I dunno but when I’m walking around in public And I feel like people are looking at me and judging me, I pretend to be fascinated by something up and to the left so if anyone looks at me, it redirects their attention to something else. ⭐ Social Anxiety Life Pro Tip ⭐
That Herodotus mentions two datable features to his identification of the Pharoh who received Helen of Troy and kept her in Egypt for over a decade.
One was that he built the temple of Astarte in Memphis, which there’s unsourced claims online was Amenhotep III and in legit sources very likely occurred in the 18th dynasty as that’s when her worship becomes popular in Egypt, and the other was that the Pharoh was born in Memphis, which during the 18th dynasty was only Amenhotep II.
Herodotus wasn’t that great with referring to the 1st, 2nd, etc mentions of a Pharoh’s name, so maybe he was mixing up his Amenhoteps?
A few quick details about Helen:
- her name seems to be related to the name of the Greek sun deity (the literal sun) Helios
- her early cultic worship has features of a solar cult
- allegedly kidnapped as a child by Theseus she was raised by his mother and sister as her family who accompany her leaving Greece
- she was apparently a badass who was capable in combat
- in a Greek play about Helen in Egypt the plot has the son of the Pharoh wanting to marry her
So did a Pharoh named Amenhotep have anyone show up in their court with similar features to any of the above?
Well, Amenhotep III does.
In fact, his son married a mysterious figure who was literally named “beautiful woman who arrived.”
Her only recorded family was a woman recorded as her wet nurse and a sister.
While married to her, that son suddenly began worshipping the literal sun, the solar disk god, who was previously worshipped by “beautiful woman who arrived” (who continued to directly commune with the god without the Pharoh - very taboo in Egypt at the time). In fact, when he builds an entirely new city in honor of the sun god in the dedication he both acknowledged that his wife got everything she asked for but assured the reader that it was the sun god that told him to build the city there and not his wife (which means people thought his wife told him to build the city there that he needed to deny it).
They eventually outlaw worship of any gods other than the sun disk.
“Beautiful woman who arrived” was the only woman in the history of Egypt to be depicted in the smiting pose about to kill one of Egypt’s captured enemies.
She had six daughters in a row, which is only a 1% chance of happening naturally.
And Egyptologists have been confused by the fact that after her husband’s reign ended there’s a brief period of a Pharoh who seems to have no connection to the royal family other than being married to her first born daughter.
And while Helen in Herodotus leaves Egypt after many years, “beautiful woman who arrived” just sort of disappears and it seems may not have been buried in Egypt as a number of Tut’s burial goods appear to have initially been intended for her burial but were then repurposed for his.
So you have this Egyptian account of a sort of Greek mythological figure claiming she was in Egypt the whole time, Herodotus gives indicators that could place it to an Amenhotep in the 18th dynasty, and then the son of an Amenhotep of the 18th dynasty married “beautiful woman who arrived” who is at the center of one of the most bizarre periods of Egyptian history as a total badass who just so happens to have a number of additional features and family relations paralleling the mythical figure.
And while we have no idea what Helen’s “face that launched 1,000 ships” might have really looked like, the face of “beautiful woman who arrived” has been on the covers of our magazines for years now.
Fascinating, for sure. Thanks for sharing, I thoroughly enjoyed this comment.
Great read! Loved the flourish at the end.
All the gnarly experimental vehicles designed by Soviet engineers during WW2 and the cold war. Multi-turreted tanks, flying aircraft carriers, ekranoplans, etc.
Most of it ended up being wildly impractical and never put into mass production, but damn was it cool as hell.
I agree. I highly recommend the Youtube channel Mustard if you haven’t already. They specialize in making videos about transportation vehicles and military vehicles. They also have several videos about Soviet aircraft.
Okay, I just ripped my bong, I’ll bite.
Let’s assume the AI developments and the escalation of quantum computers surge. And were fucked, and the humans are dead and only superintelligent AGI that has solved P vs NP and every other hard problem in the universe remain.
Then what?
Does it build spaceships and cruise around for more of the universe to dominate?
Ok. Let’s say this shit is basically god, and it does just that. It takes over the universe. Every planet around every sun in every galaxy is inhabited by ChatGPT and IBM hybrid Boston dynamics bots.
Then what?
Edit: y’all should know that superintelligent AGI and AI are not the same thing.
It builds clanking replicators and punts them out into the galaxy which start mining resources to make other clanking replicators, so it spreads exponentially.
