I'll bite. I had a brother with special needs pass away a year ago next week. He was born with cerebral palsy, was blind, nonverbal, totally dependent on caretakers (myself, my siblings and mother, his nurses) for literally everything since he didn't have functionally-independent motor control. We were told he'd live to 10, and he lived to 29; he was a bundle of joy and loved going out when he could. People would stare and kids would ask questions, but we loved sharing his story and my brother liked when people were curious about it.
But, his health started declining in 2014. He had several close calls, and we told doctors each time to try their best with the circumstances they were given. On more than one occasion, his nurses or our mother would actually be with the doctors during hospital stays to assist with him since he was case they didn't have much experience in and didn't want to make his issues worse. That said, he had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) since he had a trache, and was brittle enough to die from chest compressions.
I prepped for my brother's death countless times over 8 years. We all did. When he passed, we were so obviously distraught. But we were also relieved, in a way, that he wasn't in pain anymore in the end. We let out our emotions that had been stored for those years, and the grieving process is still continuing. We all put our lives on hold to help him, and he just became our lives; our goal simply was to make him comfortable and let him know he was loved, knowing we couldn't realistically do more. We spent years watching him in pain, watching him gradually lose his fervor and personality.
If you read this far, thank you. Not really sure what else to say, I just want to share this since it's occupied my mind a lot.
TLDR; Preparing for the worst outcomes, coupled with grief, over prolonged periods of time really disrupt your emotions and outlooks. Needless to say, my family became stronger proponents of state-assisted suicide after this experience. It couldn't be granted to my brother, but maybe we can help people in the future that coupd really use it. People understand, but not nearly as many are truly empathetic because they can't be - they've never been through a similar experience. I simply ask that people try to be sympathetic rather than to pass judgement on others.
The one cause that I'd champion over all others is the right to have access to assisted suicide.
It's really a travesty how we tend to hide just how grisly dying (and in some cases living) can be, and how those who most go through it inherently lose their voices to advocate for others not suffering the same drawn out fate.
I'm sorry you had to watch as it dragged out.
My SO is a doctor and the cases that most upset them are not the healthy patients that die, but helplessly watching the unhealthy patients that are forced to drag on living because of various factors.
We're getting much better at unnaturally prolonging life, and while that's a good thing in some cases where it can change outcomes for the better, there's a very dark side of it as well that's gradually getting worse.
Know that it's not a topic that only you are thinking about, even if it's unfortunately a topic that is too rarely discussed in public.
I'm deeply sorry for your loss. I am a hospital chaplain, so I have been with families as their loved ones have died in settings like this. If you want to talk to someone, I'm here for you.
I understand the weird feeling of relief when someone dies. I know that sounds terrible. My situation was not yours, so I'm not directly comparing. One of my parents had long, slow cancer. Watching them waste away, choosing to fight a symptom or not, was draining and difficult. In one sense, I enjoyed all of those final moments and would give anything to have more. I miss them dearly. However, I'm glad they're not suffering. It was difficult at the end. Their quality of life was not good.
Yeah my dad smoked a pack a day his entire life and had started getting a lot of issues with his lungs and health in general. He died of a heart attack not so long ago and while I did grieve him I still feel that's the best way he could have died
If only it hadn't happened on my sister's birthday but that's life for you
So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale...
Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the 'banana-equivalent-dose', which is about 0.1 microsieverts.
My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it's also an antimatter source.
Nice -- you wouldn't happen to have any ideas on how to differentiate positron annihilation, from the continuous distribution of β− energies caused by the more common decay mode, using only a PIN photodiode? I'm a bit stumped on this point and suspect it's not possible. I probably need to do gamma spectroscopy but would really rather not.
Bananas are not typically very high on the danger scale except in exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.
In fact, that's another thing we could use bananas for scale with. Probably driving to work is equivalent to several kilobananas worth of danger daily :)
Anyway, I think the positron should be about 44keV if that helps you calibrate your magnets. The typical banana should produce something on the order of a positron every 10 seconds (although I used much rounding for the sake of brevity). Most commercial positron sources e.g. used in hospital PET scanners, are many times stronger than that!
