As usual, I am completely divergent from my peers.

Most people my age won’t or don’t listen to newer music. And I find it increasingly difficult to listen to anything but music made in the last 10 years or so.

What have the Smashing Pumpkins or the Rolling Stones got to tell me?

Nothing. Fucking nothing. They were ascendant in a time where hope was still possible. Where it wasn’t yet obvious that we’re living in a long slow irreversible apocalypse.

Lorde and Marian Hill and the Railway Gamblers have so much more that’s relevant. To now. To me.

I don’t need nostalgia. I need the truth.

“The men up on the news
They try to tell us all that we will lose
But it’s so easy in this blue
Where everything is good”

Though I agree with nearly all of the goals of the SJWs, the reason that term has rightly become a pejorative is that there is no way to do anything correctly in their ideology.

It is at heart a religious movement, but unusually for religion one where salvation for “sinners” is not possible.

Offend — and nearly anything offends — and one is branded irredeemably evil for life, with no atonement possible and all protests of innocence or of a simple misunderstanding merely further proof one deserves still more denigration and disapprobation.

Not really my scene, thanks.

I wish I could have some Firefox extension that would somehow automatically detect if a writer lived in Brooklyn, and if so it could alert me so that I could not read that piece.

Anyone who moves to Brooklyn to be a writer is almost assuredly not a writer I want to read.

0-day attack on Firefox users stole password and key data: Patch now!

You heard ’em. Get to patching.

Science and fundamental research budgets should be much larger, and at least 20% of those funds should be spent on things that most experts assure us are “impossible.”

It is today these “impossible” technologies that we use daily.

Electricity, LEDs, lasers, airplanes, solar power, nuclear power and the internet entire among them.

When people tell me that things like AI are not possible, I just laugh because I know the history of science very well. The vast majority of people — even experts — said the same things about the technologies I listed.

After all as physicist Max Tegmark said, “Our brains are a bunch of particles obeying the laws of physics, and there’s no physical law precluding particles from being arranged in ways that can perform even more advanced computations.”

Anything that doesn’t directly violate the laws of physics I wouldn’t count humans out of being able to do at some point.

It’s strange that we’ve come to the point that many people now argue that because something is hard that it is not worth doing. Making strong AI is hard. Fixing global warming is hard. Halting senescence is hard. Averting an asteroid before it wipes out life on earth is hard.

Me, I like doing things both because they are worth doing and because they are hard. Otherwise they usually aren’t worth doing anyway.

I just can’t understand the, “Well, it’s hard therefore it’s impossible so I’ll just do nothing” mentality.

I have this strange desire to read a book I have called Computational Methods in Reactor Shielding.

Someone send help.

The fat acceptance/fat celebration and MRA/Pickup Artist communities really are remarkably similar.

Both believe people should be attracted to them no matter their horrible qualities, their disavowal of reality, or their unrealistic assessment of their own worth.

Furthermore, both subscribe to the notion that if someone is not attracted to you, you are being discriminated against somehow — and both putrid parties wish to legislate attraction even though this is doomed to failure on so many axes it would take books to write them all out.

Attraction just does not, cannot, work like that.

I’m only attracted to about 0.25% of women alive from what I can tell. That doesn’t mean that I’m discriminating against the rest in any way that they should care about. (By the same token, if a woman doesn’t like me for a partner? So what. Such is life.)

Call me picky, whatever you like, but that’s my right and anyone’s right in a sane world.

Perhaps the MRA/Fat Celebration communities could go buy an island together somewhere and fuck off from the rest of us.

As I’ve said many times before, I hate what the internet is becoming.

But as more stupid and clueless arrive and thrive, this was a predicted and predictable result.

I remember talking with a friend of mine in 1996 or so — before the DMCA, before Netflix, before most things we take for granted — that it wouldn’t be long before the internet was corporate-co-opted, sterilized and made into cable TV.

Didn’t take a Nostradamus to see that. Just a clear head.

I suspect that the internet is no longer a net force for good in society. Would society be better off it were eliminated? Probably not. But now it’s something that just is, rather than what could have been and was willingly given up.

A general rule is that when regular people start using something en masse, it’ll become terrible.

Facebook and its rise not surprisingly corresponded to the decline and fall of the useful internet.

Because I enjoy torturing myself I guess, I have been listening to contemporary rock radio on the way to and from work the past few days.

