Has anyone here have crazy ideas of what they want to do in life, only to realise those might be absolutely pointless?

As I've studied Food Production Technology, I have this idea of somehow making it possible to mix phages in foods for vaccination purposes. Phages are natural viruses to bacteria, so they are difficult to be used in that way...

Another idea is to make simulations of life of bacteria of different kinds.

And study the hell out of some pretty weird genetic mutations that are purely esthetic, but shouldn't happen.

Yeah, I am into microbiology and genetics...

I'd also like to develop games...

To replace humans with robots, because human beings are complete shit at everything they do.

I am a chemist. My alignment is not lawful good. I've produced lots of drugs. Mostly just drugs against illnesses. Mostly.

But whatever my alignment or contribution to the world as a chemist... Human chemists are just fucking terrible at their job. Not for a lack of trying, biological beings just suck at it.

Suiting up for a biosafety level lab costs time. Meatbags fuck up very often, especially when tired. Humans whine when they get acid in their face, or when they have to pour and inhale carcinogenic substances. They also work imprecisely and inaccurately, even after thousands of hours of training and practice.

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

So I replaced my coworkers with expensive flow chemistry setups with probes and solenoid fluid valves. I replaced others with CUDA simulations.

First at a pharma production & research lab, then at a genetics lab, then at an Industrial R&D lab.

Many were even replaced by Raspberry Pi's with two servos and a PH meter attached, and I broke open second hand Fischer Sci spectrophotometers to attach arduinos with WiFi boards.

The issue was that after every little overzealous weekend project, I made myself less necessary as well.

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

App & web development is kind of comfortable, there's always one more thing to do, but there's no pressure where failure leads to fatalities (I think? Wait... do I still care?).

Super chill, if it weren't for the delusion that making people do "frontend" and "fullstack" labor isn't a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.

Quickly recognizing that I actually don't want to be tortured and suffer from nerve damage caused by VueX or have my organs slowly liquefied by the radiation from some insane transpiling centrifuge, I did what any sane person would do.

Get as far away from the potential frontend blast radius as possible, hide in a concrete bunker.

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

That's where I'm quarantining now, safely hiding from humanity behind a desk, employed to write a MySQL migration or two, setting up Redis sorted sets, adding a field to an Elastic index. That takes care of generating cognac and LSD money.

But honestly.... I actually spend most of my time these days contributing to open source repositories, especially writing & maintaining Rust libraries.

First day at CERN: done!

Nothing to rant about :) The place and the people are beautiful, lots of support and it's easy to navigate through things even for very young people like me! Couldn't ask for better stuff.

The welcome event in the Globe of Science and Innovation is already an experience on its own :) so many people to meet and share words with! Later on one of my senior colleagues showed me around the surface datacenter of ATLAS, as well as its control room and a (physically) separate computing testing environment to run simulations and software on to later be deployed at Point 1 (ATLAS). I am stunned, humbled and excited to say the least! More to come soon! Post your curiosities below and I'll gladly answer!

I was tasked with maintaining a handful of chemistry simulations for the web. First things first, replace these outdated links and turn them into Bootstrap buttons that work on mobile. Wait, why do all of these look so horrible on mobile? nothing's scaling properly. *looks at fucking 1,000-line CSS file* The old developers used position:absolute for absolutely EVERYTHING. And I counted one div on the entire page. This is why you don't trust chem engineers to do your "web design" #FuckDreamweaver

I got a used computer case in a second hand hardware store and it still has the sticker with the specs of the computer they wanted to sell it with on it. It was going to be a moderate to shity pc. I built an absolute computing monster in it (i7 6900k, 32GB ram, 23TB storage). I like having visitors over and telling them this is the primary computer I use to do my high particle count fluid simulations and little bigdata projects with.

So I landed this interview with a company that provided military simulations, to work as an android intern (mobile). And man was I intent on getting it, I could only dream of my first job being as a dev, for a company that developed cool software. 😯

I show up, pull out my laptop, go over some of my projects (crap at the time, since I was 16, but ChessAI ftw) and also show them an android app I developed.

