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
You really do have to hand it to Scott Adams that a long time before anyone else seemed to be taking it seriously he predicted Trump would win, and predicted that he’d do so in a dramatic 3rd-act last-minute turnaround, just like what basically happened in the end. Not sure I’d call it the “landslide”…
Observations upon owning a keyboard with a separate number-pad for a few days It’s really nice having the mouse that bit closer to the right hand. It’s not about the reach, or the time it takes to traverse the reach, it’s mostly about the angle of your muscles and bones during use. Mouse-work is BAD…
Trump wins the presidency, and even by a small margin the popular vote it seems. Democrats fail to take the senate, but there is some good news from the USA this morning: Three more states legalize recreational cannabis. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/08/state-ballot-initiative-election-results-live-marijuana-death-penalty-healthcare
This new vive comes with so much stuff! Hard to believe it’s going to need all five of these power plugs, surely?
I have ordered a Vive. I wonder if it’ll arrive in time to spend all weekend with it.
The N900 is still by far my favorite of all the phones I ever owned, and it was so for three main reasons. Number one: The slide-out keyboard. When I had that keyboard, the best email-interface was still just Mutt over a terminal. Which is to say, the best and most efficient email-interface ever! A…
The social sciences as a whole are going through a massive replication-failure crisis as a result of ramping p-mining, and basically no result in the topic can be trusted right now as far as I can tell. This is an interesting approach to figuring out which of the results are likely to be real: A…
Zach Weinersmith continues to be brilliant. “The only thing that you’ll acomplish by venturing beyond the farm is that you’ll decrease the gene pool of people who are terrible at understanding basic statistical concepts” http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/path-of-a-hero
Dark Days on Gear VR scared me, made me jump, made me laugh hysterically and stare entranced. Episode one was thoroughly entertaining and I’m very much looking to playing through the rest. Perfect Halloween game-playing. https://www.oculus.com/experiences/gear-vr/1063691710368492/
One of the more amusing programming stories. Not sure why he doesn’t just run emacs in a terminal window though really. When I run my text editor it thinks it’s a text program running on a terminal emulator because that’s what it is. Posted by Daniel Colascione on Friday, 28 October 2016
CP Grey here explaining the structure of power brilliantly. Think I’m moving this book he’s based it on to the front of my queue.
This is a brilliant little five-minute web-game. Very poignant and topical. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/683106
my train home this evening hit someone at Horely. Sounded like a shopping trolley on the tracks but they reckon a person. Cops etc. examining the train now. Be careful out there in your way home folks. Presumably that person’s night and life ended much worse than mine will. I’ll just be very late home.
New season of Black Mirror is live on Netflix now. Looking forward to that. Probably be Sunday before I can watch any but Here’s writer Charlie Brooker talking about it on American radio though.
I’ve been using Windows again for a bit. The VR stuff that I wanna play with just isn’t there outside Windows yet. It’s very annoying. But obviously the machine is Linux underneath. Boots into Linux by default. But I’m mostly actually using that machine for Unity3d stuff and VR stuff and it’s left in Windows…
Nicely done Avengers/POTUS mashup. Good work Huw.
Just watched John Carmack’s keynote at the third Oculus Connect event. He’s really very jargon-filled and fast-talking and information-dense. Some useful stuff there. Hard to keep up sometimes and he still ran out of time. Abrash’s vision on the future of VR is easier to follow, if considerably more speculative.
I have finally given up trying to run my own email server. None of my MX records point at myself anymore. Not only will Google be getting a copy of every email I receive from now on (which they mostly already had on account of being sent from Google in the first place), but now…
Election years are always a gift to South Park, even when they’re not so inherently absurd to begin with. The presidential farce going on in America is brilliantly captured in these first few episodes. Watch them now. South-park is so topical watching them more than a few weeks late takes away some of their power,…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_sSpPyruj0 Whenever there’s a Sam Harris’s podcast I haven’t listened to, it moves right to the top of the list. He’s great. This is his new TED talk on AI risk, which is succinct and basically right.
Yay, new Black-Mirror this month!
This is a British status update, only for British people. Please present your authentication papers before continuing reading. Be assured that I will name and shame all those people who read this status update and who are not British. Rule Britannia.
New Google Sit-On-My-Face hardware announced.
Step One: Own Primula Step Two: Own peanuts Step Three: Put peanuts on primula Step four: Fork it out again and eat it NB: Note, not a weight-loss tip
Since Drunkman is finished, I’d been doing some more Tentacles writing. This was going okay, but then I got distracted by owning a VR headset and downloading Unity3d (a game-writing engine) and now I’ve found myself building a VR game instead. There will be some devlog on that at some point too I guess, but…
Elon Musk is currently live-streaming his Mars plan: Making humans an interplanetary species. A hundred or two people per trip, 10,000 flights! [Edit:] I do not like his new mustache, it’s distracting. It feels like Terry Thomas selling me a space-ship. I would not buy a space-ship from Terry Thomas. He seems to have a…
Randall Monroe was in town, him off of XKCD.com. The second most popular of the physicists born on October 17th to turn their hands to cartoons. His talk was funny and amusing, good to have a chance to support him a bit after leaching off of his web-comic for a decade or so without giving…
If Labour is to win there is only one way to do it, and that’s to be bold Richard Murphy’s essay on a coherent vision for a new economy is probably good advice for Labour here I think.
http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=380 I can think of nobody whose opinion on computer games I’d trust more than Jeff Minter, so I’m glad he’s written a review of No Man’s Sky. I think I’m gonna hold off on playing it in the hope I can do so for the first time in VR, but Jeff’s review says basically…
Congrats to Corbyn on increasing his majority and getting even more votes this year than last year.
