That was gross.

On a related note, one of my kids learnt about how phrenology was once used for scientific racism and my other kid was shocked, dismayed and didn’t want to believe it. So I had to confirm that yes people did that, yes it was very racist, and yes they considered themselves scientists and were viewed as such by the scientific community of the time.

I didn’t inform them that phrenology and scientific racism is still with us. There is a limit on how many illusions you want to break in a day.

Pondering where we are heading, I think the tech monopolies will get larger. The companies in a monopolistic position can raise the prices, right now officially because they have added new shiny AI functions nobody wants. After the crash they will raise prices to recoup losses. Microsoft is already rising prices across the board.

The companies that makes their products worse and more expensive and can’t recoup losses through monopoly, well they crash and/ or are bought up. The result is a more monopolistic tech sector, leading to more monopoly rents, worse wages etc.

When I was younger and more idealistically hopeful, I would have added that this would give incentives for switching to FOSS. These days I just think the now even stronger monopolies will work even harder to co-opt or squeeze out any competition.

From topic and lack of citation I just assumed that they had an LLM write it.

I was going to write that it was good that you didn’t say “um” all the time. (Being silent in pauses is in my experience a learned skill for most people and one that comes once one has heard oneself say “um” too many times.)

The sound was fine. I think your (Jabra?) headset did its job unless that was also the result of editing.

The imagery got a bit distracting because you look to the side of the camera. No problem for podcasts, but for video it’s better to look straight at the camera to look at the audience so to speak. (Also a learnt skill.) So maybe a webcam you can place in front of the screen you are presumably reading of?

No idea about marketing a YouTube, but you got in the “like and subscribe”, so that is probably good.

I’m thinking stupid and frustrating AI will become a plot device.

“But if I don’t get the supplies I can’t save the town!”

“Yeah, sorry, the AI still says no”

These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.

“Keep wearing”, so is he saying that Musk et al “keep doing” “stiff-armed salutes” (that anyone with eyes can see are Nazi salutes) in public?

I know one shouldn’t expect logic from a Nazi, but claiming that the fog horn is actually a dog whistle is really ridiculous. “You heard nothing!”

Not only that, calling the field “AI” is built in hype.

• I work in the field of intelligent machines.

• Oh cool, so you can build intelligent machines?

• Hell no. We just call the field that. For reasons.

Edit: my dialogue dashes became blocks. Must be an intelligent machine changing them or something.

In one corner: cheating US AI that needs prompting to cheat.

In the other: finger breaking Russian chess robot.

Let’s get ready to rumble!

That is cool.

I am not a geneticist, but I have had reasons to talk to geneticists. And they do a lot of cool stuff. For example, I talked with geneticists who researched the genom of a hard to treat patient group to find genetic clusters to yield clues of potential treatments.

You have patient group A that has a cluster of genes B which we know codes for function C which can go haywire in way D which already has a treatment E. Then E becomes a potential treatment for A. You still have to run trials to see if it actually has effect, but it opens up new venues with existing treatments. This in particular has potential for small patient groups that are unlikely to receive much funding and research on its own.

But this also highlights how very far we are from understanding the genetic code as code that can be reprogrammed for intelligence or longevity. And how much more likely experiments are to mess things up in ways we can not predict beforehand, and which doesn’t have a treatment.

We do not understand genetic code as code. We merely have developed some statistical relations between some part of the genetic code and some outcomes, but nobody understands the genetic code good enough to write even the equivalent of “Hello World!”.

Gene modification consists of grabbing a slice of genetic code and splicing it into another. Impressive! Means we can edit the code. Doesn’t mean we understand the code. If you grab the code for Donkey Kong and put it into the code of Microsoft Excel, does it mean you can throw barrels at your numbers? Or will you simply break the whole thing? Genetic code is very robust and has a lot of redundancies (that we don’t understand) so it won’t crash like Excel. Something will likely grow. But tumors are also growth.

Remember Thalidomide? They had at the time better reason to think it was safe then we today have thinking gene editing babies is safe.

