Unless you were largely cognisant during the late 90s, it's very hard to get across to you just _how_ bristling with positive energy computing was back then, just **look** at this opening screen, it screams "ARE YOU READY TO LEARN MOTHERF*CKER?!".
It has dolphins, in the clouds. How many smartphone apps welcome you with dolphins in clouds?
6 Deleted Letters In The English Alphabet
Eth (ð) th as in the
Thorn (þ) th as in thorn
Wynn (ƿ) attempted replacement for uu, w won.
Yogh (ȝ) throat sound as in Bach
Ash (æ) like the vowel sound in cat
Ethel (œ) like the vowel sound in coil
My Hero Academia ep 131 is like: what if Luke talking with Yoda / ghost Obi-Wan about killing Darth Vader, but instead of Luke saying "I can't kill my father" (that he didn't know *existed* until, like, last week) and Obi-Wan being all: tough shit, he's not human any more, get over yourself & kill him.
everyone involved was genuinely heroic, compassionate, and grounded about it? they have different viewpoints and say that out loud? Not "you're a fool if you think you can save him" but "we agree that he's suffering on the inside, but to us, it didn't seem like he was asking for help — just hatred."
& Deku has a whole little speech about how he's fought a bunch of people who refused to back down already, but this time, since he understands this person better due to a psychic confrontation, maybe it could go differently?
& the prior spirit-mentors are like: "heck yeah, that's why we're sticking with you. sorry for testing you. but also, like, for real, communication is not always possible, people aren't always willing to be saved, and there's a real possibility you'll have to kill him to stop him from killing a zillion more people. If it comes to that, are you prepared?"
which is the *actual* "no attachments" thing Lucas has the jedi fuck up: heroism is neither attached to killing the villain no matter what, nor attached to saving the villain no matter what. Obi-Wan wants Vader to be inhuman and morally easy to kill. Luke wants Vader's heart to grow three sizes so he doesn't have to confront the fact that his dad does a lot of evil shit. Deku doesn't know if he can save Shigaraki, or if he'll have to kill him.
He also thinks he has to do it alone, as the chosen/entrusted one (not cosmically chosen; like, these eight people each picked a successor, he's the ninth picked, and a tenth may not be possible) & if the episode thumbnail summaries are any guide, the rest of season 6 is about his classmates convincing him that he doesn't have to do it alone.
also there's some "I've never seen anything like this" in the previous ep 130 about domestic violence/abuse & what trying to take responsibility & fix that actually means.
I can't remember the last time I cried watching/reading something & I started crying after (binging like 8 eps in a row)
u can just try estradiol, you don't get any irreversible effects until like at least 1 month in. if yr curious just try it out for a bit, you can always stop if u don't like it. but see if u like it,,,,
RE: https://mastodon.social/@robavince/116859323331737836
I played the Win9X version of this game, and it lacked saving, your choices were opaque, and worst of all you had limited lives and would have to start over again if you made too many wrong choices or mis-clicked.
HOWEVER, cut together like this it's genuinely a cool episode of 90s Trek that feels like a missing episode!
Star Trek fans need to watch it!
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.
That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.
Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here. https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/
Them: Oh an Ancient Screw
Me: I have a name
Wanna feel old? Remember 2025? That was 1 year ago.
@xgranade @davidgerard the people asking if LLMs are alive and need to be cared for are the same ones who tell you to “ignore the ethics” regarding the human cost of post-training or the destruction of environment and social contracts.
You can’t debate this mind set - they can just fall back to whichever of their two world views wins them the point.
It's more that you can't, as the AI boosters have done (and that very much so includes Evan as a soft booster), put out extraordinary claim after extraordinary claim, do *none* of the work to back that up with equally extraordinary evidence, then complain to the ref that opponents of AI haven't done their work.
(2/3)
The more serious answer is that this effectively reduces to a "debate me, bro" stance. I emphatically and as a hopefully rational actor do not take the time to understand all the bad ideas that I am exposed to. That is a glorious waste of the time I could be using to come up with good ideas, and also a categorical misunderstanding of the burden of proof.
That's not to say I won't ever do the work to understand opposition, as I said, I'm anything but intellectually lazy.
(1/3)
I reject entirely the implication that opponents of AI simply do not understand AI. I, for one, didn't get my PhD by intellectual laziness.
If you're writing sci-fi, and part of the plot depends on the concept of "super intelligence" or something similar
Be careful
You're probably closer to promoting eugenics than you think you are
@researchfairy maybe this is why i liked pkd so much despite his awkward writing style. felt like he was always asking "what if the future you imagine sucks balls? what if we can colonize mars but it's a horrible place and nobody wants to live there? what if the war on drugs is inherently unwinnable? what if there's precog but it's flawed and mostly abused by cops???"
There's an interesting little subset story of an Asimov thing that got almost no time in the books, but is interesting, because it -broke- the three laws, completely
A robot was constructed to think only humans who spoke with a specific accent were human. Everyone else was perfectly fine to kill.
I think about that meduim often, because it really does approach 'everything wrong with the current real world scope' a lot better.
All of 20th century sci-fi has premises like: What happens when we can predict crime with perfect accuracy, or if robots follow the Three Laws perfectly, or if eugenics produces a true perfect superhuman race, WHAT THEN
Now people who skimmed those books are giving us half-baked versions of them held together with duct tape and Python code with failure modes that are all just fascism
But everyone still talks about them like the interesting moral questions are the ones from the perfect sci-fi
The problem with crime prediction algorithms is that they're racist false-positive machines that just make life worse for black people; not "Is it unjust to arrest someone for a crime they didn't commit, but would?"
The problem with AI is stuff like: colonial exploitation, theft, environmental damage; not that robots become so good that they gain personhood or overthrow us
The problem with eugenics is devaluing of humans now; not a hypothetical perfect superhuman
I got this apron to use in my little workshop area when im painting and doing my model kits last year or so, but i finally took it out of the package. I love this, its so cute!
Saying this again cos it's so important.
There is an eclipse this summer. And because this came up in a conversation, something I didn't realise needed to be said.
DO NOT TRY TO MAKE YOUR OWN ECLIPSE GLASSES.
Your eyesight is more important than that. A pair of iso standards certified eclipse glasses are about €3.
Seriously, do not risk your eyesight.