Then, I pulled out my calculator and showed them a clock I'd made on it. That's probably when I lost them... ☹️

They asked me a couple questions about software development, like if I knew what agile was, or if I unit tested my code (didn't even know they existed at the time ☹️ ) , etc.

I had done research on the company and asked them questions about specific software and so on, also asked about what working there would look like, etc.

They never called.

I called.

They never answered.

😭

Ended up washing dishes. Honestly, fuck my life.

My university has a course "Higher Programming Languages for Engineers".

The language you actually learn there?

Fortran 90.

Technically they are right and Fortran continues to have quite an importance in the field of numeric simulations, but still. The name is pretty misleading.

Literally anything but work with computers, I think. They ask my brother to fix anything technical in the house and ignore it when he fails. They haven't been able to watch TV in six months. When I suggest that my (well-intentioned but mostly nonverbal) sibling probably shouldn't go into development, they tell me I don't know my own job. I suspect they're convinced I do graphic design.

I write C++ applications that run physical simulations and sometimes train AI models for pattern recognition and highlighting unusual incoming files.

They suggested I go to an undergrad program for data science. I already *do* data science for money and I already have an undergrad degree. 🙄

Highschool culture...

Here in Italy we run a few exam simulation in order to prepare for finals in June.
One of the two categories of simulations, one of which revolves around the core subjects of our technical course which in my case is CompSci and Networking.

"Sounds good!" one would say.
And I'd agree, if only our CompSci professor graded solutions in a sensate manner.
If one does not exactly copy and paste the solutions we repated in class 100 times (which, by the way, are all EXACTLY the same solution but with different data in diagrams and other sections), the grade WILL be insufficient: no but's or why's.

This is only one of the prime examples of what school revolves around. Sometimes it just feels like we are trained to be sheeps in a world of wolves. Rinse and repeat over and over. No technical competency is (almost) ever valued or allowed to be expressed and is often looked down upon by old school professors who literally care about everything but their subject, students and school in general.

I'm glad this is almost over, and that greener pastures are ahead :)

At Uni i have a course that basically teaches us how to use python for simulations. So I made all the assignments and everything worked like expected on my computer. After I got my grade back, I checked the corrected file and I saw that in an entire assignment the code did not work. 🙁 So of course I dubblechecked if the code that I wrote really didn’t work. And again the code ran fine on my pc. So I send an email to the TA with my complaint. Today he replied with an email that the code still didn’t work and that he couldn’t give me any points for it.
Next step: his office 🧐

The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.

The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.

It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.

The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.

It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.

This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.

It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.

Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.

It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.

And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.

I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.

How to fucking unscrew this little shit.

I was able to unscrew the rest just fine. But just when I'm down to the last remaining screw, this lone fucker decides to put on a fecken feight.

I already tried everything. I used a screwdriver that fits perfectly. Rotated it for god knows how long. Attached a strong magnet to amplify the screwdriver's magnetic fuckery. Tried unscrewing upside down to add gravitational force. Tried chopsticking the fuck outta it. Slapped the back of it like I slap rice sacks in supermarkets. Ran physics simulations on a supercomputer. Still won't come off.

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

It's just there, looking like it's about to come off with a dip of a magnetic screwdriver but IDK WHY IT WON'T COME OFFKZKKXJZJKZ!!1

You wanna put on a fight? Fine. Resist while you still can. Because once you come off, oh ho... I'm gonna do bad things to you fucker. Imma screw you in your hole till your head spins like crazy. (To screw it back ofc.)

Before, when you bought $3k Cisco router you got the box that will run indefinitely as long as it has power in about any environment you can go to install it; with or without fans, it had more important business than to give a shit about such things.
Now, when you buy $500k Cisco box you get a over-engineered chassis with 5 separate fan modules with their own firmwares, self tests, watchdog timers and shitload of bugs. It's a fucking fan, it should spin, not do quantum chromodynamic simulations.

Pic related.

Next rant could probably be how Cisco's switch from monolithic to modular linux arhitecture (in order to reduce downtime) turned into having time bombs just waiting to do some crazy shit.

