µblog - archive for 2023-11 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich (2014)

#

Re-reading last year’s Advent of Code solutions and I have NFC what I was thinking.

(and no it’s not (just) because I used Perl)

#

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand SlateStarCodex. The racismphilosophy is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of rhetoric most of the points will go over a typical viewer’s head. There’s also Scott’s rationalist outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s self-insert fanfic, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these points, to realise that they’re not just trite- they say something deep about SOCIETY. As a consequence people who dislike SlateStarCodex truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the value of Scott’s upholding of the “principle of charity”, which itself is a cryptic reference to not punching Nazisneoreaction. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Scott Alexander’s genius wit unfolds itself on their computer screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂

And yes, by the way, i DO have a MIRI tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the ladies’ eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎

source

#

🇸🇪 Få, färre, färst – att fylla luckor i böjningsmönster

#

📷 I looked at some photos

#

“I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords” seems to be a regrettably common credo among nerds.

#

🔗📺🇬🇧 Unforgotten S05

The show is back after the departure of Nikola Walker in one of the lead roles, and it’s still good.

#

When Apple Pay fucks with the interaction of my public transport app, the easiest thing to do to resolve it is to fucking delete my card from Apple Pay.

#

🔗📺🇺🇸🚀 Scavengers Reign

Man, this is so good. Like Pantheon I got to this via a jwz recco post and he is spot on. This is Miyazaki crossed with Mœbius, a phantasmagoria of a planet that either kills you quick or subjects you to exquisite body horror. And yet among this a few human castaways struggle to survive.

#

🔗 The AI industry turns against its favorite philosophy

Effective Altruism spectacularly imploding will never cease to be funny. First SBF/FTX, now OpenAI. Turns out, when push comes to shove, cold hard cash beats bad SF predictions.

#

🔗 Pivot to AI: Microsoft looks into taking over Torment Nexus development

OpenAI drama is the nerd gift that keeps on giving. It helps that everyone involved is terrible so it’s pure Schadenfreude.

#

🔗 @david_chisnall explains why BigCorps like IBM and MSFT love “AI”

#

🔗 What OpenAI shares with Scientology: Strange beliefs, fights over money and bad science fiction

#

🔗 Erik Hoel: Why I am not an effective altruist

The utilitarian, starting from the (gargantuan) assumption that morality is just calculations along a well-ordered set of good and evil outcomes, is forced into repugnant conclusions over and over every time they compare things that aren’t local in the set, or when they hit a particularly convoluted part of it.

#

The number of patients in the emergency department of Chicago Med is only exceeded by the various doctor’s ethical violations.

#

Wanna know the difference between Lobste.rs and HN? The news that OpenAI has fired some techbro from their board is currently the third most scored submission at HN, at 4.5k score. On Lobste.rs, the same link is downvoted to the minimum of −5 as off-topic.

As a plus, the mods on lobste.rs don’t have to beg people to log off so the site doesn’t melt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310213.

#

🔗📺🇺🇸🚀 Pantheon S01-02

A good SF show. It’s interesting that it seems that animation can spend more time exploring the actual story and ramifications of a SF scenario than live action can.

One example of this is that the trope of “going public” is treated realistically. Instead of being the resolution to a story, like so many movies, in this case it doesn’t resolve the situation at all. Demagogues and those in power handle it, and the public reacts with conspiracy theories.

Season 2… goes places.

#

::Guy in corner at a party meme:: No-one I’m arguing with about the early days of the web knows I was once featured on “Cool Site of the Day”.

#

Damn I miss n-gate.

#

🔗💸 Molly White: The stones left unturned in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial

Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial was focused on securing a fraud conviction, not untangling the knot of curious threads that, if pulled, could unravel dozens of different fraud-sweaters.

#

Being a bitter Unix greybeard is not an age thing, it’s a syndrome. Some guys become one in their 20s.