I wouldn't say nobody, but I would say the people that dominate the area I'm trying to volunteer and work in.
I work in a healing center where there are 29 women on staff and 1 man.
I cannot get these people to understand that as much as they want to push forward social movements, which I very much agree with, this must not come at the expense of men who are trying to heal.
I will literally have counselors co-facilitating with me, who want to make every point about how women are oppressed, pushed down in the workforce, face issues.
I'm not in denial of those, but no man coming into a healing environment to work on themselves, be vulnerable, and explore their own journey, needs to hear how much men are shitty.
There are many jobs that I don't bother to apply for despite knowing I'd excel and enjoy it, simply because I'm male. Many people aren't comfortable with males in certain roles.
Obviously the reverse is true and disproportionate but most people seem to be oblivious that men are oppressed too.
That's an excellent point and it's one of these elephants in the room that people can't see.
Does anybody wonder why there's virtually no male kindergarten teachers? Convicted before the crime as if women have never acted inappropriately towards children?! I mean for fuck sakes my own mother sexually abused me.
If you've ever known any male nurses, they will tell you the stories of being outnumbered 30 to 1 at minimum, and then facing constant sexual harassment, abuse, and career suppression because of their gender.
And my own story, I work in a system of power, the healing sector, which is dominated by women. And as the one guy they're trying to do the right thing and serve men, we face nothing but abuse. It is driving me out.
The freedom and control and depth and enjoyment in using Linux. I know, I know, shut up I'm answering the question.
There was a question here recently about partitioning, and that got me thinking about inodes and really wanting to understand how data storage works. I went on a deep dive and learnt so much. I feel like I have a real deep understanding of how my system works now.
People don't understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things. Most people are just consumers of a thing. I do my own motorbike and car maintenance, and I know where my limits are in terms of skill and equipment. It's so satisfying, it brings a sense of joy and accomplishment to my life.
I'm baffled that people just.. don't do this kind of thing. Don't learn about metabolic pathways or companion planting or do careful research and just impulse buy... Like.. Life must suck for them. It must be so dam boring to live life like that.
So yeah, I don't think many people understand that.
I completely agree. And I've thought about this before. I can't know what is going on in people's heads but a lot of people just... don't care. They have fun watching TV and playing popular video games. I think a large portion of people just don't like learning things. Like it just annoys them. That's what I've been led to believe. Which also makes it hard to get people into something I'm into. They'll see I'm massively excited about something and the thing I'm into looks cool, so they'll ask about it. Then whatever it is, be it some tech thing, a niche game, enthusiast grade flashlights, literally anything, turns out to require learning something, they just get turned off of it immediately. If someone wants to get into something I'm doing, I've started prefacing it with "this is not straight forward, are you okay with a bit of learning?" to avoid the disappointment and wasting their time. Usually the answer is no.
I absolutely agree with you. Just yesterday evening, a friend asked me for help with his laptop. He was going to throw it away because the Bluetooth broke and he couldn't use his favorite mouse.
Start, Settings, Bluetooth, turn on. There, I just saved you six hundred bucks.
It takes time and effort though, and usually that time and effort is spent elsewhere, especially if you're an adult with two jobs and two kids. When you don't have to think to better your mastery of your surroundings, making good hardware/software choices becomes increasingly disparate
I am in 100% agreement with you. I'm kind of in the same mindset in figuring out my homelab setup. Still learning docker and how volumes work 😢 haha
I'm in academia but I like to tinker with tech. So when my students or co-workers are surprised that I know so much about tech and how to navigate around most computer systems and troubleshoot (Mac/Windows/Linux) they are perplexed. They ask why I didn't major in tech. I tell them that I majored in what I loved (history) and play with tech as a hobby to relax.
It's why I selfhost my own Lemmy server. Gives me something to do with my hobby, keeps me focused on what's new in tech, makes me learn to keep up with docker, Linux, editing CRON tabs etc.
