically call the speed of light. And we assume, that's the case, because that's actually the speed of causality.

So, it's reversed. It's not that light is just the fastest thing and as a consequence of that, nothing can be transmitted faster. No, it's actually that there appears to be a genuine universal speed limit and light would be going faster, if it could.

¹) Light is still affected by gravity, e.g. can't escape from black holes. We do assume that gravity is just a 'bend in spacetime' because of that, meaning even any massless thing are affected by it, but yeah, we're still struggling to understand what mass actually is then.

Well, I'm going to give the party-pooper response, even though science fiction and pop-science love to fantasize differently:

The past and the future are theoretical concepts. They don't actually exist in the sense that you can 'send' something to them.
Obviously, you can write data to a hard drive and then read it out after a week has passed, but presumably that is not what you had in mind.

But that's also the essence of the time travel that the theory of general relativity allows. You can travel forwards more slowly along the time axis by travelling more quickly on the space axis (close to the speed of light), which means you might just need to spend 5 perceived years to end up in the year 2200.
Similarly, you could take a hard drive onto this journey and it wouldn't have fallen apart in that time.

Travelling back in time makes no sense in general relativity. You would need to reverse causality for that, which is on an entirely different level from merely slowing causality down.

General relativity would mathematically allow for the existence of wormholes, but that's pushing the theory to extremes where it might simply not be applicable to reality anymore. We certainly have no actual evidence for wormholes.

Yeah, maybe it could look like that, but obviously they haven't actually implemented everything to make it look like that, so it's still completely up in the air, whether it actually will look like that.

Yeah, that is a valid opinion to hold. I am saying that trust is garbage.

You could consider compiling the KeePass app yourself, if you're worried about that one in particular.
A guy I used to study with, decided that he just wouldn't have a password manager on his phone.
I've certainly considered switching to a Linux phone for that, among many other reasons...

So, what's the yellow stuff for? To keep the bags from sticking together?

Yeah, I have watched videos of the guy before and would be down for 4 hours of it, but not if it's about how FluffyMcWuffington stole the pixels from sbubby82...

I don't even understand which part of the tree experience these tanks are supposed to replace. Are they really just there to pick up CO2? Because you can also plant a forest outside the city for that.

You'll miss out on all the other tree benefits, but so you also will with these glass tanks.

Well, those will work in Firefox just fine...

Yeah, people will use anything, if it comes as default...

Sure, yeah. The way I imagine this would work out best for humanity, is if companies are forced to open up platforms they provide, when they have e.g. more than 40% market saturation with that.

Most small platforms will want to strive for interoperability with the dominant platforms anyways, so this threshold is just to keep the burden of regulation low.

In practice, this might mean that Twitter would be forced to allow federation with Mastodon.
Or that Microsoft is forced to open-source the code for the Windows API.
Or that Reddit is blocked from closing up their third-party API.

Ultimately, I don't think, it even needs to be as concrete. I feel like even a law stating that if you're providing a platform, you need to take special care to keep competition alive (along with some detailing what this entails), and then leaving it up to a judge to decide, would work.

The GDPR is implemented like that and while most larger companies are IMHO in violation of the GDPR, I also feel like most larger companies actually did go from atrocious privacy handling to merely bad privacy handling, which is an incredible success.

That's effectively all I'm hoping for, too. That dominant platforms can't just stagnate for multiple decades anymore. That they do have to put in at least a small bit more effort to stay in that dominant position.

I watched it on my phone in 1080p60 and the scale didn't bother me. It's not like I have to read a lot of text and the precise position of the player character is mostly irrelevant, too. Like, if you get hit by a train or something, the screen will flash red and you'll react to it, too, so I'll know what's going on.

Well, and I don't look at the screen at all times anyways. 🙃

Would like to see more of this journey...

Yeah, I could imagine their legal department actually making up a sizeable chunk, with how much the music industry loves to sue.

Yeah, and from what I understand, learning the language itself isn't the hard part. It actually has rather few concepts. What's difficult, is learning how to program a computer correctly without all the abstractions and safety measures that modern languages provide.

Even structured programming had to be added to COBOL in a later revision. That's if/else, loops and similar.

The modding community won't be terribly motivated to build on top of their base game either, if the base game doesn't feel worth playing for long...

I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive, I just find it tricky to draw information from that.

For example, I correctly assumed this to not be akin to Dungeon Keeper, which would be a city builder like Rogue in the sense of it being a dungeon crawler.
But at the same, I guess, I assume Against the Storm would have procedural map generation like Rogue did, even though I don't really consider that typical for city builders.

And yeah, this fuzziness of the term 'roguelite' means I don't really know how much city builder to expect...

Ah yes, a city builder, which is a genre pretty much opposite to the original Rogue, but make it like a lite version of Rogue. 🙃

I mean, I don't really care. Words change meanings. But this one does hurt my brain quite a bit, trying to understand which parts of the Rogue formula they kept...