Zach still rules
This is what I want. The first bit, not the last bit. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/final-wishes
Author: pre
I watch the election debate so you don’t have to.
An IRC translation of the election debate, written with prejudice. Mod: Look, this is still cool. We had them all last time. It’s like an elimination round. A spin-off show. This is like the Elections Little Brother or something. Intro Statements ======================= Green: After the war, we actually invested in our country and made all…
They Are Watching You
Lunduke’s presentation at some conference about just how much we’re spied upon these days was both entertaining and interesting. Crazy how much data they’re gathering these days. The Stasi would be very proud of us. If you ain’t paranoid, you should be.
Conniptions
Good times at a friend’s album launch gig tonight. Top new political songs and love the drummers tongue biting. You should totally check out the “Fit and the Conniptions” new album.
Blanket Studio
Because I don’t hear particularly well, I find it hard to believe that setting up the old makeshift blanket-studio is really worth it most of the time. But because I do *listen*, sometimes, I believe that it probably is. Blanket-sound-booth, pop-shield, decent microphone all set up ready to record some voice tomorrow. Will even turn…
Future of Journalism
The guy who brought you Wikipedia wants to try and crowd-source journalism too. Not sure that “protect your sources” in traditional journalism is compatible with a “See the source” view that the new organization wants. Not sure which is better either. Hard to imagine it being much worse than the modern billionaire-funded “journalism” though. Too…
Monbiot On GE1017
I would be voting Labour if I lived in a seat where that mattered at all. George is great here, and he finishes: “The choice before us is as follows: a party that, through strong leadership and iron discipline, allows three million children to go hungry while hedge fund bosses stash their money in the…
Rick-ality
This looks like it’ll be good fun for a couple of hours. Might wait till it’s on sale though, bit steep.
Charlie Stross blog discussion on #ge17
Today’s award for most interesting comment thread on the #ge17 goes to Charlie Stross’s blog, thanks everyone for taking part. Sorry Reddit, you were too partisan by far. Facebook, you are too filled with idiots and talk is too spread out among many links half hidden. Hacker-news, you didn’t even try having better things to…
Snap Election Pie
That was pretty quick.
Yet Another Election
There exist future worlds where the Tories fall short of a majority and some coalition without them is put into government. Which will be an entirely different kind of shambles. There are things which can be done to increase the amplitude of those future-worlds. We should concentrate on doing those things I guess, even while…
Trump Jamming
Naomi Klein is pretty insightful in this five minute video. The reason we demand politicians divest, is that they otherwise can be influenced by their holdings. So if they refuse to, it’s fair to go after their holdings. https://theintercept.com/2017/04/12/how-to-jam-the-trump-brand/
Rick And Morty S3
Well, that was just brilliant. Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon are ace. 🙂 https://vid.me/3Ljb
I see this having literally just finished my re-watch of seasons 1 and 2 of Rick And Morty hoping I’d time it about right for season 3. I’m very cliff-hanger-fresh right now. S2E10 was great. Again. How can it seem so short a time since I graduated university, yet so long a time since Rick…
Metropolitan Man
The Superman story in the Methods Of Rationality podcast is brilliant. Lex sure has his work cut out saving the world from Superman, that is one powerful foe. Loving it. http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=1705
I am looking for actors
I am looking for voice-actors. Look, I even placed an ad and everything: https://www.starnow.com/listings/listingdetail.aspx?l_id=842932 I am *stunned* at the number of responses already and offer only a mercenary’s tiny amount of favoritism to friends or fans. This one matters. This is the one where I consider myself to no longer be learning, but leading. But…
Asymmetric logic bomb
Here’s Scott Alexander being thoughtful and verbose again: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ “Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever…
XKCDAgain
Have an XKCD, I haven’t linked to one of them in ages. https://xkcd.com/1810/
Craig Murry is a whistle-blowing ex-diplomat and enthusiast for Scottish Independence. I can’t remember why I started reading his blog, but I continue to do so coz he’s mostly right about most stuff. I wonder how many of the people who voted to leave the EU were even aware that doing so has a very…
health
So it seems the Whittington Health service made an appointment for me, failed to tell me about the appointment, then discharged me for not psychically knowing about it and failing to turn up. Off to the back of the several-month-long queue then. Hurray! *sigh*
Holloway
I live over the road from Holloway Prison. But Holloway Prison is no longer a prison. The last of the inmates escaped last year. When I say “Escaped” I mean “were transfered to other, hopefully better, prisons”. And it’s the government’s intention to sell the land to developers, basically. I can see an argument for…
which
Quick Poll: Imagine a horse, in a field…. Would you describe your experience of doing that imagining more as conceptualization, or hallucination? What colour was the horse’s mane? Did you know that before I asked? Was it facing left or right? Did you know that before I asked? I ask these questions because I’m trying…
Memory
I don’t think I’ve ever had a very good memory, but obviously I can’t really be sure.
