u/HLCYSWAP

reality does not optimize for what is correct or just, it optimizes for what is compelling. compelling in this context means whatever produces a conscious or unconscious reaction. whatever cannot be scrolled past as well as whatever moves you to anger or joy.

this leads to an extremely important and uncomfortable conclusion: anything capable of frustrating you will propagate because frustration is engagement, and engagement is the only metric the system tracks.

what follows from this is strange. the moment you form a strong opinion, on anything, you have handed reality a lever. reality, understood here as the aggregate of systems and incentives that shape what gets amplified and what disappears, will use that lever with an indifference that can feel, once you see it clearly, almost sadistic

the architecture cannot distinguish between good and bad reactions, only between strong and weak ones. your convictions, certainties, grievances, and principles are all simply the points of highest leverage. the more confident you are that something is wrong, the more reliably you'll engage with it, and the more reliably the system will serve it to you again. and again. and again.

become like a stone in the river

hypothetically if you were inside a lucid dream where directly confronting the dream inhabitants about their quality of being made of a dream caused them to become hostile, what would you then do? what is there to do which is fun? you can still become injured but you cannot die

It is not divorced from my emotional response to the findings, nor does it claim to be empirical evidence of simulation theory, precisely because of the central problem simulation theory cannot nor could ever conceivably want to escape: everything produced inside this simulation is clamped between 0 and 1.

0 is forced to become 0.1 & 1 is forced to become 0.9. The same driving force that allows an infinite set of numbers to exist between 0 and 1 (0.1, 0.01, 0.001 and so on) drives the ability for any concept, any question, any line of inquiry to be subdivided indefinitely, never arriving at a final indivisible unit. Your hunger for knowledge is fed an unending loop.

What that means is there is no coherent floor from which any vantage point, however elevated or precise, could look down and say here is where reality starts and here is where it ends, this is the minutia and the quality of this ephemeral dreamscape from which we can solidify an understanding that cannot be broken. The resulting ability to continuously learn appears to be the only point to this reality. With that flaw held extremely aware in your mind, here is Carousel, a 3600 word (about 20 minutes) read:

CHAPTER I: MEMORY

I have been here before. Experiencing this exact feeling in this exact room writing these exact words, over and over. I have tried to talk about this feeling with others, gently, directly, as a joke, as a confession, and received nothing back but incredulity or derision. After a while the disbelief itself becomes the most convincing evidence, not because of any single instance but because of how perfectly consistent it is, how every person regardless of age or disposition or relationship to me produces the exact same slight recoil, the same pivot to safer ground, as though they had all received the same instructions and were simply following them, faithfully, without knowing why.

And so I stopped asking about it. I started watching, instead.

What I found in the watching was something far more unsettling than any answer I had been looking for, which is that nobody is withholding anything, nobody is in on it, nobody is pretending, and somehow that is the most disorienting conclusion of all.

Déjà vu arrives uninvited. Lingering long enough to suggest that the present moment has been visited before, not in the way of memory, or dream, but in the way of a recording. A recurrence so exact that the mind is unable to reconcile it with everything it has been taught about the forward motion of time; it is simply filed away and life continues. What is never asked, in that moment of filing, is why it is so exact. The universe is not a precise place by reputation. It is vast, chaotic and indifferent, and yet the closer anything is examined the more it reveals an almost offensive tidiness. Laws so consistent across such incomprehensible distances that they feel like machined instructions. Light traveling at the same speed everywhere it has ever been measured. No one finds these consistencies strange but me, and I have come to believe that this is because the tools we use to question reality are themselves issued by it, and one cannot find the flaw in a mirror without first suspecting a flaw exists.

