#+TITLE: BIG List of Ideas #+AUTHOR: Robert McIntyre #+HTML_HEAD: * My Dream Computer I want to make a beautiful computer system that's a bunch of FPGAs and graphics cards. No CPU. If you need a CPU for some reason, just make a "soft" CPU temporariarly out of the FPGAs. Clojure at the high level, with primitives designed to spin up useful circuits in the FPGAs to do dedicated computationns. I want to be able to execute a =reduce= commannd and have it create an actual parallel circuit to do some of my computations. The computer should have sufficient capacators so that if the power goes out, it is able to keep going and get itself into a state that enables a graceful shutdown. Startup should only take, at most, 1 second. I want to be able to start the thing from a dead stop, no power, to functioning graphics and LISP input in less than a second. There's no reason that this can't be done with today's technology other than lazyness. AR desktop: I want to wear an AR / VR helmit and have the computer carefully track my hands as well as several "props" that are lying around my table. I want to be able to make a mind palace as a way of storing files, videos, etc. Ideally all the hardware would all be 3D printed but that's another story. #+CAPTION: A computer you can really sink your teeth into. #+NAME: steampunk computer [[file:../02-images/01-midjourney/02-steampunk-computer.png]] * What's "Real"? General discussion on how seriously we can take models of reality. Is a corporation alive as it's own entity? Is there somethinng it feels like to be a country? What should the world look like in each case? Would it be possible for a corporation to transcend the laws that it's originally built out of? The people who implement it's strategy? Is it that much different from uploading a person? Are memes alive? Would they notice us if there were? Would we notice them? Can we TRADE with things so alien to us that they almost exist at right angles to our reality? How does time work for memes? Do they think in the logical seconds between real time? Can we help them breed for fun and mutual profit? There's an old philosophical thought experiment, the idea that you could simulate a brain by having everyone on earth shuffle papers around. What if we took that very seriously? What sorts of aliens are summoned by our bureaucracies? If there were ghosts running around, barely able to interact with the world, would you notice them? If there were very small things, fighting and fucking all around you, would you notice? If there were big slow things eating the spaces between stars, would you notice? Abstraction barriers can close off worlds. In what ways can you "leak" through? #+CAPTION: When we work together we form a shape which itself might #+CAPTION: be a mind! #+NAME: The New Leviathan [[file:../02-images/01-midjourney/03-the-new-leviathan.png]] * Talking to the Void Talk about the Timeflowers, stable time loops, the concept that the universe follows the "path of least resistance" when allocating improbability. Connected to the concept of quantum immortality -- where do you end up when almost all of your paths lead to doom? Leads to: the idea of a "spiritual lightning rod", a mechanism that enables you to survive and costs less improbability than most other methods of quantum immortality, thus catches most of your remaining "dust". Implementable as a website that uses a QRNG to output text. When your doom is more inescapable than the cost to generate a message out, then the void starts talking back. Void entities as lifeforms that gather at spiritual lighthing rods and use them to steer fate. #+CAPTION: Stare at the void long enough, and it stares back. And #+CAPTION: it might just be your last hope. #+NAME: Talk to the void [[file:../02-images/01-midjourney/05-talk-to-the-void2.png]] * Science Court A new way for society to "know things together". Also, scientists get to sue their various fields, and you get cases like "McIntyre vs Neurosciencce". * An Elephant in Today's Economy, and a Dire Warning for the Future Our economy is designed to auto-genocide us if we ever get "cut out of the economic loop." Consider the analogy of an elephant trying to make it in the world, if it had to use money and buy land at market rates. #+BEGIN_QUOTE "We all blew it, including me when I was president. We blew it. We were wrong to believe that food was like some other product in international trade." -- Bill Clinton #+END_QUOTE * The Archival Imperative Instrumental goals: almost every intelligent system ends up converging on them. What happens to us when the AIs take over everything? Do we get stomped into the ground and forgotten? Everything always happens in the future, as long as things are growing. Even for a dead language like Latin, most of its speakers are yet to be born. IF the information is preserved. Life is baroqued to an immense degree. It's one of those things that, once destroyed, is almost impossible to reproduce. You never know what the future wants. Or if the future will value the things you're throwing away now. Implies that you might want to consider preserving those finely baroked things that you can't get back if you throw them away, as long as the cost of Preservation isn't too high. We are stewards of the present. Even stupid, short-sighted humans can see that. We kept the last few samples of smallpox. * Intuitive, Fine-Grained Control of a Big Inscrutable Neural Network Overall strategy: 1. Download an open source, high quality generative AI art program. As always, it seems that the furries are leading the charge in creating these systems. 