Seems to me that's not "between universes" because no second universe need be involved: it's sampling randomly out of mind-space, where the resulting mind almost certainly is not otherwise instantiated.

What other explanations for this network traffic have you investigated and on what basis did you reject those explanations?

What some of these folks might actually want their projects to be, is shareware. "Sure, redistribute copies of my project, upload it to all your favorite BBSes, but don't modify it or sell it — and if you use it for anything serious, send me some money."

But yeah, if you want to make old nerds cranky at you, just call your source-available shareware project "open source". You will get flamed like a clueless luser newbie of old, for such is the way of the Net.

Does it help?

As for the worst education policy: How many times & places have ever made it a crime to teach reading? Wikipedia claims there's only one; the American South 1740-1865.

If fully-automated AI companies buy up all the farmland and build datacenters on it, with the effect that the humans can't get food anymore — is that "intentionally" causing human extinction?

The quiz's axes are economic left-right and social libertarian-authoritarian. My trend is from right-libertarian to left-libertarian.

A steady change along one axis with very little change on the other axis. More than enough evidence to cue, "if you already know what you're going to believe five years from now, you might as well believe it already."

Does anyone else track changes in their beliefs or opinions about anything, over an extended period of time? Every few years I retake the Political Compass quiz, and there is a very clear trend over the past 15+ years.

It may be worth noting that an alchemy-level understanding of substances was sufficient to discover black powder and build small rockets with it — big enough to be used as weapons and fireworks.

The developers of black-powder rockets did not know the molecular structure of their ingredients. They did not know that sulfur 🜍 and carbon ● are each only one kind of atom but niter 🜕 is three kinds of atoms.

But they could adjust the ratios of these ingredients, adjust physical properties like grain size, and use binders and other ingredients, to achieve a variety of different results.