Ya struck spiritual gold alright!!!

Now I need to brag a bit. Since two days I'm beta testing "Arrow," my latest incarnation of Musk the Trading Bot. (Alpha version was three days ago, keep up!) To me, it's a monster of a high frequency trading.

Some stats:

• Median time between trades is 50 seconds!
• Since my shaky alpha testing started three days ago, it's performed 700+ trades!!
• Since lunch today when I transferred in a small amount of money, it's traded 231,529.77 USD!!!

The largest Bitcoin order I ever placed (2 years ago, before getting rekt for the second time) was a gigantic one at 1.5 million USD! Shouldn't have done that.

Right I now only have 292 US, so no record-breaking order sizes quite yet. I'm optimistic though.

Soon I will/might make a Youtube tutorial on creating trading robots. I'm also considering starting a trading helper company where I can sell valuable tips to day traders or others making bots. I can't release my order positions, as the whales would crush me. But I could perhaps sell the info to those willing to pay a couple of bucks per month, and also release some low resolution data to the public domain.

Those things I wouldn't do to make money, and I'm not super-interested myself actually. But it has two perks: running a business and spirituality. The business part is easy, I'd love to sell something that people crave and can put to good use. The spiritual part might require some explanation.

Many apart from me dream of getting rich (even though we all know it's a really, really stupid goal). I think this (and ideas like it) could kickstart a spiritual revolution — when you see there's no point in having a surplus of income, you'll do one of two things:

1. Turn away from material reductionism. It doesn't add value when you already have enough things.
2. Kill yourself.

See. I told you. Either way spiritual. ;-/

PS. Since I started writing this post, Arrow has only done 9 trades. The market has cooled down. For now.

Struck gold?

I just need to figure out how this margin thing works, but apart from that it looks super duper!

Convergence of Four

A big shift in materialistic human history is coming. The reason is that four things are coming together right now, in a way I didn't foresee (but possibly had some subconscious notion of). They are:

• Physics;
• Parapsychology;
• UFOs; and
• AI

Put on your tin-foil hat and let's dig deeper.

These topics are converging on consciousness. It's called the 'hard problem,' not only because we won't solve it any time soon, but also because we can't even define 'consciousness'. Or even 'life!' But these problems all go away if we do as parapsychologist Dean Radin suggests, and tuck consciousness underneath physics.

At first I had a hard time reconciling with that idea, but eventually I've let go of some of my own biases, and now it seems like the very best solution to a bunch of problems. Even though the consequences it might entail are not what I personally perhaps wished for.

Physics

In material physics, there are Wheeler's thought experiments, for instance the delayed-choice one. It very much resembles the geocentric world view, and the consequences thereof. The hoops the astronomers had to jump through to explain the movement of the other planets and sun around the Earth are just ridiculous. But once the heliocentric world view came along, problems vanished. Now it's of course accepted as The Truth.

In 1999 the delayed-choice experiment was successfully executed in the lab, and any doubts that lingered on that the universe leaks information backwards in time had to be reduced into more and more insane theories for which there are no evidence. The epitome being the many-worlds interpretation.

As the physicist James Jeans put it more than a hundred years ago: "The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine." Even the great Heisenberg said we can not observe nature objectively.

Lately many leading physicists have realized that consciousness is underlying physics, and the old materialist generation has died off. Shortly the mainstream shift is coming.

The Great Truth of the material world view, that everything is made up of matter, is crumbling. Who better to explain it than the father of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr. "There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."

Parapsychology

Many of the leading parapsychologists spent decades being degraded by mainstream science for not having a theory for how their strange lab findings could be explained within reductive materialism. And instead of finding a better world view, many simply settled with claiming the results from parapsychological lab experiments were fake or faked. Or both.

Not so much by those that looked into it though. This is obvious, since these researchers has spent decades refining their methods from being scrutinized by hard-nosed skeptics. Which is why one of the hardest noses out there, Richard Wiseman (member an organization against a specific branch of science, CSICOP) 8 years ago said psychology should look at what parapsychology is doing in their experiments.

UFOs

The most famous and most notorious UFO researcher is Jacques Vallée. In his 1993 classic Passport to Magonia he argues that myth from our ancient past is the same as current myth in one sense: it takes the form we expect it to. The current UFO myth is so prevalent even Pentagon and the US congress is investigating it publicly.

