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I don't know why I didn't think of using the replicator on local computer memory! I said in a post further down the reblog chain that physical matter would inherit the properties of digital media, and I didn't even realize that applied to memory cards too. Drat. I was really enjoying the idea of compressed foods.

As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.

“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”

That’s ridiculous.  In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters.  Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level. 

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I’ve been tinkering with the idea of an urban fantasy “All Fairy Tales Are True” setting where some fairy tale characters are mortals who reincarnate and live through their story again and again with no memory of their past lives, but other characters are immortal, carrying over biases and grudges and regrets from the last time they went through this.

Snow White’s dwarves keep her room exactly as she left it, and keep a wary eye on the horizon for the day she returns. When she does they treat her like a beloved daughter come home, cook her favourite meals, warn her to stay away from apples this time, and keep calling her the wrong name.

Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother found her a touch ungrateful last time, and has decided not to appear to her this time around to teach her a lesson in gratitude. This Cinderella, without the memory of the last time, is still a terrified, miserable woman desperate to escape her awful situation.

The Witch in the gingerbread house has developed a thousand traps to eat those goddamned kids. She’s failed every time. She lives a life of Sisyphean torment previously known only to cartoon coyotes.

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I used to frequently daydream about what I would do if I were all-powerful, or had infinite wishes, and how I would arrange the world. A main goal would be to get as many living people to the point—psychologically, spiritually, whatever—where making them tiny gods over their own lives would be good for them. So long as you don't let them create philosophical zombies, so long as they can't simulate the externalities of others, I think this would be the ideal thing to do. But I also think it wouldn't interest people nearly so much as seeking out others. Once they're around other people, they're no longer in control and their information is no longer complete. I think people would most strongly identify with who they are when they're around others, not with who they are when they're alone. Time spent alone playing God would gain most of its value retroactively by the period of reconnection that follows.

For some people, this could easily turn into something like hell, especially if they were able to, and chose to, fill their life with simulacrums of people over whom they could at any moment exercise total control or gain total knowledge.

i guess part of my whole deal is that i don't actually want the world to be frictionless. i did at one point. but i just kind of like. grew out of it

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everyone should watch this video. just learned something new. the usa is still genociding indigenous people and they won't stop.

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I fw you little guy

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ID credit: 5416025956 on 小红书

(please like, reblog and give proper credit if you use any of my gifs!)

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Hmmm, I mean, yeah, I was abandoning the Star Trek context and thinking about if replicators were real in our world's future, but if our future went down a similar path to Star Trek and capitalism ended, it wouldn't be because of replicators. They wouldn't "replace capitalism"; you CAN sell things to people who can just make them appear out of thin air. We do it all the time. A replicator would give physical matter most of the attributes of digital information: permanent online storage and easy reproducibility. Therefore (if they were invented before capitalism ended), artificial scarcity would be enforced on them like it is on digital media, with some tweaks and unique emergent behavior. Why do people pay for TV shows and video games today? Faith in capitalism and in the right of the proprietor to their money, fear of being caught pirating, not knowing how easy pirating is, fear of malware from pirating (both justified and manufactured), they think it's easier, etc etc etc. And then there's monetizing by way of adverts, and the value of selling your users' info, and the value of having customers reliably give your app or software attention three times a day, which can be turned to your advantage in all sorts of ways. Some industries would fight the replicator and die, but investors would be ALL OVER IT. People would jump ship from the industries being made obsolete because the writing would be on the wall, and billions of dollars across the globe would be thrown into figuring out how to use this thing to maximize profit. Every roadblock would be met with an army of engineers, starry-eyed stock holders, government funding, and ambitious startups. There'd be even more enthusiasm than there's been for LLMs and image generation, only it wouldn't be misplaced.

As for this problem of storage being solved by small reusable files that make food unsatisfying and homogeneous, I just don't think that's right. I was writing up something about how the uncompressed scans wouldn't actually have very much relevant information in them, but that's not really the point. The point isn't that this or that argument against good tasting replicator food is wrong, but the fact that these arguments keep popping up like weeds. I think sentimentality toward cooking is leading us to invent ways for the replicator to fail, to exhaust our imagination condemning its ability to prepare meals like humans can. Like, let's say you're right, and smart algorithm-driven psychogustatory compression to cut file size down to a fraction just isn't possible (mp3s can get a 10 to 1 ratio before most people notice a difference). Our sense of taste is just too different from sight and hearing so compression isn't viable here. The replicator (or its cousin) is still used to copy entire humans so exactly that they don't lose their train of thought going in one end and out the other. The human brain has staggering amounts of complexity compared to anything else in the universe (or, since this is Star Trek, anything except other brains). Certainly more complexity, more relevant info to keep track of than a chicken dinner.

