- This is really getting depressing. One of the only things that makes it bearable—even though in some sense it shouldn’t—is that most of humanity is in this together. For once, there’s no question of “why me?”
- Having watched the eighth and final episode of Devs, the thought occurred to me: if I’d had the opportunity to restart the world from 8 months ago, even inside a simulation, I’d seize the chance and never look back.
- I think I finally figured out how to explain the issue with Devs to my literary sophisticate readers. Namely: Devs consists, precisely, of the cultural appropriation of quantum computing. Now, I never felt like cultural appropriation was the world’s worst problem—not even before a pandemic started overflowing the morgues—so I wouldn’t say I was offended by Alex Garland appropriating the images and buzzwords of my quantum computing tribe for a basically unrelated purpose, but it is what it is. Again: Devs is the show for you, if you want a haunting, slow-paced, well-produced meditation about free will and determinism and predicting the future and parallel worlds and “what if the whole universe is a simulation?,” and the various ideas I would’ve had about such topics around the age of 11. It’s just not a show about quantum computing. I hope that makes it clear.
- I read with interest this anonymous but PGP-signed article, laying out the case that it’s plausible that covid accidentally leaked from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC, rather than originating at the Huanan seafood market. Or, as an intermediate hypothesis, that an infected animal from one of those labs ended up at the seafood market. (Note that this is completely different from the hypothesis that covid was purposefully engineered—the authors of the article find that totally implausible, and I agree with them.) Notably, the Wuhan labs are known to have experimented with bat coronaviruses very much like covid, and are known to have performed “gain-of-function” experiments on them, and were probably the central labs in China for such experiments. And viruses are known to have leaked from other labs in China on other occasions, and the nature → seafood market route has unresolved issues, like where exactly the crossover from bats to pangolins (or some other intermediate species) is supposed to have happened, such that people would only start getting infected at the seafood market and not at its faraway suppliers, and … well, anyway, read the article and form your own judgment!
- I find it interesting that three months ago, I would’ve hesitated even to share such a link, because my internal critic would’ve screamed “this looks too much like tinfoil-hat stuff—are you ready for all the people you respect sneering at you?” But the me of three months ago is not the me of today. I make no apologies for adapting my thoughts to the freak branch of the multiverse where I actually find myself.