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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2025

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  • I watched the movie before I knew there was a book, so I came at it without all that context and I thought they did a good job with environmental storytelling. Things weren’t exactly laid out but I always felt like I had a handle on who the characters were and why they were motivated to do what they were doing, and the bits of the world we did see felt detailed and “built” even if the movie didn’t establish a ton of worldbuilding.




  • I hope it happens. And by it I mean VR / AR equipment that I can comfortably use for a few hours at a time without getting sweaty, fatigued, or motion sick. When I’m using a computer I like to have a bunch of displays, and it would be really convenient to have a comfortable headset that I can wear instead and live my dream of coding in VR / AR and spin displays up or down on a whim, or better still use some as-yet-undreamed VR native UI that takes advantage of the platform. That dream is still a way off, it seems like, but I still want it.




  • I think if we’re ever going to find an answer to “Why does the universe exist?” I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is “yes, it’s a simulation and we can demonstrate as much” then the next question becomes “OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?” which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

    Alternatively, if the answer is “no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality” then… well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.


  • Yes, kind of, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a point against it. “Why are we here? / Why is the universe here?” is one of the big interesting questions that still doesn’t have a good answer, and I think thinking about possible answers to the big questions is one of the ways we push the envelope of what we do know. This particular paper seems like a not-that-interesting result using our current known-to-be-incomplete understanding of quantum gravity, and the claim that it somehow “disproves” the simulation hypothesis is some rank unscientific nonsense that IMO really shouldn’t have been accepted by a scientific journal, but I think the question it poorly attempts to answer is an interesting one.







  • A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it’s good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it’s built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It’s the architect’s job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,

    Here’s the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.

    IDK what they consider a “real” application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn’t all have to be functions all the time.

    And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don’t blame the horses when you can’t get milk.