I literally did this with the email we (college students) got sent by the University (of Alabama: Roll Damn Tide) on the morning of 9/11, which was basically, “We see no reason to cancel classes today.” I thought people would never believe me, because what.
Found this article in the excellent Numlock News newsletter, which had the following précis:
Duckweed is an aquatic plant that's seen as a promising source of protein for humans and animals alike. Duckweed grows in freshwater, and under optimal conditions is 45 percent protein, with a hectare of duckweed producing 10 to 18 tonnes of protein per year. By comparison, the same area of soybeans would produce 0.6 to 1.2 tonnes of protein. Duckweed grows fast — the quantity can double in less than 48 hours — and now the challenge is finding out ways to extract rubisco, the main enzyme present in the leaves and the single most abundant protein on Earth.
I really buy his argument about our interior experience being a multimodal user interface (MUI) over stimulus from some information system. We describe the universe in terms of a 4D space-time with forces and particles, but this is really the MUI we've constructed (or evolution has constructed) that maximizes our predictive power when "actuating" our MUI (e.g interacting with that external system).
I haven't thought about this before, and kinda rejected it on first reading of Hoffman's work, but think I grok it now. Because our internal experience is a MUI, and that MUI (4D space time, particles) can't be considered a "true reality", it's just an interface, then other conscious entities are more "real" than our MUI. That is, the fundamental true reality that really matters is other conscious agents (e.g. Conscious Realism).
A slightly more wacky theory I like to think about is how this intersects with the simulation argument. If our reality isn't ring 0 (e.g. there's an outer reality that is actually time-stepping our universe), then the conscious interior experience we have in our reality may be due to the properties of reality in the outer universe "leaking through" into our simulation.
This actually aligns well with the Hoffman's MUI argument. We live in some information processing system. Through evolution we've constructed a MUI that we see as 4D space time. But this doesn't at all reflect the true reality of our universe being a process simulated in the ring 0 reality. Conscious Realism then arises because ring 0 reality has properties that imbue pattern of information processing with interior experience.
YouTube made up 9.7% of all viewership on connected and traditional TVs in the U.S. in May — the largest share of TV for a streaming platform ever reported by Nielsen’s monthly “The Gauge” report. Netflix ranked second, claiming 7.6% of viewership. Among streamers only, YouTube’s total viewership was close to 25% market share.
“We’re not talking about your mobile phone, your laptop, that I’m sure you see your kids using all the time, but on the biggest screen in the house, the TV,” said LightShed media analyst Rich Greenfield. “Every [media] executive has to be paying attention.”
