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Another Hudson first
This new video about varieties of inside doorhandles on cars brought me back to an earlier trivia item about outside doorhandles. There’s a clear default pattern with a couple exceptions. Before 1940 all closed cars had simple turn levers, the same mechanism as house doors. Levers varied from T shape to L shape to stirrup,…
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Remarkably prophetic
Looking back through previous (much smarter!) products of my Dream Scripter. This item from 2018 was remarkably prophetic. = = = = = START 2018 REPRINT: I was working for a school that was entirely run by an AI system. Everyone pretended / assumed that the AI was perfectly efficient. Nobody thought about disobeying or…
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“Astonishingly prolific”
I’ve been watching the NON-war between human creators and the Altman demons. As an author who deals with a publisher, I have a literal vested interest in the matter. This article includes one dramatic illustration of the enemy’s overwhelming power. The article describes “astonishingly productive” fake historians generated by Amazon’s demonic machine. = = =…
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Breaking Parkinson
Good is good no matter who does it. Bad is bad no matter who does it. Trump committed the worst crime in history during his first term. All governments in the entire world eagerly participated in the worst crime in history. I can’t and won’t forgive all governments. Trump is doing lots of typical bad…
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Relaxing vacation
Lately I’ve been getting some nice laughs from a Reddit section that calls out stupid computer tricks. The most common items are AI running off at the mouth, getting lost in endless random numbers or stuttering the same word forever. Especially good: Commercial display boards stuck in BIOS setup mode. This one gave me a…
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Just perfect
Beautiful example of “journalistic” stupidity. Ted Gioia posted an item from Nieman about the limited opportunities for indie “journalists”. One “journalist” commented: Pretty hard to maintain democracy without a free and independent press. Pretty bleak when everyone I know not in a major city gets all their news from Facebook and/or TikTok. If you really…
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What’s spycial about cylinder?
This was triggered by a couple of those 1950s newsreel and educational films. Narrators in that era were tiresomely Grammatical and Enunciative. Every phoneme agreed with the dictionary. This film is about engines and this is about mimeographs. Both topics constantly mention cylinders. I would expect the Enunciators to say sillinder, but they said sellinder…
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What did they see?
This morning’s walk to the store was hurried and drab. I just wanted to Git-R-Done so I could resume working. We’ve been under a slowly rotating weather system for a couple days, with rain at times and breeze at times. Fortunately the heavy part stayed well to the south. Along the way I passed through…
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Like dreams
Often hammered point: AI means Artificial Imagination, not Artificial Intelligence. Altman knows what he’s doing. The misleading name causes the opposition to waste their ammunition on proving AI doesn’t work like a computer. OF COURSE IT DOESN’T. It’s meant to work like a dream. A couple dreams this week made me think of a specific…
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Temples great and small
Reading another part of the McAlester guide to American architecture. The chapter on Greek Revival styles includes an unexpected math formula. The first term is the veranda or porch. All of the Euro colonizing powers added porches in different forms when they encountered hot non-Euro climates in India, Africa and the Americas. Most of these…
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Interesting argument
Keeping up with this topic because I got obsessed with it earlier. I don’t have enough spare energy or time at the moment to dig in again. Carreyrou has identified Adam Back as Satoshi. I’m inclined to listen to Carreyrou because his story about Elizabeth Holmes rang true. For me this particular ident doesn’t ring…
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What old houses think
I’ve always been an animist, not a human exceptionalist. I’m pretty sure all animals and plants are conscious, and fairly sure that some inanimate things can acquire souls. This cartoon from a 1926 architecture journal does a damn good job of expressing what old houses (and old humans and old dogs) think.
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Probably a good thing
According to “news”, the Selective Service will start registering men automatically when they hit 18. “News” sources are treating this as bad because it happened while Trump was in office. It’s a safe bet that the agency has been planning this move for a long time. The change is actually GOOD in context of existing…
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Misses everything
Via NiemanLab, “local” “news” sources are trying to organize and collaborate. They held a Local News Day yesterday. WordPress put together a supposed list of local news sources outside the mainstream. It misses everything in Spokane. The only thing listed is rangemedia.co, allegedly “regional”. I looked there and found the standard DNC talking points. You…
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Bravo to Festus!
Many cities and states and countries are rejecting Altman’s demand to take over their minds and water and electricity. Festus joined the trend. Festus is a familiar place. One of my engineer uncles lived there for a while, and my old friend Larry also lived there for a while. It’s good to see a declining…
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 