card_zero (u/card_zero)

card_zero commented on We Need to Die willllliam.com/blog/why-w... · Posted by u/ericzawo

drhagen · 6 days ago

A funny thing I realized: immortality is incompatible with spending a nonzero fraction of my life with children.

I treasure the time I spend with my kids. I can see that this season will be over soon. This won't be my whole life, but it will be a significant fraction of my life. If I were immortal, this would be a tiny blip in the inconceivably far past for 100% of my life.

You may think I could start again every 100 or 1000 or million years, but if a nonzero fraction of people did that, that would be exponential growth. Even ignoring resource constraints, you cannot sustain exponential growth of any kind in a 3D universe.

A universe with kids necessitates a universe with death.

card_zero · 6 days ago

Yes, but why do people treasure time spent with their kids so much, expressing the feeling in revelatory terms - why this addiction to reproduction, the thing that perpetuates the genes that might cause the feeling? It's suspicious.

card_zero commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines? · Posted by u/embedding-shape

syockit · 6 days ago

You can add the guideline, but then people would skip the "I asked" part and post the answer straight away. Apart from the obvious LLMesque structure of most of those bot answers, how could you tell if one has crafted the answer so much that it looks like a genuine human answer?

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/

card_zero · 6 days ago

15 years ago ... needs updating in regard of how things panned out.

card_zero commented on Cancer is surging, bringing a debate about whether to look for it nytimes.com/2025/12/08/he... · Posted by u/brandonb

nomel · 6 days ago

Nocebo [1], a well know/documented phenomenon, can be very damaging.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo

card_zero · 6 days ago

On the other hand, the placebo effect works even when the placebo is clearly labelled "placebo". So I guess there's potential to tell people needlessly disconcerting facts and then take the edge off with reassuring bluster and functionless comforts.

card_zero commented on Delivery robots take over Chicago sidewalks blockclubchicago.org/2025... · Posted by u/mikhael

whyenot · 6 days ago

Why are you assuming that a human would be more efficient and better for the environment than an electrically powered robot? It is very inefficient (approx 25%) to use food as an energy source, and humans are always burning energy. They can't turn off at night or when they are idle. I think it is very likely that the robot would be better for the environment than the person.

card_zero · 6 days ago

Which is the cheaper power source per mile, I wonder? Electricity or bananas?

card_zero commented on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets sciencefocus.com/science/... · Posted by u/philbo

ben_w · 6 days ago

I did give a response to the non-relativity interpretation too.

Sure, it wasn't clear which way you were going with that question, but I recognised that it could have been either.

card_zero · 6 days ago

Time having a static existence, and all moments of time being equally real, ought to boggle the mind. Then again, it's not compulsory to be boggled, goodness knows it's exhausting and doesn't accomplish much.

card_zero commented on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets sciencefocus.com/science/... · Posted by u/philbo

ben_w · 6 days ago

> If we say that seconds "pass", at what rate do they pass?

One second per second for yourself, but other observers generally disagree.

Or one could use it as an inverse of the things measured against time, so meters/second of speed can be turned into seconds flowing at a rate of length.

Does "miles per gallon" lead to similar questions about gallons passing?

> Could they pass at some rate other than one second per second?

Only, and always, from the point of view of people in different frames of reference.

card_zero · 6 days ago

You're talking about something else. Or rather, my line of argument ran into a distraction hazard, namely relativity. I wasn't trying to talk about relativity, but I should have seen that coming. And now everybody's very keen to explain relativity to me, dammit.

card_zero commented on Richard Stallman on ChatGPT stallman.org/chatgpt.html... · Posted by u/colesantiago

mort96 · 6 days ago

Frankly, bullshit is the perfect term for it because ChatGPT doesn't know that it's wrong. A bullshit artist isn't someone whose primary goal is to lie. A bullshit artist is someone whose primary goal is to achieve something (a sale, impressing someone, appearing knowledgable, whatever) without regard for the truth. The act of bullshitting isn't the same as the act of lying. You can e.g bullshit your way through a conversation on a technical topic you know nothing about and be correct by happenstance.

card_zero · 6 days ago

I guess it's a fair point that slop has its own unique flavor, like eggs.

card_zero commented on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets sciencefocus.com/science/... · Posted by u/philbo

oersted · 6 days ago

I feel like you are overthinking it a bit, entangled in semantics. You can take any process that has a fixed frequency (like a clock), and measure the change in frequency in different situations, from the same point of reference. Moving that device at different speeds or into different places in a gravitational field. This is why satellite clocks move at a different rate than those on Earth.

Practically speaking, that's really what we care about when we talk about the speed of time. If some process takes a certain amount of time to complete, sending it to space and back, without changing anything else about it, might make it complete earlier from our point of reference.

It is actually about seconds per second, and there is an inner and an outer second as you say. There’s nothing wrong with that, because it is always a relative difference between two frames of reference. There are the seconds for our point of view, and there are the seconds for the device we are sending to space and back.

I think you are struggling to understand how to measure the absolute speed of time, but there’s no such thing, it’s always a comparison, it is relative.

card_zero · 6 days ago

I think our language is filled with misleading semantics about the flow of time, the passing of time, past, present, future, the arrow of time, all of that. It would be hopeless to try to use different language. But time isn't doing anything. There's no time for time to do anything in.

I'll acknowledge relativity and different frames of reference, but that isn't really the point.

card_zero commented on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets sciencefocus.com/science/... · Posted by u/philbo

ben_w · 6 days ago

> we can't measure how quickly it "flows" or at least how quickly we travel through it.

I don't understand this, because it seems like "with a clock" is too obvious an answer, so surely you can't have meant what it sounds like it meant?

card_zero · 6 days ago

If we say that seconds "pass", at what rate do they pass? Could they pass at some rate other than one second per second? That would entail outer seconds (second seconds, if you like). Which also have their own rate at which they pass, so now we need a third-level "flow of time", and so on.

So to say seconds "pass" is describing something else. They aren't moving.

card_zero commented on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets sciencefocus.com/science/... · Posted by u/philbo

ricardobeat · 6 days ago

We know empirically that time only flows in one direction, it can’t be described as just a perception. You’d have had at least the tiniest of evidence that time sometimes flows backwards.

card_zero · 6 days ago

Time doesn't flow at a speed. So, time flows at no speed, so, time doesn't flow. Time doesn't exist within time, so it has to be static. Moments don't change.