The patent system is fundamentally broken. It could be fixed, but right now, in the current state, it totally fails all its good for.

• Patents can be filed with hardly any checks in place. The point of a patent office is to issue patents, not to issue valid patents. Validity is verified in court.
• Patents don’t give you an actual claim to anything, only the right to sue, if you have enough money to afford a lawsuit. In patent court, running out of money is a common way to lose, which means that patent court strongly favours those with money.
• Patents are really expensive. We are talking about tens of thousands of Euros.

All that means that patents are completely unviable for the “small inventor” they were meant to protect. Patents largely function as a way for large corporations to bully smaller competitors out of the market.

It is a totally viable strategy to get an invalid patent and use it to bully a smaller competitor off the market who can’t afford to invalidate your patent.

As a small inventor patent law becomes an absolute minefield, since there’s hardly any way to find all the patents that you might accidentally violate with your invention.

Follow-up patents (meaning, you change some minor detail when your patent runs out to artificially extend the life of your patent by getting a new patent on the slightly modified versions) also break the other goal of patents which was to force inventors to open-source their invention through the patent.

So instead of a way to protect small inventors and making sure that ideas end up available to everyone, the current patent law does the exact opposite.

• The start and end of a simulation don’t need the start and end of the universe. If I fire up a game of Sims, it doesn’t start with the big bang and it doesn’t end with the heat death.
• The rules we know about our universe might just hold true for our simulation and have no bearing on what happens around the simulation. For example, water works very differently in e.g. Minecraft than it does in real life. For a being living in Minecraft, having a perfect understanding of in-game physics will not help that being to understand how real-life physics work.

This.

The models we have of reality are based on observations and forming theories that attempt to describe the observations.

Our models are, by definition, models and not the reality itself.

Since the paper is only based on the models and not on reality itself (which it can’t be since we don’t have access to the real inner workings of reality, so to say the “source code of reality”), the paper cannot actually say anything about reality, only about our understanding of it.

And pretty much any physicist worth their salt will freely admit that our models and our understanding of reality are flawed and imperfect. They are good and good enough to be used for a ton of real-world applications, but they are far from perfect and physics is far from solved.

I think you might be confusing something. The simulation hypothesis is rooted in the concept of the Boltzmann Braun, which is exactly what I described: A simulation of reality as in “the perceptions of a being is simulated” not “all of reality is simulated”.

I haven’t heard a single time so far by anyone seriously into that topic that a simulation would need to simulate reality to a perfect degree. That wouldn’t even really make any sense, neither from the argument, nor from the words. A simulation is always an abstraction, and since you bring up the world “simulacrum”, a simulacrum is something that by definition lacks the detail and sophistication of the original. A plastic apple is a simulacrum of a real apple, and in no way does a plastic apple replicate the cell structure or the biological details of a real apple. It’s just something that from a distance looks vaguely like the real thing.

And that’s what all forms of simulation hypothesis are based around: simulate everything necessary for the conciousness living in the simulation to believe it lives in reality.

In fact, humans have a mechanism that does just that built right into their brains: dreams. While dreaming your brain doesn’t accurately simulate reality down to the atom-level. All it does is simulate enough of your perception to make you believe you are experiencing what is happening in the dream.

Geh heulen, Alkoholiker.

“We can solve any problem by introducing an extra layer of abstraction. Except for the problem of too many layers of abstraction.”

Considering how important WASM is, I haven’t seen a single application of it.

WASM on the server seems especially weird since it’s not much more than a bytecode interpreter. At that point you could just use a JVM, maybe with some more cut-down API to make it more sandboxed.

Das hier. Mit beginnender Demenz sinkt das Urteilsvermögen, aber es ist erstmal meist weder für den Betroffenen noch für das Umfeld offensichtlich. Meist tut der Betroffene erstmal irgendwas wirklich Blödes bevor es den Leuten rund herum klar wird, dass was nicht in Ordnung ist und man einschreiten muss (u.A. indem man eine Diagnose anstrebt).

Der Opa meiner Frau hat mit 95 entschieden, dass er jetzt zu alt ist zum Autofahren, wollte aber keines seiner Kinder damit belasten, dass die das Auto verkaufen müssen.

