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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve held off rewatching Rogue One until Andor season two finishes, so the former isn’t fresh in my mind, but there is plenty of character development in Andor. He’s the “guy who gets shit done” but at the beginning of the show, he’s reckless and only in it for himself. In that season he sees first hand how the evils of the Empire affect his life, recognizes how his selfishness negatively impacts those around him, sees what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself, and is able to (sort of) move on from a life that revolves around his missing sister. The Rebellion gives him something to focus on and be apart of.

    The ending of episode 6, exactly halfway through the season, is also a perfect midpoint for this arc. He’s approached by somebody that’s in it for themselves, and the reckless, reactive part of Andor reflexively shoots him. He’s refuting the selfish part of himself that would have done the very same thing, but the reckless “shoot first think later” part of him is still alive and well.







  • If you want, you can view science as a system of organization. A way of making sense of facts. If I give you a file of seemingly random ones and zeroes, it is useless. If I give you an algorithm to decode those ones and zeroes into a message, that has utility. However, somebody else could produce an algorithm to decode those same ones and zeroes into an entirely different message. So, which algorithm is correct? Neither.

    But say I give you another file, and Algorithm B doesn’t produce anything useful for this message, so now Algorithm A is more useful. But I also provide a new Algorithm C which also finds messages in both files. Now which is more correct, A or C? And on and on. We continue to refine our models of the data, and we hope that those models will have predictive utility until proven otherwise, but it is always possible (in fact, almost guaranteed) that there is a model of the universe that is more accurate than the one we have.

    Consider the utility of a map. A map is an obviously useful thing, but it is also incomplete. A perfect map, a “true” map, would perfectly reproduce every single minute detail of the thing it is mapping. But to do so, it would need to be built at the same scale as the thing it is mapping, which would be far too cumbersome to actually use as, you know, a map. So, we abstract details to identify patterns to maximize utility. Science, likewise, is a tool of prediction, which is useful, but is also not true, because our model of the universe can never be complete.






  • I’m sympathetic to the view that artists should be paid for their work. Collectively, artists have produced so much, and these tech companies are funnelling all their work into a machine and recycling it into new works, and profiting off that, without any compensation for the people partially responsible for this new reality. I’m also not interested in people who argue “but actually it’s not copying that’s not how the technology works it’s actually a really complic-” yeah I don’t care. Without the artists you would have nothing.

    BUT

    Don’t confuse the business practices that make this technology a reality with the technology itself. These tools are incredible, and will result in things that could have never existed previously. I just believe we need to have serious conversations about what they mean for our future.







  • The reasoning behind a specific system may not be arbitrary, but why is one system better than another? People have also used 8 day systems, and 10 day systems. It would seem to me that biggest reason it is still in use today is “it’s the way we’ve always done it”. The inertia of the 7-day system makes change very hard, though there have been attempts over the last few centuries by both France and the Soviet Union. So, even if you could scientifically prove that some other system would be more productive, you would have a very hard time implementing it.

    The idea that I will work a few percentage points more or less over my life, as a direct result of the phases of the moon, is, while perhaps technically correct, a fundamentally silly reason.