markjgsmith

Relatively okay day yesterday. There was some small amount of harrassment here and there but I was able to ignore it. The girl staff in the shop cafe that always seems to be doing a C3PO from Srar Wars impression was a bit weird. I noticed that her thing is to always be slightly ahead of you in whatever interaction you have with her, so she's always in some way waiting for you. So she will move very quickly, then slow down, move very quickly, then slow down. But the whole charade stops as soon as she’s done interacting with customers, she’s completely normal with other staffers. Naturally I did the same thing to her while buying a second coffee and some biscuits. Evidently this was not appreciated, because right after finishing the coffee she materialised from downstairs on her way to the toilet, casually making a fake sneeze 'choo' sound as she passed.

The only other thing was that, quite predictably, the penis grafiti has spread so now there is also a sticker of a cartoon fast car on the wall next to the bathroom. Someone’s obviously tried to scratch it off but it’s too well on the wall to be easily removed. What a shame the walls had been nice and white for so long, now it’s being over run with vandalism. Before long the whole place will no doubt become unusable and be shutdown for a renovation or something.

Forgot to mention a couple of days ago that a lot of the time when sketchy lady with the fancy hat turns up, a bit later towards the end of whatever money dealings she’s up to, a sort of twin of her shows up, hangs around, usually sitting on the other side of me. She also had a fancy hat, but more importantly is dressed in a very similar style as OG woman with fancy hat. She’s the same exact height. She’s basically a twin. Weird.

I made some progress on the reusable workflow. As suspected the minimal example with 17 secrets works totally fine. Even tried a variant with the same number of required and optional secrets. Also works. So who knows where the bug is. The only thing left to do is laboriously rebuild the production workflow piece by piece, testing each time if it’s still working. Eventually, hopefully it will work and I can do a diff to see what was different.

Not much blog post inspiration at the minute. #

Some interesting subtleties about Telegram’s encryption implementation. Firstly the UX is a bit weird: although they advertise as being a fully encrypted product, they only offer end-2-end encryption on 2 person chats, not group chats, and it’s not the default, and to enable it you have to hunt through deeply burried settings, and even then it only works if the other person in the chat is online when you setup the chat.

Also their encryption implementation is a little bit "non standard". The author of the article linked above suggests that combining all these subtleties, it would be understandable if some people formed the view that their implementation was in some way malicious, i.e. user hostile. IMO there are a huge amount of right up to the line and no further situations in this story.

Like a weird honey pot inside a honey pot inside a honey pot. A honey pot fractal? Is that even a thing? Why did Pavel get fired for trying to unresign? There’s definitely something uncanny about this whole thing.

Has this entire story been written by an AI? #

I’m finding this whole Mike Lynch british entrepreneur super yacht sinking story very weird. Especially the latest bit about him being interested in this bizare and very dark Letby case.

It’s weird to me that Letby has been given 15 life sentences, and 2 days ago I wrote about a RL conversation I had with a person I said apparently works 15 simultaneous jobs or something. What an odd coincidence. And especially, given the details of the case, right after the pedo pervert apocalypse.

Also since numerology is clearly trending, what’s up with all the sevens in this article? I feel like all this is going to be fed into a powerful AI and turned into the next Iron Maiden album cover art or something.

Did I mention that yesterday morning a street food vendor ordered me to 'buy', as I stood there, after I communicated to his female collegue what dish I wanted and she was preparing it, and I was quite clearly waiting already holding the money in my hand to pay. This was, judging on the smile and chuckles they made, very funny to them.

Come on world, you are clearly warpathing at extreme levels. #

Oh and Ronny Chieng hates Smiths now.

Come on world, wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of non-escallating normality? #

The mind bending realities of the universe’s scale and deep time

Today’s quote piece is a long one but well worth it. Everything this week seems to be about exponentials so it fits in very well. It’s from the most recent Rogan podcast episode where he talks with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated UFOs.

There’s a ton of wild stuff in their conversation, which is super interesting because it gives a view into how these things are thought about from inside the establishment. Quite pragmatically actually. In any case Luis is very science and engineering focussed and I thought his view of time and the universe was both mind bending and incredibly well articulated. Enjoy.

[1:19:13] Luis:

Homosapien sapien as a modern species has been around for roughly between 100000 and 200000 years. It was only the Greeks 2000 years ago that introduced the idea that there are only 2 types of life forms on this planet, you are either (a) a plant or (b) you’re an animal. And it was only in the last 300 years, if you look at a 24 hour clock, roughly the last 5 minutes in the 24 hours towards midnight, we discovered another form of life that is neither plant nor animal, that’s been here with us on this planet. And that is the world of fungus: during the renaissance and the days of Newton, we discovered that there was this other life form that we had been sharing the planet with all along.

So we patted ourselves on the shoulder, and it wasn’t until the last 120 years, think about it, the last 10 seconds of our existence on this planet, so to speak, on a 24 hour clock as a modern species, we actually discovered the true dominant life form on this planet. And infact if you take all the biomass of every plant, and the biomass of every animal, and the biomass of every fungus and add it all up together, it’s still not equal to the biomass of this hidden kingdom of life, that’s actually the dominant life form of this planet. And that wasn’t until we were able to curve glass and look through a little steel tube and famously shout "little beasties, little beasties", did we discover the world of micro-organisms, that yes, live inside of you, and yes, live on the skin of the ISS space station, and live miles underneath the artic ice. That is the true dominant life form on this planet, and always had been. In the last 120 years we discovered that.

