[Warning: Accidents and Horrible Death, not graphic]
After I’ve watched a bunch of videos on youtube of Russian tanks getting variously blown up and shot at, the algorithm appears to have decided I’m a nasty person and has started feeding me all kinds of things that blown up, crashed, and otherwise disastrously killed passengers. This one really caught my eye.
This one’s a bit embarrassing.
You already know I despise marketing, advertising, and the people involved in it. The reason is simple, as I have said before: in order to do advertising you generally have to promote something as being better than you know it to be.
Old welder to young welder: “OK, now we’re going to check your welds to see if they hold.”
Young welder: “They’re tight, they’ll hold up to anything.”
Old welder: “We’ll see about that.”
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a special effects wrangler. In fact, the short story Armaments Race by Arthur Clarke [wik] really appealed to me – I thought that making swords and guns and armor and tanks for movies would be a fine way to spend my life.
In my recent post about government’s manifest failure in the face of climate change, GerrardOfTitanServer naturally cropped up and started banging the “Nuclear is our only option” drum. I got so annoyed – he has pulled several comment threads into the weeds in the past – with him that I implied that maybe he could fuck off a little bit.
I regret that. The philosophical ideal would be to not be King Thag of This Blog, and fall back on my authority – which is real as far as bits in this corner of the internet go – I should have had the patience to engage, instead. So, I thought about GerrardOfTitanServer’s arguments for, oh, 5 minutes, and noticed a few gigantic, glaring holes in them. This posting is about that, and I welcome and invite anyone who wants to argue with GerrardOfTitanServer to go ahead.
This can be the GerrardOfTitanServer thread and, note to GerrardOfTitanServer: do not continue to drag other comment threads into endless text-walls of argumentation or I’ll shut you down. You’ve got your thread, now, here you go, this is it.
It was a dark and stormy night in Okinawa, 1962; the seas were beaten into foam by the wind that howled across the island.
No, that’s not right. But it seemed like a better setting for “almost the end of the world.” And there was a storm, but it was a storm of toxic, invisible, lies. Lies were the fuel of the cold war; their target was the population of the whole planet, who were not trusted with anything close to the truth.
This posting will be a bit image-heavy.
Like in Vietnam, the US continued a bloody war well past the time at which losing was inevitable. And, now it’s over. There’s going to be some people put up against walls and shot, in Afghanistan, which is a return to normal of sorts.
One of the challenges in AI is creativity: how do you make an AI that makes new things? For a long time, many humans privileged the human experience (as we do) saying that computer creativity was a hard limit.