Author: polistra
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Vultures
Paparazzi working for DailyMail are somehow spying on Elizabeth Holmes in prison. They caught her holding hands with her husband briefly, which is supposedly against the rules. GODDAMNIT, she’s trying to be a normal human, a normal wife and mother, and you’re preventing her. Vultures. Journalistic malpractice.
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Maybe not so stupid
One of the perpetually annoying tricks of movies and TV is the Girl With Glasses. She’s an ugly duckling with glasses. When she removes the glasses she instantly becomes an irresistible sexpot. Life doesn’t work that way. Or does it?
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Trite but true, untried but true
Branching from previous item about the two Cindys. I figured out the truth when I stopped listening to Rush’s VERSION of what the Cindys (and Naomi) said, and started reading the ACTUAL TEXT of what they said. It was NOT THE SAME THING AT ALL. Previous AHAS always came from finding a primary unmediated source.…
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AI vs bitcoin
Just a rant. Curve fitting and simulation have been major tasks of paper math for thousands of years. Analog and digital computers were devoted to predictive simulations for 100 years. Using the curve to generate text is relatively new but it’s an inevitable extension of the earlier uses. Eliza was “creating” text in 1964, and…
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‘Economies of Scale’ is fake
The latest upload at American Radio Library is an internal RCA publication from 1940. It lists patents and academic articles by RCA’s engineers, and has some articles about various parts of the company. One of those parts is the Export Division, which I hadn’t thought about. Auto companies often made interesting variations for export, which…
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Trustable ticket
Barrett is talking about RFK etc with his frequent cohost Cat McGuire. Barrett lost his skeptic’s license to the “virus”, but still holds realistic views about other subjects. Barrett and McGuire are solidly in RFK’s cult, though recognizing that he would inevitably converge to DNC orthodoxy. They bring up Cynthia McKinney as a guaranteed non-converging…
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Grudges count.
Pence has entered the meaningless “election”. Unlike the other pointless puppets, Pence has a personal grudge against Trump and isn’t afraid to say so. He was mercilessly tossed around for 4 years and wants revenge. Disgruntled cofounders sometimes create lively new enterprises, and rarely converge back to the company that kicked them out. Might be…
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Some companies have learned.
The corporations who haven’t yet figured out QT are properly making news and causing boycotts. It’s worth noting that SOME big corporations have caught the wind change and altered their steering. Starting around 2018, USBank and Citibank both used the same rotating set of splash screens for their logins. The pictures showed aggressively Die-Verse and…
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Mabel would be proud
The 1920 phone operators didn’t win their fight against Strowger. One of the Hollywood unions, the Directors Guild, just won a fight against the new Strowger. Groundbreaking agreement confirming that AI is not a person and that generative AI cannot replace the duties performed by members. They also gained improvements in royalties and residuals, which…
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Palate cleanser…
I’m barnstorming the semifinal install and check of all courseware modules, mixing new ones, reprocessed old ones, and unprocessed old ones. As I run through each lesson, I’m reminded again of the remarkable engineering in our anatomy. Time for a break. Here’s a piece of engineering in the palate and pharynx. For orientation, this picture…
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Trying to clarify
Inspired by Mabel, trying to clarify my thinking about the line between publisher and common carrier. First: Section 230 of the Communications Act was a bad piece of “law”, undoing a very old balance and a very old distinction. In the 1990s the new online publishers like Yahoo and Myspace didn’t look like newspapers, so…
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Rehankhilling, dehankhilling
Since March I’ve been doing longer neighborhood walks, inspired by Beatrix to reconnect the physical world. During the NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP period I was restricting walks to one standard path, operating in SIR! NAME RANK AND SERIAL NUMBER SIR! mode. Also, my walking capacity is much longer now after cutting down on carbs, inspired by…
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Was Mabel traumatized?
Big Tech still relies on human judgment, but it CAN’T POSSIBLY TOLERATE hiring Americans and paying them decent money. So it hires cheap slaves in Africa. These slaves have a moral sense, unlike ChatGPT, and their moral sense is bombarded by constant contact with angry Americans. Why are the Americans angry? Because we’ve been kicked…
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The first metricator
An incidental mention in an old Inland Printer led to this strange book. The American Accomptant, by Chauncey Lee, pub 1797 in Vermont. Lee was trying to metricate everything, and he succeeded with money. The rest of his proposal didn’t get anywhere. He distinguished Vulgar measures from his proposed Federal measures. In each case he…
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Sure enough
I’ve wisely avoided paying attention to beer since I stopped drinking in 1990. Today, just for curiosity, I walked down the beer aisle in Safeway. Sure enough, most brands are half taken, while Bud Light is untouched. Last week I observed one of the few Bud buyers, who is precisely the exception that proves the…
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