There are many sites that ask you about polices and in return suggest who you should vote for. Any in a Facebook App are surely harvesting your data for their profiles. Any that don’t have a good privacy policy are basically just gonna sell you answers to marketing people. Any that don’t have a clear…
This is what I want. The first bit, not the last bit. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/final-wishes
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.
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…
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…
This looks like it’ll be good fun for a couple of hours. Might wait till it’s on sale though, bit steep.
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…
That was pretty quick.
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/
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Zach Weinersmith does it again. Ha. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/christian-science
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/
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/
Good question www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/12/27/twenty-five-questions-for-2017/
Hahahha, brilliant. I’m having enormous fun playing Serious Sam VR. It’s so fast!
“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
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…
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
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
Just spent an hour traveling the globe with Google Earth VR, and it’s damned awesome.
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”…
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
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
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
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.
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.
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!
New Google Sit-On-My-Face hardware announced.
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…
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…
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/
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…
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