Arachnophobia​

It doesn’t actually still haunt me (I’m the family spider hunter) but I did get nightmares for a while from that one.

This was mentioned (not fully, but enough to get some of the ideas) recently in an episode of PBS Space Time

As far as MWI itself, my understanding is that it comes from simply taking the same math that works for atoms (as you say) and applying it to everything - the observers of a quantum system, the earth, the whole universe. I think it really comes down to the question: If Everything is a wave function, what would it look like from the inside? And MWI pops out of trying to answer that.

And the other interpretations of quantum mechanics don’t even seem better to me, requiring arbitrary conditions for a state to collapse to a single value for example. That feels to me like an entity of the type Occam meant.

Paying literally hundreds of dollars per month as soon as I no longer have income isn’t a reasonable expectation either.

If a freak accident like this happens while I don’t have a job, I’ll just go bankrupt and likely become homeless, then die. I’m counting on that not happening.

Heh, that would be neat. Maybe that’s what stegosaurus plates were: a MIMO array.

Lately?
Dealing with UPS (and I don’t mean backup power, although I did also buy one of those recently.)

I ordered a laptop from a foreign country (I’m in the US), and UPS didn’t tell me I needed to tell them my ‘Tax ID’ and there was no way to input it online. So I had to call (and be on hold) a bunch before I could finally supply it, while my package was on hold.

Then they didn’t tell me I had to pay the outrageous tariffs (thank you voters) until I noticed it wasn’t moving and called them again.

Then most nights it said it was ‘on the way’ and would be delivered the next business day, until it reverted to ‘In Warehouse’ (code for held by customs) 4-5 hours later. So far it’s done this for over a week: Each day sending out alerts that I’d get it the next day, then silently taking that back. I’ve been on the phone with them a lot.

Tonight it finally actually said that it cleared customs. I’ll believe that when I see that it’s left Kentucky. Still says it will be delivered tomorrow (technically today) which seems unlikely regardless.

Update: Tracking still says it will be delivered today, and it’s actually nearby now, but that I owe the tariffs again!
Phone support says they see the earlier payment, so I don’t owe, and the website just hasn’t updated… From over a week ago. She also said it won’t be delivered today anyway. Why do they have separate systems that apparently don’t talk to each other‽

Update 2: Sure enough, the driver arrives and asks for a check. My new laptop is right there. I told him I paid, I show him a screenshot from my credit card, he calls his office, they don’t see it. I call customer support on my own phone while the driver is talking to his office, support gives me a confirmation code! Driver’s office doesn’t accept it. Their system has to be given notice of payment through some internal channel or something, and that should have happened automatically, but didn’t. I’m given a number to call and told what number to press.

That department is closed now (Friday evening). Opens Monday.

The driver offered to accept a check and said they would refund the part already paid.
Absolutely no way I’m trusting them after what I’ve already seen. Trying again on Monday it is.

Update 3: Besides ruining my mental health, now they also ruined the plans my wife and I made for today (…Saturday.) I got a notification this morning while out and about around 40 minutes away by freeway that the package was out for delivery. So I called again, and the phone system even said it was out for delivery today, Monday. Today is not Monday. And once again customer service could see that I paid. She did say she’d call ‘the facility’ and give them the authorization. She also said she would call me back, but my phone didn’t ring while I was rushing home. I called back when I got there and miraculously got the same agent, who said that she did get ahold of them, and gave them the code. But couldn’t reach the driver or something.

I got home and waited. And waited. Eventually the UPS truck did arrive, and of course the driver asked for payment, and I said I paid and asked her to call in.

Then the miracle happened.

Apparently the support agent had actually managed what none of the others could do, and and got the left hand to know what the right was doing. The driver’s manager (handler? Whoever) actually was able to confirm to her that I paid.