2. Experiment with lots of ways of slowly stepping through the various transformations the NN performs, and allowing multidimensional human intervantion. Let's see just how inscrutable these programs are!~ 3. Ideally build tools to paint an image with a "semantic brush", creating images in a way that's not possible with the human or AI alone. * Beautiful Pictures of Brains As part of my research, I generate these beautiful slides of thin slices of rat brain, stained with silver. This is one of my favorites. There's something really amazing about this image -- the level of detail, the big splotches of white voids that seem like they should disrupt the pattern but end up somehow working, it's not something that human art tennds to have. #+CAPTION: 40x magnification, Bielchowsky stain, rat corpus callosum. #+CAPTION: I think this is one of the prettiest histo images I've ever done. #+NAME: bielchowsky rat corpus callosum [[file:../02-images/02-brains/01-rat-corpus.png]] #+CAPTION: Art imitating nature can start to look like these brains! #+NAME: trees [[file:../02-images/02-brains/02-trees.png]] # * Fear # #+CAPTION: This is the caption for the next figure link (or table) # #+NAME: boy and dinosaur # [[file:../02-images/01-midjourney/01-dino-door-first-pic.png]] * The Mental Spotlight * How the Heck does the Golgi Stain Work? * How the Heck does Cytoplasmic Streaming Work? * The One Correct Way to Believe * The Homestuck Aspects * DS9 Should have had Slime Girls * TNG's Drumhead Reinterpreted * Using Decibels as Intuitive Probability * Making a Physical Copy of "MICATWOA" * Making a Physical Copy of "The Erogamer" * Recreating Undertale's "Game Over" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elkL84kbolU * Chat Politics When I was canvassing, I was struck by how ineffective everything was. You go to different people's houses and ask them who they're voting for in the upcoming election. If I could have just offered each person $50 for their time answering my questions about what troubled them, and then credibly promised to forward their concerns to the campaign, then I think it would have worked better and gottenn a lot more votes. One of they ways you know that God doesn't exist as described in the Christian bible is that that sort of god should be the kind of entity that you can just talk to, anytime, in clear comprehensible English. You really should just be able to ask God / the Holy Spirit what they think the term should be for copyright law (for example), and get back a well-reasoned English explanation that's consistent with scripture. Political parties somewhat share this absenteeism. You can't talk to the Democratic Party and complain about your life and expect to get any help. No one will hear your concerns. You can't even talk to a congressman and get anything. Political chat bots. A closed loop that asks for donations, uses the money to fund itself and also pay for lotteries to people who need the money. * Memetic Entities * Plan for an american-legal real-money prediction-market The trick is that you a platform for people to run their own feelance consultant jobs. The payments for these jobs are determined by what happens. People are offering their advice and participating in the market, with the payments for their advice to be determined by the results of the bet and the penalty to be determined by the result as well. The math works out to a prediction market but it's all legally a consulting job. legal: blah blah blah the ISSUER will rely substantially on your advice and should it turn out to be wrong then you agree to pay a penalty relating to be decided by third party arbitration not to exceel the full amount of the ADVICE AMOUNT. * Bacteria are smarter today than long ago * Is there a diciplined way to "decompile" DNA Suppose that DNA is essentially a the executable result of a "compiled language". What are various principled ways to go "back" and derive a more structured language / compilation rules that would "compile down" to the human / simple bacterial genome? * personal stocks so you can short someone IRL, and send them a letter explaining that you're shorting them. "My parents and teachers shorted my stock..." * Can you train plants to use VOLTAGE to grow faster?