I generally don’t use Pandora or any similar recommendation service because there is no way to tell it “no male artists.”

I’m generally not interested in male artists and I like them in roughly 1/20 the proportion of female artists.

Eliminating that factor would improve Pandora and similar services a lot for me.

This was a surprisingly moving piece for being so brief.

I remember well the early days of the web, full of promise and interesting people. No Facebook. No Twitter. Cool people doing fascinating things all around you. Smart people just everywhere.

No more.

I love the Web so much, like more than is probably sane and healthy for a non-human entity, but nearly every other good thing in my life has happened because of it. And that Web is going quickly, if not already gone.

The same for me. I met my wonderful, amazing partner on the web 13 years ago now because we both liked Linux. Not on a dating site, just a completely accidental encounter on ICQ. ICQ is now a ghost town and replaced with things far worse and less useful. And I was there for and participated in the early days of blogging, starting my first blog in 1999 before there was the word “blog,” coding the HTML by hand and also a little later installing the then-new blogging software completely manually.

I had more readers then than I do now, even though I was a worse writer then — in fact, about 100 times more readers, because today people can’t be bothered to step outside  of Facebook and other worthless hellholes.

So, yes, that web is gone already. Facebook and the invasion of the know-nothings killed it.

And I hate them for it, and will always hate them.

The Real Population Problem.

Anyone who thinks there will be 10+ billion people on earth in 200 years is a doofus. I’d estimate between 200 to 500 million, with small but real possibility of extinction — say for instance if climate change precipitates resource wars which then go nuclear.

The world will look drastically, shockingly different in 200 years. That is just the reality.

I won’t be around to see it, and there will be far fewer people to do the seeing for that matter.

It doesn’t take being sexist to dislike Joanna Newsom’s voice. I can’t stand it though I recognize her abilities.

I also really, really dislike Tom Waits and Bob Dylan — both for their voices. And Neil Young. Even Billy Corgan’s voice — which I used to be ok with — mostly just annoys me now.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that most men who dislike Newsom do so for sexist reasons. But I dislike her voice because it’s about as musical as screeching brakes on a truck.

This is more my style in unconventional voices. A true classic from a woman not of this planet.

I watched that on live TV way back in 1994. Though I’d been listening to Mazzy Star for several years before that, I’d never seen Hope Sandoval perform. I remember it well because I had no idea an actual living breathing human could seem so utterly alien and unknowable, and wise and fey like Galadriel in the book version of LOTR (but not the movies).

That she did not become more well-known is a sad commentary on our entire culture.

Everyone who writes writes fiction.

The world is never as it seems, and never as it is seen, and is never understood completely if at all. Memory is porous; fantasy and aspiration, fear and yearning all leak in like oil through a cloth.

Each word is a condition of reality that reality itself doesn’t experience. Each thought is a Lilliputian clockwork model of something infinite. No conception of the world contains its most vital features, only a spray of evanescent impressions. Not only is the map not the territory, the territory isn’t even mappable.

Partitions of truth to certain realms where it applies seems most reasonable. There might be some absolute reality but each demesne contains its own quasi-reality just as incommensurate with one another as the truth of an electron vs. the truth of a redwood.

Even more than my first point, everyone who sees “reality” writes a fiction of it, remembers it and then re-writes it again in recall.

It’s a miracle that any of this is possible, even in principle.

What kind of moron believes stuff like this?

It has at least three neologisms that I noticed without first reading the Snopes article and in addition doesn’t sound period-appropriate in a number of other ways. Truman and MacArthur also had quite different writing styles whereas this sounds like it was all written by the same person, and in addition nothing there sounds like a typical telegram communique.

Humans are outmoded. Our software sucks.

A note about my other blog.

I assume my few readers are discerning. As such, sometimes I post items on the other blog that I disagree with as long as they are thoughtful and well-reasoned. And some that I only agree with partially and any combination thereof. Or even items that might directly contradict something I post here.

And no, I usually won’t say which is which. That is not the purpose of that blog for me.

Assuming you know what I think about something from what I post on the other site…heh, good luck with that.

If I write about it here, you’ll have some idea. Over there, good luck. The other blog is not (usually) to pursue some ideology, but rather to spur thought. Though I vow to slam the FAs and MRAs on either blog relentlessly, so there’s that.

But Epicene Cyborg is a space for wide thought, not conclusions. If you think you know what I think from reading that blog alone you’re probably really wrong.

And this has been a public service announcement courtesy of my own bad self.

This is great news and the EFF does excellent work with the few resources at their disposal, but it is still requesting  and being granted from our masters a right that shouldn’t even be in question.

All rights have to be fought for of course. That’s just the way humans work. But that so few people are at all concerned about what information they have access to and how much control they’ve given up — well, I just think humans as evolved are ill-suited to the society in which they find themselves for the most part.

But climate change is likely to take care of that, alas in a most unpleasant way.