So is it possible that there is something else that is just as normal to this world? Is it possible? Well the answer is a resounding yes of course it’s possible, cause we are always discovering new new new new ways life can exist.

When I was growing up as a kid, I was told absolutely as a matter of fact all life form is derived from photosynthesis, ultimately when you go all the way down. It turns out that that’s not true. It wasn’t until we discovered in the deepest depths of our oceans, were these things called black smokers. We discovered there are these creatures that thrive with no light, and they thrive off of something called kinosynthesis, a completely different way to metabolise energy to sustain life. Everytime we put Mother Nature in a little box, she always finds a way to wiggle her way out. And so think that’s important when having this conversation because if there’s one thing we know as human beings, it’s that we are usually wrong, at first.

[1:21:46] Rogan:

Well we exist and we do send things to other planets and we do send things into space. It only makes sense that something far more intelligent than us that would be doing that, and if they did, they would probably watch an emerging civilisation, which is essentially what we are. Like you said 200000 years which is nothing, the existence of homosapiens have gone from things that use stones, and flintmap to things that can fly things through the air. If you look at Orvel Wright and Wilbur Wright when they flew the first airplane. You go from that to the first Apollo 11 launch, that’s only like 50 years. That’s nuts.

And you just take that, and everything moved exponentially, and you imagine a civilisation that’s been around 10000 years longer than us, 100000 years longer than us, a million years longer than us.

[1:22:44] Luis:

How about 100 years? We have evolved more in the last 150 years than we have in the last 150000 years. And then you have the other side of it. For me, I find, when people say space is so huge, and is it possible that things are coming from outer space? My response has always been the same. Look I don’t know where they are from, I just know they are here. Could they be from outer space? Sure. They could be from outer space or inner space or even the space in between. And I say that because the universe is far more complex than we give it credit for. Everytime...there was a time we had Newtonian physics, we thought that was the solution, then Einstein came along, and we realised that wait, space and time are actually connected and everything is relative. And then all of a sudden you have Quantum Mechanics, which is this spooky action at a distance, where the whole universe is behaving in a way that it shouldn’t, yet that looks like the real way the universe actually works.

I often tell people that as humans we only have 5 fundamental senses that we can base our reality upon. If you can’t touch it, taste it, hear it, smell it, etc we can’t interact with it. And so where I live in Wyoming we have these beautiful night skies, 300 days of un-occluded night skies per year, and as beautiful as those night skies are, if you were to look at that same portion of the night sky through a radio telescope, you would see a whole different reality around you. You would see nebula and you would see things in different spectra that we can’t pickup. You pick an ultra violet, an infra red, so you would see a whole new reality, just like our cell phones. You would see in cell phone vision, you would see in WiFi, 5G and GPS. You would interact with your environment completely differently. We can only interact with a very small sliver of the reality we can perceive because we are humans. But most of reality is actually beyond that.

And then of course you have scalability issues. The universe is immensely huge. And what scientists are now saying, if you look in any direction, you can see roughly within the visible horizon, which is roughly 13.9 billion light years. So that means I can see 13.9 billion light years with the right equipment. What’s a light year? Well it’s the fastest light can travel in a year. Well light travels pretty fast. In fact it travels at 186000 miles per second. That’s 7.5 times around the planet in a second. So imagine how far you can go in a year. Now multiply that by 13.9 billion. And that is by scientists estimation. So the universe end-to-end, we are stuck in the middle, is roughly 27 billion light years. Scientists are now saying possibly that’s only 10% of the known universe, because the universe is so big, and so vast, and so far, that light will never have time to reach earth. That’s at a minimum 100 billion light years. And we are this little speck in the middle.

As crazy as that is to even try to conceive, if you compare 1 atom, 1 Hydrogen atom, Avogadro’s number, 1 x 10 to the minus 26, it is roughly the same level of scale as we are to the universe. Meaning that atom’s size is to a human, as we humans are in size to the universe. So we as humans can only interact, plus or minus, with one order of magnitude up or down. Otherwise the universe is either too big or too small. Most of the universe and reality lies in those scales. We live in this little tiny tiny sliver.

[1:26:26] Rogan:

[Exhales deeply] You are hurting my head.

[1:26:27] Luis:

Ha ha ha

[1:26:28] Rogan:

Yeah we live in a tiny sliver. And I think the idea we are alone is preposterous, I really do. #

Joe Rogan and Luis Elizondo discuss the possibility that non-human higher intelligences live among us:

Luis: To this day in China, we have the Panda bear exhibits. What do we do? We don’t disrupt the pandas, we wear panda suits. It sounds silly but you can actually get online and see zoo keepers wearing panda suits because they want to interfere as least as possible with the natural flora and fauna there inside the exhibit.

Rogan: Do you think there are non-human intelligences that look like us, moving around with us, living amongst us?

Luis: Do I think it’s possible? Well we are doing it already with the panda bears.

OMG, politicians are going to turn into furries. #