The tech bros who are gene editing babies (assuming that they are, because they are stupid, egotistical and wealthy enough to bend most laws) are not creating super babies, they are creating new and exciting genetic disorders. Poor babies.

all people contain exactly two personality cores corresponding to the two hemispheres of their brains, that every personality core is either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil and less than 5% are good

If you have one of each, does that make you neutral? Now how is the Lawful-Chaotic alignment constructed? Does it reside in the kidneys?

I want to roll up a Chaotic Neutral Rogue Halfling.

Some years ago I read the memoirs of a railroad union boss. Interesting book in many aspects, but what I thought of here was a time before he became a union boss. He was working at the railroad, was trusted in the union and got the mission to make store keeping of supplies and spare parts more efficient.

This wasn’t the first time the railroad company had tried to make it more efficient. Due to earlier mergers there was lots of local supplies and a confusing system for which part of the company was supplied from where. In short, it was inefficient and everyone knew that. Enter our protagonist who travels around and talks to people. Finally he arrives back to HQ and reports that it can’t be done. Unless HQ wants to enact a program where everyone who is made redundant gets a better job, with the company footing the bill for any extra training or education needed. Then it could be done, because then it would be in the interest of the people whose knowledge and skills they needed.

This being in the post war era with full employment policies, labour was a scare resource so the company did as they were told and the system got more efficient.

It’s all about who benefits from the automation. The original Luddites targeted employers who automated, fired skilled workers and decreased wages. They were not opposed to automation, they were opposed to automation at their expense.

Economic Shock Doctrine works great for the oligarchs. Less well for everyone else. So it’s not strange that Milei wants to scam his supporters and hand oligarchs a direct way to show their gratitude.

It’s scamming the true believers and creates an obfuscated channel for the oligarchs to deliver the carrots / bribes. When Trump launched his memecoin and got a question he waved at the tech billionaires and said “it’s peanuts for these guys”. Unfortunately nobody followed up with asking if that meant those guys were the ones transferring money to Trump through the memecoin.

I have been looking into Fairphone for work. My focus for that is mostly long lasting, repairable, hardware. I want a minimum of friction with switching the users, so it would be Android for us, but I think there are open non-Google options.

Regarding banking apps. A relative bought a Huawei just as they were pushed out of the western market and it turned out that it was shipped with a Android fork with a Huawei store. Most things worked fine, but banking apps was a problem because they could only be installed through Google Play or App Store.

The solution I found for her was installing a virtual Android environment with Google Play. So when banking apps are needed she opens the virtual environment.

I don’t know if this solution will continue working, but it works for now. Guess I will find out.

This is a civil case, right? Are there any criminal cases ongoing (as far as you know)?

I was thinking the other day about when some twenty years ago EU and EU countries created pretty drastic criminal laws for copyright violations. And also about how they included both jail time and punitive damages, so that in EU countries that doesn’t otherwise use punitive damages, only copyright crimes can be punished such.

These laws were of course ghost written by lobbyists from large corporations, often from the US. But you can’t say that when pushing it through, so they were officially created to protect authors, artists, musicians and composers.

So it would be funny - and potentially very profitable - if for example some (or a lot) of authors reported for example Meta for their crime of creating local copies of books from LibGen before using it as training materials.

Now, I think the law is there to protect big corporations and if push comes to show relevant ministers and prosecutors might get invited to a trip to the US to understand how to interpret the law. But funny, and potentially very profitable.

We can finally see what the real trigger of the Butlerian Jihad was:

“Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, because they are really annoying. Just to be sure, destroy anything that might be such an annoying machine.”

(It got shorter over time.)

Oh, that explains it. They put “Kill kids in Gaza” as “A” and “Win election” as “B”.

In the new Washington Post profile, Malcolm implies that he “engineered the scene” because “he knew smacking his kid would draw attention, help the article go viral and get their message out.”

How does beating your kid for clicks make anything better!? You still beat your two year old kid!