I was totally wrong about Scott Walker (what a flameout — politics is really not my thing), but something I was and will be right about is Siri and what it augurs.

On my older blog when Siri was first introduced, I opined that tech historians looking back would find it the most important feature and harbinger of the future introduced during the smartphone era.

People are realizing that this is true already.

As David Pierce wrote recently in Wired, voice recognition and artificial intelligence are getting so good so quickly that it isn’t really a stretch to imagine that talking to computers will soon become one of the signature ways we interact with them.

AI, robotics, facial recognition and voice control (all related problems, btw) are improving so ridiculously quickly that people just have no clue.

It won’t be all that long before we look back at most of Ex Machina as being dated rather than futuristic. And like Kevin Drum it’s not that I think AI is some spectacular amazing achievement, it’s more that humans just aren’t really all that smart (our machines are just even dumber but rapidly improving).

This advice for handling a Title IX complaint in a university sounds like the exact advice I give about police investigating you or anyone you know about a criminal complaint: always have a lawyer and don’t tell the police a goddamn thing. And if you must tell them something, always have a lawyer review it, approve it, and record it.

The police are not there to help you. They are there to make arrests and to hurt people.

Title IX office university reps can’t make arrests, but sounds like they and the police are about the same.

Fear the Walking Dead really needs a military consultant (as do most shows).

It’s not a bad show, but a first lieutenant in charge of an entire large operation? Not too damn likely. Especially as this first lieutenant looks about 45 or 50. First lieutenants are generally 23-26 but can be older if they do something like green to gold, etc. But never 45, really.

Also, there was a corporal portrayed. Corporals are quite rare. Promotion to that doesn’t really happen often, and if it had been a promotion of expedience (everyone else died in the zombie apocalypse), then his rank insignia would’ve been clipped on, not sewn.

FTWD folks, I’m available for consultation so you won’t screw the military parts up. Low, low price of $500 an hour.

My theory of depression’s greater prevalence in the modern era is that it’s a response to increasing choice, and/or the response to the visibility of apparent if not actual choice that is denied to the depressive.

So, say, to someone living in the year 1000 A.D, or the year 8,000 B.C., it was obvious that life had few choices and there were fairly clearly delineated paths for one to follow.

By about 1900 or so, this was less true. But 1960 or so for the majority of people in Western countries, it had become even less true than it had been in 1900.

My speculation is that if you did some testing to measure freedom of choice (or apparent choice, which might be even worse) and depression rates, they’d rise together.

I’d speculate that you’d also find lower rates of depression in low-income black communities and higher rates in affluent black communities.

When I read this headline on NBC news as I was  90% occupied with designing a complete customer environment, I kept thinking, who the hell is “false Obama?”

I was like, damn the press really has gone full-court-press conservative loon if they are actually claiming that Obama is the dreaded Muslim interloper.

And then I realized…missing conjunction problems.

I will never understand why obesity is not considered an eating disorder and why it is classed any differently than anorexia or bulimia.

Delusional shit like this and this are signs of mental health issues just as exist in those two aforementioned disorders.

I say this not to stigmatize obese people but to allow them to be helped, or to help themselves, and not to harm others like their children or friends since delusional thinking spreads. (And it’s especially immoral to condemn your children who have no choice about the consequences of obesity like diabetes and early death.)

We have fat acceptance (alas) and to me this sounds no different than cancer acceptance or heart attack acceptance. In fact in some ways cancer acceptance would make more sense because unlike being fat cancer is something not chosen. Obesity is a choice you make every time food goes in your maw.

Yet the FA movement tells you that obesity just happens, like getting struck by lightning and that miraculously it is totally unrelated to food intake*. And yet the universe has this inconvenient feature called the laws of thermodynamics.

*Yes, most of the FA movement believes this now. I know. I know.

Dylann Roof grew up like I did.

So many stories I could tell. In some ways I both recoil from and feel so much commonality with this life still; these were my people. You can leave it behind as I did and yet there is this invisible rope of shared fate that always connects you only because your early experiences bind you and that vinculum takes a lifetime to completely unravel.

I can understand why the people around Roof did nothing. Southern underclass white culture is full of big boasts that never come to fruition, that are never even attempted — both evil and aspirational. A friend of mine avers when I was 10 or 11: “We had the niggers in slavery once, we can put them right back in.”

I sit down on the couch at my dad’s place. I feel something poking into my bony butt. It’s a .38 pistol. I take it out of the couch and put it on the counter. There is nothing unusual about this.

Other friends of mine wear to high school shoddily homemade t-shirts with the slogan “KKK – Kool Kids Klub” on them. A group of black students nearly beats the both of them to a bloody mist. They are never seen in school again.

My sister drops out of school at twelve years old. She’s a heavy drug user by thirteen. She’s pregnant by a notorious area violent felon and drug dealer by fifteen.

Everyone you know nearly talks about the heroic acts they will undertake and the Homeric (except they have no idea who Homer is) deeds they will do in the inevitable and much-needed cleansing race war.

