I’ve heard that that’s similar to why Adobe creative cloud was so easy to pirate for years (maybe it still is, idk, I switched to affinity forever ago). Adobe is the industry standard because everyone uses it -> person wants to learn photo/video editing, digital illustration, etc, but can’t afford it -> pirate Adobe instead of trying cheaper/free alternatives, because it’s the industry standard -> person with Adobe skills gets hired by business that pays for Adobe legitimately because that’s what most people know -> Adobe is the industry because everyone uses it, and the cycle goes on…

Strawbelephant

Connect for Android does

Magically no, but sometimes a clean slate is easier than a refactor. I’m speaking generally though, I’ve never looked at Lemmy’s code, and I’m not even who you originally replied to.

lemm.ee doesn’t block it, so it’s not a problem with your instance. You don’t have to ask how I know

I just found out in this thread that connect is too? But it doesn’t have any ads or purchases, so now I’m wondering what that developers goals are

Wow, no kidding

I didn’t even realize that it wasn’t, tbh. There’s no ads or purchases or anything

With a dash of Keanu Reeves and Nicolas Cage

You’re right about recycling metals and plastics. I swear I read somewhere though that recycled glass is “purer”, and that the first few cycles happen right at the factory. They’ll make a batch of glass, immediately destroy it, and recycle it until they get their desired threshold of purity.

It’s a whale of a wash, and the price… is very, very low

Those are sick in their own right, but op’s has a cool depth about it that I really dig

Nice

We’re the creators? As in the human race? Okay, I actually think that I understand your point now. If we start with the assumption that the universe was run by beings like us, and they based it on their own universe, then I’d have to agree with your position that those beings would probably be interested in our life.

Whenever I said that the universe could be a simulation, carried out by a creator, I meant those terms in only the most abstract sense. I didn’t assume a human or human-like creator, or that our universe has any resemblance to theirs.

Semantics man, that’s what it always comes down to. Good conversation

Sorry if I came across as aggressive, it’s just fun to think about.

Why “can” it? What defines what “can” and can’t be? Why exactly should possibility imply reality? Why can’t possibility not necessarily imply reality? Seems to me like a philosophical kick the can down the road thing - which to be fair is pretty much all philosophy.

To us a being that can create a universe is a god, not just another creature.

That’s my point - we’re just another creature. On a scale of bird to god, we might as well be a bird. It’s vain to assume that a universe-creator of all people would give a fuck about human achievements. Only other humans care.

I don’t follow your train of thought that the creator of a simulation wouldn’t know of the only advanced intelligence within their simulation.

I’m not saying that the creator couldn’t know, I’m saying they likely wouldn’t care. Of course I’m just guessing same as you, but life in general is probably just noise considering all that goes on in the universe without a trace of life as we define it. My bet is that we’re simply outside of the creator’s scope. She’s probably interested in other things like gravity and the ratio’s of elements as time progresses.

Also, you say that we’re the only advanced intelligence in the universe/simulation with way too much certainty. We’ve only been outside of our atmosphere for a little more than half a century, which is to say three things:

1. “advanced” is relative, if not subjective.

2. Give it time, we could find life in the next few millennia.

3. Even if we never find life, Occam’s razor. Is it wise to assume that the universe was created for homo-sapiens, when it’s possible that life is simply rare and we aren’t as advanced as we think we are?

The vastness of the universe and the speed of light limitation is likely the invisible wall meant to keep us where we are.

This sounds a lot like the flat-earth ice wall idea. Most thought on simulation philosophy posits that our fixed rate of causation is due to the limits of the media that the universe “runs” on, and we see parallels in our own “simulations”. So there’s no right or wrong here but again, Occam’s razor.

I believe that my first paragraph addresses your last, but I do want to take the anthropological angle. When we thought the earth was flat, many civilizations assumed that theirs was the center. When it became clear that the earth was a globe, we assumed that the sun, planets, and stars orbited the earth, and that the earth was the center of the universe. When we learned that actually the earth orbits the sun, we still thought that the sun was the center of the universe which was just the solar system + the stars before we realized that the sun is just one star, and the sun itself had an orbit in in the galaxy, which we again falsy assumed was the whole universe.

We tend to see ourselves as the center of the universe because that’s our perspective, it’s natural and intuitive. That assumption has been wrong every step of the way so far though. So what makes you so sure that this time is so different? What makes you so sure that homosapiens, the apes living on one rock on the edge of some random, average galaxy, who only just escaped their planet’s orbit just now on a cosmic scale, are the focal point of the entire theoretically observable universe, which they’ve only just scratched the surface of being able to observe? The fact that they have a few million year evolutionary head start on their chimpanzee cousins? Or a few more million on their dolphin cousins? Or a couple billion on their rock cousins?

It’s an interesting thought. I don’t pretend to know an infinite beings thought process, but what does thought entail for them? Presumably an infinite being imagining our universe would come up with some universal laws, begin from singularity, and work from there event by event. How does general relativity factor in? Is the being simply doing those calculations too?

Overall, if our universe is is merely a prediction (and importantly, predictable), I just don’t see the practical difference between a perfect being capable of cheap, infinite thought and a merely clever being with a really, really powerful computer. It’s a different medium, but it doesn’t say anything different about our universe as simulation. Whether the perfect being thinks of and builds the universe in their head, or the clever universe-software developer comes up with a framework for a universe and runs it on their super computer, it might as well be the same universe from our perspective if the initial conditions and laws happened to be the same.

And both were triggered by ideas, which surely didn’t come from nowhere, but even if it did it only brings us back to the age-old question: what created the Creator? So it doesn’t really answer the “why” and “what triggered it” questions either.

Compared to a being that can build a universe? A spacecraft might as well be a bird’s nest. I’m inclined to agree with the guy that you’re replying to. If this universe is a simulation, I personally doubt that its creator is specifically aware of us as a species, let alone as individuals. The fact that life appears so rare in this universe only tells me that if the universe was designed, it wasn’t designed for us or entities like us.

Also are you sure about that last sentence? Surely none have language as sophisticated as we do, but don’t dolphins have a sort-of language? I genuinely don’t know

Seriously, what the fuck?