Forums Barber posted:

I do think that if Eripsa took on a project of writing a short story of what it might be like under StrangeCoin, and engaged other people who write science fiction, that the feedback he would get, while still maybe being a little stronger than he might like (particularly about parsimony, holy poo poo), but I think that he might be able to process it better because maybe he wouldn't perceive it as particularly the same type of personal attack. I don't know, because I've never encounted anyone else like Eripsa.

Yiggy posted:

Oh, he actually has started writing a short story on his Attention Economy if you check back to the goldmined thread. Hes about three chapters in. It'll give you a flare for the sort of world-building he's capable of as a writer of fantasy. Not really my sort of genre these days, so admittedly I'm not a great judge of its excellence.

midnightclimax posted:

I haven't read it, but art would be a better place for his ideas. He's in love with language, the only thing that attracts him to science is probably its status.

quote:

1a

"Go home? What are you talking about, go home? Ricky and me have been drinking at this spot since we were in high school with fake IDs, and you're gonna tell me to go home now that I'm a legal loving adult? Get the gently caress outta here, go home. gently caress that."

Paulie gestured aggressively with his right hand, which also happened to contain the left hand of Monica, whose recently manicured fingernails stuck out of his thick, hairy fist like a fleshy mace with bright red spikes. Monica struggled to maintain balance and the integrity of her dress while being tossed back and forth by her increasingly agitated boyfriend as he thrust their impromptu weapon at the stoic bouncer guarding the door. The bouncer sat motionlessly and in all black on the edge of a stool behind intimidating shades that seemed to create subduction zones on the skin of his face.

"This is my home, you bald piece of poo poo. I was here long before you got here. You can't tell me what to do in my home. Ricky, tell this gently caress who I am. Tell him this is my home. This is where I grew up, you loving wage slave. Someone's paying for you to be here, I don't have to listen to you. Ricky, do you see this loving wage whore telling me I can't drink here?" Paulie turned around his left shoulder to look for support, swinging Monica like a doll and causing her to yelp. Ricky and Marie, whose IDs had already been checked and accepted, stood uncomfortably on the other side of the bouncer and the black chain rope that blocked off the entrance to the club. They were both scanning the crowd nervously for judgmental looks or worse, the infrared glow of an ID scanner aimed in their direction. A scan meant that this whole incident would get published online and become a thing.

Ricky's eyes fell on the bouncer, and he reflexively configured his face into an expression designed to distance himself from the escalating threats coming from his friend on the other side of the rope. Ricky couldn't tell if the bouncer was looking at him or at Paulie, or if he was watching ClearCast behind his shades and was completely oblivious of the scene developing before him. The man could be in the grips of a narcoleptic fit or in an advance state of rigor mortis as far as he could tell. Marie tugged on the bottom of Ricky's jacket. "Do something..." she muttered under her breath, taking care not to present an overtly stressed appearance. Ricky sighed and grabbed the phone from his pocket as he approached the bouncer.

"Look, how much to get them in?" Ricky asked, jabbing at the screen of his phone.

"Doesn't work like that. If you want in, go in. He can't go in."

"What do you mean it doesn't work like that? We just put in sixty-five discoins, right? Look, I'll put in another hundred, and we'll just forget this whole thing happened. Deal?" Ricky flashed the screen of his phone at the bouncer, which presented the symbols "Đ100/h" over a large red button which said "ESTABLISH CONNECTION".

"Nope. We don't deal in discoins any more. Now we only take rottecoins."

"Watercoins? I've never heard of those. But watercoins, discoins, bitcoins, who cares? They're all coming from the same place. Its all money. Its all coin. If you want watercoins I'm sure you can exchange these discoins for all the watercoins you want."