A few weeks ago, I was kept up until the wee hours of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell the Monty Hall problem works. After finally getting it (I'm slow, okay?), I decided to write a program to run simulations of it.

First incarnation of program took user input. User enters what door they choose (1, 2, or 3), then is told what door Monty opens, then given the decision of staying with the door they originally chose or switching, then informed how that worked out for them.

Second incarnation of program ran on a loop. At the start of each loop, a random door is picked for the user guess. Then the door Monty opens is calculated from the remaining doors (excludes user guess and prize door). Then user switches doors (choosing the door that was not their original door or the door Monty opened). At the end of each loop, if the door they switched to was the prize door, it would increment a win counter, else increment a loss counter. After running the loop 1000000000 times, it printed to console `You always switched doors, resulting in ${wins} wins and ${losses} losses`.

THEN I decided to write a variation to run a while loop on the outside of the loop to increase the number of total doors until the point where the decision to switch doors hurt more often than it helped. At this point, I decided to incorporate file I/O and write to a file rather than a console. And that was neat!

And then I decided it would be cool to go back to the three door variation, printing on each loop the original door, the door Monty opened, the door that was switched too, the result of the switch (win or lose) and what the prize door was.

But for the life of me, I couldn't seem to get the file to write properly. It would, like, always crash my terminal. I tried open + append, I tried append. I tried createWriteStream. Still just failure.

And then I changed it to an appendFileSync and happened to look at one of the files that I was writing to. "Huh, over a gig seems a lot."

"Well, how much are you writing each loop? Did you forget to keep in mind how many bytes that would be?"

TLDR: If you're going to write a program that's going to write data to a file on a loop, you might want to figure out how much it's going to end up writing .... before trying to run it. And running a loop 1000000000 times may be a little excessive.

*face palm*

I once failed a subject during my masters (complex analytics and measure theory).
Next year I decided to give it everything I've got. I had grown to love it and could solve most problems they threw at me. Hand written an 80 pages long "book" distilled from all the notes, proofs and visualisations from all the lectures that year.

I only exerted this effort (even though I could've just "passed" this subject) because the lecturer was so damn enthusiastic about maths. Even though he wasn't a CS teacher this course was my best experience of a teacher at uni. He loved the beauty of the maths he was teaching and managed to make me love it too.

He was a maths geek and when I aced my final he told me he actually writes code too. He showed me some simulations he wrote while he worked on some theoretical nuclear physics stuff, because that's what he was into. Really cool guy. I wish more CS lecturers were as good teachers.

Wrote a bunch of Python scripts that alter an lsf script for software that we use in our lab. So now we have a Python 'library' of sorts that runs the simulation files, changes variables in the files, exports data, analyzes, tabulates, and continues until done.

I've automated potentially weeks of work to happen in minutes. I know this is run of the mill here, but I am fairly proud.

There.s this thing where you can donate pc capacity to do medical simulations on protiens. It helps to understand deseases.
Its called "folding at home"

They now running studies on corona.
So today i started up my old mining rig again (6x rx480's) and set it up to run in the corner of the room. It acts as heater and since winter is starting here i decided well why not heat up my room while someone else use those gpu'sto study corona..

Well turns out mining rigs are still noisy! So much for that idea.

Well i will have to move it or no sleep for me

Thought experiment time:

Imagine that this whole universe is a simulation created by a Group Of Developers (GOD).

- Who would make up this group?
- What kind of design patterns would they follow?
- What type of programming language would they use?
- What kind of bugs are there if any?
- How do they test?
- Assuming the use of quantum computing, what are the implications? Parallel simulations? All possibilities play out?
- Would the controller input be life?
- Who is AI and who are players?
- Has all time already been rendered?
- Do we respawn?
- What would the leaderboard look like?
- What kind of stats are tracked
- What are dreams, nightmares, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, birth and death?
- How is memory stored, accessed and pruned?
- What kind of neural net is used and where?

etc etc, if you can think of any other interesting fire away

My life with C++:
- my first course about coding was an intro to C++ for scientists (I studied physics), because "everybody uses it in the field". I never used it in my life in physics;
- I got back to it this year because I was planning on doing some interesting simulations with it;
- hence, this summer I started learning it again. I took one month to actually follow a structured tutorial so I could get at least slightly proficient for what I needed to build;
- and nothing, after one month without using it, I forgot so much already, and I feel like I'm going back to case one.

