Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • There are literal eldritch horrors we do not comprehend. It is why the sun has all the material features of god, yet we see it as a (very large, implacable, thankfully consistent) object, and we don’t think about how we must refrain from looking at the sun directly, only that it burns our eyes.

    Bertrand Russell’s attempt at reducing all of mathematics to a perfect system of logic (until this was proven by Gödel to be impossible) broke him, much the way professors at Miskatonic would go mad trying to model the universe by pondering quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.

    Myself, I was already pretty mad (diagnosed) when I saw lines being crossed in the US that pointed towards a fascist autocratic future and a purge campaign, and so I took to studying moral philosophy and the Holocaust, specifically the human mechanisms that justified the engagement of and participation in evil. Consequently, I broke my brain even further. Nature, human or otherwise, can be unflinching and ruthless in its efforts to exploit or consume us, which is why we need reciprocal ethics in the first place.

    I do not imagine the universe is incomprehensible, only that we are small and still pretty simple, imagining the moon closer and bigger since we see models drawn to disproportionate scale. And so the layperson doesn’t understand how difficult it is to launch a probe from one speck so that it drifts for months or years, to fall into an orbit around another speck. It’s difficult to imagibe that the stars in a single galaxy, each teeming with satellite objects, are uncountable like the grains of sand on a beach. We know it’s a number, but still have to estimate its value with a wide error margin.

    It’s not forbidden knowlege. The parabolic manifold in which the pillars of R’lyeh stand can be computed, but our hominid brains have to bend a lot, or chain together analogies and metaphors to understand them.

    It’s like a dog chasing a hyperball, possibly to its peril.





  • Obama campaigned on getting past it. ( Hope amd Change ) but then he didn’t. Corporations got their bailouts. OWS was cleared violently with the cameras off. BLM notice law enforcement kill a lot of people. The disposition matrix was a thing. The IWOT went on and on. The mass surveillance state was a thing. The economy was better but 88% of households were in precarity, and a lot of people were homeless.

    And then Trump won by the EC.

    So Ive been waiting for things to get better for a long, long time. I’ve just stopped expecting the suck to ever reverse, or even ebb.


  • I just use LGBT+ since it was LGBT for a long time (it was GLBT but the Ls earned their place at the front during the AIDS crisis) then it became LGBTQ, then a bunch of other letters were added while the community was recognizing is profound variety before it turned into LGBTQ+

    Q+ has a nice ring to it, but since I’m an unusual form of NB, I fit squarely into the catch-all variety of Q.




  • Courtesy of XKCD, long before we have to contend with unfriendly AI (we have committees of AI-techs working on this problem already) we’ll have to contend with someone like Musk or Bezos determined to own everything and capable of creating an AI-controlled army of killer robots.

    We’re not sure how rogue AI is going to manifest. We are sure rogue power-seeking humans exist all the time, and positions of power are commonly filled by them. (That’s the primary argument for election by sortition, or by lottery.)



  • Whatever made that crater was an ELE. Bigger than Chicxulub.

    We have plenty of great filters to navigate:

    We end war, or we die.

    We restore the atmosphere and rebuild global ecology, or we die.

    We end stratified society and power disparity, or we die.

    Where are all the aliens? Fermi asked. The first question is, how do we navigate our way to becoming a space-faring, world colonizing species, ourselves? It’s turning out to be pretty difficult for the common hominid.




  • Sacramento Police department has a helicopter, Air One, that the department is super proud of. I live in a not-rich neighborhood where Air One likes to hang out and help which sometimes includes shouting inaudibly on the PA. Air One has its own webpage which is sometimes current about what it’s doing, but not always.

    Air One also likes to fly low enough that we can hear the thumping of the rotors through our apartments. At 11pm on a school night. We know it doesn’t have to because the rescue choppers zing by quietly on their way.

    And lately Air One has gotten, whinier. This loud screeee! that wasn’t their before that makes me thing something in the rotors is not sufficiently oiled, or something is about to fall apart. I wonder if Air One is soon going to make an unscheduled landing in my neighborhood.