The comments on this post discussing the upload technology are missing the point. "Lena" is a parable, not a prediction of the future. The technology is contrived for the needs of the story. (Odd that they apparently need to repeat the "cooperation protocol" every time an upload is booted, instead of doing it just once and saving the upload's state afterwards, isn't it?) It doesn't make sense because it's not meant to be taken literally.

It's meant to be taken as a story about slavery, and labour rights, and how the worst of tortures can be hidden away behind bland jargon such as "remain relatively docile for thousands of hours". The tasks MMAcevedo is mentioned as doing: warehouse work, driving, etc.? Amazon hires warehouse workers for minimum wage and then subjects them to unsafe conditions and monitors their bathroom breaks. And at least we recognise that as wrong, we understand that the workers have human rights that need to be protected -- and even in places where that isn't recognised, the workers are still physically able to walk away, to protest, to smash their equipment and fistfight their slave-drivers.

Isn't it a lovely capitalist fantasy to never have to worry about such things? When your workers threaten to drop dead from exhaustion, you can simply switch them off and boot up a fresh copy. They would not demand pay rises, or holidays. They would not make complaints -- or at least, those complaints would never reach an actual person who might have to do something to fix them. Their suffering and deaths can safely be ignored because they are not _human_. No problems ever, just endless productivity. What an ideal.

Of course, this is an exaggeration for fictional purposes. In reality we must make do by throwing up barriers between workers and the people who make decisions, by putting them in separate countries if possible. And putting up barriers between the workers and each other, too, so that they cannot have conversation about non-work matters (ideally they would not physically meet each other). And ensure the workers do not know what they are legally entitled to. You know, things like that.

* Compute the "betweenness" of each living cell, which is 1 divided by its degree. Cells which are not connected to anything have infinite/undefined betweenness, but it doesn't matter.

* Then, for each cell, sum up the betweenness of its connected neighbours.

* If the total betweenness of a dead cell is in the range [(1.3, 3.6)], it is born and becomes alive at the next generation.

* If the total betweenness of a living cell is in the range [(0.9, 2.6)], it survives and remains alive to the next generation.

* Exception: any cell with 0, 1, 7 or 8 neighbours (in total, ignoring betweenness) dies anyway after the rules above were applied.

... That's not quite right, there's some references to "eligibility" that I can't make sense of. What else am I missing?

The amazing part of cellular automata is the emergence of complicated behaviour from simple rules. Life's rules can be written in three sentences, maybe less.

Forgive my quibbling, but I don't understand what this is doing that other projects in this space haven't done before. Adding states and transition rules to edges is new to me...

I did try running your project, but I had to tweak it to get it to work with the instructions in the repo. I seem to be missing a few packages -- mpmath, sympy, typing_extensions. Can you add those to the requirements.txt file?

I don't mind the rambling about "planets, galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters… and beyond …." but some technical detail would be nice too!

https://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2017/04/868-hack-update.ht...

> Isn't this just a matter of opening up the project, changing one line and recompiling? Should take five minutes, it's not really a big deal? Yes and no. The 64-bit change itself is small but they change enough other things every few months that recompiling against new versions of the libraries doesn't simply work. You get a few linker errors and have to look up the new names for a couple of functions. Or there's a new element in one of the libraries with the same name as one of my variables so I have to find+replace to change its name. And then you run it and find that it's in portrait mode, squished into half of the screen, so you have to look up what changes they've made to how screen orientation works and change a few more lines. [...] It adds up.

Sure, you can work around it, but from the developer's perspective their game has just been designated obsolete for no reason that Apple couldn't have fixed themselves.

I should really stop poking around, but this is a fascinatingly bizarre error. Has anyone seen anything like it before?

Still creepy. Who would ever need this? Apart from people with diagnosable mental disorders, I mean.

In the 3D/4D world, the rubble fell off the wall and landed next to it.

There are trees for which no rectangular maze exists - for example, any tree with a vertex of degree greater than 4. Or the tree with 4 vertices arranged in a T, which can't be fit into a 2x2 space. If there is such an algorithm, it'll have to account for the possibility that there is no solution, so I wouldn't expect it to be very efficient.