"Rottecoin. It's some new German coin. All the European clubs are using it to screen their clients, and the Owner thinks we should start doing it too. I don't know why. It's not my business to know why. All I need to know is how to use this machine to scan IDs, and this machine says that you have rottecoins and he doesn't, so you can go in and he can't." The machine in question was a black scanner held in his left hand. It had an array of sensors emitting pulses of almost imperceptibly thin red light from the front, a rubber handle and trigger underneath, and a full screen and keypad on top.The bouncer began pulling the scanner's trigger to punctuate the pronouns in his otherwise calmly articulated speech, causing the machine to rhythmically chirp with error codes as he spoke. "And frankly I could give a poo poo if he's your friend because he looks like an rear end in a top hat."

"Look, I don't know what the hell a rottercoin is, so if your machine says I have them there must be some kind of automatic transfer or conversion or something because I'm not the one earning them. So if you transferred some to me then do it for Paulie too, you know the guy is good for it. Or take more from my account." Ricky looked around for Paulie, who was now apologetically dusting off a now more agitated Monica, whom he had knocked over into a barren dirt planter in the sidewalk a few seconds earlier and was now yelling furiously about her ruined skirt. "Look, here's another fifty. Just let us in, man."

"Nope. Owner says that letting in anyone without rottecoins devalues the whole place. Says its worse than pouring our best scotch down the drain. Says it's not worth any number of discoins. Besides," the bouncer lifted his scanner and fired a shot off at Paulie and Monica, the latter of whom had just connected her swinging purse with the left side of Paulie's jaw, hard, causing him to twirl around and fall into the patch of dirt himself, "they're not getting in here acting like that, rottecoin or not."

The shot from the bouncer's powerful scanner excited (and therefore made momentarily visible) the growing field of red lights growing around at the physical confrontation between Paulie and Monica, who appeared to have decided to abandon all pretense of public composure and invest fully in a spontaneous public performance of their argumentative dance. It was a routine they both knew by heart and had improvised together so many times as a private ritual that they fell instantly back into the rhythms for their newly acquired public audience with all the grace of dancers at the height of their craft. This had the effect of turning the cameras and microphones and array of sensors that were now capturing this performance into an exercise in documentary and voyeurism and surveillance and couples therapy and anthropology simultaneously. Every data point captured in association with this event will be integrated online and processed for identity and criminal or creative activity so that merits and demerits can be distributed to the participants accordingly. And unless you're sure you come out looking great, you generally want to be as far away from those redistribution events as possible, because they always seem to gently caress over someone.

Ricky looked back at Marie, who subtly but distinctly and firmly gestured towards the door of the club in frustration. Ricky turned around one more time to see Paulie and Monica now both sitting on the dirt patch a few feet apart and sobbing, slumped over a bit and looking defeated. Some members of the crowd recording the event were becoming bold enough to move towards the couple for close ups of their facial expressions. The phones in their outstretched hands allowed them to both study their subjects in detail while maintaining enough safety and emotional distance to snicker and comment on the incident while it was occurring before them, like a group of tourists on safari who had just stumbled upon a pride of feasting lions. Careful to stay out of their line of sight, Ricky turned quickly around, uttered something indiscernable to the bouncer, and with Marie scurried quickly through the door and into the club.

1b

In physics, the symbol for current is a capital I, from the French intensité de courant, or "current intensity". The standard unit of current is the ampere, named for early 19th century French scientist André-Marie Ampère, who used the symbol I in his experiments measuring the flow of electrical charge across wires. Ampère knew how to induce a flow of electrical current across a wire, and he knew that current would flow in one of two directions, depending on how he coiled the wires. Ampère's experimented with wires hung in parallel, passing current through each and observing the effects. He discovered that when the current flowed in the same direction through parallel wires they were attracted to each other, and when they flowed in opposite directions, the wires repelled. Ampère also found that the strength of the attraction, and therefore the intensity of the current, was proportional to the length of the wire. Both were surprising results.


