TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Delicious baked goods

you need eyes

Why do so many things named after a grandma taste so good? My grandmas cooked delicious meals, did everyone's?

Anyway, this brand of bread and this brand of sugar cookie are the best (that is, my favorite) but previously I could only get a hold of them in Utah. Once I even made use of a Mormon missionary care package website to ship a bunch of the cookies to me out here in Washington. Utah residents know what I'm talking about, especially with the Granny B's pink cookie.

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Why not wireheading?

A ton of money and engineering is being spent on trying to reach the dream of full-body haptic VR. Many of the components are ready, and they're being pieced together bit by bit into a full system. The company furthest along doesn't really think of these as individually owned devices though (probably because their full thing requires a giant hydrolics-powered arm that swings you around and lets you 'run' in place), more of something you'd find at an "arcade" or other experience-center. To me that's a mistake, in-line with companies that try to justify space research with 'space tourism' for the ultra-rich, but we'll see how it plays out. Go-Kart tracks are still a thing after all.

Prices may fall, but by how much? Physics demands certain requirements of a powered machine capable of suspending and manipulating an average human, and that level of equipment isn't going to fall that much anytime soon without breakthroughs in other technologies.

All this leads me to the titular question, albeit my terminology may not be precise. Why not devote the money and time into figuring out wireheading? By that I mean not just implanting a wire to stimulate one's pleasure center, but the act of implanting a wire or device or devices that can input arbitrary signals to the brain as if they were real. (If someone has a better word I'm willing to update this post with it...) I'm not fully convinced that the combination of vibration, heat, and pressure will really simulate the feeling of holding a cat, but if you hooked up some signal loggers to my brain, you could have me hold a cat, record it, and then replay it later.

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