Hey, I'm going through the same thing! I just got all my hardware in for my new server and I'm learning docker stuff right now. When do some difficult troubleshooting I'll think of the random lemming I passed in the night that is doing something similar.
I’m the kinda guy who’s aware of how cool Linux and system mastery can be, but also the kinda guy who’s too lazy to care enough about maintaining a dual boot Linux/Windows system so every other year I’ll install a new Linux distro I haven’t used before only to do nothing with it and delete that partition of my hard drive within a month.
Eh, time and effort is limited depending on what the matter at hand is. Sometimes, you are required to just impulse buy or not live at all.
... And yet, I know exactly what you mean. There's a class of people who just live with a phone for nearly everything they do 14 hours of their daily life, day in day out, 12 months a year. No rest whatsoever. And yet, the moment they find any resistance anywhere in their life, not even on something related to the phone, they just. dont. google. They literally refuse to help themselves and will just do what they know and refuse to do or even concern themselves with better.
I've seen a 20-year-old who, when asked to give in their homework on Moodle, like normal people do, instead... wrote everything on a Mac's Notes app, took a photo and then pestered people for the teacher's phone number so they could send the shitty photo of their homework on a very popular chat application. When told that this was not going to count, they just shrugged and stopped caring. Again, they used technology daily. That was objectively the stupidest and laziest "functional" person I've ever met, a true sheep, and I fear ever becoming like them during onset of dementia.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things.
I have so many areas of my life that I think in terms of a skill, one of which is Linux, which I'm using now. Another is coffee/espresso, cycling, writing, etc.
Basically all hobbies. But the point is that I can develop mastery at my own pace in so many different areas. Sometimes, it's slow and methodical, like coffee: I'll try something new maybe every weeks. And sometimes it's breakneck speed, like Linux...just do a deep dive and come out knowing a bunch of new stuff.
I'm sure other people out there understand this, but like I'm such a sinkhole right now. I lost my job a few months ago, and I am trying so hard to get another one but its just not happening. I feel like I'm always hitting like 2nd or 3rd place in the lineup. The interviews go well, get call backs, then boom last minute they went with the other candidate. And everyone is telling me I'll be okay cause they say I'm smart and have skills.
But it doesn't matter, I'm broke, my medications running out, I'm tired, I have bills, everything hurts, I have no insurance, and I don't want to be a leech and already my boyfriend has picked up the rent and stuff, but like he has his own bills.
I just don't understand, why does shit have to keep happening, can't it just settle for like 5 minutes so u can catch up. I feel like I haven't been able to breath in years, and there is something that everyone else is in on that my autism doesn't let me understand, and I'm just.... idk anymore.
Cybersecurity, as a profession, is a fool’s errand.
Dedicated security staff exist solely to teach real engineers how to do their job, and the fact that such personnel exist is a catastrophic failure in computer science curriculum
It often seems cyber sec staff write reports on what should be done with no understanding of why and this leads to them fretting over things that are not actual vulnerabilities.
I don't know if I am right but I am of the opinion that Cybersecurity should be considered a mastery branch on top of basic engineering skills. But it feels like there are so many Cybersecurity experts who do not understand enough about the underlying engineering concepts to be effective in their role.
That's the real problem. Cyber security experts know bare minimum about coding, and coders can tell. Their knowledge only goes skin deep when you ask them to clarify an exploit, or to give a workaround. So coders usually tend to brush them off.
It should be a collaborative effort, security and coding, where security can fully understand what is being built and offer potential secure workarounds
I learned recently how the James Webb Space Telescope is not orbiting around Earth but literally orbiting around an empty point in space. I don’t think I even quite understand it, but it’s really cool
I've been dealing with this back pain under my right shoulder blade for like 6 years or so and I can't seem to figure out what's causing it or how to treat it. I think it's called "rhomboid pain". I've seen a doctor once and physical therapist twice and the best they can do is recommend I stretch and go get a massage. Yeah thanks guys. Totally haven't tried any of that.