...now I remember how I felt as a student, when I was preparing for exams.

I f****** love node-red for quick IoT simulations

I once wanted to make easy money by becoming a professional poker player. I did this by programming a poker simulator and calculate chances with certain cards and stuff. To assure you have 6.**% winning (mathematical chance calculated) of a hand takes around 3k simulations to cancel out the luck. So don't trust to much on your math.

That went well, but that wasn't all that there was to learn, you could even consider a small start. Long story short, I became quite a good player and won a lot with Appeak Poker (Great app! No adverts!). Now, I opened a while ago an account at the Holland Casino to make some money. But they were playing on such low wages that it was just not interesting and I quitted. Today I realized I had still an account with money on it and thought "let's get over wit it" so i did aggressive betting on red (1:st 40% all in, lost, 2nd 100% all in won) in a roulette game. In the end I had a few euro profit so the gambling adventure never costed me money.

Another reason the poker carreer ended is because I realized it's not a quick way to make money at all and the gambling factor was too high. I expected poker a bit to be more strategy.

I even consider the best poker spelers maybe to just be lucky bastards in some cases. Poker stars is fun to see on youtube tough, they're bullshitting a lot.

I consider gambling for losers. Poker, you can become really good in it, but still some luck is required. Not bad luck at least. You can lose with a multiple of quite good hands.

Fact: one of the best poker players is actually a software developer

bro look how cool i am haha lol i know java c c# angular react and php lol haha infact bro i created couple compilers haha lol bro vscode bro more like vssucks lol i use Google Docs for coding haha bro what is windows i use Ubuntu lol for that alpha sigma grindset life haha lol just update 1000 packages a week bro i play with the bootloader like messi plays football bro haha bro i can't exit vim bro i basically stay in it haha lol bro i know all about AI haha LLMs haha im taking an inteview, a shit and solving complex neurological simulations at once bro haha i wear dev related tshirts haha lol bro my house is built on Alexa bro haha ALEXA TURN ON THE LIGHTS see how cool it is bro haha i use OAuth everywhere bro to gain access to my toilet seat haha lol my thumbs hurt so bad lol bro cuz I code all day long bro what are weekends bro I never take leaves bro haha have to stay on that sigma side hustle culture right haha look how many stickers i have on my laptop haha im so cool haha lol.

But I am lonely and go online to tell people how cool I am from my mother's basement.

Guys. Guys. Guys.

I went to sleep last night, after hunting a bug the whole day that showed up towards the end of my simulations (after several hours of simulations) and that crashed my program.

The crash was due to a bounds error in a fixed size vector, that worked on all the other thousands of iterations but for some reason randomly crapped out late into the sim. So I gave up and went to sleep.

Booted up my program today, 10x speed gain and no bug. Please send help. My brain is playing games with me, I'm sure. This shouldn't happen. :(

Theres a method for speeding up diffusion generation (things like stablediffusion) by several orders of magnitude. It's related to particle physics simulations.

I'm just waiting for the researchers to figure it out for themselves.

it's like watching kids break toys.

We are being run in a simulation. But the simulation is physical. We exist as humans being run on the simulation called Earth. Our brains are designed to interface to a hub. This brain power is used to do calculations for a much larger system. The benefit to using biological systems is they self repair and reproduce. This allows the simulations to scale over time.

Another benefit is we are creating all terrain vehicles (humans) for alien consciousnesses. Big foot is an upgraded atv for high mountain ranges.

Front-end development leaves me slightly in awe of the developers. How do you do it?

I come from a background in scientific computing. I can write boundary element code that's fast, performant and safe. I can build Monte Carlo simulations that work well. I'm even decent with backend development in Flask somehow. But ask me to build a simple web form and... argh!

So, my simulations started to take about a week to complete.
Productively invested the time in getting into Python!

