WtAF

See this?

New information physics paper claims 'we're living in a sim'

Now read the comments.

You see all those people debating the likelihood of the hypothesis being true based upon the energy costs involved in simulating our universe … because ‘the laws of Physics’ …

*sigh*

El Reg used to be a place where you could rely upon the ‘commentards’ being

1. knowledgeable — not only about IT but a great many other things besides.
2. intelligent.

In recent years, I’ve seen people questioning why the decision/reasoning process of neural nets ¹ not be ascertained by ‘examining the logs’ … and people not simply declaring HTML to be a programming language but getting upvoted for it! ²

But you don’t need to be a physicist (I’m not myself) … nor a genius (likewise not me, guv’nor) … to realise the futility of trying to apply knowledge gained within a simulation to the external reality in which it is simulated — that’s like the inhabitants of Sim City debating the accuracy/fidelity with which Godzilla is simulated within their world … because their laws of Biology.

Now take a look at this.

SingleFile - Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

What does it do?

Once again, check the comments (or, rather, reviews).

Notice the one by Gnarf (on 22.09.23.)

Pay especial attention to the final remark …

Let me get this straight …

Not caring whether a webpage is saved into a single file or not, this person proceeds to install a webbrowser extension, the sole purpose of which is to save webpages as a single file.

And then complains about it not functioning as they would like on a specific website.

What?

That’s like saying you don’t care whether you get wet when fly-fishing in the middle of a river and then complaining that the waders you tried didn’t keep you dry when you went spear-fishing in the ocean.

Seriously … What. The. Actual. F**k!?

There really ought to be an intelligence test before one is allowed to

… well, anything really … but especially before one is permitted to read/watch SF books/films/TV/etc. — particularly things like The Matrix or The X-Files ³.

Or use technology.

I swear ⁴ … the human race is getting ever more stupid by the year (if not the day) — stupider, ignoranter and shamelesser ⁵.

___
¹ A forty-year-old technology … not something new and obscure, about which it is not unreasonable to be ignorant of the fundamentals of how it works — it’s not like there hasn’t been ample educational material available in various formats for a very long time now.

² Those of you with experience of programming paradigms beyond the procedural/production-rules, yes, okay, an argument might be made that HTML is as much a programming language as something like PROLOG. But it is to languages like that as emojis are to everyday modern tongues — more a pidgin (not even a creole) than what most would understand by ‘programming language’. And, moreover, in the specific contexts in which I saw it mentioned, it was more than apparent that those describing it as one had no such experience/knowledge themselves. So the point stands, as far as I am concerned here.

³ Or anything else likely to excite people in the Paranoid Schizophrenics International group on Facebook/wherever.

⁴ Frequently turning the air around me blue with invective that makes even me blush, never mind a teamster — but that’s a different matter 😉

⁵ Oh, yes, it is; just read its comments and status updates — I guarantee they will contain ‘stupider’, ‘ignoranter’, ‘shamelesser’ and ‘irregardless’ (thus proving the point).