Very glad to see more Red Dwarf existing, the new episode was perfectly acceptable Red-Dwarf. I’d give it a B-. and I’ll watch any sci-fi better than a D, really. Even some E+s. So, really great compared to most of the stuff I watch! Made me laugh many times, somehow they don’t seem as old…
So the Labour Party Leadership election is over and the media coverage of it has been truly some of the worst journalism I’ve ever witnessed. The whole conversation has been terrible. If our news media were half way sensible they would not be talking about whether or not a particular train a particular man sat…
Chunky Mark’s rant about last night’s Dispatches is, I suspect, better than the Dispatches show itself, though it’s hard to tell since Channel Four’s web-player doesn’t seem to want to work on my Linux box. Mark’s rant rings true though. Did everyone notice that the production company who sold the show to Channel Four are…
“I have personal documentation for each human being that proves all of their existential fears are real and unsurmountable” Brilliant. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/citation-needed
Scott Alexander is once again awesome here talking about clues from neuro-science about how the brain might work and what exactly goes wrong with schizophrenia and autism and mania and AMPA receptors and NMDA receptors and things. Really enlightening read. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-up/
“Drunkman” now has closed-captions and the entire hype-and-release thing is scheduled and should happen at 19:30 on the 22nd October even if I’m murdered or whatever between now and then so no use murdering me any more, it won’t stop the release of “Drunkman” anyway.
I certainly suck at Excel, I never really need to do any of the things it’s good at and tend to just write programs in the languages I know rather than trying to force things into spreadsheets in general. Never really watched anyone using it even till now. Suspect this will be useful to many…
Visited the British Ironworks Center with my family. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, close to nothing but the hospital my father’s currently in as far as I could tell. Some great sculptures though.
I went up to Birmingham for the Autumn Green Party Conference 2016, at the university there in Edgebaston. Not been to a political conference before, so have no idea how much it was like any other. Arriving a little after noon with not a clue what the hell we were doing, the registration desk directed…
Read more Green Party Autumn Conference 2016
This is not what I was searching for, but it’s very nice. I suspect this kind of hair cut requires a lot of maintenance. http://geekologie.com/2016/04/all-the-rage-hidden-cat-head-shave-in-ba.php
86 percent of 1st choice votes to the new green leadership team..
Me and the rest of the Crystal Mayes team won at Crystal Maze today. At least won out of us four teams, which as “The Young Ones” taught us, is all that really matters. Our Maze Master, Anna Key, was suitably bouncy and did that Richard O-Brien thing of singing enough vague idiocy in the…
Went to see Macbeth at the globe yesterday. Beautiful building, good company, earnest performance, great costumes. Shakey is too arcane for me though.. Barely any idea what’s going on most of the time, and I mostly avoid cinemas coz of how uncomfortable the seating tends to be. The Globe is way worse than that. Good…
It was surely one of the hottest days of the year today, and the performers in that theater were all wearing winter clothes and jumping around and dancing under stage-bright spot-lights. Whereas I’d spent the day at my desk in my pants. I did some pretty good work, but then I wasn’t dressed in winter…
This is a 60 minute talk (plus 30 minutes Q&A) about TTIP given by David Malone, the Green Party Leadership candidate I’m most likely to vote for at the moment. I think these next two or three years now, as our country negotiates a bunch of bi-lateral trade agreements to replace the cushy relatively-democratic deal…
All the parties are having leadership elections over the next few months. The Tories are picking between what appear to be a shower of literal monsters. Half the Labour MPs are trying to ensure their most popular candidate doesn’t stand for some reason. Much has been written about that, but the Greens just have an…
Read more Too long and overly opinionated guide to the Green Party Leadership Elections 2016
Imagine that you’re a Labour MP and you think Corbyn is what the media have been spinning him as: a hopeless unelectable incompetent throwback from a past age who will surely doom us all. You think, for some bizarre reason, that Corbyn is to blame for the Brexit insanity rather than it being Cameron’s fault.…
Thing is, the Stabby MPs (that should be the name for the new political party they are going to inevitably have to form now) are certainly right that our media’s reaction to Corbyn and to any hint of any diversity in politics at all is a joke, and you probably can’t actually win elections that…
It’s not about the budget What passes for democratic debate in this country is apparently mostly squabbling over how many millions some made-up tea-bag predictions say you’ll make or lose personally if you’re in or out. Gah. Economic projections aren’t really important either way compared to the political, constitutional issues. Sovereignty. Democracy. The very future…