Roger ebert's last moments- "this world is all an elaborate hoax"- note that this agrees with the underlying aspects of several religions (see thread 🧵 below 👇🏽)
I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: "This is all an elaborate hoax." I asked him, "What's a hoax?" And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn't visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can't even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once.

esquire.com/entertainment/… 2/ in the Indian traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, the term "Maya" means illusion, but some scholars say it means something more subtle: "a carefully crafted illusion" and "one in which we ourselves agree to participate" (at least until we come out of it). The term is closer to like watching a magic show- at some level you know that it's all a trick and the magician isn't really seeing a woman in half, but you agree to suspend disbelief because it's part of the fun!

A thread on this Easter about ChatGPT & Generative AI, The Holodeck, The Bible and The Simulation Hypothesis, which is the subject of a forthcoming long form article I just finished this weekend. (With shoutouts to @jradoff and @NirZiso1 and others for stimulating my thinking to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… In the past when we wanted to write and debug code, particularly video games, we had to write the code from scratch, debug it ourselves, and work with a team of artists ... today we have game enshrines and tons of prepackaged models, making writing video games and worlds much… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…