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To extend on your edit #1: And, when you go back in time, delete all punishment for murder and see whether you get the same number of murderers.

If you get more than before, the punishment might make some sense in a deterministic world so reinstate it.


And it probably does, right? Punishment adds a negative bias to the payoff matrix. Funny side note: increasing punishment severity past a certain point actually saturates and doesn't alter the dynamics further. (which is why modern judicial punishment schedules sometimes seem so mild)

Eh, sorry chaos theory doesn't work this way.

It's just as likely you go back and perform whatever magic you need to to delete punishment for murder, then zip back to 'now' and see the world is a global panopticon making sure people don't murder each other.

Some of this may be a failure of people to realize what P !=NP is about, especially in non-linear systems.

Small perturbations in an early state of the system can lead to wildly different outcomes in the final measured state of the system. You can't determine what that will be in non-polynomial time. The only thing you can do is make probabilistic models by running a full simulation in real time (or reality with a time machine I guess).


If you look at chaos in dynamical systems, you can often find some equilibria (like attractors, spirals, saddle points etc ) at least, even if the details might vary. This is how people still manage to predict the weather somewhat, for instance. Oddly orbital mechanics is chaotic too, but it sort of rhymes over the millennia.

Your correct. You'd have to run the universe simulation a bunch and pick the most probable outcomes (which makes you the most brutal serial killer in existence). The probability graph would represent the state stability of the underlying structures that guide what you're trying to measure.

In weather you have things that are chaotic, but follow rules and don't create them. Things can surprise you, but you'll mostly center around particular solutions.

With humans this gets a lot more complicated because you are messing with systems that follow fixed rulesets (chemistry) and things that follow self modifying rulesets (social conventions). A very unstable system on top of a semi-chaotic probability state.

A good example of this would be if I deleted the concept of rain from the human mind and all of human history and knowledge. Humanity would be very surprised on the thunderstorms that popped up, but they'd continue on just as they did before.

Now lets imagine I delete the concept of all gods. Would the idea of gods come back, for sure. Would they look like our gods now. Very questionable indeed. We wouldn't be getting jesus back. And the new set of religions could have wildly large effects on how the people act.


You can get something quite useable these days by plugging a pixel into a USB dock with a monitor and a keyboard + mouse

Android Desktop mode looks so promising, it just needs to support higher resolutions/refresh rates but this is probably a side effect of at least the Pixel having weaker performance versus other flagships.

Although I can’t wait for the more powerful Motorolas with GOS to release. Maybe that’d be enough to make a phone my sole computing device.


Runaway greenhouse effects on other planets have resulted in surface temps of 400C+

Yes, but Venus has 93 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth, and it's overwhelmingly CO2.

Earth isn't likely to get a true runaway like that until the sun gets another billion or so years on the clock, and when it does it will be water vapour as the oceans are promoted to atmosphere.

What we're doing to ourselves is still bad, of course, but it's nowhere near that bad.


Is there a possible scenario for that on earth, that results in every place on earth having a temperature non survivable by humans?

For temperatures not survivable by humans we're talking about a sustained wet bulb of >=36C

On whether it's probable, I'd lean towards no but I'm not qualified. The certainty that I read in the parent comment was mainly what I was pushing back against. On a re-read though it's much less certain (either edited or perhaps I massively misinterpreted it the first time around). Runaway implies positive feedback which is hard to gauge, was all I intended to say


If my social circle (in real life) is anything to go by, mostly testing out home renovation/decoration ideas.

That's also what my real life social circle does. My friends and family test out home reno/decoration ideas, and as I posted in another comment, my wife likes to visualize different layouts and changes to her flower gardens.

I make my brother look older and plumper in most pics he sends me. It makes me laugh.

Yep, renovation and landscaping idea mostly.

Well, that and infographics on what to do when the AI's start to take over.


Those monsters

GP is an llm


Typically the email domain of a user is enough for those sorts of claims.

It probably shouldn't be, especially for university domains. But here we are.


Ugh! That's such a inappropriate interpretation of the data they have available. I always feel for funders who are fed such information and likely don't have all the expertise to recognise these tricks.


I remember in Kings Quest 6 you can meet a guy early on in the bookstore which becomes relevant (but not critical?) right at the end. I never knew how relevant though, as the time I played it through right to the end wasn't one of the times when he'd happened to be in the bookstore early on.

I guess that's not enough of a dead end to block progress.

Maybe it'd be enough just to know what happens in the castle if Prince Alexander had befriended him. Otherwise I guess I'll carry that unresolved thread around with me for another ~25 years.

Edit: went looking for spoilers and yeah, alternate ending which admittedly sounds better than the one I got


I played KQ6 as a small kid who could barely speak English, and again ~10 years later as a grad student. The day I stumbled on the long ending and found myself in the Realm of the Dead still counts as one of the most mind-explodey things that ever happened to me.


I'm a native English speaker, but I was a young kid as well and so I remember learning a lot of the puns and wordplay in English much later on in life after first seeing them in that game. I'm sure another playthrough would reveal even more.

"Stick in the mud", "Wallflower", those sorts of thing.


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Wow. On mobile Firefox I have to use two fingers to scroll that site.


Yeah, that's some cursed JavaScript :-/


I think, sadly, this is the expected result.

Imagine if tomorrow we invented ubiquitous instant teleportation to arbitrary locations.

There would be a moment where we hear how great it is to eliminate commutes, or air travel, followed shortly afterwards by the collapse of civilisation as societies grapple with the elimination of property, what remains of private space, and so on.


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