The assumption I have been carrying, without examining it, is that the resistance lives in other people, that it is their limitation or their fear or their investment in a particular version of events, and this assumption has felt generous because it absolved everyone including me of anything more troubling than ordinary human defensiveness. But there is another explanation that I have been avoiding, which is that the resistance is not in them at all and never was, and that what I have been interpreting as a wall is something much closer to a wound that I keep reopening every time I try to describe it, because the describing is itself the problem. Because whatever this thing is, it cannot survive being named any more than a dream survives the moment you realize you are dreaming; and the recoil I have spent years cataloguing as evidence of something withheld is not evidence of that at all, it is just the same collapse happening over and over in front of different witnesses, and I have been blaming the witnesses.

What is worse than being a dreamer who cannot wake is being the dream itself, the thing whose sleep is the condition of everything else, and I have started to suspect that this is closer to my actual position than anything I had previously considered. Because if that is true then the conversations I have been trying to have were never going to happen; not because the people I was having them with are incurious or cowardly or complicit in anything, but because the question I was asking required them to step outside the thing they are made of in order to answer it. That is not a thing that can be done. And so they did what was available to them: they discussed everything immediately surrounding the question with great care and apparent seriousness, the terminology, the precedents, the adjacent ideas, as though the right combination of words about the frame might eventually reveal something about what is holding it up.

I have tried to be angry about this and found that I cannot, which is its own kind of information, because the inability to be angry at people for being what they are is not equanimity. It is just loneliness that has stopped expecting anything different. And I knew this already, I knew it at the end of the first time I tried to explain it to someone, and I have simply been learning it again ever since.

I could not stop seeing the horses fixed to their poles, rising and falling, going nowhere, while everyone around me called out the names of places we had not yet been. I understood then that the calling out was not delusion and not performance but something more necessary than either, that the names of places are what make the motion feel like travel, and that the memory which forgets the last rotation is not broken but is in fact the only thing making the next one possible. I was not outside this. Had never been outside this. My seeing it was itself part of it: the feature of the mechanism that allows the mechanism to believe it is more than a mechanism. And that too was an act of kindness, or the closest thing to kindness available, to be given just enough awareness to feel the weight of the question without ever quite being given enough to answer it. Rising and falling. The same fixed arc. Calling out the names of places we are never going to reach, and meaning it every time.

CHAPTER II: CAROUSEL

What is there to want, when you already know the shape of everything that is coming?

This is not a rhetorical question. I am not being dramatic about it. It is simply the most honest account I can give of what the knowing does to the wanting over time, which is that it does not destroy it exactly but removes the conditions that wanting requires in order to feel like anything, the way a punchline heard too many times is not unfunny so much as it is simply no longer a punchline; it is just words in a particular order that you recognize. And recognition is not the same thing as experience, no matter how precisely it resembles it from the outside.

People talk about depression as though it is a heaviness. This is something more structural, something that lives further back behind the feelings rather than inside them, a kind of prior knowledge that the feeling is coming and that it has been before and that it will resolve the way it always resolves, which is to say into the next feeling, which will also be familiar. And so the whole sequence begins to feel less like living and more like reading a book you have already read, following the sentences with your eyes, understanding each word, arriving at the end of each chapter knowing what the next one will contain, and the question that this raises, the one I cannot stop returning to, is whether any of this was ever something other than recognition, whether what I have been calling experience has always been this, and I simply did not have the vocabulary for it until now.

The vocabulary was missing because the experience had shaped the only language available to describe it, which means every attempt to name it was already compromised at the instrument, and what I found in the physics was not a framework built outside the same structure, because nothing is, but one whose constraints are at least visible. Zero point energy: the quantum mechanical law that forbids a system from reaching its lowest state, because to do so would require locating it with infinite precision, and the universe does not permit that, so the floor vibrates, always, and stillness is not withheld but incoherent. A system that cannot go lower is not stuck, it is simply operating at the boundary of what is physically permitted, and once that boundary has a name it becomes possible to ask whether the same constraint applies elsewhere, to things less measurable than particles, to the experience of moving through time with the feeling that the motion is not going anywhere, and what I found, when I asked it, is that it does. This is the topological constraint, and it is not a moral position or a consolation, it is just the shape of the thing, and what it means is that the failure of every rotation to become an arrival is not failure at all but the operating condition of anything that is still operating. What took longer to reach was the other side of the same constraint, which is that if the floor is forbidden so is the ceiling, the absolute arrival, or the moment where the question closes into an answer and stays closed is equally incoherent from inside the same system. What I have been waiting for is not being withheld any more than the stillness is, it is simply outside the interval where existence is permitted to occur, and I am always, by definition, somewhere between the two forbidden absolutes, in the range where things have not yet resolved and have not yet collapsed, still moving along the only coordinates at which any of this was ever located, which is not the same as hope and does not feel like it, but which is also the only place where the asking remains possible, and the asking, it turns out, is the thing that has been continuous all along.