Something I have trouble processing is the delusional nature of the fat acceptance/fat celebration movement.

I mean, every human is delusional to some degree — including me — or else we’d all kill ourselves immediately as we realized the true Nietzschean/Lovevraftian horror of a cold uncaring universe.

But the link between calories and how big you are is so bleedin’ obvious. That the whole movement denies calories in/calories out and elementary laws of thermodynamics is just so bizarre to me. Yes, various food does metabolize somewhat differently, blah blah blah, but the basic fucking fact is that if you eat less than you burn, you’re gonna lose weight. Period.

In changing my own habits I saw this right away. I cut my food intake in half (roughly), and lost 50 pounds in about four months. In fact at one point I lost so much weight I was getting too thin (less than 140 pounds) and had to start eating a good bit more.

I’ve been watching closely how people eat at work because people are notoriously bad at reporting their own calorie intake. A lot of people who “don’t eat much” according to themselves eat more calories at breakfast alone (observed directly by me, my company often brings food in) than I eat in an entire day.

Many of them eat snacks constantly but I am sure they don’t count those towards any sort of calorie tally.

So much delusion. Befitting Poe’s Law, I often cannot tell when someone is actually an adherent of the fat acceptance movement or is trolling/making fun of the FAs because the two are completely indistinguishable.

Except one guy at work who I really like. He’s big but honest with himself and others. He says, “I fucking love food so I’m gonna be fat.”

That I can perfectly support 100%. He knows what he likes, doesn’t hide it in some stupid-ass veil of delusion, and understands the consequences.

Perfectly consistent. The rest of these nutcases just annoy me to no end.

Not only is the below true, but police officers should have a duty to exercise more restraint than the average person, not the same amount of restraint.

Police officers have no more right than the rest of us to physically attack someone because they’re mad. #AssaultAtSpringValleyHigh

— Lisa Bloom (@LisaBloom) October 27, 2015

Police officers should have (and do, actually) receive training on how to defuse tense and dangerous situations, resolve situations peacefully and the like — but the whole culture and even origin of policing goes against this minimal training.

Of course in a larger context and for sociological reasons it all makes sense — the police force as an idea and a realization of that idea was created to protect the interest of the rich and to keep the proles pacified. This has not changed — if anything, it has become even more true as economic conditions have worsened and the nation-state has decreased in importance.

In a real civilization, the police would not be armed and would not be thugs with persecution complexes. But the US at least is not a real civilization, just a monkey troupe with monkey troupe rules.

Sadly, an entire era and domain of human creativity is coming to a close.

It began with tinkerers in garages and basements in the 1970s building computers on their own time and dime, transitioned to the rise of BBSes in the 1980s and survived into the era of the web.

The bullet that killed any hope of an individual having so much unrestricted ability to modify and to know his or her own devices was the DMCA in 1998. Everything was a fait accompli after that law was passed. If it hadn’t been the DMCA, it would’ve been something else, though — the general purpose computer combined with the internet handed the average person simply too much power to be tolerated for long.

I miss the days of being able to modify my computer and my software to make it do what I want it to do, not what some suit-clad shithead thinks I should be able to do with it.

But such power just couldn’t be allowed to last. Surprised it stuck around for as long as it did — and it only did so because of the connection of the hippies and the countercultural movement to the early history of computers and the internet.

Mozilla, at it again.

Removing this setting means that it’s possible once again to fingerprint you using installed browser plug-ins.

They claim it was because it broke some sites. Real reason is that the ad/content industry is paying them.

While this isn’t inherently a bad idea, in the current situation it’ll only make things worse.

The reason it won’t work is that rising productivity is occurring that economists can’t (won’t?) measure due to tools over 100 years old being misapplied to a modern economy that is no longer subsistence-based, so they will be treating the wrong problem.

In short, then, negative interest rates will just mean a lot of people will withdraw their money from banks and store it under their mattresses.

The problem with ferreting out bullshit in scientific papers even in areas that I’m pretty familiar with is that even not-that-difficult publication take a long time to read, even longer to fully understand, and to do the calculations all over again is nearly impossible (for me).

How does the average person even stand a chance? They don’t. They really don’t.

This paper for instance is 45 pages long.

The paper’s premise is that 100% of the decline in the US labor share of income is due to intellectual property. This doesn’t even pass the sniff test, but I’m willing to give the paper a fair shot at convincing me. (So far it has not.)

However, even to make sense of one not-that-hard paper without any complex math, it has taken me about two hours. And I think I know where and why the authors went wrong. But it’d take me another 10-15 hours of work to prove it, which I’m not planning on doing because I don’t have that kind of time.

My point is that 90% of science could be utter BS (even though I don’t think it is) and no one would ever know. Or at least not many people.

Damn, we humans need an upgrade. This software just isn’t cutting it. It is buggy, slow, prone to failure at the worst possible times and can’t easily be improved.