Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

I ask them about the history of time travel and either listen to them, or accept the recording they give me, and carefully record it myself. Then I ignore them and try to metagame time travel, assuming they've set up some form of time loop.

The first step is to buy lottery tickets (with choices based on a quantum RNG), and if I win, buy more lottery tickets until I have an arbitrary amount of wealth. If I'm in a time loop, there will exist an iteration where I win all attempted lottery instances (note that only non-deterministic RNGs will work for this, like the one I have on my desk). I then use that wealth and my foreknowledge to adjust the future history of time travel such that I exclusively control the technology. Then I send someone back in time with the recorded history (now incorrect) of time travel.

That ought to destabilize any loop they're trying to set up after a finite number of iterations, and wrap my loop around it. If you're a time traveler looking to prevent me from doing this, I accept cash, money, and filthy lucre. Just make sure the dates on the bills make sense for this period.

Oh man, that brings me back. Lynx was really important back when GPU support for Linux was less good.

Much time was spent navigating NVIDIA Website in Lynx trying different driver versions. Then the autogenerated Xorg.conf would always be wrong. Kids these days have it so easy. Get off my lawn.

(Seriously though, I like this strange new world where Linux is super easy to set up)

KiCAD. It's so good these days.

I still code most Python in IDLE. It's fine!

Various flavors of Linux and the many, many applications supporting that. Also OpenWRT. OpenOffice > Google Sheets.

I also grabbed an open-source script that would turn on a fan every time the humidity level rose high enough for a specific type of mold to grow, and move air until it dropped. That ran all day for a few years until the fan broke and I repurposed the other hardware.

Worth a shot. Let us know how it works out!

Interestingly, here in Asia some inkjet printers are sold with huge (like 500ml per color) external ink tanks that take very cheap 3rd party ink. They're not terribly expensive. I see all the print shops and some businesses using them, they seem to work OK. I don't have one personally, but recently I've been tempted to get one.

If I do, I'll post about it somewhere. It sounds like it's nearly worth physically flying all the way over here, buying one, and carrying it back. If you're a small business owner and print a lot or something.

The ones that have a network jack, and WiFi that you can turn off are OK too!

I have a funny story about a Xerox printer!

I had a problem where there was ink left (this was a solid-ink printer, the ink came in blocks you could easily see), but the page count had run out and it wouldn't print. So we found the flash memory IC that held the info -- it used I2C to communicate. There's a similar IC on consumer RAM to store the manufacturer info. We swapped it in, hex-edited it so there were a huge number of pages left, and put it back in the printer.

It worked fine!

Then, days later, I noticed that the printer's web interface let you reset the page counter by just pressing a button in a web browser. So the whole hack had been completely unnecessary :D

Well, doing nothing isn't really an option. I live right next to China.

Stock up on essentials before everyone else does, learn some Mandarin, and keep my head down while trying to move my family further away from the conflict.

Otherwise, keep going to work. Like many software developers, I'm of no use with an assault rifle, but at least I could keep earning money and paying taxes instead of panicking.

Yeah I've ended up with some sort of syncretic mixed culture. It's quite good. You get to pick and choose what works best in your situation from both cultures. There are a lot of people from Asia who have done this, but not many from the West -- I think mostly because not many people immigrate from the West to Asia. I've managed to really push my business forward drawing on ideas from both cultures.

I've already started packing up and exporting concepts back to family in the West. The way Asian families handle family-level economics and real estate inheritance is something that I think early adopters would benefit from in the current ridiculous housing situation in many parts of Canada. Meanwhile, the Western tolerance of lawyers in family matters gives me a big edge here -- avoiding the family feuds that so much is lost to. Just the first two random examples that come to mind :)

I enjoyed Romance of the Three Kingdoms quite a bit. It was legitimately entertaining! I would recommend an abridged translation.

I've studied some Analects / Dialects / Neoconfucianism in school, Tao Te Ching, and Art of War. Those had some useful ideas in them, but were not exactly a laugh a minute (although Tao Te Ching has some funny bits). Those last two are very short texts as well.

Still on my list: Bandits of the Marsh, Journey to the West, and one other I can't remember the title of right now.

One thing you can personally do is try to cultivate friendships on both sides, and make an effort to share and appreciate the culture, history, and daily challenges of each. If we have populations that really don't want to fight, maybe that will help de-escalate things a bit.

China is my neighbor now (I immigrated to Asia). Some of their literature and history is really quite interesting! I'm not an expert, but I could make a suggestion or two if you like.

We've got Trạng Quỳnh. Sort of a trickster folk-hero. Not exactly literal with the whole economic redistribution element, but in other ways somewhat similar to Robin Hood.

With regard to watery figures dispensing swords as a method of selecting government figures? We do have the legend where a golden turtle dispensed a magic sword to Lê Lợi at Hoàn Kiếm lake to help repel foreign invaders. It later had to be returned.

The latter story is often compared to the Arthurian legend. Both are fun stories to read about, although a lot of the tricks of Trạng Quỳnh don't translate super well (and are somewhat NSFW, haha!).

Good public transit is #1! So much goes into making those trains awesome.

The second one that comes to mind is vacuum tubes. They still keep them in stock. You can just walk into Tokyo Radio Tower and there's normally quite a good selection -- in a brick-and-mortar store. It blows my mind that they are still so readily available!

Primarily, that what we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.

Sure -- but at what resolution (analog signals have resolution too)? At what framerate? A vinyl should hold about 440MB of data (both sides, normal vinyl), with a read speed of 167 kilobytes per second.

So actually... that's less bad than I thought! You could probably get 240p video or better!

I think it was done with wax cylinders first, somewhat earlier! So at least for vinyl, there was strong technological precedent.

In the early days, it was quite a simple device! Sort of a cone to focus sound waves, with a membrane at the end attached to an engraver that carves wax. I bet it was quite hard to make those mechanical systems reliable, but I can sort of see how someone goes from "sound is a pressure wave in air" to that device!

It occurs to me that I could totally put a short movie on a vinyl record. It would display "buffering" for quite a while though.

If we set aside Hollywood for a moment to talk about something unexpected... this is a completely serious and rather interesting subject of study:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

My position on the matter is that it is quite easy to design systems that are to some degree "intelligent" (for most definitions of intelligence), without possessing qualia (consciousness, subjective experience). Several such systems exist, and you have probably heard of them!

Moreover, I think many natural persons can be intelligent without being conscious, at least sometimes. I think many people have this experience when working on difficult problems, e.g. programming.

For Hollywood-style zombies? I would start with chemistry rather than biology. There are many substances that can alter our mood, body control, aggression, and consciousness. Find a mix that creates the effect you want, and create an implant (or make it an addictive drug mixture). Probably the result would be less consistent than hollywood-style zombies. It would not be contagious though.

Or if sci-fi, insert genes into a living person that encodes a system to internally synthesize the drug mix.

Edit: Something that makes most people into shuffling drones? Increases aggression? Spreads like a disease? A cynical answer would be that we have invented that already. We call it "capital".

Haha, that would give them infinite information density, wouldn't it?

Haha, that describes me exactly.