DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]

A gaggle of particle physicists standing in a circle chanting “RING! WORLD! RING! WORLD!”

The goat pastures call to us all.

I nearly had a heart attack until I read the word “ARM” at the end.

It seems like ARM Arch is doomed for whatever reason.

Consciousness is not part of the observer effect (which is itself named in the most infuriating way possible, specifically because it makes people think that the universe is somehow aware of when something sentient is looking at it). “Observing” a particle requires interacting with it in such a way that you meaningfully affect its current state of being, whether that be deflecting it in a different direction than it was going or changing its velocity, and therefore it is impossible at a quantum level to be a passive observer that does not influence the outcome.

In the case of the double slit experiment, if unobserved light will act as a wave with interference and if observed then it acts like a particle. The reason for this is both complicated and simple: light behaves as a wave due to probability. There’s no way of observing a photon without influencing it, so therefore the best we can do is say it has a certain probability of being in this collection of spaces, which in the case of photons is a wave (because it can travel in any of a number of directions outwards from the photon emitter in the experiment, but all going away from the emitter and towards the wall the slits are cut into). For the purposes of this probability wave, the start position is the emitter and the end position is the wall behind the slits, so averaging out a large number of photons will recreate the interference pattern on the wall.

However, if you observe the photons at the slits to try and figure out which slits they’re going through you have influenced the photons and thus collapsed that probability wave into a particle, and in the process created a new probability wave from that moment onwards which has the same end position as the original wave, but now starts at the individual slit. From its perspective, there is no second slit, so now the wave acts as if it is in the single slit setup because from its perspective it is, hence the loss of interference.

Nothing here has anything to do with consciousness. You can recreate this experiment with no one in the room and it will behave exactly the same, and has a sound (if very confusing conventionally) mathematical cause.

On a side note, string theory is effectively unfalsifiable and therefore completely useless as a scientific theory.

Space is an ocean. That’s why there’s space whales.

Amazon is supposedly working on it, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up of it being any good.

Famously impossible thing to detect in historical records: massive amounts of uranium-235.

Time doesn’t slow down when you approach the speed of light

Correct, but only from your perspective. To other people you’ve slowed down, but from where you’re sitting (or careening through the cosmos at the universal speed limit) everything happens just as fast as it normally does.

the theory we’re using to describe much of the universe is based on a bad premise, that the speed of light is constant.

Quasi-correct. “The speed of light” as we think of it in physics is actually the speed of information, which dictates how quickly changes can propagate outwards (or put another way: how quickly you can know about something happening elsewhere). We refer to it as the speed of light because photons move at that speed in a vacuum due to having no mass and thus moving at the fastest possible speed, but things like gravitational waves also propagate at that same speed and have nothing to do with EM radiation. However, the speed of information doesn’t change; it’s a hard natural law with no known exceptions.

Physics in general is cheating for this thread though, because the answer to what makes stuff happen as we understand it is a giant metaphorical mass of “I 'unno.” The Standard Model, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, etc all have giant gaping holes in them that other models can often fill, but cannot be properly combined in any way that we’ve tried so far. They’re still correct enough to base your entire life around without any worries, but there’s always that last 0.01% that amounts to the margins of old maps reading “Here There Be Dragons”.

There’s a top surgery joke in here somewhere, I can feel it.

If you want to support your favorite artists, buy their merch while at one of their live shows. That’ll put literal orders of magnitude more cash in their pocket than streaming their music ever would, and you get a dope ass t-shirt out of it.

Sounds like a skill issue to me /s

“I’ll have it figured out by lunch, probably.”

You have to sell a new phone every 12-18 months, because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits. You have to differentiate your new phone from your last phone, even if there are no meaningful changes to be made and the last phone was good enough for everything anyone would ever use it for (as was the one before it, and the one before that, and etc etc). You have to push for people to buy the new phone, because otherwise you don’t make money.