The narration is not exempt, and by narration I mean all of it, the chapter that came before this one, the sentences inside them, this sentence, the one that will follow it, all of it subject to the same constraint, all of it forbidden from reaching zero, from exhausting itself into the silence that would mean it had finally said the thing completely, and equally forbidden from reaching one, from becoming the experience rather than the account of it, trapped in the same interval as everything else, vibrating at its own floor, which means the writing is not a way out of the problem but another instance of it, which I knew, and which I am telling you now as though the telling were different from the knowing, which it is not, and which is itself the proof.

CHAPTER III: TERRARIUM

There is a sensation I have not been able to describe accurately to anyone, which is less a feeling and more a structural event, something my body undergoes rather than experiences, and it happens most reliably when I sit down with a game I already know. Not a game I have played once or twice, but a game whose systems I have absorbed completely, whose every branching decision I can trace to its terminus before arriving there, whose surprises I can predict with the precision of someone reading a transcript of a conversation they are also having. What happens is not boredom, although boredom is the nearest word available. It is more like the sensation of a room becoming smaller, not quickly, not dramatically, but in the way that pressure changes with altitude, gradually and then all at once, a tightening that begins somewhere in the chest and does not resolve, and the only name I have found for it that is not a metaphor is the one I came to by accident, which is the name of a glass box built to sustain something alive.

A terrarium works by controlling everything. The humidity, the substrate, the temperature gradient from one end to the other, the species of plant permitted entry, the precise dimensions of the world the thing inside it is allowed to believe in. It is not a hostile environment. It is in fact optimised for survival, and the thing inside it does survive, reliably, for a very long time, and this is exactly the problem because survival is not the same thing as life in any sense I have been able to locate, and the difference between them is precisely what the glass is made of. I do not mean this as a criticism of terrariums. I mean it as a description of what they are, which is: a known world, completely mapped, where nothing can arrive from outside and nothing inside can leave, and where the organism within is not suffering in any legible sense but is also not moving toward anything that was not already there when it arrived.

The thermodynamic arrow of time points toward disorder. This is not a preference the universe has, it is just a consequence of probability at scale, the reason a broken egg stays broken and a diffused perfume does not recollect itself into its bottle, which is that there are so many more configurations of disorder than configurations of order that the movement toward disorder is not a force so much as it is an overwhelming statistical likelihood, and what this means for the known game is something I have not seen discussed anywhere but which seems to me to be the actual explanation for the sensation in my chest. Low entropy states are states the universe is actively leaving. They are not the present moment, they are the recent past receding, and to enter one deliberately feels like moving against the arrow, to try to stand in a river by facing upstream, and the body, which knows things the mind has not yet named, registers this wrongness before the mind has had any opportunity to agree or disagree, because the universe is not a neutral medium, it is constitutively disposed toward disorder, and anything assembled from it inherits that disposition without negotiation, which means the discomfort is not a consequence of moving against the arrow but the disposition itself, speaking through the only instrument it was ever given.