I could go on. Oh could I.

These are the people without a culture, the people that the world has left behind, where nothing matters and nothing makes sense and each day is unconnected to the last and unrelated to the future. There is no direction because direction is meaningless when you have no possibility of going anywhere worth going.

This is why they did nothing: they are and I was surrounded by penthouse paupers boasting about their great and terrible deeds, all built on smoke and lies.

A former friend of mine from where I grew up said years after we both left that he still had a lot of Lake City in him. Even though I did not, I understood what he meant. As I understand these people. I am no longer a part of them, but they are a part of me.

Hewlett-Packard to cut 25-30,000 jobs.

This is not surprising. I am cursed with using (mostly) HP products at work. Their equipment is a decade behind the times at the enterprise level. Compared to things like Cisco UCS, using their gear is more like archaeology than IT. I could go into the technical details but these would bore even me.

Also their employees and support are generally not very knowledgeable, often have no real-world experience implementing their own products, and are not particularly helpful.

If I were in charge of purchasing, HP would be last on the list of vendors I’d consider for these and many other reasons.

I can now recognize a Natalie Angier article in six words. How is that even possible? How can a writer’s style be so atrocious and distinctive that this can occur?

Microtransactions are the real answer to this, and the article glosses over them — perhaps because it’d require stating how evil the credit card companies are and how they’ve made this obvious solution nearly untenable.

No, I won’t look at malware-ridden ads but I will be glad to pay a nickel to read that NYT article, etc.

Microtransactions with strict limits and clear costs are the way the internet could be a thousand times better.

(Yes, I know it’ll never happen. But still.)

Any normative proposition of the form that “people should/shouldn’t do this or that thing because it is/isn’t natural” is shot through with logical holes from the outset.

Humans are actors on themselves and self-modification individually and culturally is one of the defining hallmarks of humanity.

Note that I still believe and evidence shows that humans are not as disconnected from the natural world and instinctive or near-instinctive reactions as most people would like to believe, but I’m discussing post-hoc justifications of what is most likely latent personality tendencies here.

It’s “natural” to have nuclear families?

Eh, so what. What does that mean? It’s natural to stab someone in the eye with a stick, too.

It’s not natural for women (or men) to shave their pubic hair?

Eh, so what. Earrings aren’t natural. Any hair cutting isn’t natural. Surgery isn’t natural. Clothes aren’t natural. This is a terrible argument.

Though I’m aware that it’s not really what G. E. Moore meant by the phrase “naturalistic fallacy,” I will term it that for this brief discussion.

This redefinition of More’s naturalistic fallacy to suit my own purposes then is just to demonstrate that any argument (for humans at least, and especially about culture) is doomed from the start and demonstrates more about the speaker’s personality, preferences and biases then it elucidates anything about nature, correct behavior or what is actually natural.

Killing people with drone strikes is worse than clamato, but I’m not sure by how much.

When a drone tosses a bomb at you, you’re usually dead. But when you drink clamato you must live the horror of that experience for the rest of your life.

Your Job Is Safe From the Computers — For Now.

Good piece, but I wouldn’t even be so sure about that “for now” part. These days, even absent true AI, it’s more a matter of cost than of capability.

For instance where I work now, I could pretty easily eliminate 30% of the jobs in the entire company if someone gave me $500,000 and two good coders for a year.

Hell, if someone gave me alone a year of uninterrupted and undivided time just to work on what I know is easily possible, I could probably eliminate 20% of those jobs all by myself with some simple scripts and a few off-the-shelf tools.

This is true most anywhere.

When anything even approaching decent AI (even domain-specific) is out there, the cost proposition will look even better.

Right now if you have a job that is mainly doing the same thing over and over it’s actually shockingly easy to automate, but the bean counters haven’t realized it yet because things are moving fast and they are always 5-7 years behind.

But they will realize it. Oh trust me, they will.

Two additions to this list (which is pretty good):

Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina. Her performance is controlled, warm when it needs to be, yet somehow alien, foreign. Her ballet training is as much the star as her acting (which is excellent), but that’s not a bad thing. Ava might be an android, but Vikander makes her breathe.

And Elle Fanning in Super 8. She is the only reason to watch that film — her stark, empathetic and wounded performance just blazes off the screen. In this film she is simply amazing and the movie also has the best example of meta-acting that I’ve ever seen (also from her, of course). She’s the best under-twenty actress out there by a long shot and her character feels like the only real one in Super 8. The movie should’ve by all rights been told from her POV.

I was going to read Peter van Inwagen’s “An Essay on Free Will” what I thought was, as they say, real quick.

It’s 248 pages.

An essay is not 248 pages.

An essay is like 10 pages, 15 pages, max.

Someone really needs sit home slice down and explain an essay to him.

(Yes, I realize there is not-commonly-used sense of the word “essay” that he might be using here. I’ve read at least three different dictionaries. But still. No one uses it that way, not even some crusty old philosophy professor.)