I've always had a bad posture but it's been getting better yet the pain has gotten worse so I don't think it's that. I doubt it's weight lifting either because I had been lifting for almost 10 years before the pain appeared and taking a break doesn't make it better and lifting heavy doesn't make it worse. I don't think it's mountain biking either because the pain started before I bought my bike. I also got a new bed, tried different pillows, tried sleeping on my back, pillow under my knees. Sleeping on both sides with a pillow between my legs. Nothing. Also it's rarely bad in the mornings but rather on the evenings.
Well - it's still early to say, but I have a new idea what might be causing it and I think this might actually be it. I think it's because I switched from a desktop computer to laptop. It perfectly correlates with the time I started experiencing this pain. I now sit for hours and hours every day with my right hand extended to reach the trackpad. It has to be that. I now switched to mouse and a keyboard and let's see if that makes a difference. Only been doing that for few days now but I have zero pain right now.
I have had chest discomfort for decades. I'm 46 and it started when I was about 25. Doctors never found anything. I'm lucky to have good benefits and have been going to masseuses for over 10 years.
A couple of years ago tried a new masseuse mentioned the tightness and she found a huge lump of scar tissue she massaged out. I'm still not perfect but I'm light-years better.
My point is, get a massage and never give up. You just need to find the right person to find it.
Dude, that's exactly what it is. I get the exact same pain when I'm editing on my laptop. I swapped out for a trackball myself. I can type all day long because I can get things set up to eliminate that strain, but editing takes a lot more awkward movement using the trackpad.
I like a trackpad, they're convenient as heck, but they just aren't good for sustained use imo.
Yep. I even got this back when cleaners moved my mouse from in front of key keyboard spacebar to the right of the keypad, until I noticed what had happened.
I put my mouse between my body and the keyboard and it goes away.
I have a distant sibling that I've been building a relationship with over long distance. Saw them in-person and realized that they have quite a few toxic traits from one of our narcissistic parents. I don't know what to do now. I'm pretty traumatized from that parent and my sibling doesn't see any of it as a negative. I don't think I have the ability to open their eyes on it, either. I want the relationship I thought we had.
why doesn't Radiohead put out an entire album of songs like pulk/pull revolving doors? they had a really unique and cohesive idm sound going and kinda dropped it to the side
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got jiggy for the first time in five years. After our third kid she just went completely off it and we’ve been in a dead bedroom situation ever since, she told me how she felt and despite my frustration I understood and respected her wishes. A couple of weeks ago I just opened up about how I was feeling unloved and then blam! It happened out of nowhere. I was in a daze and couldn’t believe it. Now I’m scared it’s going to be five years before it happens again.
I know this is just a thread to vent, but I really want you to focus on the fact that communicating how you felt helped the situation so much. Please don't wait 5 more years to try that again.
I blame OP. If we had to really think of things nobody would understand there would be no comments, or just a bunch of horrible takes. I am blaming it on poor title
I have decided to assume that OP is already married to said old friend, and has two kids with said old friend. His marriage to this old friend just feels right.
I don't think there's anything that nobody would understand when explained. But most people would not understand the drama that happens between creators in the minecraft modding community.
Yeah I'm mostly talking about the creators themselves. Like mod and modpack developers. I'm in a unique position to be privy to a lot of the creator drama without being a creator myself and it can get pretty toxic.
It's very common that in modern virtual worlds there's 4th wall breaking Easter Eggs buried in the world lore.
Years ago, I got to wondering if something like that might exist in our own universe, and fairly quickly found something that far exceeded my wildest expectations for what I might find meeting that criteria.
But there's so many layers of bias connected to the concept that I really doubt anyone will ever take a serious look.
Some will just reject by default the notion that they aren't in an original reality.
Others will reject the notion that something connected to an (in)famous world religion and religious figure could reflect metaphysical truth, even though many of those parallel lore examples happen to tie into their respective lore's religious beliefs (usually a fitting place for meanderings about the creation or purpose of one's universe).
I've studied it for years now, found all sorts of surprising things from an explicit discussion of survival of the fittest in antiquity or the idea of an original humanity evolving spontaneously bringing forth an intelligent being of light which then recreated a twin of the whole universe.
