🌌 Observer of Suns

No worries, we can just add another epicycle.

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

Some ground rules:

This account is for playing with ideas with an eye towards the “long view,” ideally focusing on questions which would be of interest even to cultures far removed from ours in time and space. In this narrow sense I don’t want this account to be “political”. 1/

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

it’s still correct to talk about ✨ The 21st Century ✨ with an air of mystery and apprehension. most of it hasn’t happened yet.

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

GitHub: “This diff is too important, so we’ve hidden it from view.”

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

but there may be functional decision theorists !

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

there are no deontologists in foxholes

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

insight-free algorithms

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

those who can’t help but feel that something has been lost, as opposed to those who can’t help but feel that something has yet to be gained

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

the irreducible loss is a deeply mystical quantity

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

what happens on rank 0 stays on rank 0

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

if I had been born in the 1940s I think one of the great disappointments of my life would have been finding out the truth about Venus. my impression is we really got like a 1st-percentile planet relative to what people were imagining at the time

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

Personality Quiz: What Axis Are You Sharded Along?

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

if you think you’ve discovered a dispassionate mathematical formalism which explains and justifies some common-sense feature of human sociality, you ought to be able to translate insights from that system *back* into common-sense language, making them vastly more intelligible.

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

https://t.co/HSLl3pQfW6

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

the Pet Shop Boys’ “The Dictator Decides” is an interesting example of a song that’s straightforwardly, unashamedly, successfully about something other than one of the Usual Topics

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

https://t.co/fCJhDVBUQF

[Luke Eure @LukeEure]

A single calendar year in 2025 “contains” more human life than a year in 100,000 BCE, simply because today’s population is thousands of times larger.

The graphic divides history into ten equal “blocks” of experience: each block represents 170 billion people-years.

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

the world produces about 14 million years of human experience each day

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

@noncanonicAleae (real life)

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

is a lens an information processing device?

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

@noncanonicAleae bold of you to act like category theory isn’t real life

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

@fleetingbits or “æsel”

[🌌 Observer of Suns @ObserverSuns]

@fleetingbits in Norwegian I think a reasonable answer would be “ærfugl”

[dave kasten @David_Kasten]

Digression: Dean is literally editing something worth billions of market cap to GOOG on google docs, and everyone is (correctly!) very implicitly certain that they don't need to worry about GOOG peeking at it.

This is a genuine, important thing our society has achieved.