having a lot of money is crazy because there is literally nothing to do. there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. if you sit around all day then people who work at local restaurants will start to know you and people here and there will start to recognize you from wandering around between your haunts every day. its such a weird feeling when you realize that the world isnt as big as you thought it was. before having total freedom, you image that even a single metro like sf bay area is enough to swallow you up. its not. the reason it feels so big is because your are busy all the time. and the same goes for the entire world. theres nothing to do here unless you are busy with something. traveling and gawking at stuff is not going to get you very far. that is the terrible and insane reality of life. that life is an illusion. this is part of the reason why so many people buckle under the apparently feather-weight pressure of having lots of money. the other reason is that your sense of identity and self-worth becomes tied to your money. you find yourself completely unable to ask for a lower price, balk at a price or decide to not buy something if there are other people around. because after all you have the money. except nobody has enough money to behave like that. 60M would evaporate very quickly under someone who did not recognize and correct this effect. this is why so many rich people are so comically cheap. they have to be because you lose the ability to think rationally, to thread the needle. you have to just shamelessly be cheap.
elon musk said "vacation kills." hes one hundred percent correct. when you feel totally free you stop thinking in terms of how to protect yourself and begin to explore all possibilities in an unconstrained way. i dont have to be at work on monday so why not climb a mountain? why not go on safari? why not try this designer drug? logic could save you but without the impulse to protect your fragile life, not everyone is logical enough to sail those waters. i almost killed myself twice before i learned it.
the strange and absolutely unambiguous truth about life is that there is no such thing as not working. you must always be working. it doesnt matter how much money you have. the only way to live a good and satisfying life is to work and have enough at stake that you are afraid of failing. it is better to risk losing your money or even your life rather than stop working.
Society doesn't put money into some people's hands so that they use it to buy big shiny boats. Society trusts some people with money because they use it well. I also think that not using it is OK because it's a virtual thing anyway, so focusing on other aspects of life - like running a farm for example - is an option.
the appetite for self-destruction is just as big now as it used to be among teenagers. i think people simply dont understand how self-destructive social media is. thats why theyre surprised.
even if you had a billion dollars and a private island you still wouldnt be ready for whats coming. consider the fact that the global order is an equilibrium where the military and economic forces of each country in the world are pushing against each other... where the forces find a global equilibrium is where borders are. each time in history that technology changed, borders changed because the equilibrium was disturbed. there is no way to escape it: agi will lead to global war. the world will be turned upside down. we are entering into an existential sinkhole. and the idiots in silicon valley are literally driving the whole thing forward as fast as possible.
i want to learn to speak another language but now i find myself questioning whether or not it makes any sense in light of the fact that AI already translates so well. its clear that by the time i learn another language real-time translation will be so good and so accessible that my own translations will just be a hindrance to effective communication. i looked very hard for some reason to justify learning other languages because i have always wanted to learn another language. the only good reason to learn another language is to have privacy. you could also say that it would be useful if you were cut off from AI services but that will probably only apply to terrorists or other extreme cases. the only solid justification for learning a language yourself is to have conversations that are not monitored or data-mined. honestly, in the context of the world-to-come, its not worth doing.
i want to do a data dump here. did you ever wonder how its possible that you can experience vivid, real-time non-scripted (so to speak) events that are totally lifelike? how is it possible to do that without sensory input generating the images and sounds? i thought about this a lot and there is only one answer that fits: the human mind generates a model of the world and everything in it, your experience of the world is actually happening inside of this model. when you are awake, your mind looks at the world thru sensory organs and updates the model accordingly which gives the illusion that you are directly experiencing the world. but in reality there is a middle man. this is why so many aspects of the dream world kind of half-work. like clock hands changing position. your mind isnt designed to operate without having information fed to it, so it can only predict so much and you get a kind of semi-logical state of world within this internal model. most of what you experience is not as real as you think, although the minds model is designed to track and predict reality as well as possible.
but theres more to the story. there were reports of people using a drug called ISRIB, russians mostly, a few years ago. its a drug that impacts the latency of cells, turning on cells that have gone latent due to injury... or for any other reason, reasons we may not be aware of. this drug is basically used in labs in cultures and is very new. people arent supposed to take it. but some people had it synthesized and they tried it anyway of course. most of them reported extremely life-like dreams. one person reported having waking dreams that were so real that even while totally and completely lucid, she was not able to tell that she was dreaming. she was pretty shaken up by it based on the chats. i think she described it as experiencing total insanity. but this tracks. when you are asleep, your model is not firing on all cylinders. part of the reason why the world is "unrealistic" is because your brain is not working as hard as it could to fill in the model in a coherent way. think about the experiences that schizophrenics have, seeing in full fidelity people and things that are totally non existent. all of these considerations together point to the fact that we inhabit models of the world rather than experiencing sensory stimuli directly.
wow thank you so much for linking this. the journey to this conclusion began simply because i wanted to explain how my lucid dreams could be so realistic. i also came to a satisfying conclusion to the question of free will, many years ago. there are many things that inform how i see and operate in the world but these two tools most of all i cannot imagine living without. the one thing in my life that i still dont have any kind of satisfying answer for is pain. what is pain? do you know if someone cracked it?
not really. its stalking. it poses a direct threat to someones safety. and people arent even supposed to have that information under the current rules... thats why its only possible to get his jets location by crowd-sourcing it. anonymity for high profile passengers is a legitimate concern, enough for the FAA to bake it into how these flights are tracked. soon this loophole will be closed and then what will you point to? how could you seriously compare this to being banned for saying something that is politically incorrect?
Even if true, which I'm skeptical of, social media sites don't have to be permanent. It's no different from any other service being enshittified, just use it until it sucks and then stop.
I'm thinking that it's a cynical way to put all the data on an open network rather than a gated and paywalled one. As far as I can tell, Bluesky is still entirely funded by Twitter and that will eventually be cut off. They're betting on the Google/Mozilla type relationship to be maintained for now. They need to make the indexing service easier to replicate before that happens or the network will collapse when funds dry up.
its so frustrating that the only reason i am able to post this is because of X... because searching for this guys name or "poject veritas nudge" does not produce the result that it obviously should anywhere except for X. this is the tactic that is so often used by people like you. state something that is factually correct but completely incorrect and misleading when the full context is taken into account. even if this were an actual civil case brought on in the normal way it would still be the undeniable truth that one billion is silly and that this is political.
if anyone know the person who maintains that site or if that person reads this: this site would be massively improved if the speed of the ISS footage playing in the background were simply slowed down a little. right now it gives this feeling of rocketing forward which is a very different vibe from the premise of the site. the user should float slowly to emphasize the thoughtful nature of the activity and enjoy the sensation of watching the world go by.
elon musk said "vacation kills." hes one hundred percent correct. when you feel totally free you stop thinking in terms of how to protect yourself and begin to explore all possibilities in an unconstrained way. i dont have to be at work on monday so why not climb a mountain? why not go on safari? why not try this designer drug? logic could save you but without the impulse to protect your fragile life, not everyone is logical enough to sail those waters. i almost killed myself twice before i learned it.
the strange and absolutely unambiguous truth about life is that there is no such thing as not working. you must always be working. it doesnt matter how much money you have. the only way to live a good and satisfying life is to work and have enough at stake that you are afraid of failing. it is better to risk losing your money or even your life rather than stop working.