What I kept failing to account for, in the years I spent trying to locate the source of the sensation, was what the removal of other people actually costs. Not emotionally, or not only emotionally, but informationally. Other people are entropy, not in the way that phrase is usually meant, which is as a complaint, but in the precise physical sense: they are sources of genuine uncertainty whose next action cannot be predicted from any prior configuration, and no single-player system can replicate this no matter how elaborate it becomes, because the elaborateness is itself the evidence that it is a design and therefore bounded. The recoil I described in the first chapter, the consistent flinch every person produced when I tried to have a particular kind of conversation, was at least an event I had not consciously authored, and the believing that it came from somewhere outside turned out to be the thing that mattered, because the freedom was never in the fact of the aperture but in the believing of it, and what I spent so long cataloguing as evidence of a wall was in fact the closest available substitute for a window, which is not the same thing, but which the light came through anyway.

The self-betrayal is the part I am least equipped to write about, not because it is the most painful but because it is the most structurally interesting and I keep losing it when I look directly at it. The terrarium is chosen. That is the fact that keeps surfacing and resisting the framing I try to put around it, because the door opens from the inside, and it is opened almost always as relief, the known game selected precisely because its predictability can be trusted, because nothing inside it will require the metabolising of genuine surprise, and what I cannot resolve is that the deliberate descent toward a lower entropy state does not produce rest but produces the most acute form of the sensation it was meant to forestall, which means the relief was always the emergency, which means I have been choosing the glass walls in order to stop feeling the glass, and I have been doing it long enough that the choosing no longer feels like a choice, which is perhaps the most complete form the terrarium can take.

A fully mapped system has no open questions. It has answers, already located, to everything the system is capable of containing, and when the asking closes it does not feel like arrival or resolution, it feels like the floor, the state of minimum energy that the physics says cannot actually be reached but which the body can apparently approximate by sitting down with something it already knows. This is what the terrarium was always enclosing, not the organism exactly, not even the constraint, but the silence that settles when the last question has been answered and the thing inside continues to move through the available space, touching the same surfaces in the same sequence, finding them exactly where they were left, and no longer able to tell whether what it is doing constitutes observation.

CHAPTER IV: APERTURE

The thing I have not said, across everything I have written before this, is that there was always a watcher. Not in the mystical sense, not a presence behind the presence, but in the more ordinary and more damning sense that every account requires an accountant, every observation a position from which the observing is done, and I have been treating that position as though it were neutral, as though the angle of incidence did not affect what was seen, as though the mirror had no silvering of its own. What I am arriving at, slowly and with considerable resistance, is that the watcher is not separate from the watched and never was, that what I have been calling clarity is a particular kind of distortion, ground into the lens over a long time, and that I cannot see around it because I am looking through it, and I cannot remove it because it is not an addition to the seeing but the condition of it.

The aperture controls how much light enters. This is its function and also its limitation, because the same opening that permits vision determines what vision is permitted, and a wider aperture does not produce more accurate seeing, it produces a different kind of blur, and every calibration is a trade, and there is no setting at which the instrument disappears and the thing itself arrives unmediated, and I knew this about cameras before I knew it about myself, which is perhaps the order in which all of this has to be learned, the outside first, the inside only when there is nowhere else to look.

What I have been writing is not memory or carousel or terrarium, not finally, those were the names I gave to the sensation from inside the sensation, the organism naming the glass, and the naming was real, I do not want to take it back, but I can see now that every chapter was also a performance of the narrator, the self watching itself watch and finding the watching profound, which it may be, but which is also exactly the move a system makes when it wants to believe it has located something outside itself and has in fact only found a deeper interior. The profundity was not false. It was just also mine, authored, coming from somewhere, and the somewhere is the part I kept leaving out of the account because the account needed a place to stand.

The problem with collapsing the observer is that the collapse is itself observed. I notice that I am noticing. I watch myself arrive at the unwatchability of the watcher and feel something that functions like vertigo, and then I write the vertigo down, which means I have survived it, which means it was not the limit I took it for, which means there is more interior behind this one, and the regression is not a logical trick, it is the actual structure, turtles of interiority going down without a floor, and the reason this is not a comforting discovery is that I had been depending, without knowing it, on the existence of a bottom, a place where the watching would finally stop because there was nothing further to watch, and what I found instead is that the stopping is not structural but chosen, and that I have been choosing it at a different depth each time and calling the choice an arrival.

