That’s the thing. Being just as fair doesn’t necessarily imply it’s equally travelled. Even being worn the same doesn’t necessarily mean equally traveled, although it strongly implies it. I think the final line is so certain that it overrides the earlier lines and implies to the unwary reader that these similar paths actually were differently travelled.

I don’t expect self contradiction in a story / poem. So that certainty of there being a difference overrides all.

It’s only after reading the author’s intentions that I know for sure that the contradiction was intended and that was actually the point of the poem.

As I said before, this makes me like the poem even more now.

Even after rereading the poem I had to read the Wikipedia analysis section to be convinced you are right. It’s a very subtle poem, which, honestly, just makes it better.

It is absolutely ai. The experience of talking with chatgpt is so human like that it just blows my mind. What I’ve learned so far is that human brains aren’t nearly as magical as they seem.

I thought the main obstacle was the computing power to update 175 billion neurons with large datasets. You probably could generate a good llm just using Wikipedia, but I think it requires a room full of expensive video cards to do.

The Google response seems to agree with you, but this Berkeley study says the opposite:

https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/kaplan.pdf

(Fixed link.)

The Matrix. Blew my fucking mind the first time I saw it. It’s awesome on repeat viewings, but that first watch is magical.

I play Switch games while on my treadmill. The split controller works perfectly for that and makes it easy to forget I’m walking.

Everything in this thread so far is normal stuff I could have guessed. Guns, metric, tipping, etc. Most of it has large groups of people in the country that agree, or at least know.

What are some non-obvious things? Culture shock isn’t about major political issues. It’s about universal things that turn out to not be universal.

For example, US people have a strong culture of how standing in line works. It’s basically a moral sin to butt in line unless you have someone holding your place. This is universal in the country. My understanding is that other countries differ. Is that true?

I assumed it was intentional.

I understand the downvotes, but that law really needs reforming. The labels need to say in what way it can cause harm. I remember seeing a piece of wood (pressboard) labelled as carcinogenic at Home Depot. I couldn’t figure out what that meant. Is it ok as long as I don’t burn it? Is it bad to breath near it? Is it only dangerous if I eat it?

Labels need to be more specific about possible dangers.

Every instance just needs to store the communities they use, just like now. But once cached, any other instance could grab those messages from any of those instances. It’d be a peer to peer sort of organization.

I can think of lots of caveats regarding freshness of content and trust and ensuring the tree of instances is auto organized to minimize depth. Maybe for trust you could have signatures for all content signed using keys that every instance could pull from the original instance just once every now and then.

Upvotes and responses would just travel up the tree in the reverse trip from the way content came down.

But, I think it’s similar to other things that already exist. These problems seem solvable.

If it worked like torrenting where you have seeds, etc, it’d scale almost infinitely. I don’t think we should change to fit the algorithm. We should change the algorithm to make it scale.

I’ve read theories about white holes and such. I’m not a physicist though. But ultimately, sometimes you just need to shrug and say I don’t know. Any assertions without evidence are meaningless guesses.

I did a bit of searching and the initial size you mention seems to be the initial size to which extrapolation is possible given information we have and that past that point it’s unknowable?

These are the philosophical questions that every traveler must answer for themselves. I am but a hobbit. I didn’t even remember to bring a handkerchief!