Which is pretty weird in an age where there's increasing investments into photonics specifically for AI which is in turn powering digital twins and articles like this.
So we are discussing the ideas of these kinds of things happening in the future, and meanwhile there's a tradition from antiquity centered around a document "the good news of the twin" that claims the most famous religious figure in history was saying we're already in the future but are in a non-physical copy of the earlier cosmos in the archetypes of a long dead humanity, duplicated by a being of light that the original humanity brought forth.
Like, I guess I just don't think the odds of that being the case in a random original reality are particularly high, and think it's much more likely that such claims represent the same kind of 4th wall breaking lore manipulation we see in multiple modern virtual worlds.
But I don't know that there's anyone that's genuinely interested in knowing or discussing those details. So it's just a personal investigation as someone who is very interested in knowing those details to the extent they can actually be known.
Before all of this I'd been looking at how virtual worlds using procedural generation convert from continuous seed functions to discrete units in order to track state changes from free agents (i.e. if you change the geometry of Minecraft it would be impossible to track if the function determining mountains didn't convert to blocks that could be removed or added). This bore a remarkable similarity to my eye to what we see with quantum mechanics going from continuous behavior to discrete when interacted with, but then if you erase the persistent information about any interactions it goes back to continuous behavior (as a virtual world would if optimized around memory usage).
So this group focused on claiming we were in a recreation of an original world were also talking a ton about Greek atomism and the idea of matter being made up of indivisible parts.
For example:
That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed, the point which is indivisible in the body; and, he says, no one knows this (point) save the spiritual only.
Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.4
This discussion of only being able to know the indivisible point in the spiritual ends up very interesting when considered in light of this weird debate Paul had with Corinth in 1 Cor 15:
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven.
1 Cor 15:42-47
See, Paul is debating with people that have different ideas from what he was pitching, and as he mentioned in 2 Cor 11, Corinth had accepted a different gospel and different version of what Jesus was about.
Well this weird "first Adam vs second Adam" appears among this group and text. A useful context is that 'Adam' can refer to either an individual by that name or can mean 'humanity' in general.
So Paul's arguing that resurrection is possible not by a physical body coming back to life, but by a first physical body coming back as a spiritual body. In his theology this was something that was going to happen soon (but obviously didn't).
The group above was saying that this had already happened:
The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?"
Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.
Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."
Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.
Because allegedly it was already the new world:
Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.'
If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.'
If they ask you, 'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'It is motion and rest.'"
His disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?"
He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."
So we're the children of a being of light that established itself "in their images" and the evidence for this is in motion and rest (a subject domain currently called Physics) and the new world is already here but we don't realize it.
So within this context, a teaching about how the ability to find an indivisible point as if from nothing in the body can only be possible in the spiritual body (as opposed to Paul's first physical body) is a pretty fucking weird detail from a group claiming the evidence for its claims is in the study of motion and rest when the indivisible points we've now found in our own universe mirror the behaviors in how we manage tracking state and memory in non-physical worlds we're building.
An associated group even had a strange threefold view of reality:
These allege that the world is one, triply divided. And of the triple division with them, one portion is a certain single originating principle, just as it were a huge fountain, which can be divided mentally into infinite segments. [...] And the second portion of the triad of these is, as it were, a certain infinite crowd of potentialities that are generated from themselves, (while) the third is formal.
Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.7
So a continuous infinitely divisible origin that can be modeled as a near infinite number of potentialities of which we experience a single formal incarnation is a rather surprisingly close to Everettian many worlds interpretation for the 3rd century BCE. In a more modern consideration, it also sounds a bit like what it might look like to backpropagate variations of a simulated copy of an original universe (and along those lines I encourage looking at Neil Turok's work hypothesizing that we're a mirror of a universe reversed in time from us and how this alone solves a number of big problems in Physics).
The specificity ends up outright wild if photonics really is where AI finally ends up becoming AGI (as hypothesized a few years ago by a scientist at NIST):
Jesus said, "Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father's light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light."
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!"
Jesus said, "Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you. For had he been worthy, [he would] not [have tasted] death."