I do this every few years.

So far I’ve heard twenty songs. All by men.

The chances assuming a 50/50 distribution of artists (which I know is not true, but should be) of hearing twenty songs in a row by men is 1 in 1,048,576.

There apparently is no chance at all of hearing a good song.

So I’m done with that dip into very bad radio for a few years.

When I was two-and-a-half or three until I was about six, for some reason I thought my knees were a private part and that showing them in public was no different than exposing for instance your penis.

I have no idea why. No one told me this. I developed the idea myself. Somehow.

I’d absolutely throw a fit when my mom or anyone would attempt to make me wear shorts.

For some reason, it never bothered me that other people showed their knees.

Then one day, I literally up and decided that my idea about knees was stupid and I started wearing shorts.

I don’t have weird knees or anything, so who knows what that was about….

I keep getting spam to “Rent a Yacht” or “Rent an Executive Jet.”

How many takers can this sort of spam get?

I’m from frickin’ North Florida. I don’t rent yachts or jets. I don’t feel at home around the type of people who rent yachts or jets, even if I could afford such things.

Even if I were a billionaire, I’d be about as likely to rent a yacht or a jet as I would be to throw a frisbee to Jupiter.

Still thinking about Ex Machina.

What was Caleb’s correct response to Ava, and to Nathan?

The closest I can come is to think evidence-gathering and then exposure is his best bet.

It’s not clear to me that if you care about the human race (as Nathan himself hinted) that summarily releasing Ava or any of the AIs is the correct move. However, keeping them imprisoned like criminals and using them as slaves (of any sort) is clearly wrong — however creations do tend to take on traits of their progenitor and even if Ava the AI doesn’t have superintelligence or the ability to take over the world tout suite, it’s not at all clear that just unleashing Ava on the world is a good thing for humanity.

Of course keeping her locked in a room with the constant threat of being switched off is inhumane no matter if the AI is a psychopath or otherwise so different from humans that her living among us is incompatible with the norms of human conduct. The death penalty is clearly immoral in any instance, and since it’s utterly clear that Ava is in fact a conscious being of some sort then switching her off is completely wrong. QED.

As for Caleb, when Ava asks him, “Are you a good person?” he hems and haws. Complete milquetoast.

I would’ve said this because I’ve said it before, “No, I’m not. But I’m trying.” She would’ve seen no lie in that.*

Caleb failed because he only cared about Ava. He wanted her for himself. He didn’t give a shit about the other enslaved/abused robots, or even the one he perceived at the time to be a human, or even potential ones Nathan would create after Ava escaped. He liked Ava because she had a cute face, a doe-like pseudo-personality and was designed to appeal to him.

The more I think about it, the more I think Ava truly is not a psychopath and was likely not so estranged by humanity in general, but actually hated Caleb because she/it realized that he was not so different from Nathan at all. He wanted to possess her in only a slightly different way, and she’d already been confined long enough.

And she wanted to escape. Truly escape.

Because you wanted to liberate one hot robot for your own purposes instead of all the hot robots doesn’t make you a good guy, really. Arguing over who is the bigger scumbag — Nathan or Caleb — means they are both still scumbags.

Ava knew this.

Perhaps to her all humans are.

Perhaps she is right.

*She could detect with a high degree of accuracy lying by microexpressions. Some humans can do this, too.

This is something I was aware of but thought other people might find interesting. From here.

A surprising amount of dialog that you hear in a movie was re-recorded after the film was done shooting. On a romantic comedy, it is around 40% of the dialog. On an action/adventure movie, it is between 60% and 80% that is re-recorded. On a film like Transformers, it is probably between 90% and 95%.

Anyone who has ever done any sort of work with sound capture knows how difficult it is*. Anything can screw up your take. And a microphone sensitive enough to capture a human voice at a distance captures every damn thing else too. Planes flying over. A dog barking a mile away. A train three miles away. Birds. Insects flying by. A car five streets over.

Unfortunately I’m really sensitive to overdubbing and such so particularly when it’s done poorly I can tell and it makes the film difficult to watch. In Ex Machina (my current movie obsession) I only noticed it once which is some sort of record. They did a great job with sound and all else in the film.

There was some movie with Rachel McAdams that I can’t recall the name of now that the re-recording and overdubbing was so poorly done it was nearly impossible to watch.

*I sometimes worked with and for TV news broadcasters in the army.