rollin

Not sure if this is a joke, but if not this software is to help protect *against* ddos attacks, not for running them 😂

Not without the correct licence, no

You’re mixing up nightmares now lol

Yes it’s true that everything we perceive could be fake, when I turn my head to the left, the world that I was looking at before could disappear. That’s not a new paranoia, it’s been around for literally hundreds if not thousands of years.

The simulacrum hypothesis is a little different in that it tries to bring it up to date, and use statistical principles to show that our universe is very unlikely to be real.

The idea is that at some point, a life form will create machines so powerful that they can simulate the entire universe in a way that is indistinguishable from the real universe. There is a real universe in this vision, and it functions very much like the universe which we ourselves inhabit. We are not special in our simulated universe, just like the beings that do live in the real universe are not special. That is, every part of the universe exists in every simulation just as it does in the one real universe. By saying no beings are special, I mean that there are no shortcuts to fool one being (or group of beings) into thinking the universe is more complete than it really is - the entire universe is fully simulated.

I’m afraid you didn’t understand what I wrote.

If it were to take 1 year to render each minute, it would take 6500 trillion years to simulate the universe from the big bang to now. That is, the parent universe which is running our simulation must run it for an impracticably long time.

As for your other point, yes each simulation has to be a similar universe to the one we ourselves live in. Only that way do you end up with vastly more simulated universes than real universes, and the conclusion that statistically we must be living in a simulated universe and not a real one.

If you don’t have that part, then you do not have anything more compelling than Descartes’ age-old nightmare that an evil demon could be deceiving us about everything we perceive.

It could take a year in U0 to simulate a minute in U1, and so forth, and we wouldn’t notice it.

I’m not sure about this. Our current universe is 13 billion years old. At one year to one minute, that would take over 6500 trillion years to simulate (I think).

The solar system will only live another few billion years or so. All the stars in universe will burn out in around 100 trillion years. So it would probably not be possible to run a simulation for that long.

“In order to bake an apple pie from scratch, you first have to create the universe”

If you don’t create the universe, then you aren’t really making an apple pie from scratch. In the same way, what you’re referring to doesn’t simulate the universe - not in the way that it is simulated in the simulacrum hypothesis.

In the simulacrum hypothesis, the entire universe is simulated. You exist entirely inside the simulation rather than being merely plugged into it, and so do I and so does every other consciousness that exists.

huh that’s interesting, I’ve never seen a disclaimer like that before. At least they’re honest I guess.

The “article” seems to be a summary of this press release from the European Central Bank: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr251030~8c5b5beef0.en.html (and this site lets you choose a language, so there’s not even need to run it through Google)

Well, there may have been a period when MS was trying to improve product quality, and in that time, yes maybe they did have very comprehensive automated testing processes. But before that, up to the time of Windows 7 I guess, their quality was dog shit.

In the early days, MS was an undisputed monopoly though, and not only did they not test thoroughly, they hardly even tried to fix bugs - the userbase had to take care of that too. Earlier versions of Windows had all sorts of workarounds and 3rd party tools to try and get things to work properly.

I suspect that once they’d achieved their objective of improving quality, there just weren’t the incentives there any more for middle management to allocate resources to things like comprehensive tests.

This requires someone to spot the AI stuff, but for less common languages, there are fewer people who even can read an article. Thus AI articles in rare languages are more likely to slip through unchecked, and if other AIs are training themselves on wiki articles, this could cause a feedback loop where rare languages become distorted. Something like that I think, didn’t actually read the article sorry.

At least his paws are still warm

It seems to only have an Arduino as processor, so presumably the former i.e. you need a PC to plug this into. It seems to have highly simplified tracking compared to something like a Quest - a single Inertial Measurement Unit. All enough for sim racing which is this guy’s jam, but I wonder how well the tracking stays calibrated.

Thanks for the info. I’ll look into that. The issue with shutter glasses is, in addition to the wire, the fact that you are only seeing every other frame, alternating in each eye, making the image appear at half brightness. Still workable though, if you’re a 3D fan like me. I had a pair of shutter glasses ages ago, when Nvidia drivers used to support them - you could turn any DirectX game into 3D. VR has surpassed that now, by a long shot. I’ll def look into the projector though, it sounds more practical for watching movies with more than one person.

Projectors still mostly support 3D

These require glasses I assume?
I’m one of the few people who actually love 3D for movies. I’d heard of the TVs but not projectors. I’d watch all movies in 3D if I could, particularly on a large screen like a projector’s. It’s especially great IMO for movies with lots of computer-generated effects - I saw the first Avatar in 3D at an IMAX and it was amazing.

According to the article, the lie that the current Danish chair of the rotating Council Presidency is being accused of making by Patrick Breyer is that the European Parliament will refuse to extend the current soon-to-expire voluntary scanning regime unless the EU Council first agrees to implement Chat Control:

“This is a blatant lie designed to manufacture a crisis,” states Dr. Breyer, a long-time digital freedom fighter. “There is no such decision by the European Parliament. There has not even been a discussion on this issue. The Commission has not yet proposed to extend the current legislation, and the European Parliament has not yet appointed Rapporteurs to discuss it. We are witnessing a shameless disinformation campaign to force an unprecedented mass scanning law upon 450 million Europeans. I call on EU governments, and particularly the German government, not to fall for this blatant manipulation. To sacrifice the fundamental right to digital privacy and secure encryption based on a fabrication would be a catastrophic failure of political and moral leadership.”

the word’s not useless, it’s just that its meaning has evolved to encompass pretty much all authoritarianism, rather than just a specific subset of it.

You can have nodes on a mesh network which act as gateways to the internet, but such nodes are going to have to go through an ISP. There’s no other way to connect to the internet at large unfortunately.

this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.

You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.

The other approach is not to try to block out all non-approved internet sources, and instead teach your child about the dangers out there, and how to handle them.

If a young child becomes addicted to online porn for instance, it’s an indication of deeper issues and it seems to be missing the point to put the blame on network operators for not blocking children effectively enough. I don’t think a healthy well developed child would become addicted to porn in the first place.

That’s the real challenge for parents: they don’t need to be a part-time network über-wizard but rather a stable trustworthy figure for their children to rely on who can guide them through the often difficult journey of growing up.

they’re mammals though, sharing a common ancestor with pigs (who are also renown for their intelligence)

I stopped paying for YouTube when they started cracking down on free users, and stopped using them pretty much entirely. It was hard though - even though I have Netflix, I always found it easier to find interesting and informative things to watch on YouTube than Netflix. I’d watch YouTube several times a day, whereas with Netflix I usually spend about 10 or 15 minutes scrolling through their god-awful UI before closing it and finding something else to do.