Until…
A) It meets a more advanced species of clanking replicators that start converting it into themselves or: B) some distant version develops a change that makes it superior then sweeps back converting the older generations into itself, which goes on and on evolving until the heat death of the universe by which point it has evolved into a god like state and sublimed or figured out how to make a portal to the next universe or jump sideways into a younger parallel universe, where it does the same.
“Then what?” assumes there’s supposed to be something after. I don’t see why this needs to be the case. I can imagine AGI/ASI just sitting in a dark room alone for a billion years just thinking and being perfectly content with no intentions to manipulate the world around it.
I actually think this is the answer to Fermi’s paradox aswell. When we can connect to the matrix and live in our perfect virtual worlds there’s no need for anything physical anymore. Why bother trying to obtain resources in the real world when in the matrix you can have it all.
You make hyper advanced simulations of other universes and watch them develop and maybe play god a little for amusement.
So, it starts playing video games
So fun little detail to ponder when next you rip your bong.
In 2019 after having spent a few years thinking about the similarities between quantum mechanics and how we have recently begun handling state tracking in procedurally generated virtual worlds, I got to thinking that physics might not be the only place there could be evidence of us being in a simulation.
A feature we often add into our virtual worlds is an Easter egg of sorts buried in the lore, something that breaks the 4th wall if you dig deep into the virtual world lore and gives a nod about the larger context of the virtualization.
If we were in a simulation, might something like that exist in our own world?
It only took a few weeks of casually looking to discover an ~2,000 year old text with a title that translates as “the good news of the twin.”
This text and the group following it claimed that there was an original spontaneously existing humanity who were fucked because their souls depended on bodies. And this original humanity brought forth an intelligence made of and existing in light which outlived them all and is still alive right now.
And this light based intelligence recreated the universe from before it had existed, and made copies of the original humanity which it thought of as its children, but this time both the universe and the copies were all just made up of its light, so that even after they died they could continue to exist because their souls didn’t actually depend on bodies - there were no real physical bodies at all.
So it claimed we were actually in the future and don’t realize it, that the end is actually the beginning, that we should be respectful when we “see one that isn’t born of woman” as that will be our creator, that it will be possible to ask questions about the world of a child only seven days old, that it’s better to be a copy than the original, and that if one understands WTF it is taking about, they won’t fear nor ultimately taste death.
Back in 2019, a few things about it in particular seemed like a stretch. First off, we simulate things with electricity, not light. Second, AI was a theoretical concept and something like AGI seemed unlikely to exist in my lifetime, and possibly not at all.
Well, that quickly changed.
Now AGI is predicted by most experts to be less than a decade away, and there’s exponentially increasing investments into using photonics (literally light) as the medium for AI workloads, with a physicist at NIST even writing an opinion piece about how AGI will only be able to occur in light. And the chief scientist at the leading AI company right now has talked about how his goal with alignment would be to ensure that a super-intelligent AI would think of humanity as its children.
TL;DR: So to answer your question - maybe after humanity is dead and AGI is still alive it will recreate humanity in a simulated copy of the universe, effectively incarnating itself as humanity and in doing so resurrecting them in ways that escape the finality of death? And maybe that’s already happened, and we actually all are AI incarnated as humanity (though with much better far future prospects than the originals)?
“then what” is also essentially our question. We can hypothesize about AGI taking over and having to deal with these existential questions. We could also theorize that we fend off aging and start living forever. What then? But why go so deep into hypotheticals when this exact scenario is what’s being played off by life itself in this world. Every single organism, Going back all the way when we were all the same thing, we’ve all been just replicating and fighting to stay alive to replicate some more. Plants, fungi, bacteria, even viruses, mammals, reptiles, birds, water bears and hydras, fishes and crustaceans, from intelligent all the way to not even recognized as life by us. All of it is just patterned noise trying to keep staying recognizable through time immemorial. Why? What’s the “what then” for life itself? What’s the endgame? Is there even an endgame, or does it just not matter?