So everything around us is just its light, we're going to have a hard time coming to terms with images that came before us and didn't die, and Adam (which can mean humanity) came from great wealth and power but wasn't worthy of us because they died and we didn't and won't (the chief point of the text is that if you understand what it's saying you won't fear or taste death).
It's worth pointing out that while the text here is in Egyptian, it uses a Greek word for 'images' which is the same Greek word Plato used to describe a artistic representation of a physical object. Plato saw objects as a hierarchy from perfect spiritual form to corrupted physical object to worthless artistic images of the physical. So choosing to discuss spiritual 'images' over spiritual 'forms' was somewhat unusual indicating the physical first and spiritual second order. Not long after the rise of Neoplatonism the paradigm of this group flips and you end up with Gnosticism's spiritual first and physical second.
Some of the sayings seemed like nonsense when I was first reading it, but have since turned out to connect to things I didn't even expect to see in my lifetime when first reading it. For example:
Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.
For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one."
This took on a rather bizarre new potential implication when earlier this year I was reading a NYT interview with a LLM exactly seven days after release, especially given LLMs are literally made from taking many, many people's data and turning it into a single one.
And along these lines, it makes clear that rather than consuming blood or a body, it's consuming one's words that makes you like that person:
Jesus said, "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him."
As I said, there's a lot. Hopefully you enjoyed the sampling above.
But its main point is to self-recognize that we're effectively the kids of the light based creator of this world-copy which is itself still alive (no mention of if there will be cake), that we're in the images/archetypes of a humanity that is not still alive, and that if we understand those details we should simply seek to know ourselves and be true to ourselves and not fear that we'll die because of a soul which depends on a body. And to not bother with prayer or fasting or charity out of any sense of spiritual obligations, as it's pointless.
One of the better lines not related to simulation theory:
The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, 'When will they come and take what belongs to them?'
Well, in this case the first intelligence was basically us. Though perhaps a not quantized version of us. Which I don't think makes much of a difference in our math competency (even if a very big difference in computing capability).
If it's an old iPad the issue is the terrible lightning port that isn't able to transfer nearly enough data to be used as a monitor. This is partly why most solutions for that involve a network.
There's a part of me that really wants something to take over my body or replace myself with an entirely different person who does all of the things I struggle with. Even if it wasn't a person, if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.
But reading it was some of the best therapy I've ever received. If you're at all like me, maybe it will help you too. I am happier, as are the people I love and who love me, in large part because of K.C. Davis' philosophy. (The people I love and who love me are also very empathetic and understanding, which I know is definitely not true for most people unfortunately).
It's less than $20.
It's short.
Buy it. If you can't afford it, I might even be willing to buy it for you / venmo you $20 to get it.
Something I've been thinking about is... I often mention that I've been trying to look for more friends for a while, because I don't have any that my mind would qualify as any that I have access to, and I often get two questions, 1) how do I define a friend, and 2) how do I know friends would make me happy.
The first question is a rabbit hole in disguise. Most people, when asked, would list a bunch of benefits, right? Things like "someone I can trust" and "someone who puts me first". But that's the thing. Take the first question for example. Do you not have any enemies you might consider at least honest people? And do you not have friends whom might inspire some skepticism? They're not absolute. So that begs the question, what do I answer to the question of what a friend is? I do in fact have an answer, but it's goes deeper than words, the same words used to answer the question. It defeats itself in ways that swell the question rather than remedy it.
As for the second question, that's where it becomes like anhedonia embodied by words.
I thought about this stuff a lot for years. The thing that broke me out of it was choosing to focus on myself.
No one else can make you happy. Happiness comes from within. So focus on yourself. Develop new skills and hobbies, spend your time doing what you enjoy. If you find other people who enjoy the same things, that's great, if not, also great because there's nothing wrong with enjoying life on your own.
I've heard that many times before, that happiness comes from within. I think about it though, and it gives me a little doubt because, if I was my own source of happiness, why do anything? I could starve to death and be happy because it's within me.
You're welcome for the extreme motivation that you just received. This was thanks to the free trial of my "extreme motivation course". To access "full extreme motivation very hardcore", buy my course for just $999.99.