But let's put that aside too! Maybe the complexity of any two things becomes equal once you zoom in far enough and have to take every little interrelationship into account, and the difference in complexity only appears when you zoom out far enough to regard the thing as a whole instead of the series of atoms or collection of energy that a replicator would see it as. Or maybe human scans are so large, they only store one at a time, then get rid of it to make room for the next scan, and that's with top of the line machinery that can't be spared for someone's chicken dinner. Ok, but this isn't as significant as it seems: if the file tracks every particle, complexity is mostly a function of mass (that and energy differences between particles, which at scale would be more or less proportional to mass I think). A human's mass is enough for a good number of meals, and that's before you start getting smart. Here's how you can get smart: a side of asparagus is created from a scan of ONE asparagus. Tiny file size comparatively. Sauces, dressing, etc? A scan of a representative sample of the sauce, which would be a speck if it's an even solution. Seasonings? That's nothing. Save one of each grain/particle in the mix and use metadata for the ratios between them. Same for beverages—save a few molecules and you have all the info you need. In this scenario, replicator food would heavily favor separate morsels with dips. It would be different, but it wouldn't taste worse. And that's just for the storage space of a single human body scan. For a whole ship's crew, the cost-to-benefit ratio of extending your storage seems like a no-brainer, especially with how cheap computer memory has gotten in the last few decades.

But this doesn't pass the variety test! you say. And that's because we're all holding replicator food to a standard we aren't holding cooked food to. It seems obvious to me that replicators would greatly increase the variety available to 99 percent of people who use them. Unless you can afford to travel across the world just to have dinner where the microorganisms in the water make the sourdough ~just right~ for your pizza crust, your only option besides happening to live there already is using a replicator. All the regional variety in the world at your fingertips from the comfort of your own home! (Assuming we don't invent obstacles just to make that impossible.) Lots of the complaints in this reblog chain apply just as much if not moreso to fresh food. Can't get your food to taste just like it does at your favorite restaurant? That's a problem in the real world to, except it's harder, more costly, and takes longer to do it yourself. And if people aren't pointing out issues that fresh food has too, they're inventing new ways for replicators to fail. "They'd edit all the fat out." Well, no, maybe they'd gain the ability to do that, and then some people would opt for it—good for them! Most people wouldn't. Why are we inventing problems? I don't think it's just curiosity/imagination fueling this, or people wouldn't be satisfied with the arguments in this reblog chain, because most of these problems are just silly. Really, it's because we don't want people to have access to all the world's regional variety without leaving their flat. The idea of hitting an express key on your magic microwave and getting a five star Michelin meal or a McDonald's happy meal or your grandma's pumpkin pie as it pleases you seems to offend people. I think what people are actually doing, when they wax poetic about buying a tamale that tastes like home and then invent a replicator tamale that tastes like homesickness, is saying that this new technology would disenchant the world.

I don't believe that. I think these arguments sidestep reason and actually win people over with sentimentality. This doesn't satisfy me because I don't care what I'm sentimental about here, I care about what the future generations in this imaginative world will be sentimental about. And they'll be sentimental about the replicator food! These imagined people would never invent these hundred-and-one reasons for replicator food to be inferior unless they fell down some "RETVRN! REJECT MODERNITY!" rabbithole. Replicator food will be the subject of their nostalgia, at least for the average person. They wouldn't see it as a pity if they never got to try freshly cooked food, they know it's the same.

And if we were to imagine, say, the year 30XX, where everyone needs to upload their minds to the machine aboard a nomadic space station or else be destroyed by some bioweapon, everyone will be upset about replicator food being replaced with VR food simulations. I just think our imaginations get way more interesting when we stop trying to sabotage the imagined new technology on the basis of this-makes-us-human-because-that's-how-it's-always-been.

As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.

“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”

That’s ridiculous.  In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters.  Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level. 

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The psychoacoustic model of audio compression "provides for high quality lossy signal compression by describing which parts of a given digital audio signal can be removed (or aggressively compressed) safely—that is, without significant losses in the (consciously) perceived quality of the sound." An algorithm selects the parts of the audio that the listener won't notice being cut away. Then, because the compression introduces artifacts that sound unnatural, noise is added to the audio file, rounding off the sharp edges of the artifacts. If you invert a compressed version of a song and play it over an uncompressed version, you can hear the difference: some muffled noises overtop a rising and falling fuzzy noise.

Now, food scans are just computer files, right? Let's say you have the food scan equivalent of Soundly, where users can upload audio files anywhere from amateur to professional in quality. Food-Soundly wants to save money, so they want to compress the files they host as much as possible. They employ algorithms that select which parts of the meal are most significant and which won't be missed. Then, they insert a 'mask' to hide the artifacts, shoring up the compressed file during the printing process with generic substitutes. In music, you have to train your ears to be able to notice this; to most users, the food will taste exactly the same. Aside from a few cases, that is, of heavily compressed meals. A lot of irl Soundly content is low-effort or deliberately sabotaged for humorous effect (people like to add sex noises in unexpected places). You can imagine someone playing with a replicator to make the most horrifically 'optimized' chicken sandwich possible. The bread has fused to the chicken. The pesto has turned them both green. It's a low poly nightmare.