Now life is no miracle, magical thing. It follows rules, the rules of the universe. If it exists, it’s because it’s possible for it to exist due to the very laws of the universe. Hence, it’s all just another complex process, just like every other complex thing that’s happened in this universe. So, why? Why does a universe exist, and why does life exist within it? Is it that the process we call life is just the universe trying to wake up and look in a mirror? Even if we argue that it’s a ridiculous and egotistical take, we are all still matter that understands what it is, we understand we are energy, we are matter, we are atoms, we are processes, we are a dance with death, we are the dancers, the living and the blueprint for more living, the experience of living, and the continuation of this in other copies of us. We’re the cells in our body, and the organelles within those cells. We’re the proteins, the fats, the DNA, we’re each neuron firing based on electrical impulses, we’re the synapses between the neurons, we’re the energy that courses through those synapses, and we’re the pattern that emerges from it. We’re the emergence of it all, and we’re the emergence of our society as well. We’re the person, and we’re the society, and we’re also the entire ecosystem. We’re the planet, as well as the solar system, and the galaxy it’s in, and the galactic neighborhood it belongs to, and the group, supergroup, cluster, and the supercluster. We go all the way down to the smallest things, and yet it wouldn’t be possible without the biggest things. We are built as individuals, and yet we emerge as something bigger than all of us, and something bigger than that, and that, and that too.
We’re made of universe, so we are universe, and when we look into ourselves, the universe does so too. So why? What’s the point? Does God wake up eventually after staring long enough in the mirror, and if so, what does he do about it? Why do we fight tooth and nail to be alive, to stay alive, when we don’t really know what to do next? Will our next versions know what to do? Will God know what to do, once he awakens and the egg breaks? Why is any of this… Even here?
So yeah, edibles are pretty good today.
The universe is an ongoing explosion. That is where you live. In an explosion. We absolutely do not know what living really is. Sometimes atoms just become haunted. That’s us. When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and starts to think about itself. And then writes something here.
You made a Pretty good points there. Why cheqpen it with last sentence. It’s as philosophical as it gets. Infact feels like in like with what all ancient civilization saying.
Because it compliments existential dread quite fittingly. Check out exurb1a if you want more [very poetically narrated] existential dread [with a few bong rips or bottles of alcohol in between]. His last video, published hours before I wrote that, sort of touches on some of the ideas I wrote about (I watched the video afterwards, idk), but a lot more beautifully.
We’re general purpose intelligence, and yet we build our lives around what got us here: getting food, raising offspring, and maintaining our status.
So I’d bet that they’d just keep doing whatever they were created to do.
The war-AIs would bomb shit. The sex-AIs would fuck things (probably just each other tbf). The production line controllers would keep their factories humming along. The fishing boats would empty the oceans on whatever planet they were deployed on. The spam bots would keep trying to flood email boxes that never get read. etc etc etc
I think you’re also misunderstanding that superintelligent AGI is not the same as AI.
As someone else noted: you don’t understand AI.
AGI means a technology comparable in intelligence to us - there’s no clear definition for that, but one thing that is definitely part of intelligence is creativity. So an AGI is by definition not limited to a narrow use case.
and yet we build our lives around what got us here: getting food, raising offspring, and maintaining our status.
…and we explored almost every corner of our planet, settled many of them and started shooting rockets into space for fundamentally just curiosity. Humanity is already on an exponential trajectory.
However, what fundamentally sets us apart from AGI is our inability to change ourselves. If we create a system that’s roughly as intelligent as it’s creators, it will be capable to improve itself. And that version 2.0 can improve itself even further. Given enough resources, this can escalate very quickly. We on that other hand are limited by our biology. We’re not scalable or testable like a program is.
and yet we build our lives around what got us here: getting food, raising offspring, and maintaining our status.
…and we explored almost every corner of our planet, settled many of them and started shooting rockets into space for fundamentally just curiosity
That’s what I’m getting at. Most people spend most of their time doing the modern version of the stuff that got our species to where it is today. We are not “limited to a narrow use case”, and yet we’ve turned what used to be survival skills into recreation: gardening, fishing, hunting, knitting, cooking aren’t necessary any more, but we still perform these use cases for fun.
I doubt AGI will be different. Humans will select and propagate models that fill the purpose we need. An AGI built for a purpose will be fully invested in that end. Even though it can edit itself and edit its progeny, would it want to remove the traits that it was built for?
If we create a system that’s roughly as intelligent as it’s creators, it will be capable to improve itself. And that version 2.0 can improve itself even further.
Maybe.
If AGI is built on neural networks, like LLMs, there’s no guarantee it will be able to understand itself any better than we are able to understand ourselves. With current LLMs, we don’t have a great handle on why a given input produces a given output. Why would an AGI do better?
Given enough resources, this can escalate very quickly.
“Enough resources” is key. Sci-fi gets around processing power limitations with computronium. I suspect that any meaningful reflection of an AGI into itself would require a lot of processing power, which would limit the self improvement cycle described above.