I'm really liking its syntax and relative simplicity (coming from c++) and I'm kinda digging it at a sort of proof-of-concept producer: instead of talking in pseudocode I can just put down a python script to show what I mean.

Area: oil & gas
Full time job: SCADA apps, network comms, real time database;
Part time job: drilling app for geologist engineers, real time data acquisition, lots of math calculations and simulations;
I'm loving both jobs, because of working with external acquisition devices, because of freedom of work and complexity of the field.

I fucking cannot stand CMake. I hate this stupid fucking piece of software. I've been trying for 3 fucking days to get SDL2 to link just once and I cannot. It doesn't work in the slightest.

Every time I look for help I find a Stack Overflow post from 5 years ago about someone having the exact same problem and all of the responses are "This function is deprecated, use this instead"

THAT DOESNT SOLVE MY FUCKING ISSUE
WHY DOES CMAKE DEPRECATE THINGS EVERY 1.5 YEARS

THIS ACTUALLY MAKES ME WANT TO SWITCH TO INTERPRETED LANGUAGES I CANNOT STAND BUILD SYSTEMS

SURELY IT CANT BE THAT HARD

WE HAVE OPERATING SYSTEMS, AERODYNAMIC SIMULATIONS, AND A GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK BUT WE CANT FUCKING PASS COMMANDS TO GCC PROPERLY?????

rant === true

I despise university. Since I went there, I have stopped learning exciting and new technologies. Instead, I do mips, lisp and Java.

I mean I wouldn't mind java, but it's boring repetitive crap. Making stupid simulations - all the fucking time.

I can not be bothered to learn this shit anymore. It's not worth 9k a year.

I'm lost. I don't know what to do. I can not physically do this anymore.

Edit:

Also, I hate this industry. All they want is a cs degree u til you have 2 years experience and then fuck it. It's a 50 k passport... wtf.

If one of these fucking deformable object simulations would actually do contact and collision right, that'd be greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeat.
😐

How am I supposed to grab the shit with a robot gripper, if shit doesn't do contact friction right? Gah!

Flame war:
Best functional language + eco system for web dev -
F#, Haskell, Scala, elixir, other?
Same for scientific/mathematical simulations?

I really hate working with learning management systems (LMS).
I make training simulations for retail companies and some of these have the worst, backwards LMS's out there.
The providers who install and manage these LMSs for the companies always insist we make our training run inside their own environment, but we can't since it's a 3D training made in Unity that doesn't run well in a browser.

Luckily some of these are fine to figure out. Just a few API calls here and there for authorization and reporting progress, but some are an absolute nightmare.

Just now one of the providers provided me with a 2000 page documentation of all the functions of the LMS's API that our customer is using. All I need are like 5 pages that explain what URL to call with what data and the responses, but now I'm stuck spending days trying to find the 0.5% of this documentation that I need to communicate with their API.

And of course, the documentation is vague as all hell. minimal descriptions of what each endpoint does. Subjects names are super vague, as in do I look for course progress or lesson completion state. What the heck is a Learning Event, is it relevant to me?

And the errors in this document, too.
Bullet-point lists with duplicate items.
language errors everywhere.
Property lists where they copy-pasted the description of properties.
An entire EMPTY chapter, literally a page with only the chapter's title.

I just can't stand how these providers barely seem to know anything about the API of the LMS's they provide to customers.
(for clarity, the LMS is produced by some big tech company, it's installed and maintained by some 3rd party which is our main line of communication when rolling out trainings to these).

It always goes like: "Hey, we want to use your training." "Oh, that's great, we have our own, simple LMS where you can view your employee's progress." "Nah, we want to use our backwards LMS. Here's a giant manual about it's API, go figure it out!"
And then I'm left here tearing my hair out trying to figure out which 3 calls I need to send their API from the tons of extra stuff it can do which is completely unnecessary and being unable to rely on the provider because they lack the knowledge and have such thick skulls about the implementation of the LMS itself that they also seems completely unwilling to help to begin with!

Just another day at the office.

A space game (obviously) where ships are built and broken in convex pieces. With in-game computers and ship design/construction software, of course. Because what would a game engine be without the ability to play a game within the game, with exactly the same visual quality as in the outer one?

