dsign

I have some friends that come from that part of the world. It brings me to tears that they are good Christians and Muslims but don't remember Inanna nor Asherah, nor all the others who the priests murdered so that Yahweh could thrive...as a widower. Gosh though I don't think old Yahweh would have liked what the priests did to him either...

I don't know; I think that if I were young and I didn't have to worry about the future, I would be happy. I also think that, if I were young and worry free but had my current level of maturity, I would manage to have a far more interesting social life that I could afford in my previous youth.

It's just hard to make predictions about post-scarcity. At present, we are all running against a clock and that shapes the way we see the world. We are running out of time and about to hit the wall of frailty and death. And, every human being that has ever existed went or has been going through the same. So, our vast spirituality is 95% about dealing with that fact. But we are at a moment in our civilization development in which we actually can take that wall down; it's just such a shame that 95% of our vast spirituality is at best non-cooperative, and at worst very angry and self-defeating.

The orgies? He shouldn't have gone to any if his wife didn't approve. But anybody that can go with their conscience in peace should have orgies more often than they have wine. "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. *Love* your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD." (Lev 19:17–18). What the priests and the FBI say is just politics :-).

Does anybody what's the status with solar power there? Seems like the country would have plenty of sun to use. I know that some private people in the island are running almost 24x7 on solar and batteries, but most private people, companies and specially the government are still in blackout.

I'm not hugely concerned about the company using properly anonymized data from my sessions for training, but I'm hugely concerned about anything below that bar. While I wait for hardware to run LLMs locally to become better, I'm going to do my best to handle any PI-adjacent data with a mixture of models from OpenRouter.

I find it easier than x86 SIMD[^1], but the lack of support for vector operations for 32 bits makes me very grumpy.

[^1] Though, to be honest, x86 has great automatic SIMD tools so I never had to try too hard.

Why does this article read like good, honest, working-class astroturfing?

I don't understand either what, technically, "off-key" means. I mean, sure, in well-known songs the singer needs to sing certain parts at a certain pitch, and it sounds awful when they don't. But say this is a song you are composing. There, you have your chord progression, but the chords and their notes are some sort of guidance. You may compose the song in such a way that the singer sticks strictly to the notes in the chord as much as possible, but that sounds weird and requires no small amount of singing skill. Or you may keep the singer a perfect fourth or a minor third away from some notes of the chord for part of the melody, "off key", and it may still sound good.

What a shameful lack of planning and foresight.

One fourth in joke, three fourths seriously, I say that Google should have built their datacenter underground in this case. First, trees will appreciate if they can warm their roots during winter with data center heat. Second, Finland has a border with Russia, so it just makes sense to put vital infrastructure underground. Third, when people start revolting against AI (and something tells me the Finnish are going to the on the vanguard), it's just better (for the shareholders) to force the rioters to dig through many meters of rooted dirt than to have to fill the building with weaponized androids and then have to pay Boston Dynamics a wad of money for them and also feel nervous for what will happen if the rioters cut the power.

I watched the other day Rick Beato's "What If Stairway To Heaven Came Out Today?" and what stroke me is that his granddaughter remarked that the song didn't have auto-tune. First, she has great musical ear. Second, she destroyed my illusion that "true" musical producers were in the business of zapping the singer whenever they went out of tune, not of using auto-tune, which is something more becoming of the plebeian musicians who make songs from their bedroom.

With that said, a silver lining of AI learning to imitate mainstream producers is that the (big players of the) music industry may finally lose their grip on people's musical taste. Maybe people will start searching for alternative styles, and going to their (minor artists with a unique voice) performances in person.

This is… not bad, but not ground breaking. I expect there will be something more in the coming years but nothing that will change the fundamental about disease and illness. For AI to make “orders-of-magnitude” more progress into the biology of diseases, fully automated labs are the next thing, though I would rather not have one of those here on Earth… maybe we should put a couple billion on building biolabs on the Moon…

I don't think it was a republican the one who "destroyed... inexhaustible energy supplies". It was well-meaning environmentalists in Europe who didn't bother with math nor science when they demanded to take down nuclear power and to buy gas from Russia. They were raised in the "end of history" culture of the nineties that was a little too cheerful, but busy shifting manufacture to Asia, and it favored more humanities in schools in this part of the world, in itself not a bad thing, but to the detriment of exact and logical thinking. Maybe all of it made our thinking an easy prey of the people selling the oil and the gas.

Republican or German butterflies (as in "butterfly effect") should not be blamed when they start a big scale avalanche on loose snow.

Well, it does. Which is the problem. We essentially have three choices: one , we walk the knife edge which is our current-day thinking, where we hope that we somehow enable some magical thing--in the future, always in the future--that solves climate change without making life even a little worse for anybody. Two, we do nothing and adapt to climate change however it comes. Three: we do something unpleasant. Four is "go and make colonies in space" but for most folk that's the same as three.

This. I have, lying around unpublished, a few science fiction novels that I wrote where I assumed we actually did everything realistically needed to stop climate change. Like, not the deal "we make some solar panels but keep all the industries," but the real thing: "we take down the industries, we promote degrowth, we embrace and promote a proper demographic collapse, we shame meat eaters, we put youth into environmental enforcement militias, and we change global culture to embrace all of that."

It's a world that has nothing to do with this one. Of course deceiving ourselves with plastic straws is easier.