#

Sometimes the modern nattering nabobs of negativity can lead to something worthwhile. After reading a day’s worth of dunking on Canonical for their Ubuntu Pro pricing, I was informed by a friend on IRC that Pro is actually free for personal use and 5 systems. Subscribed and enrolled my two machines. Thanks yrjan, and shame on Canonical for hiding their light under a bushel.

https://ubuntu.com/pro/subscribe

#

Always entertaining to see HN (re)discovering that the global diamond market is rigged by a few producers and deciding it’s all the fault of feeeeeemales.

#

🔗🇺🇸 Out Of Options, Parents Of Children With Mental Illness Trade Custody For Treatment

This was a plot point in Chicago Med and amazingly, it’s true.

#

It’s ironic to see TV shows set before the pandemic dealing with infectious diseases where the producers still can’t put the beautiful cast members behind masks, so they’re running around breathing in the bad stuff all the time, then visiting uninfected people and spreading the infection. Except they don’t, because they have plot armor.

The same show episode as one of the protagonists reacting to a TV news segment of people wearing protective gear on public transport with “this is the sort of news that gets people killed”. Now it’s possible they were reacting to a previously reported rumor that a Latina food truck was responsible, but the juxtaposition was a bit jarring.

(Show is Chigaco Med S05E04 “Infection: Part II”)

#

JWZ on The Wheel of Time:

An important reminder is that The Witcher and The Wheel of Time are actually two different shows! They are both an incoherent mess set in an identical thousand-year-long Sixteenth Century With Elves and Portals and Chosen Ones, and incomprehensible politics that drain any of the fun out of the ass kicking, but one of them has…. actually I don’t know. Something must distinguish them but I don’t know what. Good luck with that. Watching this show is like that time I was two hours into Heat before I remembered that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are completely separate people.

– Recent movies and TV

#

🔗 Memories of a Dame: An encounter with Ngaio Marsh

#

🔗🚀 Charlie Stross: We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus

Charlie tears the TESCREALs a new one.

#

🇸🇪 tycker synd om den stackars Idol-deltagaren som skulle sjunga duett med en kändis och fick dras med Uno Svenningsson.

Uppdatering: hon åkte ut.

#

🔗✈ An Utterly Uncivil Guide to Cancelled British Airliners

#

With all Drew respect to the ambitions of making Hare a 100-year language, I’d let a couple of years pass before passing judgement. The creator has a history of enthusiastically embracing stuff only to drop it later – see gemini.

🔗🐇 Hare aims to become a 100-year programming language

• lobste.rs
• orange site

#

🔗💸 patio11: Seeing like a Bank

#

“Why does this open-source project that I despise and constantly denigrate not do the exact things I want them to do?”

#

“Mozilla is gonna use Github, wholly owned by Microsoft!” my brother in Gnu, Mozilla is wholly owned subsidiary of Google, Inc.

#

Content warning: about 90% of this blog is me impotently subtweeting idiotswell-meaning people on lobste.rs.

#

Those who can, code. Those who can’t complain that those who code are using the wrong license.

#

🔗🇸🇪 Jack Werner: Flashback: Från förtalad till omtalad

#

Writing your own static site generator is this generation of programmer’s variant of writing your own IRC client.

#

almost 20 years of static site publishing

My first blog was a home-grown bash script (long since lost in the mists of time).

Then I blogged using Movable Type, which infamously combines the heft of DB backing with the high latency of static.

Then I ran blosxom dynamically for a while, until the overhead of generating (poorly implemented) Markdown bogged it down. So I used its static publishing option (around 2007).

This blog is more trad SSG.

#

reason 1,456 we’re in a recession - Swedish biggest commercial TV company is streaming “Bachelorette - Denmark”

#

tea time

I used to be quite particular about how I took my tea (lapsang souchong with milk, I know it’s heresy but I was young) but my family hated the smell of lapsang and I started to drink more coffee. So now I use bags, and generic black “English Breakfast” tea.

Teabags used to annoy me because the little tab didn’t really fit into the compost recycling. Enter PG Tips which don’t have a tab and are cheap.

I’m trying to be better at steeping the tea longer.

#

If it’s one thing that dates Far Cry 3 as a game, it’s the inclusion of a poker minigame.

#