I wouldn’t say I “like” the idea, since it’s one of the most doomed ways for a universe to be, but Greg Egan’s Arrows of Time is a good exploration of this idea.

There seems to be something wrong with the image quality. Here, I improved it for y’all:

Oh, the lab leak/zoonosis debate is a good thought, but I don’t think it counts as a conspiracy - if I search for news articles from before 2022 mentioning it, I immediately find, say, this BBC article from 2020 that treats lab leak seriously, so it was a mainstream-ish idea quite early on. This seems to match with my own memories, I’ve seen lab leak being discussed in 2022 and I think even earlier.

In general, though, there’s probably some good COVID-related example, even if I can’t think of one immediately (I think it’s pretty disingenuous how media demonized every prospective COVID drug, especially ivermectin - but they did turn out to be ineffective against the virus itself, and I don’t think there were any conspiracies about the drugs that ended up actually working, like Paxlovid).

Thanks, that’s a nice askreddit thread. A lot of these have the same problem though, which is that I have trouble believing (and have no idea how to find evidence, since they were well pre-internet) that these were conspiracy theories before they were revealed.

(I note now that I didn’t actually mention, in my comment, that by “was a conspiracy theory” I don’t just mean “sounds crazy” but rather “sounded crazy and there were actually people saying it”. I’m not interested in every insane thing secret agencies did*, I’m interested in stuff people successfully predicted.)

*well, I am, but it’s not what the question is about

I’m not sure what you mean. Arresting random intelligentsia is not a “well reasoned response” to foreign interference. And it’s also unrelated to the topic - I’m asking about conspiracy theories that were later validated, and “foreign governments are trying to sabotage us”, in Stalinist USSR, wasn’t a conspiracy theory - if anything it was the party line.

Sure, the fact the US government spies on every single citizen without warrant or cause.

Ah, that’s true, I totally forgot about Snowden. Technically I don’t think I’ve heard of there being a conspiracy about it before 2013, but it’s a good example.

Stalin wasn’t crazy nor did he overreact with his actions against ‘enemies if the state’

Very questionable phrasing (I have some Soviet ancestors who spent years felling forests for the crime of being too educated and teaching things that didn’t quite align with the party line; that’s not an ‘overreaction’ to anything, but just tyranny), but anyway, this doesn’t count - it was definitely not considered a conspiracy theory in the Soviet Union to think that foreign states were doing espionage there.

Are there any examples of something that was a conspiracy theory being validated by confidential documents later? I can’t think of any, even though secret agencies sure did do a lot of crazy stuff.

the Winnie the Pooh comments are racist though

That’s a strange assumption to make. “Because it’s forbidden in China” is a sufficient explanation of why people do this. For the exact same reason people will forever keep bringing up the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

I was going to say “it’s Rust so it’d be easy to compile on Linux” but actually it’s a Tauri application and so needs some system dependencies like libwebkit2gtk-dev. It looks like the project used to build linux executables in CI but removed it due to a bug.

Most of the structures in the game would be impossible for me to make because they use hardcoded methods I don’t have access to.

You mean “with a datapack”, right? I don’t think there’s any limitations on what you can change with a mod, if you’re willing to do some messy reflection.

It’s only Chaotic if you use it carelessly, OP, rather than to build your Lawful Evil Empire of Poop.

Teledoctor*, unless you’re planning to only use it on people if they convert to your religion.

One can justify it however they like but it’s going to end up making the experience worse for competent users anyway. Much like this Android 12 security change that made it permanently more annoying to manipulate files.

Huh, that’s a fun thought. If the bird flu turns into a pandemic (there’s a prediction market that gives 16% for it, which is pants-shittingly terrifyingly high), we’ll get to see how the Trump administration deals with one. And that… can go various ways.

On one hand, there’s tons of anti-vaxxers in the Trump voting base and presumably this will affect the government, which is concerning. But on the other hand, one of the biggest problems in the COVID handling was when FDA stopped people from using already-created vaccines for idiotic bureaucracy considerations while people were literally dying by the million. That’s the sort of thing that could go a lot better with just one presidential decision speeding it up, and there’s a bunch of new people with power in the government now, like Elon Musk. Muskrat is a horrible person and kind of insane in some ways, but not stupid and I think he’d notice and act upon an opportunity like that. So I’m not totally pessimistic about how a new pandemic would go, either.

“The crusades are an example of capitalist oppression” sure is a hot take.

If you can’t even fly around as an owl and eat voles in your free time, what is even the point?

I’m not sure what the author meant by this. Python does support parallelism via multiprocessing (and in experimental versions, via threads in no-GIL builds), e.g. like this. It’s a bit questionable whether it’d help in this particular benchmark, because the overhead of sending the inputs between workers may be comparable to the speedup, but it’s certainly possible, and very common in real tasks.

(I’m not familiar with Ruby, but from some googling it seems the situation is about the same as Python, but there’s not a stdlib implementation and instead you need to use something third-party like the parallel gem.)

Fun fact: if Luna was only about 30% heavier than it is currently, the Earth’s barycenter would lie outside of Earth, which would potentially make Earth not count as a planet by the modern IAU definition.

I can’t tell if this is a joke or real code

Yes.

Will that repo seriously run until it finds where that is in pi?

Sure. It’ll take a very long while though. We can estimate roughly how long - encoded as ASCII and translated to hex your sentence looks like 54686520636174206973206261636b. That’s 30 hexadecimal digits. So very roughly, one of each 16^30 30-digit sequences will match this one. So on average, you’d need to look about 16^30 * 30 ≈ 4e37 digits into π to find a sequence matching this one. For comparison, something on the order of 1e15 digits of pi were ever calculated.

so you can look it up quickly?

Not very quickly, it’s still n log n time. More importantly, information theory is ruthless: there exist no compression algorithms that have on average a >1 compression coefficient for arbitrary data. So if you tried to use π as compression, the offsets you get would on average be larger than the data you are compressing. For example, your data here can be written written as 30 hexadecimal digits, but the offset into pi would be on the order of 4e37, which takes ~90 hexadecimal digits to write down.

You generate it when needed, using one of the known sequences that converges to π. As a simple example, the pi() recipe here shows how to compute π to arbitrary precision. For an application like pifs you can do even better and use the BBP formula which lets you directly calculate a specific hexadecimal digit of π.