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[silverspawn]

*IBAN

[silverspawn]

A lot of meditation teachers, even the extraordinarily lucid Sam Harris, often say that the point of meditation is not to change your experience.

For some reason, no-one ever points out that this makes absolutely 0 sense.

You are (as they will also tell you) identical to your experience. So if you don't change it, you've achieved literally nothing.

[silverspawn]

Now fortunately, I think this mostly comes down to words.

What they should say instead is that you're not trying to change your experiences along the 6 "obvious" axes, which are the five senses + thoughts. You're rather trying to change consciousness in spite of those axes. But this is conceptually confusing, so no-one ever puts it clearly.

But honestly, it's not that confusing! It just means consciousness is a function of more than 6 arguments. Which, in fact, it's not.

In reality, consciousness is the shape of your electromagnetic field, and the field is affected when the brain receives sensory inputs and thoughts, but it can also be affected in other ways. So, there you go; mystery solved.

[silverspawn]

*it's not it is.

Rephrased the sentence there.

[silverspawn]

Ever since hitting puberty, I've had a relatively slurry speech. And as it happens, people will systematically discriminate against you if you don't talk clearly, probably without ever noticing it. Whenever two people try to speak, everyone always will listen to the one who talks more clearly. This happens with stunning consistency. It took me quite a while to figure out that this is an acoustic thing. You also have a harder time even getting people's attention,

So now I'm finally making a legit effort to change my speaking patterns. But it's quite difficult because there are so many objectives at once. You want to talk at a lower pitch, which is more attractive. You want to be very relaxed. You definitely don't want to have breathing noises in the microphone if you're recording. You definitely want to articulate every syllable clearly. But you definitely don't want to sound artificial, so it's very important that you have a healthy range in your pitch. You want to articulate vowels clearly. You need to have space between words. You want to talk slowly. Etc.

[silverspawn]

Probably if you actually have a speech impediment, people will make a conscious effort. But since nothing is technically wrong with my speech, it's just on wrong side of the bell curve in terms of clarity, that doesn't happen.

[silverspawn]

THAT'S IT NO MORE SCHOOL

[Awaclus]

I wouldn't count on AI-generated illustrations in children's books any time soon. We're probably going to start seeing indie games (digital ones, that is) with AI-generated art in the near future because the art is often an afterthought for these games and it saves costs, and we're probably going to start seeing illustrators who actually use AI themselves e.g. to generate ideas, but the illustrations in children's books are often at least as important as the text and it's usually one person doing both the writing and the illustrations, or two people working together as a team such that the art also inspires the writing, not just vice versa. And when you're releasing a physical book, the cost of getting the books printed and distributed is pretty high so even if you would have to specifically hire an artist to illustrate your writing, it probably would not be a substantial part of the total cost.

After getting the beta invite to DALL-E, I must say it's even less exciting than I would have anticipated (to be clear, it is still extremely exciting, but the level of exciting it would have to be to start replacing human artists would be outrageous). If you have multiple keywords, it can probably take into account all the keywords, surprisingly well actually, but it's totally hopeless to try to get it to get their relationships right (for example, to get the whirlpool to appear in the ocean and not in the sky) and get everything to look good individually and get the entire picture to look coherent colors/lighting/shadows-wise instead of different pictures pasted on top of each other and not have it include some unrelated bullShiT that ruins the image (for example, random people in ordinary modern clothes posing in front of your prompted thing (to be fair I did ask for a photograph that time)).

It's maaaaaybe usable for very low budget indie video games if they can kind of compromise what they're going for and accept a result as soon as it looks decent even if it doesn't match their original vision, or if they only ever need simple enough things that there's not too much room for it to screw things up, but even that's probably less doable than I was hopeful for. However, it is definitely usable for generating ideas, and a bunch of the results I got were something that a skilled artist could easily save a lot of time by drawing over instead of starting from scratch.

[silverspawn]

Why do you have access to Dall-E? (and how?) And why do I not have access to Dall-E?

But ya, that tracks what I've heard very well.

[silverspawn]

Also like how Molly Weasley is left agonizing for hours about whether people in her family may have died after the events at the cup, and no-one bothered to take the 20 seconds required to apparate to the Burrow and tell her everything's fine.

[faust]

Also like how Molly Weasley is left agonizing for hours about whether people in her family may have died after the events at the cup, and no-one bothered to take the 20 seconds required to apparate to the Burrow and tell her everything's fine.

I think that is fairly accurate when it comes to crisis situations. The perceived threat for an outside observer is always greater. I recall when there was an attack on a christmas market in Berlin back in 2015 or so where 15 people died, I received some concerned messages. I wouldn't even have thought to contact anyone to tell them I'm fine, like 15 people out of 3.4 million died, it's not like I'm going to be one of them.

[silverspawn]

yeah, and no-one died in the riot. Ok fine.

But here's something else. Why can the marauder's map and Moody's eye see through harry's cloak? It's a flippin deathly hallow! It should make you truly and utterly invincible!

[silverspawn]

*invisible

[silverspawn]

Sleeping is such a hardcore activity. You set aside this massive 7-8 hour block from your day, to be totally unresponsive and trip out like nuts, hallucinating about attending school shootings,  missing trains, flying planes, casting spells, flying yourself without planes, getting rich, driving trains, losing your money, dying, barely catching trains, killing people, getting onto the wrong trains, being other people, getting stuck on the wrong station, and all of this other crazy shit. And of course, the trips are usually high valence, until get a bad one and fantasize about unable to move while crazy killers are beside your bed.

[faust]

yeah, and no-one died in the riot. Ok fine.