Also hat er so einen “Wir kaufen dein Auto”-Typen von der Karte hinterm Scheibenwischer angerufen, und der hat gemeint, dass das Auto (welches in perfektem Zustand war) nur mehr verschrottet werden kann, und dass er es dem Opa für €1 abnimmt. Der Opa war dann richtig stolz auf sich, dass er das Auto selbstständig los geworden ist.

Mit 76 ist eine geistige Einschränkung (z.B. durch beginnende Demenz) nicht selten.

Every single day of my life I am grateful that my parents didn’t go through with their plan of moving to the USA when I was little.

Congratulations, you found a typo. Now what? Are you going to fine OP for it?

Dafür hast du einen Chef. Leite die Ärzte und Pflegekräfte an deinen Chef weiter.

“Chef hat gesagt ich muss eine Pause machen/ich darf keine Überstunden machen. Wenn dir das nicht passt, rede bitte mit meinem Chef.”

Dann kann der Chef ggf. mehr Personal anfordern oder dir offiziell einen Auftrag für (dann auch bezahlte) Überstunden geben.

Es ist nicht deine Position zu entscheiden, welche Arbeit wann gemacht werden soll oder nicht.

Bis zu einem gewissen Grad ja. Du wurdest angewiesen, dass du eine Pause machen solltest. Wenn du während deiner Pause stattdessen arbeitest, dann ist das schon dein Fehler, ja.

Du musst eben selbst stark genug sein um während deiner Pause nicht ans Telefon zu gehen und Aufträge, die außerhalb deiner Arbeitszeit gehen würden abzulehnen.

Wenn du dafür Ärger von den Auftraggebern bekommst, dann ist dafür dein Chef da. Sag dem Auftraggeber, dass du den Auftrag nicht vor Ende deiner Arbeitszeit fertig kriegst und er sich an deinen Chef wenden soll.

Wenn der Chef dann sagt, du sollst den Auftrag machen, dann ist es eine angewiesene Überstunde für die du bezahlt wirst. Wenn der Chef sagt, dass du den Auftrag nicht machen sollst, dann ist es an deinem Chef eine andere Lösung zu finden.

Indem du den Auftrag einfach annimmst und abarbeitest machst du es deinem Chef zu einem gewissen Grad unmöglich seinen Job zu machen. Dein Chef weiß dann ggf gar nicht dass zu viele Aufträge rein kommen und kann dann nicht darauf basierend neue Leute einstellen. Es nimmt auch deinem Chef die Verhandlungsbasis um neue Leute einzustellen. Wenn wichtige Arbeit liegen bleibt, dann ist es leicht neue Stellen zu begründen. Wenn aber eh alles ohne Probleme funktioniert (sogar ohne offizielle Überstunden), wie soll dein Chef dann argumentieren, dass das Arbeitspensum nicht schaffbar ist?

What most people intuitively understand, though, is that public roads are expensive, not profitable and still a worthwhile investment.

It’s kinda baffling that the same isn’t intuitively understandable to everyone when it comes to public transport.

This is going to happen more and more. The age of video evidence is well and truely over.

We had a quite unique run over the last 100 or so years, where video was first unfakable and then so hard to fake believably that video evidence was very close to a real proof.

This is now over, with AI tools making creating fakes easier than creating un-faked videos.

From now on we need to go back to trustworthy sources and consider everything from unknown sources as being faked, same as we always did with written word.

Time to rearm school crossing guards.

School crossings should be fitted with hole slots in the ground into which guards can place angled spear bollards that skewer oncoming cars thus protecting the crosswalk.

My Lenovo LOQ 15arp goes to sleep really nicely. Flawlessly, really, every single time.

It just can’t wake up from sleep and requires a reset to be able to do anything after a sleep on kernel 6.11+.

6.10 is fine.

Why the hell is sleep so difficult for Linux machines?

The bad cop is the husband. He’s just there crying instead of handcuffing and kicking the corpse.

Very simple fix for that perceived contradiction: A simulation doesn’t need to simulate everything. All it needs to simulate is the inputs and outputs perceived by a single human being, the observer, me.

For me it would be indistinguishable if the universe I am living in is real, if it’s a simulation or if it doesn’t exist at all and instead only the things I can perceive are simulated.

Simulating the perception of a single human being should be in the reach of our current calculation power.

Kind of how in a computer game only areas around a player are simulated.

Is there such a thing as a kid that dreads playing games on a computer?