Who Cares if AI Is Consciousโ€”Itโ€™s Basically Alive. Correct.

What Was the War on Terror?

The risky mission to de-mine the Strait of Hormuz.

Mysterious Black Jet That Emerged At Long Beach Airport Identified.

The Complacent Style in American Academe.

300,000 European factory jobs at risk as Chinese competition mounts.

Proboscis bat.

The complex corporate web behind a $3.2 billion AI data center.

U.S. is running low on advanced defensive missiles โ€” and it could take years to recover.

Lena

Elena Ferrante and the people who vouched for her.

I am 100% convinced that “Elena Ferrante” is a man. No one but a man can write about women so observationally and so lucidly (with rare exception).

I’ve read everything by “her” now in both English and Italian and it’s pretty darn clear that Elena is a man. Women never write about fellow women so unflinchingly but with such empathy — their natural intrasexual competition drive almost always gets in the way.

Slave Morality

The left’s position on everything is that you should have to apologize to them for why they suck. As if you caused it.

The inferior is elevated to superiority; the superior is assumed to have oppressed the inferior to have achieved anything at all. This evil is set in place to avoid the obvious conclusion that people are different, groups are different, and that’s just reality.

However, no matter what, that brute reality overrides all in the end.

Goalposts

Teortaxesโ–ถ๏ธ (DeepSeek ๆŽจ็‰น๐Ÿ‹้“็ฒ‰ 2023 โ€“ โˆž) (@teortaxesTex) / X

Exactly. Fucking ridiculous definition. The goalposts move constantly with AI. Now that they effortlessly pass the Turing test as originally forumlated, it has become, “The AIs could not erect their own civilization de novo and build their own fabs before dying out.”

Brothers and sisters, neither could we.

The definition of AGI is not “become a god.” It is “do as well as an average human.” And in more and more areas every day, that is true of AI. We are about 20% of the way to creating a person1 and getting 10% closer every six months. We should be prepared for what happens when we succeed.

  1. Not a human. A person.

Nuke Flags

What are some red flag questions in an interview?

“Do you like to go out, drink and party?”

Was asked that about a role I really wanted at the time, handling networking for nuclear power plants. Since I already knew the instant that question was asked I was not going to get the job, I replied, “What does that have to do with the role exactly?”

“Oh, we like to have fun after work. Just want to make sure you’re on board with all that. We’re a tight-knit team here.”

After a bit more back and forth, I said something like, “I don’t think this role is for me as my actual qualifications seem not to matter. Selecting people based on their capability of ‘partying’ for something with the importance of the monitoring network at nuclear power plants seems like a terrible idea.”

Then I got up and left.

Use Your Words

Does anyone else find it strange that women (speaking very generally here) insist they are masters of communication and have high empathy, but most of what men see of them is that they are terrible at actually communicating — relying on opaque and/or invisible hints and desiring mind-reading — and have very little empathy for men?

A protective self-image is often very different from the reality on the ground.

Along these lines one of the great puzzles of Woke 1 was why so much cultural production was made dumb, off putting, and aesthetically repugnant.

Fewer Americans are Working or Looking for a Job. Experts Canโ€™t Agree on Why.

Hereโ€™s another one of my occasional messages directly to progressives, my former tribe.

Betelgeuse's atmosphere is becoming spotty and asymmetricโ€”and a nearby companion could be shaping the pattern.

Time Is No Longer on Iranโ€™s Side in the Battle of the Blockades.

Large employers drop health benefits as costs rise.

Good intentions are not much protection against somebody who wants you dead.

CD sales are making an unexpected comeback amid a retro tech boom.

Humanoid robots could upend life as we know it โ€” if only they had better brains.

Fake job recruiters are getting smarter about scamming job seekers. AI is making it even worse.

Flock cameras draw opposition from across the political spectrum.

How Do You Know That Conspiracies happen. That doesnโ€™t make conspiratorial thinking sound.

Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil.

Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.

Just bury your trash.

This Is the Biggest Obstacle to New Cancer Cures.

Ukraineโ€™s scramble to secure critical air defenses stalls.