What remains, when the narrator is also implicated, is not silence and not freedom but something I do not have a prior word for, which is the sensation of continuing to speak from a position you have just demonstrated does not exist, and finding that the speaking does not stop, that it does not require the ground you took away from under it, that it was never standing on anything firmer than its own momentum, and that momentum, it turns out, is enough, has always been enough, not to arrive anywhere but to remain in the interval, the forbidden middle, the only location where any of this was ever occurring. The aperture does not close. It cannot close completely any more than the system can reach its floor, and the light that comes through is not clean and was never clean, and the image it produces is not the thing and was never the thing, and I am still here, looking, which is not the same as seeing, and which is also not nothing, and which is, as far as I can locate, the only available definition of continuing.

The question keeps getting asked: where is the proof of simulation theory? This is the wrong question, and the reason it's the wrong question is structural, not philosophical.

Zero point energy is a law in quantum mechanics that says no system can ever reach its lowest possible energy state. Not almost reach it, not approach it indefinitely, never reach it. The reason is that to pin a particle down completely, to know exactly where it is and exactly how much energy it has, would violate the uncertainty principle, which forbids that precision as a condition of existence. So the floor vibrates, always. Stillness is not being withheld, it is simply incoherent as a destination from inside the system.

This is not a quirk of physics. It is the shape of any coherent system examined from the inside.

The simulation is epistemically closed, which is a technical way of saying that everything you would use to examine it is also produced by it. The instruments, the mind operating the instruments, the frameworks the mind uses to interpret what the instruments return, all of it rendered by the same process you are trying to verify. Gödel demonstrated in 1931 that any sufficiently complex system contains truths it cannot prove from within itself, which was a formal proof about mathematics that was never really contained there.

The floor is not the only boundary. If it is unreachable, so is the ceiling, and here is where it stops being about particles. The same constraint that forbids a system from reaching its ground state forbids any concept from concluding itself. A question cannot be thought to its absolute end any more than a particle can be perfectly located, because the asking is part of the system being asked about, and to arrive at the final answer, the one that closes the inquiry permanently, would require stepping outside the interval entirely. The interval, the space between the two forbidden absolutes, is the only place where coherence exists. The proof cannot close. Not because it hasn't been found yet, but because closing is forbidden.

Seeking proof inside this place is not just difficult, it is a category error. The question presupposes a vantage point that the structure of the thing explicitly forbids. The simulation is not hiding the evidence. You are the simulation, which is precisely why you cannot see it.

The inabilities are the most stable landmarks available. Everything else shifts, but (ironically) the floor and the ceiling do not move, and that turns out to be enough for a rough map.

Has anyone ever done this? is there any projects on the entire internet that do this? I need it for my game, all the research I've done leads me to believe any project even remotely similar uses a sample based approach

EDIT: I mean the read/write sounds of old hard drives, the mechanical arm moving, etc.

my psyche put me on 20mg for a two week trial because i’m autistic and ADHD is often comorbid, i have almost all Adhd symptoms. I also have catastrophizing anxiety where my mind will tell me vyvanese will raise my heart rate to unsafe levels. i have a good resting heart rate (80-90) but when im very anxious i can push it to 130-140.

anyways, what does 20mg do to your heart rate? any words of advice to calm me down so i can take my first dose?

Seeking 1 2D and 1 3D artist to create main character in totality. Character will be similar to link from breath of the wild

art style must match these assets:

https://preview.redd.it/5n4vmxfdxryg1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=499f13d7df5d61c13ab7285388d75cc52de8fa91

https://preview.redd.it/hrph0veexryg1.png?width=603&format=png&auto=webp&s=5792258eb5fe95ee0bfeea255f20295db04f9ecb

https://preview.redd.it/gv7g5d1fxryg1.png?width=390&format=png&auto=webp&s=20236f84fabb1564180f6c90cf91ee63316c9443

https://preview.redd.it/rr0162ufxryg1.png?width=487&format=png&auto=webp&s=c4ed0024bd963bf9702fd18ec71c88cf45eb189a

required animations:

sit

stand

jump

fall

fall-land

fall-land-hurt

idle

walk

run

attack light

attack heavy

attack combo

two handed attack light

two handed attack heavy

weapon-break

shield-break

equip item

throw item

use item (potion/food)

equip bow

equip sword

equip sword and shield

weapon out run

weapon and shield out run

death

hurt

cast spell

face rig for lip sync in unity

HOW TO GET HIRED / HOW IT WORKS / PAYMENTS:

