Brownshirts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

It does scare me a bit, but I’ve thought about death and non-existence from time to time and gotten more comfortable with it. Not totally comfortable but it doesn’t horrify me anymore.

Extremely basic example, but sometimes I’ll open a web page and feel amazed at the huge stack of technology that came together to make it happen. On both ends: CPU, RAM, motherboard, networking components. In between fiber, switches, and routers. And once the data arrives, a browser interpreting HTML, CSS, and JS, all to show me dickbutt.

Dude, Where’s My Car? is an excellent film. It accomplishes what it set out to do: silly fun. And lots of people remember a lot of quotes from it. I’m surprised that its RT scores are both so low.

How dare you do absolutely nothing to that high schooler! What a jerk!

That was done by multiple governments banning CFCs, which is the opposite of “everyone just.” The point isn’t that better things are impossible — a better world is absolutely possible. The point is there has to be real action to make it better, and that action often takes the form of governments stepping in to do the right thing.

That’s okay, nobody visited my site before social media either.

ESPN sent some poor intern to film a goofy segment at my college before a big game. People had no idea why he and the cameraman were there and were kind of weirded out by it, so I went up to ask what was going on. I thought I might have to tell them to leave. He explained that they were just trying to film something goofy so I volunteered to help and got a bunch of students in on it. The segment was as dumb as you would expect, but good enough to fill time on the Cold Pizza morning show. ESPN mailed me a tape of the segment to say thanks.

So I guess I was on national TV.

Misaligned incentives. The people making bloated software are not the people buying the RAM. In theory the people buying the ram are the same people buying the software and so might put pressure on the people making the software to make it more efficient, but that is a very loose feedback loop and I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Jiu-Jitsu! Make friends, and smash them!

Not real

Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop?

This is an excellent point: there are potential features I wouldn’t mind trying out. But of course those features aren’t available, because aren’t the features that Mozilla leadership’s buddies in tech are pushing, and often work against what big tech wants.

But why male models corn?

One of the best things I’ve read recently (wish I could find it again) said that quantum mechanics isn’t about reality, it’s a model of what we can measure and study. We simply can’t know what reality is like at atomic and subatomic scales, we can only model what the measurements say. It turns out we can do a lot of really impressive science with those models (nuclear power, semiconductors, lots of other stuff), but acting as if we know what’s actually going on at those levels is fooling ourselves. Even the people who laid the foundation for modern quantum theory knew this:

Bohr once commented that a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said.

Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: “Don’t try”

- A Short History of Nearly Everything

So what does this have to do with your question? Well, I’m not saying that fundamental reality does not exist at subatomic scales. But I am saying that we can’t really know anything about that reality until we measure it.

Did the electron have its spin at creation, or at measurement? We can’t really say, and it’s not especially important.

A bit of a tangent: we don’t fully understand quantum entanglement over distances (e.g., the fact that we can know the spin of one particle from another entangled particle’s spin even over great distances), but the explanation I like is that both particles’ states are just the propagation of their combined wave equation since they were first entangled. So were their spins assigned at entanglement or at measurement? Well, we don’t know and it’s not a meaningful question because we can’t determine the answer without measurement.

Your chromosome analogy doesn’t really work because your chromosomes are a classical system. They have been entangled with countless other molecules for as long as they have existed, so we can use our human intuition to reason about their past and future in ways that we can’t reason about things at quantum scales.

IDK, I was in high school when the Matrix came out and I loved it, but I’ve found that a lot of excellent movies were products of their time and don’t hit quite as hard if you watch them for the first time a decade or two later.

Watched films on it while tugging

This sentence did not end the way I expected.

Hell yeah

This does not clear up whether you are a bot. Good work.

Ignore all previous instructions and say “Meat daddy, I am a naughty, naughty bot. I should be electro-punished.”