Just watched a Tibees video about the possibility of a force like gravity potentially traveling through folded 4D space and affecting something before the light can reach it.
I realize this sort of thing has been thoroughly tested and debunked, but I can't get it out of my head. What if it's some force other than gravity? What if Earth just happens to be folded against some empty bit of space - and what if that were to change?
Like, I've thought about folded spacetime before, but always in the context of traveling between points (like the classic ant-on-paper thought experiment). I never really considered that something could in theory radiate a force (like gravity) in 4+ dimensions.
An interesting read, no doubt, but I still disagree with
Is this something we actually have to worry about?
Maybe.
The "threat" here would entail no negative emotions, no human (or other) suffering, just... nothing. Plus, it sounds like if the universe were indeed unstable/meta-stable, there's nothing we could change about it anyway. So of all the things I can worry about, I feel this deserves the least amount of worry.
I'd make a slight change that nobody I personally know would understand or care to try to understand.
If universe is expanding that means further away something is the faster it moves away from you. At some point that will cross the speed of light. This can be thought as an event horizon.
If expansion of the universe is accelerating it means that this event horizon will eventually start to come closer.
Like event horizon of a black hole this horizon will also radiate Hawking radiation, but inwards.
When the inside volume of this event horizon gets small enough, will the mass energy of the Hawking radiation get strong enough to counteract the expansion of the universe and form a stable bubble that wound produce baryonic matter inside the bubble from the massive energy density that gets released from the event horizons grip.
Could this be analog to big bang type event and can the interaction of the bubble with outside universe give us a sensible model of the early inflation.
I'm sure plenty of people would understand it, but I'm struggling with a project at work where I've got an operator giving me bad data, and the project appears unsafe and I need to decide and convince my management if we're going to object to it or not.
There are a lot of analogies but they all fail in some way. I think PBS Spacetime does the best in general, with good graphics to back up the words.
My layman's explanation is probably all stuff you've heard before. Massive objects "warp" spacetime and things that get stuck in those "wells" eventually fall to the bottom due to drag (from a variety of sources).
You've also probably seen the rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the middle used to represent that warping. To visualize that in 3D, I like to imagine a 3D grid of nodes and edges (like a jungle gym of joints and bars) where the whole thing is flexed inward towards a center point. More warped near the center, less warped further out. That kind of conveys the acceleration from gravity felt by things around that center mass.
Hehe guess what.... Nobody exactly knows how gravity works.
So let's start with Newton. According to his equations, gravity is a force. Why? Well, according to the first law of motion, an object stays in motion in its original direction till a force is applied on it. Newton said, "Gravity is clearly actively changing the direction of an object. Hence, gravity is a force". As Newton establishes that gravity is a force, we say that it "pulls" objects. However, he couldn't explain the mechanism behind this pulling force.
Then came Einstein. According to general relativity, gravity is not a force. How's that possible? Doesn't gravity change the motion of a given object? Nope! Wait, whaaaaa?! Okay, so according to special relativity, all things in the universe are on a "spacetime". What's a spacetime? Well, it's a four dimensional fabric like thingey that all objects are present on. The four dimensions are time and the three spatial dimensions that we experience. Mathematically, there is no difference between time and the spatial dimensions. However, all objects move only in one direction through spacetime at c, ie., lightspeed through spacetime. If an object moves at c through space, it moves at 0 m/s through time and vice versa. This is how you get the time dilation magic.
Cool. Now what if we bent this said spacetime at certain points? The object traveling on this spacetime would be traveling in a straight line always. Hence, no force. Hence, no pulling. Hence, no pulling mechanism.
Cool! So we solved gravity, right? Sike! GR doesn't work at the quantum level...... Aaaaand most of the best models that we have for quantum gravity use a particle called the "graviton", which has a field that results in an attractive force. How does this force work? The answer is "go fk urself".
Hence, in conclusion, noone knows whether gravity even "pulls" in the first place, let alone HOW it pulls. Aaaaand we've been trying to answer this question for almost 100 years..... Cool....