These Wretched Games We Play

I spend a lot of time on my job driving around. That enables me to listen to a lot of new music. So here's the first installment of a series, a quick round-up reviewing albums that I listen to: Buena vista! Caligula - Lingua Ignota (2019) Opera / Neo-classical / Death Metal / Noise 9/10  (With the possibility of being 10/10 upon relistening) CW: Themes of Domestic Violence & Abuse I've described my emotional reaction to records with many terms; "terrified" has never been one of them. You've got your creepy albums, spooky albums, albums that fill your stomach with dread. But Caligula  made me flinch and jump with its spontaneously violent music. I'm no stranger to crying to heartbreaks music, but I've never heard a song that's driven me to tears out of fear. It's hard for me to even conceptualize the torture that Ignota has survived, but her soul-rending screams and overwhelming orchestra posses me to feel maybe a minuscu...

Jessica's Mongoose : A Solution to Roko's Basilisk  A spectre is haunting the internet, the spectre of Roko's Basilisk. A majority of internet denizens can agree that the problem of Roko's Basilisk ranks among their top concerns. To the uninitiated, the wiki of the website where from the problem originates, LessWrong ,  provides an overview of what Roko's Basilisk is.  An alternative explanation/rebuttal of Roko's Basilisk  can be found on RationalWiki. In essence, Roko's Basilisk postulates a superintelligent A.I. that utilizes efficiency and what LessWrong  users refer to as "quantum morality" to end humanity's worst crises: war, hunger, poverty, etc. A major obstacle is that building a superintelligent A.I. is difficult, as evidenced by the number of superintelligent A.I.'s in operation (0). The Basilisk, being so smart that it realizes this before it is invented, creates an incentive for its future (or past?) developers.  ...