Edit: Game-within-game premise based on the idea that it will be easier to write the ship-CAD software in a game engine than from scratch

Edit 2: may as well also be able to play the actual game within itself, since it would be like holodeck simulations

people be using system random for simulations and be like, shit, but the math is right!

Anyone with experience in developing matlan simulations for magnetic localization?

Do you have some recommendations on server providers with hour based billing?

I wanr to run some simulations which need appr. 8 cores and 32gb of ram for one or two days and I don't want to rent a server a hole month or year for this.

The Turing Test, a concept introduced by Alan Turing in 1950, has been a foundation concept for evaluating a machine's ability to exhibit human-like intelligence. But as we edge closer to the singularity—the point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence—a new, perhaps unsettling question comes to the fore: Are we humans ready for the Turing Test's inverse? Unlike Turing's original proposition where machines strive to become indistinguishable from humans, the Inverse Turing Test ponders whether the complex, multi-dimensional realities generated by AI can be rendered palatable or even comprehensible to human cognition. This discourse goes beyond mere philosophical debate; it directly impacts the future trajectory of human-machine symbiosis.

Artificial intelligence has been advancing at an exponential pace, far outstripping Moore's Law. From Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that create life-like images to quantum computing that solve problems unfathomable to classical computers, the AI universe is a sprawling expanse of complexity. What's more compelling is that these machine-constructed worlds aren't confined to academic circles. They permeate every facet of our lives—be it medicine, finance, or even social dynamics. And so, an existential conundrum arises: Will there come a point where these AI-created outputs become so labyrinthine that they are beyond the cognitive reach of the average human?

The Human-AI Cognitive Disconnection

As we look closer into the interplay between humans and AI-created realities, the phenomenon of cognitive disconnection becomes increasingly salient, perhaps even a bit uncomfortable. This disconnection is not confined to esoteric, high-level computational processes; it's pervasive in our everyday life. Take, for instance, the experience of driving a car. Most people can operate a vehicle without understanding the intricacies of its internal combustion engine, transmission mechanics, or even its embedded software. Similarly, when boarding an airplane, passengers trust that they'll arrive at their destination safely, yet most have little to no understanding of aerodynamics, jet propulsion, or air traffic control systems. In both scenarios, individuals navigate a reality facilitated by complex systems they don't fully understand. Simply put, we just enjoy the ride.

However, this is emblematic of a larger issue—the uncritical trust we place in machines and algorithms, often without understanding the implications or mechanics. Imagine if, in the future, these systems become exponentially more complex, driven by AI algorithms that even experts struggle to comprehend. Where does that leave the average individual? In such a future, not only are we passengers in cars or planes, but we also become passengers in a reality steered by artificial intelligence—a reality we may neither fully grasp nor control. This raises serious questions about agency, autonomy, and oversight, especially as AI technologies continue to weave themselves into the fabric of our existence.

The Illusion of Reality

To adequately explore the intricate issue of human-AI cognitive disconnection, let's journey through the corridors of metaphysics and epistemology, where the concept of reality itself is under scrutiny. Humans have always been limited by their biological faculties—our senses can only perceive a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, our ears can hear only a fraction of the vibrations in the air, and our cognitive powers are constrained by the limitations of our neural architecture. In this context, what we term "reality" is in essence a constructed narrative, meticulously assembled by our senses and brain as a way to make sense of the world around us. Philosophers have argued that our perception of reality is akin to a "user interface," evolved to guide us through the complexities of the world, rather than to reveal its ultimate nature. But now, we find ourselves in a new (contrived) techno-reality.

Artificial intelligence brings forth the potential for a new layer of reality, one that is stitched together not by biological neurons but by algorithms and silicon chips. As AI starts to create complex simulations, predictive models, or even whole virtual worlds, one has to ask: Are these AI-constructed realities an extension of the "grand illusion" that we're already living in? Or do they represent a departure, an entirely new plane of existence that demands its own set of sensory and cognitive tools for comprehension? The metaphorical veil between humans and the universe has historically been made of biological fabric, so to speak.