Fricken

"With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out"

-Guess who said that in 2014?

Hospitals at the dawn of the 19th century in Europe were generally places only poor people in desperate situations went to give birth because they were hives of disease transmission.

The notion that doctors should wash their hands between treating one patient and the next was met with ridicule. Doctors were insulted by the suggestion that their hands might be unclean, so mortality rates for childbirth in hospitals were horrendous. The idea of handwashing emerged and died many times before it finally caught on, and then only at the behest of vigorous campaigning over a generation.

There is a long list of hidden costs and negative externalities associated with car dependent sprawl as well, they are well studied, but nobody want to hear that their hands are unclean. This idea one should be washing their hands a dozens times per shift is patently absurd. Physicians would be wasting hours a day just washing their hands! How would we be able to treat all these patients?

Scandanavians have been getting around without cars for millenia. Nobody had even heard of a car until just over a century ago.

Car dependent infrastructure is definitely not helpful for the physically disabled, as well as those too young, too old, and too poor to drive a car. This and a lot of other issues that the vocal and active "cars aren't the devil" crowd don't engage seriously with.

It's getting really old, and increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "Pitbulls make great family dogs" crowd.

"Stunning and Brave" is the episode in which PC Principal makes his debut, at the start of season 19.

>Musk has said his critics “cannot cite a single name of someone who died” and “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!” When confronted with the names – including those of children who died because of the cuts – Musk called a journalist “an utter piece of shit and a liar” and “utterly evil”. Musk has claimed, without evidence, that US tax dollars went to arming militants and “corrupt politicians”.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/07/elon-musk...

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

I hiked that trail on August 10, 2019, and after coming down from the summit I bivvied on the shoulder of Habrich just below the sugar-lump shaped granite summit. Coincidentally the night I slept up there was the same night the Sea-to-Sky Gondola was first cut.

The trail to the summit of Habrich starts at the gondola station, and for several kilometres follows a broad ridgeline which is overgrown and has several steep and rocky ups and downs. The path through was labyrinthine and marked by ribbon, not obvious, and I had to do some hunting around and doubling back to find my way up and down through the treacherous 4th class sections.

There was an abundance of blueberries, I stopped to snack at several blueberry patches. I was stuffing my face with blueberries. In addition to descending the wrong side of the mountain Poor Stanislov missed out on the all blueberries as well it seems.

Her personal example was odd, but there are many other valid examples of destructive impulses cited by her (and Poe) in the essay

You can just pull tokens out of a bag to generate a random sequence of virtually any length. Am I missing something? Why make it so complicated?

>The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.

-Carl Sagan outsmarting Mike Judge with this passage from The Demon Haunted World (1995)

Idiocracy is a fable about our time. Setting his story in the future helps Mike Judge to maintain plausible deniability, but the movie is there to validate your sneaking suspicion that everything is kind of stupid.

Are we in prison? What is it we're hoping to escape from when we achieve technological escape velocity?

Technological advancement needs to advance towards being sustainable or else it's a joke.

We're acting against our own evolutionary fitness function. Human nature is against human nature.

It looks great. I'm conventionally a critic of the pursuit of realism in games, particularly with faces, because of the uncanny valley, but the faces look great. They're not uncanny.

GTA VI is the biggest single entertainment property of all time and we've waited a dog's age for it to drop. It appears the level of polish and attention to detail throughout is unprecedented.

After GTA V the franchise was feeling played out for me. I thought I had decided I wasn't going to buy a console just so I can experience GTA VI, but my mind it seems is changing. It looks banger. It looks like it really does have the power to elevate the whole industry.

Supply and demand. I could expound upon that but why bother when you can just google it?

I go around with the general awareness that about 200k people die every day. I know that disasters and tragedies happen around the world on a regular basis. I know that cameras are nearly ubiquitous even in the developing world, so there is a good chance that any sensational event will be recorded and posted on the internet. Armed with these priors it's not a huge surprise or shock to me. It is still impressive, however.

The only reason any of us can read is because industrialists a long time ago decided we would be more productive if we would. The labour standards in the US today established by FDR and the New Deal were done under duress, with a very popular effectively holding a gun to the ownership class's head. They've been working to claw it all back ever since.

The whole reason trillions are being spent on AI and not making thing better for little people is because we don't want to have to depend on them anymore for anything... you know, so we can get rid of them. Having 8 billion people alive at once is a huge liability.

In the US it's a supply and demand problem. America chose redlining. White flight. More cars, less public transit. They largely stopped building desireable new mixed use medium density neighbourhoods after WW2.

The article links to a report from the library of congress, from which it gets it's numbers. The congressional report is quite informative, and and non-partisan.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49057

2-3°C of warming by 2050, 4-5°C by 2100. There's no rule saying it will stop there.

https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...

From the perspective of our evolutionary fitness function the most critical thing is to eliminate existential risk, and from the dawn of the industrial revolution to now all we've done is create them. Fossil Fuels allow us to keep 8 billion people alive at the same time temporarily, which is a reckless and irresponsible thing to do. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.

Everybody alive today will die. We're mortal, that's just how it goes. So with or without fossil fuels, billions of people will die regardless, that much is baked in. It's a moot point.

As a species, however, we can persist indefinitely so long as our lifestyles are sustainable. If it's not sustainable it's a joke.

Go free solo El Cap or something before telling me you're cool taking those kinds of risks on behalf of all humanity.

Yes, he wrote the original short story and also the screenplay for the film.

Johnny Mneumonic (1995), set in the mid 2020s, depicts Beijing as the global epicentre of power and wealth. Much of the action is set in Newark New Jersey, a dystopian hellscape where civil order has broken down.

I could show up at your doorstep, declare myself at your service, and then spend the rest of my days catering to your every beck and whim. There's no law against that. Can it even be slavery if it's voluntary?

Facebook is legal, like alcohol. People drive drunk and kill people. People drive while using facebook and kill people as well.

Elite cyclists are all about maximizing their sugar intake. The more sugar their bodies absorb the better they perform. They chug liquid sugar until they puke, and then drink some more. It trains their guts to absorb more sugar.

That's what's happening whether anybody wants it to or not.

The IPCC consensus is limited to what politicians can agree on.

Scientists all over have been observing the acceleration of climate change for some time, but it has until now been difficult to tease real change out of conventional temperature variabilities.

The newsworthy part is that statisticians now have enough data to claim with strong certainty that warming has significantly accelerated.