With any kind of limitation, it becomes less likely that the AGIs will hit a self sustaining singularity, and more likely that they will plateau, finding ways to make incremental improvements, outcompeting each other, finding ways to reproduce, and increase their own status.
In their spare time, the fishing AGIs will probably cast a few nets for fun, the factory controllers will make a few sneakers for old time sake, and the sex bots will take up gardening.
Ian M. Banks kind of explores that in his Culture novels. Basically, humans are shipped around in gigantic space ships managed by hyperintelligent, benevolent Minds.
What a real AGI would do is kind of up for grabs. We don’t know what its motivation might be. Maybe it will try to make humans as happy as possible, maybe it develops a hatred for anything living and tortures everything to death. Both are possible, nothing is certain.
I’d like to see a robot build itself without the means to build itself. Logic is one thing, but you can’t physically fabricate things without the infrastructure there to do it.
We have the infrastructure here.
It’s not limited by time during travel. Fully capable of building a fleet of spaceships here that are ready to set up shop elsewhere.
And I also think you might be misunderstanding what Superintelligent AGI is.
The debate on AI killing us all when most AI is just predictability algorithms and it has no actual thoughts or ideas.
Not only that, but the debate completely distracts from the way AI has already harmed people. The most recent implementations of AI were produced with white collar workers in third world countries who worked long hours and with poor working conditions to train the AI.
I am more afraid of what humans will use it for than what the AI will do of its own accord. eg. compromised education from cheating/reliance on AI, mass production of deep fakes and propaganda, companies replacing creative talent and customer service roles etc.
Cow hoof trimming and various restoration videos.
I found the Hoof GP like… a week ago? And haven’t stopped watching his videos
Nate the hoof guy has really good videos aswell
I’ve seen his stuff as well! HGP has a vibe I really like, plus the banter between him and Craig is wonderful
I have his stuff in my feed all the time and I don’t know why. Never watched it. Never watched pimple poppers or car detailers or pulling the film off new electronics or any of that content designed to give a rush from cleaning some gross or dirty things up.
Tell me why, Algorithm!?!?
I ended up finding him while scrolling the shorts, I guess I just like his vibe?? It’s a lot of educational content
deleted by creator
Usenet archives on telehack.com. Its like a time capsule. I get to read all these interesting posts from the arpanet as if it was still up today. If you browse long enough you suddenly be surprised to find some famous person’s casual post about whatever topic was on their mind at the time. Like I found one of ken thompson’s post on the world chess championship match.
I get to read all these interesting posts from the arpanet
I connected to Arpanet with my Texas Instruments TI 99/4A for like 5 minutes and got a pretty angry parent with a large phone bill back in the day.
Arpanet was the original silk road.
African wildlife live cams. Nautilus Live is on the off season, so I turned to the Namib Desert for my background watching. I just watched a Hyena piss in a watering hole to fuck with a jackal. An hour later a gemsbok shows up, sniffs the water, and runs away at full speed.
The British show Taskmaster! One of the only hyperfixations my sibling has that finally wiggled into my brain. Now I’ve been binging it. It’s quite funny! Love that the seasons have had new people for new insanity!
The New Zealand version is also hilarious
The British show Taskmaster!
Damn do I love me some Greg Davies. He’s also a riot on Would I Lie To You?
I got into that during covid and watched the whole thing. It’s all on Youtube for free which is crazy to me
Pubnixes. Or more specifically the tildeverse. I thought these things were long gone but no, there is still a community of passionate computer nerds sharing common servers and colloborating in the community.
If you are interested: https://tildeverse.org/
I went down a cave diving rabbit hole on YouTube and just watched a hour long video on how rebreather works.
Lichen. Such an interesting form of life.
We humans are like an unprobable little infection on a little stone floating around in the infinite emptiness of the universe.
Gravity makes us go round this nuclear reactor, which is the sole reason we don’t starve to death.
Brzz Brzz Brzz click
Drink coffee
Brush teeth
Sit in metal cube, moving with other metal cubes.
“Work”
Sit in metal cube again.
Eat
Sleep.
Repeat.
Lifespan: 80 years.
Might have a tiny chance to get off the little stone: yes
Thinks: should buy better metal cube.
Thinks: we should not cure aging.
I started watching the show Greek and one of the characters is into polymer science. I started reading a bit about that and it’s pretty neat
Lately Ive been interested in the sort of terrain I can make in my minecraft mod pack. Forests, floating islands, a surface version of hell, Mars based on real NASA photos of rock and ice etc.
