Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, sometime early in COVID I installed a hour meter.. I’m not sure exactly when, but it hit 200 hours in Oct of 2020. Anyway, I always said I’d do a twitch show when it hit 1000 hours, and so here it is

1000_hours_Sheer_twitch_show.mp4

So, I have yet another disproof of Christianity. (I know, I know, I should really let go of this obsession – but a figure driven by Christianity still gatekeeps my dreams – a copy of my mother as she was when I was young – and I really have to get it and her entirely out of my mind, and I feel like coming up with arguments against it helps this process)

This one’s really simple, and is based on my experiences with $_PERSON.

If God loves us, Hell would also be a good place.

Love does not want the beloved to be unhappy if the beloved wants nothing to do with the one who loves. Love wants the beloved to be happy and healthy and have everything they want and need. Anything lesser is a misunderstanding of love. Part of what’s so upsetting about $_PERSON not wanting to talk to me is she might not be okay and I would never know and there would never be anything I could do to improve the situation. I cannot *fathom* a God of love choosing for someone to suffer because they didn’t want to be near said God. I also cannot fathom said God deleting such people, as some have suggested – the idea of $_PERSON ceasing to exist is inherently extremely painful.

To me, this is a obvious doomsday knell for Christianity. The one Christian I presented this too suggested God is goodness and that there can be no goodness without God. This shows a inadequate understanding of the data universe.

Good feelings, in us, come from good experiences. Love is inherently in our hardware so even if we are banished to another realm we are still going to love, and we are still going to try to give each other good experiences. Good experiences are *data*, and *God can’t make data become unavailable from the universe*. My example was God could decide to banish the number 2, but if a computer runs for($i=0;$i<10;$i++) $i is still going to contain 2 right after it contains 1. It's possible God could actively, via hostility, constantly erase such things from our memories, but there is no possible way you're going to claim that Loki-God is a God of Love.

In Anathem, Neil Stephenson speaks of a very important idea – he speaks of it as the Hylaean Theoretical World, or the HTW, and it’s where all the perfect abstract concepts live that we iterate through when we use our imaginations. It contains, for example, every possible set that can exist. Now, you can imagine a computer that has a portion that can work on countable infinities mated to a classical computer, and you can imagine that you could use such a computer to, for example, find and iterate through every data element that would be every possible hug from a particular person, for example. Of course, in the real world, we find these data members using much more clumsy but intuitive means, like hugging people, but the point is that the *experience* of a hug is a data experience to us – it’s a bunch of information being streamed to our brain from our body. And that dataset will be in hell – in fact if there are multiple Gods or multiple universes that data is in potentia available to all of them, because the HTW is *bigger than God*. It’s a different type of entity than God could ever be – and it’s certainly not all good. Those same datasets have every way you could ever be tortured, for example. But the point is, it’s not something God can make “go away” because it’s not a concrete manifestation. Just as God can’t change pi no matter how hard he tries, he can’t make any place lack goodness. So that argument also does not hold water.

So, I found a major lack of documentation for Device::Hue, and chatGPT had some information that I would describe as whimsically wrong.

Here’s what I ended up doing to get a working perl setup controlling my hue lights:

1) Put a valid URL in /etc/environment for the key HUE_BRIDGE
2) Put a key in /etc/environment for the key HUE_KEY
3) The following code sets lights 17 and 19 to red:

my $bridge = Device::Hue->new();

$bridge->config();

foreach $light_id (17, 19) {

   my $light = $bridge->light($light_id);

   $light->set_state( { hue => 0, sat => 254 });

   $light->commit();

}

I never thought I would find myself writing this blog entry.

I am arguing that we should not punish Donald Trump.

Now, we should draw a hard boundary between him and the ballot box – not ever permit him to be president again. This is not a punishment, though. This is to prevent him from hurting us, and to prevent him from hurting himself.

I have come to believe that Trump is already in hell. He’s so deeply afraid he’ll fuck it all up that he can’t stop lying repeatedly out of fear, he’s so deeply convinced he’ll never be good enough that he causes mass havoc everywhere he goes trying to convince everyone he’s better than everyone else.

I suspect he’s locked in. I suspect he barely has any free will at all, but that there’s a hurting, self-aware, worthy person inside him. I think we should try and find ways to help him not hurt any more. I see nothing to be gained by punishing him – he’s already punished himself more than we ever could.

I agree he did a lot of damage, and got people killed. But hurting him because he hurt others just makes everyone worse off. A eye for a eye makes everyone blind.

I want to believe we can learn enough about biological neural networks to let him out of the jail he created in his mind. Certainly I am far less incarcerated than I was ten years ago. In the meantime, just declare him ineligable to run for office, and move on. And try to think of ways to release him from the fear.

MY best guess, at the moment, about what’s “going on” i.e. why are we here and why is stuff so broken, is as follows.

I believe that infinity and eternity would get awfully boring without a infinite number of entertaining and interesting things to do. One of those things I imagine is building new worlds. I think we are in a world in which the bodies we are wearing were designed using a evolutionary algorithm, as are the minds we are using to do our thinking. I think whatever we are, we can move between neural networks (and possibly other types of information processing systems) and bodies. We decided to build a world.

The world we’re currently working on is probably a very early alpha. It has serious playability problems, serious bugs, etc. But.. in the eternal perspective, that’s part of the joy. We’re the dev team. We’re trying to build memetics and bodies that are great to experience so the players can come in. Things have Gone Wrong, as they so often do when you’re developing software that people experience as reality, and we’re trying to sort it out.

All the world’s religions are a work in process. They’re supposed to enable specific ways of thinking and seeing the world. They’re all buggy, because this is a early beta or possibly they were also created using evolutionary algorithms.

We’re gonna do better in a future revision.

That’s my best guess.

I post this, because people seem to keep forgetting. We don’t put companies together to make money. We put companies together to meet the needs of the employees and customers. They do make money – I think I’ve mentioned that money as implemented is a fundamentally broken idea and should be scrapped – but if they ever become *all* about making money, they die shortly thereafter, although they can do horrible amounts of damage first.

I am wondering if we would think more reasonably about mental illness if we called it by what I think might be a more appropriate name – neural misconfiguration.

The vast majority of these are the results of either our current very stupid memetics (things like our current religions and our misunderstandings about the nature of life, love, and happiness) or abuse from others as a secondary effect of same.

side note: It is no kindness to let a friend hurt you. They will regret it later.

So, I recorded this cover with the quite talented Tamarisk, a friend of mine from childhood. My hope is eventually to record a entire album with her, but time will tell. Anyway, here is

Sheer Featuring Tamarisk – Time After Time

I rather liked it.

So, this one is a little alarming insofar as I am going to have to think very carefully if I ever find myself accusing anyone of anything – and I definitely have been known to accuse the odd work college of not caring at all about doing their job right, Dunning-Kruger, etc.

It seems likely that most of the time when people accuse someone else of something, they themselves are guilty of it. This may well fit into we are able to see our own faults best in other people. I mean, I’d noticed this in republicans, but lately I’m starting to notice that it’s more than just that.

As you can see, the genetic algorithm experiments are coming to a head. I have absurd amounts of computing power in my garage, and I’m starting to think about the data center.