New Bads

I hate to keep beating this drum, but I also really abhor the New Morality and the New Prudishness.

Someone should really tell liberals and “feminists” that women have bodies and if they do things with those bodies in public, “unauthorized” people are going to see those bodies.

We really are just trying to converge on sharia, aren’t we?

Creepshew

It would’ve been unimaginable to me in the 1990s that “liberals” would become so weirdly prudish. It feels extremely creepy to me.

To return to my previous point, people have bodies. It’s ok to see them. It’s just beyond asinine to attempt to devise your own moronic Islam variant.

Anyway, have one of my favorite sports photos that would certainly be banned now as it shows that a sportswoman shockingly possessed a body.

Maria Sharapova of Russia celebrates her win over Daniela Hantuchova of Slovakia during the 118th Wimbledon Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London 25 June, 2004. Sharapova won 6-3, 6-1. AFP PHOTO/ODD ANDERSEN

Has Bod

About this article I linked below, liberals really will not be happy until all women are in burqas, will they?

I do think something approaching that is a likely end state of liberalism1. It turns out that women have bodies and if you point a camera at a woman while she has a body, the images produced show her body.

Fucking Christ.

  1. No longer an accurate name.

How Putin Turned Japan Into a Den of Spies.

Welcome to the era of the forever layoff.

The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier.

New womenโ€™s athletics guidelines crack down on โ€˜sexualizingโ€™ camera angles. What. The. Fuck.

Microsoftโ€™s Secure Boot has been broken for a decade and no one noticed until now.

Large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.

Data centers have already hiked electricity prices on the public by $23 billion. Good luck clawing that back.

Elephants turn footsteps into messages through ground and skull vibrations.

The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isnโ€™t doomed.

Gasoline Plunged in June and lots of Month-to-Month CPI Squiggles Happened to Drop Simultaneously, but that Wonโ€™t Last.

RFK Jr. Cut Funding For FoodNet, Making It Harder To Figure Out Why Youโ€™re Shitting Yourself Uncontrollably.

Freedom Fries

(1) Ben Landau-Taylor (@benlandautaylor) / X

I have no real memories of the 1970s, but certainly overall freedom has been decreasing for a long while. We were a lot freer in the 1980s and 1990s than now; with today’s ubiqiutous surveillance and monitoring, life is a virtual1 prison compared to what existed then.

  1. Dual meaning very much intended.

Some Lone

It’s strange and a little dispiriting being in calls or in meetings and there’s a load of people blathering on about a technology and its functioning when it becomes clear that you’re the only one who actually knows how it really works. The others are making mouth noises that only serve to illustrate how it might work in some other world nothing like ours. They might believe they have a grasp of the tech, but in fact they do not.

It’s good to be the expert in the room but sometimes lonely.

Personality

Remember when movie theaters had personalities?

That is some personality, yes, but that is a sloppy caricature of and feeble nod to 1920s-style theaters that were the height of amalgamating Egyptian, Asian, Indian and other architectural influences, most famously in the various Fox Theaters that dotted the nation then — some of which have been restored of late.

So even this is but an imitation of an imitation of a simulation of the reality. And it shows.

Social media limits are coming for teens across Europe.

The EV market is on the road to recovery thanks to high gas prices.

Satya Nadella has issued a shocking warning to companies using AI.

Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries.

Quantum-gravitational mechanism could explain the universe's homogeneity.

World-First 'Super Alloy' Could Transform The Way Metals Are Made.

The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes.

The Difference Between Watercolor and Gouache Paints.

Kamikaze Drone Boats Used By U.S. In Combat For The First Time.

Ukraine Getting License To Build Aster 30 Anti-Missile Interceptors. Cool.

Barely Recall

(1) Cartoons Hate Her! (@CartoonsHateHer) / X

Remember, this is the same person who tried to tell us how things “really” were during the 1990s while being 0 years old in 1990 and nine in 1999. In other words, she barely recalls the 90s.

Butt (heh) yes, there was a time when a big butt on a woman in particular was considered unattractive even if she was skinny. This view had started its slow decline by the mid-90s (when this person would’ve been five-ish) and had disappeared nearly completely by the early 2000s. I do remember otherwise-normal, healthy and good-looking women being made fun of for having a big butt, though, during the 1980s. So yes, it was a thing.

People confidently telling you how shit was that you lived through. Just annoying beyond all reason.

Not Pineal

To those who say that LLMs absolutely cannot be conscious because there is nothing in there that can be identified as the “conscious” component, you’d be awfully surprised when you slice open a human and the readily-identifiable “consciousness area” is also nowhere to be found1.

What a bummer, right? That we just can’t have absolute certitude here. And so many conclusions that so many people are certain about just have no basis in anything at all — not neuroscience, not computer science, not pure reason, and certainly not philosophy. It’s all just someone’s naรฏve and nearly-always worthless feeling about something.

Embodiment matters. So do other things that shall go unnamed here as it’d be just too long to have any sort of proper discussion.

But many properties in this world of ours are emergent. They do not appear “in” anything. They are the thing itself. And this is what all these not-even philosophers miss: The outward properties — the perception — is often all we have. It’s all we can really know. I’m not arguing that we should treat Claude as conscious just because it says it is. But recall how I said (correctly) that many features of the world are emergent? That means that it could be conscious in some important way, even if fleetingly, even if much different from how humans experience their own self-awareness, and we’d not know it because we do not have any way at all to evaluate that.

In other words, we — humans, AI, your cat — might be illusions that become real by us believing in one another. That belief reified is what we call “consciousness.”

  1. And even if it could be found, and even if you say, “It’s the whole brain!” what would that prove? Probably far less than you think.