Image source
Ampère called the phenomenon "electrodynamics" and published these results along with his experimental design: a thin, vertical contraption called a "current balance", again involving two parallel wires, this time running horizontally. The bottom wire is fixed in place, but the top wire bends up at the ends to form three sides of a square, the fourth of which is connected by a nonconducting glass tube. In the middle of the glass tube, elevated on a thin copper post sticking straight up, is a copper sphere balanced at the apex like a Sumo wrestler doing a hand stand. The square wireframe with its top-heavy copper ball hat is mounted to spin one way or the other-- until parallel currents flow through the wires at bottom, in which case their attraction will keep the square level and the copper ball balanced at the top of the square.

Although similar phenomena had been demonstrated using magnets, Ampère's experiment was the first to demonstrate the force as a product of electricity alone. It was an early step towards the unified theory of electromagnetism developed my Maxwell fifty years later. It is also one of the first instances of an artifact whose behavior is controlled entirely by a flow of electrical current.

RealityApologist posted:

Strangecoin started as an attempt at a sci fi sort called "Current".


The story was planned to be sorry snippets from the future contrasted with facts about the development of electromagnetic theory. I stopped the project because I'm not good with writing or f fiction, and would rather talk theory than character.

Judakel posted:

From page 33 to page 34, Eripsa actually turned the tables and started schooling community college dropouts like Sedan Chair and Who What Now on epistemology, but tripped over Feyerabend on the way there and negated the existence of observation while trying to talk about paradigms. Best two pages of the thread.

Eripsa, I am not sure you have the schooling you claim to have, but I do believe you may be somewhat mentally ill. I am not even sure why you're allowed to post from another user's account. I thought account sharing was prohibited. Take a break from the forums and just seek help. You'll be much happier in the long run.

RealityApologist posted:

No one else uses this account. Taking the mental health advice of this thread would be silly.

RealityApologist posted:

No one else uses this account. Taking the mental health advice of this thread would be silly.

eXXon posted:

I don't know about you but if I was in strangecoinland I would try to figure out how to maximize my income (and close friends/family).

emfive posted:

Therefore, to me it's much easier to think about a world that spent 5000 years evolving to the strangecoin situation.

RealityApologist posted:

The shot from the bouncer's powerful scanner excited (and therefore made momentarily visible) the growing field of red lights growing around at the physical confrontation between Paulie and Monica, who appeared to have decided to abandon all pretense of public composure and invest fully in a spontaneous public performance of their argumentative dance. It was a routine they both knew by heart and had improvised together so many times as a private ritual that they fell instantly back into the rhythms for their newly acquired public audience with all the grace of dancers at the height of their craft. This had the effect of turning the cameras and microphones and array of sensors that were now capturing this performance into an exercise in documentary and voyeurism and surveillance and couples therapy and anthropology simultaneously. Every data point captured in association with this event will be integrated online and processed for identity and criminal or creative activity so that merits and demerits can be distributed to the participants accordingly. And unless you're sure you come out looking great, you generally want to be as far away from those redistribution events as possible, because they always seem to gently caress over someone.

Wanamingo posted:

Not wanting to admit you're ever wrong is a big one, but there's also stuff like conflating criticism of your ideas with criticism of you.

RealityApologist posted:

Lol the amount of projection in this thread is ridiculous.

RealityApologist posted:

Lol the amount of projection in this thread is ridiculous.

Who What Now posted:

Eprisa, I have a legitimate question that will actually lessen the amount of trolling you're getting: "What would it take for you to abandon StrangeCoin"?

Can we prove to you that it won't work? Can we demonstrate conclusively that it will objectively harm the poorest classes? Can we show without a doubt that it will collapse society into a Mad Max post-apocalyptic world?

What's your threshold for "Ok, this idea was bad, let's start anew"?

Obdicut posted:

Who here has conflated criticism of their ideas with criticism of themselves, other than you? And again, instead of asserting it, actually point out where it occurred, cite it.

Judakel posted:

You have crazy eyes and seem desperate to come up with the next grand idea for something or the other. Here's a tip: Start small.

quote:

Also, I distinctly remember someone saying that RealityApologist was their account during the Google Hangout introductions. I guess it is your's now.