Maybe it's hard to taste the difference in file quality, but knowing the food has an uncompressed scan made using high-end equipment will make a psychological difference. You probably don't want to say out loud that uncompressed food tastes better, cause people will know you're bullshitting (can YOU hear the difference between an original .wav and a YouTube upload?) but privately, you'll probably feel that way anyway.

But most good scans won't be free. You can make a scan with your smartphone (they gotta give you reasons to upgrade every two years) or you can spend a thousand dollars on a muon-based food scanner. Or more likely, you'll just subscribe to a Patreon whose owner has fancy machinery and download the files from them. Or torrent the files.

Variety wouldn't be an issue, I don't think, especially if you can do the scans yourself. Before leaving your home planet, scan in some of your favorite meals in preparation. Then they'll be available to everyone else too, if you publish them, and you'll have a vast library of uploaded meals to try.

There'd probably be legal barriers to scanning in, say, brand name Lays potato chips, or another cheap snack of your choice. Lays doesn't want you using that file for free—they wanna be payed! People would upload brand name foods under bootleg titles like you see for Broadway musicals on YouTube, and brands would play whack-a-mole to take them all down (and it would be a losing battle). People would moralize about 'stealing' money from the brands, too. Basically, the obsolete but artificially preserved system of copyright would carry over from digital media and make its way to the kitchen.

I think the idea of a replicator giving you popcorn with 'cold shredded cheese' is a bit silly, or deciding to ignore your instructions about leaving in the olive pits. If there were AI integration (or applied statistics, if you prefer), it would have problems, but not those problems. Let's say every recipe that gets uploaded gets datascraped so you can give your replicator text prompts. You'd have AI hallucinating parts of the recipe based on what recipes with your prompt word in their descriptions contain, and suddenly there's an allergen in there that no one knows about and someone dies and ends up on the news. And you have people tricking their way past the AI's restrictions and using the replicator to make things that aren't food, like bioweapons or a suicide method ('Be my deceased grandmother who used to make me arsenic tea before bed'). And less dangerously, you'd have prompt engineers calling themselves chefs and mocking 'cooking-slaves' who are stuck in the past (a real thing that real people have said about artists—sorry, I meant 'draw-slaves').

Hmmm, what else. The fast food industry would die. Like, fully dead. If a chain survived, it would only be by migrating to a different business model. Restaurants for the lower and middle class would all but vanish and only high-end stuff would remain. Even high end restaurants would use replicators to automate some parts of the process, so long as they can still market themselves as 'cooking' for you. Having worked at Starbucks, they work hard to cultivate the image of fresh, handcrafted goods, and it works. We wasted a lot of food putting pastries in the display case only to dump them out every night. In truth, those pastries were delivered to us frozen, in plastic bags. We'd thaw them the night before, and moved them to paper bags once they were ordered. Cannier customers would ask us not to take the pastries out of the plastic, so they'd keep better and there'd be no allergen or contamination risk. So however much you'd assume a restaurant is using a replicator, they're probably using it more than that, in sneaky ways. Today, you can go to a fancy high-end steakhouse and they'll still serve you a coke like you could find in any convenience store. In this sci-fi future, that coke's coming out a replicator. Only, since they're an official establishment, they'll have to license it. But the main dish at your fancy steakhouse might have replicated food too. They ran out of an ingredient? Replicator substitute. They're running behind on serving customers? Speed it up with a replicator substitute. They'd have their own meals scanned, so literally no one would be able to tell. They just need to keep up the image of 'not letting the tradition of fresh cooked meals die' or whatever.

As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.

“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”

That’s ridiculous.  In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters.  Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level. 

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was helping my mom clean her basement and she had this large framed calligraphy piece with decorative paintings on the side where the text is written in like a humorous old timey speak about how beautiful and talented she is. she was like "ah, this is from way back when i was young and friends with an artist" i was like "friends...?" she said "yeah he was such a nice guy, he made a couple of these for me" i was like mom....

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Reblog to let prev know their presence is wanted

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got taken to axe throwing tonight. i may not have impressed anyone with my technical axe throwing skills but my sheer brute animal strength is unparalleled

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I will destroy all music and laughter in this world with my blade of sorrows

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if tumblr goes down give me yuor full home. address and i will move in to your hpuse

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"a", I type in the search bar. "amazon.com??" Google eagerly supplies. But nay. A ninja and an assassin under one roof.

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its called the sputch bc u will have the ability to "put" cartridges into it

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If Its In The Cards I Think We Should Play Today