Pom Pom Crabs
The Washington Post has video of a weird species of crab that always carries around a special species of sea-anemones in it’s claws like *all the time*. And if you take one away, it rips it’s remaining one in half so that it still has two, reproducing those anemones asexually. If you take away both,…
Eichmann
Scott Alexander remains awesome. Here he reviews a book about the trial of a Nazi, Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann In Jerusalem”, and tries to learn some lessons, ending: “It seems almost possible to imagine a world where something goes wrong and America ends up overtly fascist. Yet even in my worst nightmares I can’t imagine a…
Christian science
Zach Weinersmith does it again. Ha. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/christian-science
Audacity ramble
The thing about when the audio-editing software “Audacity” crashes on you (which it has done on me several times tonight) is that at least you get to step back from your standing desk and throw your arms out and exclaim “How DARE you have the AUDACITY to just suddenly lock up right THEN!? When I…
miles
My phone keyboard app tells me that I have swiped a mile with it now. That’s done in, roughly, a year. Depending on whether it’s counting distance racked up on the old stolen phone. I think this is low, compared to most folk’s who use a Swype-style swiping keyboard. For Swift Key isn’t really about…
EU Robot
The EU parliament have written a report on the regulation of robots in the EU. It’s pretty good, all in all. Asking many of the right questions, suggesting some reasonable answers. And a few unreasonable ones, but hopefully that’ll get ironed out in subsequent drafts. It’s stupidly long and detailed with no beauty and is…
peak indifference
I hope Cory Doctorow is right and this is the peak of privacy indifference. Not nearly enough of my friends have lost their indifference yet. And one day, Mark Zuckerberg will be president, with ALL the facebook data. How fun! Excellent article, Cory is awesome. http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2017/01/cory-doctorow-its-time-to-short-surveillance-and-go-long-on-freedom/
sanity
I thought people believing the CIA lies about Russian hacking was bizarre enough, but the lies people seem to be taking at face value this week are a whole step up in crazy. Our news industry is very broken. Here’s Crag Murry injecting at least a little sanity. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/01/hitler-diaries-mark-ii-hope-changed-mattress/
Serious
Serious Sam is serious. I mean really. Sixty seconds is pretty good I think.
Happy new year
Happy new year everyone, expect I’ll be out of signal range at midnight, hope it all comes in nicely for y’all
Interesting questions
Good question www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/12/27/twenty-five-questions-for-2017/
Serious Sam VR
Hahahha, brilliant. I’m having enormous fun playing Serious Sam VR. It’s so fast!
I hate windows
Somehow or another my “offline” login to my Windows box seems to have been changed during the last session to an online account attached to my email address but with a different password that I don’t know. It tells me I can change this at screwyoucustomer.microsoftarebastards.com Presumably if you own Windows you’re expected to have…
The Talk
“Wait. You guys put complex numbers in your ontologies?” Scott Arronson is brilliant, Zak Weinersmith is brilliant. You might fear that them both together would cancel out like two opposing complex amplitudes in Hilbert Space. But you’d be wrong, they reinforce and make something really excellent. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-4
Goodish
David Goreman’s rant about Huel in his show on Dave this week was hilarious and brilliant.
SFA
Saw the Super Furry Animals at the Roundhouse tonight. Great band. Really the only band I can be bothered with getting excited about now. They played Radiator and Fuzzy Logic all the way though. Gotta be 20 years since I heard half the Fuzzy Logic tracks. Surprising how unfamiliar some of them were. Great stuff…
Richard Murphy’s Post Brexit Vision
Richard Murphy talks a lot of sense on a post-brexit British economic plan. My guess is that the government will do none of these things, and will instead steer the country towards being an iniquitous tax haven where most of the people get to grovel for scraps from the tables of the super-rich. Still, Brexit…
spys
If our government were responsibly looking out for the safety and security of it’s people, it’d be mandating that ISPs destroy their logs within 28 days and extending the data-protection act to protect people from their log data being used in any way without their permission. Instead it’s mandating logs are kept for a year,…
VPN
As you may know, the government have passed their Snoopers Charter retro-actively legalizing their spying on all citizens, legalizing lying in court about where they get their evidence, and promising that in future they’ll ensure your complete browsing history is available to everyone from MI5 through the Food Standards Agency to the Gambling Commission. You…
always sunny
In case anyone was wondering, “It’s always sunny in Philadelphia” gets pretty funny around season five or six and you would not have any idea what the show is about by looking at the frankly bizarre and unrepresentative icon Netflix chose for the show.
Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality Again
This lovely image which I found on the HPMOR Podcast site today gives me another excuse to link to easily the best fan-fiction work I have ever read (Note: I have not read much fan-fiction). Some don’t like the voice of the narrator I’m told. Those people are weird and I disagree with them about…
Read more Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality Again
Election Process
An election process must be transparent and observable, and nobody can claim the movements of electrons in a chip is “observable”. I’m a technophile, and I think there is no such thing as a transparent, safe, secure, anonymous, electronic voting system. There should be no such thing as an electronic voting machine.
democracy
Read two great posts this evening. One, from Paul Arbair (great name, great profile picture) here: https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2016/11/15/trump-and-the-autumn-of-democracy/ One from the better-known George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/25/13-crises-we-face-trump-soil-loss-global-collapse George was the guy who first pointed me at Paul Arbair in the first place (though not that Arbair post), but even despite that they seem…
okgo
OK Go continue to make five-star videos to three-star songs, and I hope they never stop. Brilliant stuff again. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/inside-ok-gos-latest-record-breaking-music-video-marvel-w452114
windfarms
Perhaps we should just give him all the wind-farms. If he owned all the wind-farms he’d believe in climate-change, surely?
Google Earth VR
Just spent an hour traveling the globe with Google Earth VR, and it’s damned awesome.
wolf
Scott Alexander has a point about the left crying wolf over Trump racism. Seems to me people are believing the press again, even when the press are reporting in their usual horrible exaggerated way the statements of a known liar. You Are Still Crying Wolf