So you tell the engineers to bump up the clock speeds on the processor 5-10% so you can market it as being faster. You market the phone as being revolutionary for using the USB connector that was forced on you by regulators because your proprietary one was filling landfills with e-waste and pretend like it was your brilliant idea all along. You make sure to limit that USB connector to speeds that were outdated 10 years ago purely so you have a built-in ‘upgrade’ for your next phone where you fix the thing that shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with.

And then you realize your phone overheats because you overclocked the processor, all to squeeze extra performance out of a chip that 99.9999999999% of users will never notice or need. You’ve made the user experience of your phone worse purely so you could pursue an untenable goal of endless profit, a pattern you will repeat every 12-18 months for the rest of eternity or until the climate wars claim your life.

Only the most sane and functional economic system.

To add to the list of non-chud reasons to dislike it, the plot is driven entirely by characters doing the dumbest thing possible at every turn on all sides for little to no reason.

Someone once pointed out the First Order could have ended the movie in the first ten minutes by having their dreadnaught just shoot the Resistance’s capital ship instead of the planetary (read: entirely stationary) base first, or by having the dreadnaught’s fighter screen/escort ships deployed instead of just chilling and doing nothing the entire fight.

Horny answer incoming:

If you’re into ERP at all, f-list.net is unparalleled in catering to just about anything you can think of that isn’t outright illegal. There’s a lot of trash as you can imagine, but you can build out a fairly intensive kink list and scroll through an absurd number of character profiles and channels for just about anything.

Well, I’d rather the day be sooner than later.

Agreed, but we’re not the ones making the decision. And the people who are have two options: move forward with a risky, expensive, and potentially career-ending move with no benefits other than the system being a little more maintainable, or continuing on with business-as-usual and earning massive sums of money they can use to buy a bigger yacht next year. It’s a pretty obvious decision, and the consequences will probably fall on whoever takes over after they move on or retire, so who cares about the long term consequences?

You run months and months of simulated transactions on the new code until you get an adequate amount of bugs fixed.

The stakes in financial services is so much higher than typical software. If some API has 0.01% downtime or errors, nobody gives a shit. If your bank drops 1 out of every 1000 transactions, people lose their life savings. Even the most stringent of testing and staging environments don’t guarantee the level of accuracy required without truly monstrous sums of money being thrown at it, which leads us back to my point above about risk vs yachts.

There will come a time when these old COBOL machines will just straight die, and they can’t be assed to keep making new hardware for them.

Contrary to popular belief, most mainframes are pretty new machines. IBM is basically afloat purely because giant banks and government institutions would rather just shell out a few hundred thousand every few years for a new, better Z-frame than going through the nightmare that is a migration.

If you’re starting to think “wow, this system is doomed to collapse under its own weight and the people in charge are actively incentivized to not do anything about it,” then you’re paying attention and should probably start extending that thought process to everything else around you on a daily basis.

Translating it isn’t the difficult part. It’s convincing a board room full of billionaires that they should flip the switch and risk having their entire system go down for a day because somebody missed a bug in the code and then having to explain to some combination of very angry other billionaires and very angry financial regulators why they broke the economy for the day.

Train gang needs no justification

Games have to talk to your operating system to have it tell your GPU to draw lots of funny pictures that come together to make up the graphical portions of the game. Game developers do not want to do this directly, because talking directly to the OS is hard. As such, games talk to graphical APIs like Vulkan or DirectX to do the hard bit for them.

For years almost all games used DirectX, which is made by Microsoft. This gave Windows a virtual monopoly on PC gaming because they weren’t about to let their competitors use their API. Then Vulkan came out, which was designed from the beginning to be OS-agnostic, sending us to the promised land of games that could (with some other efforts) run on any machine, anywhere.

Feudalism never ended, it just transitioned from a bunch of failsons inheriting land titles to a bunch of failsons getting middle management jobs through nepotism. Every company larger than 50 people is a vast internal labyrinth of lords-in-everything-but-name jockeying for promotions, accolades, and raises by inflating their roles, and the best thing you can do for yourself is find a position that isolates you as hard as possible from having to deal with that yourself lest you end up spending 50 hours a week working to get one over some petty rival of your boss.