But here's something else. Why can the marauder's map and Moody's eye see through harry's cloak? It's a flippin deathly hallow! It should make you truly and utterly invincible!

Well I don't think that's particularly thought through in the books, but there is an explanation: The cloak merely makes you invisible, i. e. shields you from the sense of vision. It does not work on e. g. touch or smell. One might argue that magic is a further sense that the cloak does not shield against. Of course I have no idea whether JK is consistent about this.

[Awaclus]

Why do you have access to Dall-E? (and how?) And why do I not have access to Dall-E?

But ya, that tracks what I've heard very well.

I queued for the beta invites some time ago, probably in like May or something, and now that they sent out a ShiTton of them, I got one. If you don't have access, I'd assume it's because you haven't queued for the beta invites, you queued later than I did, or you just got less lucky than I did.

[silverspawn]

yeah, and no-one died in the riot. Ok fine.

But here's something else. Why can the marauder's map and Moody's eye see through harry's cloak? It's a flippin deathly hallow! It should make you truly and utterly invincible!

Well I don't think that's particularly thought through in the books, but there is an explanation: The cloak merely makes you invisible, i. e. shields you from the sense of vision. It does not work on e. g. touch or smell. One might argue that magic is a further sense that the cloak does not shield against. Of course I have no idea whether JK is consistent about this.

Admirable defense, but I like my solution much better: the cloak does hide you!

[faust]

yeah, and no-one died in the riot. Ok fine.

But here's something else. Why can the marauder's map and Moody's eye see through harry's cloak? It's a flippin deathly hallow! It should make you truly and utterly invincible!

Well I don't think that's particularly thought through in the books, but there is an explanation: The cloak merely makes you invisible, i. e. shields you from the sense of vision. It does not work on e. g. touch or smell. One might argue that magic is a further sense that the cloak does not shield against. Of course I have no idea whether JK is consistent about this.

Admirable defense, but I like my solution much better: the cloak does hide you!

That's certainly what you'd want. A magic cloak that does not hide from magic detection is a bit crap. The question is, does it make you completely imperceptible?

[Awaclus]

yeah, and no-one died in the riot. Ok fine.

But here's something else. Why can the marauder's map and Moody's eye see through harry's cloak? It's a flippin deathly hallow! It should make you truly and utterly invincible!

That actually raises an interesting question: given that the Marauder's Map is something that a bunch of teenagers can create and it's that powerful, why doesn't everyone have one? Just go buy a muggle atlas and enchant it with the same spell and you know where literally everyone is at the current moment. Or if the spell is advanced enough that maybe not everyone is able to cast it, someone who can do it should probably sell enchanted muggle atlases and make a ShiTton of money.

[faust]

yeah, and no-one died in the riot. Ok fine.

But here's something else. Why can the marauder's map and Moody's eye see through harry's cloak? It's a flippin deathly hallow! It should make you truly and utterly invincible!

That actually raises an interesting question: given that the Marauder's Map is something that a bunch of teenagers can create and it's that powerful, why doesn't everyone have one? Just go buy a muggle atlas and enchant it with the same spell and you know where literally everyone is at the current moment. Or if the spell is advanced enough that maybe not everyone is able to cast it, someone who can do it should probably sell enchanted muggle atlases and make a ShiTton of money.

Magic Google Maps! Complete with all the data harvesting.

[faust]

You could easily say that's not possible because that spell gets more tricky with area covered. But of course the magic system in Harry Potter is rife with all kinds of exploits.

[silverspawn]

yeah, and no-one died in the riot. Ok fine.

But here's something else. Why can the marauder's map and Moody's eye see through harry's cloak? It's a flippin deathly hallow! It should make you truly and utterly invincible!

That actually raises an interesting question: given that the Marauder's Map is something that a bunch of teenagers can create and it's that powerful, why doesn't everyone have one? Just go buy a muggle atlas and enchant it with the same spell and you know where literally everyone is at the current moment. Or if the spell is advanced enough that maybe not everyone is able to cast it, someone who can do it should probably sell enchanted muggle atlases and make a ShiTton of money.

Not I think it was thought through (slash what faust just said), but James and Sirius were supposed to be brilliant, like the best wizards in school, and they also managed to become Animagi, which is supposedly extremely difficult. So it could be that only very few people are capable of creating a map like that.

[silverspawn]

In general, I think it's cool to have unique items and powers. Like the Marauder's Map, the Time Turner, The Philosopher's Stone, the Weasley's Grandfather Clock, the Houseelf teleportation power, even the enchanted word "Voldemort". But when you want to increase the sanity barometer, or whatever should call this quantity of not having plotholes, you gotta explain why they're not used all the time. Why isn't Hogwarts security useless if elves can teleport in and out? Why couldn't the Death Eaters catch everyone in book 7 by enchanting an everyday word like "breakfast" that will break all secuirty charms if it's uttered? What doesn't everyone have an analog to the Weasley's Clock? Why isn't everyone using Marauder's maps and Time Turners?

[silverspawn]

hpmor had explanations for most of those, and sometimes it was "everyone is using them all the time," like for Time Turners. I'm just gonna ignore them, though. Time travel is a bridge too far.

[silverspawn]

When I was little and my entire family minus my father were harry potter fangirls and boys, there was this pervasive opinion that the books basically got better as it went, but that book 2-4 break the trend, with 2 and 4 being worse and 3 better.

But now, I think 3 may be my least favorite book of the entire series. 3 has the most ridiculous plot by like a mile, and I'm just so annoyed with Harry's decisions all throughout. Book 3 really makes he dislike him. I'm enjoying book 4 way more so far.

I think one of the things we really loved was Lupin, and, fair enough, Lupin is cool.

It does have by far the best movie, for what that's worth.