Blah blah AI no creativity, whatever, blah.
It’s still fun.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Blah blah AI no creativity, whatever, blah.
It’s still fun.
I’m on both sides of the fence about things like the world cup. For one thing, it’s a joy to see that humans can perform at such a level, but on the other, it seems to me like a complete kill off of any joy in the sport. Joy, which is often replaced by the ugliest form of nationalism. [I just accidentally put my finger on why I found the Norwegian team to be so charming] I also found the World Cup to be a bit disgusting, given that some of the nations involved are cheerfully performing crimes against humanity, while the others appear to be setting that aside, because, yes, the players practiced a lot. I think none of that really holds much water, because the players aren’t amateurs who are giving their lives to sport – they are professionals, who are gambling that they will make millions of dollars if they perform well.
A lot of this is what I consider being from the Department of Obviousness Department, which I normally try to avoid, but sometimes, the timing is such that I appear to have powers above and beyond those of an ordinary ex-nerd thinking about the future. There was a time, once, when I was arrogant enough to reply – when someone asked me to predict the future – “I make the future, I don’t predict it.” Which was literally true but also JD Vance-level stupid.
The great machine of scientific enquiry continues to grind relentlessly along, in spite of the smoking wreckage made, then thrown in its path, by the likes of RFK, Jr. Eventually, I suppose, the republicans will realize that ice-picking the tendons of American Science just means that some other detestable part of the world will “get ahead of us” in their endless imaginary fight for dominance.
I hear that they took him to the Naval Observatory for emergency medical care. Could this be The Day? It would be funny if it coincided with what I posted last night.
There are a few things I find fascinating about the current war. First and foremost, it’s a war of attrition and apparently that never occurred to the pentagon command structure. One of the things that Europe learned pretty thoroughly before the Franco-Prussian War, is that an experienced command structure that knows how to communicate and plan is essential. Or so we would think.
I can’t remember where and when I wrote about it; I think it was here – but since I forget, it does not count. The point, I recall (because I keep discovering a’fresh) is that there is a certain basic recipe for cake and once you understand it, everything is a matter of proportion of flour to milk and how you cook it. For example, a pan cake is a cake cooked in a pan. A waffle is a cake cooked in a waffle iron. A popover is a cake cooked in a cup. Now, we can argue whether lard or tallow or butter makes a popover a Yorkshire pudding, but the basics are: a quantity of flour, a quantity of eggs (for structure) some salt, some melted butter (or lard or tallow or even vegetable oil, and then something to make it foam a bit, maybe. If there is absolutely nothing to make it foam, I think maybe you have shortbread. If there’s baking powder, it’s a pancake or a waffle. If air is lofted into it with a whisk, it’s a popover or Yorkshire pudding. But once you understand how runny it should be, how fatty it should be, and how airy it should be, you can produce a tremendous amount of Europe’s greatest cuisine. Unless you get into millefeuille which is basically butter/bread damascus with no air in it… Anyhow.
Warning: Potentially Embarrassing References To 1980s Music
Of course, the autocrats are assuming that the AIs will be nietzschean ubermenschen, but …
This is a dagger named “Beast Mode.” It’s not quite finished, yet, but it’s close. The handle’s done and that was the hard part.
I sometimes enjoy drinking a few glasses of wine and playing Rimworld. There’s something about a slight buzz that engages my creativity in a kind of sloppy mode.