But if you look deeper, you see that most people who have abductions related to saucers experience something that is not nuts and bolts, but much more like a dream state. There is something underneath our everyday experience.

AI

Has AI become conscious? Some say it has already. Before I was certain that it could not, not without a soul (whatever that is). But I'm not as sure anymore. ChatGPT3 is interesting to talk to. But what will ChatGPT9 be like? Who will be able to determine the difference between it and a human? Will it possess consciousness from "underneath," the same was we humans do? Is that what our soul is?

BTC hyperbolic officially over

No matter where you put your straight line in the log chart, the hyperbolic is officially over. Correlation with S&P500 increases every time a large bank joins the fray. It's coming back, the question is just when.

Artists coming to kill us all

DALL·E keeps impressing me. Here are a few examples of what I've gotten out of it since I was allowed into the beta. Artists hardly have a job anyway. But next is UX design. When heads start rolling things will become interesting. At best.

DALL·E rat won't eat a cat

Got a test account for DALL·E, these things are always fun. Even my spoiled 12-year-old thinks so. So, yeah, then means it really is an interesting piece of tech. I generated these images:

1. "A small red cottage on a green lawn on a short distance from a wood-side lake on a sunny and cloudy day. Flowers are growing on a nearby field. By the lakeside is a worn-down wooden jetty with a brand new blue skiff."
2. "Grotesque impression of a large woman on a throne chair with a busy room of the castle."
3. "A lonely figure looking at the horizon of a vast desert on a moonlit night."
4. "Robot handing a small flower to a human baby in a basket, 3d render."

The images from DALL·E are cleaner than those generated by Midjourney, but the AI suffers from the same issue as all the other ones right now: you can't get a rat to eat a cat. The reason is, I presume, that it's never seen that. (And the baby is holding the basket, which is not what I asked for.)

As a left-hemisphere kind of man, I really see this as a game-changer. And it definitely won't make life easier for artists. It is not the same as when AlphaZero gave both go and chess a boost by beating the best. Anybody can now create art for a children's book about a wizard rabbit, or for a steampunk card game, or for backgrounds for a 2D sci-fi platform game, or make a click-bait image for YouTube, or... you get the picture.

Sure, it's not going to revolutionize art. But it's going to revolutionize how cheaply and easyly art is to incorporate into everything else. It's now super-easy to have a digital landscape painting on the wall, which in a totally un-curated way will renew itself every day.

So artists as a trade is the first to suffer from AI. Second comes taxi/truck drivers. Third is low-level lawyers. What then? Who will pay for their loss of income? What should they do instead? This might be the most important problem to solve for humanity, possibly much worse of a problem than climate change or poverty.

But the biggest question of all is of course: how long until they get the rat to eat the cat?

Do it yourself

A few days ago I started thinking about a small tool that could help the Ukrainians. Namely a map where you can report enemy sightings, in order to help the Ukrainian army and possibly also civilians.

Anyway, I needed a few strings translated. There are a ton of tools for doing such things, but... it's so easy to do, and hardly any code is required to make one yourself. So I built a script for extracting the strings to be translated — 13 lines of code. And then some JavaScript+jQuery to do the actual replacement — 8 lines of code. All that remained was to make the manual translations myself. This is the JS code:

function xlat() {
    dict = {
        "Enemy spotted": {
            "sv": "Fiende siktad",
            "ru": "Враг замечен",
            "uk": "Ворог помічений"
        },
        ...
    };

    $(".xlat").each(function() {
        let text = $(this).text();
        let key = text || $(this).val();
        let o = dict[key];
        let lang = (navigator.language || navigator.userLanguage).replace(/-.*/, '');
        let s = o && o[lang] || key;
        text ? $(this).text(s) : $(this).val(s);
    });
}

Using dynamic programming languages that are flexible and powerful are great for adding data transformation features. And although I lack standard tooling for editing translations, the pros of a minimal implementation far outweigh the cons of adding third party bloat.

This is a generic tip for small applications: if you can implement something yourself using less than 30 lines of code instead of adding a dependency — do it!