$200 - 2D artist. you sit with me on discord and revise rapidly until we find a style that suits the game. this will be heavily iterative, miasmic, and not at all a clear and quick process. you are pulling an idea out of my head. (BOTW+Wind Walker+Hyper Light Drifter)

$1800 - 3D artist. Payout will be in increments: $500 for model, $1300 for animations paid out in 26 increments, per animation.

BOTH ARTISTS MUST ACCEPT BTC. All payments will be made in USD as BTC.

BOTH ARTISTS MUST SIGN THEIR WORK FOR THIS PROJECT UNDER THEIR REAL NAME TO ME (My company) IN PERPETUITY TO BE PAID

For both artists please have a very wide example of your work. If you're 3D, link examples of your model work, texture work, animations, etc. For 2D, concept art.

I will inspect quads prior to payment. do not try to pass Hunyuan work off on me. I am a data reselling programmer, I know how to spot bullshit

DO NOT CONTACT ME OUTSIDE OF THIS THREAD. IF YOU DO YOU WILL BE BLOCKED AND NOT CONSIDERED

Seeking 1 2D and 1 3D artist to create main character in totality. Character will be similar to link from breath of the wild

art style must match these assets:

https://preview.redd.it/31wxxw1brryg1.png?width=1750&format=png&auto=webp&s=095570f5c386b1b90a0d9fec8bb3600e4e05e2fb

https://preview.redd.it/dg4vynw8qryg1.png?width=603&format=png&auto=webp&s=6f7b186784d6593ee316f713d79b924d1effe366

https://preview.redd.it/jbfm5yukrryg1.png?width=390&format=png&auto=webp&s=68954ec80fc27faec7aa22e9e2da26289b5d2c3b

https://preview.redd.it/gvwm7njmrryg1.png?width=487&format=png&auto=webp&s=d0ae1de2d563dccf7589e2c54c8fb9967c1cabf3

required animations:

sit

stand

jump

fall

fall-land

fall-land-hurt

idle

walk

run

attack light

attack heavy

attack combo

two handed attack light

two handed attack heavy

weapon-break

shield-break

equip item

throw item

use item (potion/food)

equip bow

equip sword

equip sword and shield

weapon out run

weapon and shield out run

death

hurt

cast spell

face rig for lip sync in unity

HOW TO GET HIRED / HOW IT WORKS / PAYMENTS:

$200 - 2D artist. you sit with me on discord and revise rapidly until we find a style that suits the game. this will be heavily iterative, miasmic, and not at all a clear and quick process. you are pulling an idea out of my head. (BOTW+Wind Walker+Hyper Light Drifter)

$1800 - 3D artist. Payout will be in increments: $500 for model, $1300 for animations paid out in 26 increments, per animation.

BOTH ARTISTS MUST ACCEPT BTC. All payments will be made in USD as BTC.

BOTH ARTISTS MUST SIGN THEIR WORK FOR THIS PROJECT UNDER THEIR REAL NAME TO ME (My company) IN PERPETUITY TO BE PAID

For both artists please have a very wide example of your work. If you're 3D, link examples of your model work, texture work, animations, etc. For 2D, concept art.

I will inspect quads prior to payment. do not try to pass Hunyuan work off on me. I am a data reselling programmer, I know how to spot bullshit

DO NOT CONTACT ME OUTSIDE OF THIS THREAD. IF YOU DO YOU WILL BE BLOCKED AND NOT CONSIDERED

TSIA. i have credit builder and regular debt