The little scanner thing she had however still wouldn’t let her actually take my signature* and close out the delivery. Even with her contact trying to walk her through it. Thankfully she decided to leave the package with me and deal with it later. I really hope she doesn’t get in trouble for that, but her contact didn’t seem to mind that plan, and many hours later it’s showing as delivered.

The laptop seems fine after all that. I expected it to be all kinds of mangled by this malfunctioning machine called UPS.

*Side note: the entire time, the tracking site said
"At the request of the shipper, pre-signing your package is not available.

Signature Required Sign Now

Not going to be home? Pre-sign for your package so your signature isn’t required…" - I didn’t test if it would let me. I knew I’d have to talk to the driver anyway.

Sure. But RF can go through dense bush or a forest even better than audio if it’s high enough power - and without alerting any non-RF animals like audio would.

Or imagine animals with actual radar for finding prey. IR is good for that (I know snakes use it) but again radio could penetrate cover, and yet nothing uses it like that.

The main point though, is that RF exists despite non-use by life (excluding human technology of course). The same likely applies to dark matter and dark energy whatever they end up being.

Nobody said the aliens were smart.

That’s quite some hostility and unhelpfulness.

Anyway, after an overly difficult search (go enshitification) I did find this. So I have edited that part of my first post. The overall point remains though - life as we know it doesn’t always make use of Every possibility, so lack of use (on earth anyway) does not mean lack of existence.

Anyway, I was indeed wrong about two of my examples, so here’s two more to replace them, of very similar nature:

Nothing evolved to transmit or receive neutrinos or gravitational waves.
Mostly because doing so for neutrinos would require being the size of a large building for receiving, or containing a nuclear reactor (oh hey, there’s another thing life hasn’t done) for transmitting. For gravitational waves that would be small city sized for receiving, or being star sized with uneven mass at high speed for transmitting.

[citation needed]

I was very careful to phrase that with ‘selected for’ because of course things absorb radiation. That’s how bones are visible in X-ray radiology. But that doesn’t mean it is something they evolved specifically to do.

There are tons of phenomena or technologies that exist but aren’t used by life. The most famous is probably the wheel (with an axel, rolling a whole body doesn’t count, nor does cellular machinery).

As far as I know no living thing has selected for transmitting or receiving radio frequency radiation, nor X-rays or gamma rays. [Edit: eventually and with no useful guidance I managed to find This. Note how I linked it so others can learn about it. Still didn’t find anything for RF. End edit.] (I’m sure electric eels and such put out some RF, but only as a side effect. They aren’t using it for communication or sensing for example)

That’s really weird to see those in boxes. They are the main brand that comes in bags where I am at least. (Besides the super bland religious-or-something brand)

Some people call them Maurice.

Who are all these people in the photographs you inherited from your own parents, then I did from you? How were they related to me?

Of course vulnerabilities exist. And creating a major one like this for an LLM would likely lead to it destroying things like a toddler (in fact this has already happened to a company run by idiots)

But what it didn’t do was copy-with-changes as would be required to ‘evolve’ like a virus. Because training these models requires intense resources and isn’t just a terminal command.

Why would someone direct the output of an LLM to a terminal on its own machine like that? That just sounds like an invitation to an ordinary disaster with all the ‘rm -rf’ content on the Internet (aka training data). That still wouldn’t be access on a second machine though, and also even if it could make a copy, it would be an exact copy, or an incomplete (broken) copy. There’s no reasonable way it could ‘mutate’ and still work using terminal commands.

And to be a meme requires minds. There were no humans or other minds in my analogy. Nor in your question.

If you know that it’s fancy autocomplete then why do you think it could “copy itself”?

The output of an LLM is a different thing from the model itself. The output is a stream of tokens. It doesn’t have access to the file systems it runs on, and certainly not the LLM’s own compiled binaries (or even less source code) - it doesn’t have access to the LLM’s weights either. (Of course it would hallucinate that it does if asked)

This is like worrying that the music coming from a player piano might copy itself to another piano.