Wanamingo posted:

You're an academic, of course

RealityApologist posted:

Sigh. You are all conflating criticism of me with criticism of my ideas, and attributing the mistake to me.

You are all pretty loving dense sometimes, too.

RealityApologist posted:

Attention Economy would be a little harder, it's a little like you're asking Marx what it would take to abandon communism. For me, AE is an organizing framework for discussing digital philosophy in practice. I think it will require waiting 20-30 years to see what actually develops to to fill the socioeconomic of roles I'm describing. Then we can talk about how reality diverged from the theory.

RealityApologist posted:

Sigh. You are all conflating criticism of me with criticism of my ideas, and attributing the mistake to me.

You are all pretty loving dense sometimes, too.

SedanChair posted:

That was him you smoker. I guess it's hard to tell all those "community college dropouts" apart?

RealityApologist posted:

Sigh. You are all conflating criticism of me with criticism of my ideas, and attributing the mistake to me.

You are all pretty loving dense sometimes, too.

Slanderer posted:

Actually, for once Judakel isn't shitposting. I figured out a few threads back that Eripsa must have inherited the account, as http://realityapologist.com/ redirects to a certain co-conspirator...

Obdicut posted:

Your 'attention economy' is a very nebulous, un-worked-out mess that doesn't even define what 'attention' is, nor how you can interpret it meaningfully. It is not an organizational framework. we could wait 20 to 30 years and nothing would change, people would say "Wait, how are you measuring attention?" and "How do you jump from 'people are payassholinntion to this' to 'the solution for that problem is this'?" The problems it has are fundamental, because you haven't approached it with the slightest hint of rigor.

RealityApologist posted:

For strangecoin, it would be enough to finish the spec and simulator, and testing enough configurations to determine that there are no stable configurations for the network.

Attention Economy would be a little harder, it's a little like you're asking Marx what it would take to abandon communism. For me, AE is an organizing framework for discussing digital philosophy in practice. I think it will require waiting 20-30 years to see what actually develops to to fill the socioeconomic of roles I'm describing. Then we can talk about how reality diverged from the theory.

RealityApologist posted:

quote:

You are a bully, and I don't feel that my positions ate threatened by your bullshit posting in this thread. That's not egomania or being oblivious to criticism, that's just not letting assholes win arguments by being assholes.

Who What Now posted:

Jawn already did a spec and simulator, and tested it, and there was not a stable configuration

RealityApologist posted:

For strangecoin, it would be enough to finish the spec and simulator, and testing enough configurations to determine that there are no stable configurations for the network.

RealityApologist posted:

I'm writing a new proposal, from scratch, with my notes on the procedure I wrote up earlier,
to be done by the end of the day because I have to catch a plane early tomorrow.

RealityApologist posted:

Just to indicate the kind of blatant lies I have to deal with in this thread, you claim I've not demonstrated a hint of rigor with the idea.

quote:

Despite the very narrow, technical focus of the proposal in the op

quote:

I've obviously shown "hints of the rigor"

RealityApologist posted:

I denied repeatedly that the idea is novel

RealityApologist posted:

Traditional economics is like alchemy, and I'm like one of the early chemists before the periodic table or anything else was developed but who has a pretty good sense that alchemy is just bad methodology and that there's an alternative science just around the corner.

RealityApologist posted:

I know I should learn econ, but

RealityApologist posted:

Despite the very narrow, technical focus of the proposal in the op ... I'm not saying I've even completed the formulation

Wanamingo posted:

Somebody earlier in the thread, I forget who, said that you used to be completely different a few years back, before all the OWS stuff. If they were right, then that's really sort of worrying.

RealityApologist posted:

I never suggested I had the comprehensive knowledge necessary to cover the scope of the topic, and I've eaten crow several times in this thread to humble myself, admit mistakes, address criticism, respond to questions, and so on.

Wanamingo posted:

RA, do you think that every single person in this thread save for BernieLomax is out to get you or something?