This roof paint blocks 97% of sunlight and pulls water from the air.
10,000 generations of hominins used the same stone tools to weather a changing world.
Qantas releases first images of jet that will fly nonstop from Sydney to London and New York.
Welcome to Big Tech’s ‘Age of Extraction.’
The Lonely New Vices of American Life.
Boeing won’t face criminal charge over 737 Max crashes that killed hundreds of people. Of course not. Can’t hold any corporation accountable now could we?
Yep. Women spiral into depression and, sometimes, suicide attempts if they experience even briefly 1/1000 the amount of rejection the average man does his entire life.
Women have no idea. The leitmotif of most men’s lives is rejection and disposability.
Why can’t I “preview message” from a trace anymore? Is it because I’m shitty?
No, Microsoft has broken something completely yet again. Something that used to work rather well. It’s the Mozilla-Google-Microsoft way: take something that was working fine, destroy it, then tell you that the new way is better and that you “just hate change.”
I tried to use this tool last night and just gave up and found another method. I guess we’re in the “everything just gets roundly worse forever” stage of tech now.
I used to have that discussion all the time when I worked for a German company with an American subsidiary. When we’d have to send things or get input from the German side, I’d have to explain to my American colleagues that it was August, everyone was on holiday and no, we wouldn’t be hearing back from Helga probably for the entire month, and no, she doesn’t have a stand-in, and no, this was not unusual. They were all on a beach in the Med somewhere.
My American colleagues never quite understood as it seemed so outlandish to them.
Average liberal: Your preferences and tendencies are just what they are because you grew up in a certain social environment! If you’d grown up in Ghana or Thailand, they’d be totally different!
Average non-doof: Ok, what is your point here, exactly? That if everything had been completely different than it was, they’d be completely different? Brilliant. I commend your perspicacity.
(While there are some valid arguments around the Rawlsian veil of ignorance and the universal lot of humanity and the commonality therein, the average liberal is not making this argument and probably does not know who John Rawls even is; rather, they just want to give your shit and your country to some third-worlder because they “deserve” it more than you do.)
I’m going to a book club on November 15! In person, that is. I don’t do virtual events because they really suckkkkkkkkkkk. At least for me. If I wanted to be on yet another Zoom call I’d get a second job.
Naw, y’all, it’s got to be real if I’m gonna be part of the deal. Should be fun.
The quest for some constrained and denotative definition of “artificial general intelligence” is daft and pointless.
When does a 747 become a bird? When is a submarine a fish? When you ask an amorphous, unfocused question all your answers are disjunct from the set of possible paths to revealing the actual important questions, much less any answers.
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader what the important questions are. But suffice it to say that though I believe some form of human-level machine intelligence is possible, we’ll never succeed in making a submarine into a fish, and we’ll also never accomplish the feat of transforming silicon and transistors into a human. A person, perhaps. But not a human.
This 1999 clip of Prince warning about the internet.
“Don’t let the computer use you.”
Prince saw what was ahead better than most of the “intelligent” commentariat. This was 1999 — smartphones and the malevolence of mainstream social media was still ahead of us. But he knew what evil was in store.
Experts Explain How Long It Would Take Russia To Resume Nuclear Weapons Detonation Tests.
Brain-IT: Image Reconstruction from fMRI via Brain-Interaction Transformer.
NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again.
Norway reviews cybersecurity after hidden remote-access feature found in Chinese buses.
Layoff announcements surged last month: The worst October in 22 years.
Universe expansion may be slowing, not accelerating, study suggests.
Divide and Concur: A Radical Plan for Peace in Europe (1920).
If in conducting estimation your estimates become too specific, they then transition from estimates to promises.
Resist this in yourself and others if you can.
One of the reasons I make a terrible coder is parts of it are too much like math for me. And by that I mean, even in my own code after I create it, despite leaving comments after a bit I completely forget how it works and why I did something. If it has been more than a couple of weeks, it’s like I’ve never seen any of it before.
I’ve re-written my own scripts from scratch before because I could not remember well enough how the old version worked. I have the same experience with math. Once I learn something, it doesn’t build as it apparently does for most people. I just forget it completely in a week or two. It’s like I never knew it. No matter how much I study, it all disappears posthaste.
My brain apparently is just not set up to retain things like that. Language, though. Not a problem.
A more goth Phoebe Bridgers. ✅
A rare blonde goth Phoebe Bridgers. 🤩
Great performance of an amazing song. 🎉
One camera, no cuts, flawless cinematography in challenging, changing conditions. 🎥
Folks, we have a complete win here tonight. 🏆
(That’s not a super-long mic cord. It’s a long-range wireless setup and the cord is connected to a sending unit that’s at her back. Had to be a big one to get wireless to go to that far.)
My friend got a weird offer… someone said they’d fix his life in exchange for his “soul” ?
Hey, that’s better than the offer I got. And that was two identical blonde twins who in exchange for letting them drink my blood would have threesome incestual1 sex with me.
They were very beautiful, but also dumb and dangerous. No sex was had and I lost no blood. This was around 1996 in North Florida. The last I heard one of them had died of a heroin overdose and the other one moved to Chicago.
The Real Reason Socialism is on the Rise.
IBM to Cut Thousands of Workers Amid A.I. Boom.
The Democratic Tea Party Is Here.
The Gen Z job crisis is real: 1.2 million recent grads in the U.K. competed for just 17,000 open roles. It’s similar in the US.
Loss has become a pervasive condition of life in Europe and America.
