Author: polistra
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Yang is dumb.
Andy is at it again, pretending to solve our problems by introducing fancy gimmicks in the “voting” system. As far as I can tell from his glitzy but vague website, he doesn’t have any actual plans or proposals for economics or industry or peace. He just wants rank-choice “voting”. Pre-Yang nasty complicated voting: Yang’s New…
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Straightening up a fact
Last month, pointlessly trying to counter the standard notions about Soviet vs US, I wrote: While Stalin was alive, Soviets had no physical way to listen to the West. Instead of tunable radios, all citizens had Muzak speakers hard-wired to the official cable system. They could choose from two or three official channels. Anyone who…
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Everything is needed and used
I’m halfway tempted to place this under Thiel questions because it seems so obvious and so completely unrecognized. Maybe it’s more recognized than I think, but I sure as hell don’t see it in the usual “science” websites and newsfeeds and forums. Writing and reading are hard-wired parts of the human brain, just like speaking…
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Status is all.
Facts do not exist. Status exists. Latest “news” item via New Superstitionist: We have ignition! An analysis has confirmed that an experiment conducted in 2021 created a fusion reaction energetic enough to be self-sustaining, which brings it one step closer to being useful as a source of energy. The fusion ignition took place on 8…
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Ask and ye shall…
Previous item about AI and creativity made me wonder what AI would do when instructed to draw an old car. Would it come out hopelessly weird like a ’62 Dodge, or would it be a statistical average of all old cars, like the generic advertising cars? Neither. Ian Fischer has made a movie solely by…
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1906 reprint
Linked this in previous item. It’s worth a reprint. = = = = = START REPRINT: Looking for old info on coherers, ran into a US Census publication from the magic year of 1906. The Census bureau wrote a splendidly informative article on the present condition of electricity and electronics, getting everything right and describing…
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Latest Kirn quibble
Kirn’s latest pithy point: We need a few experts on the history of experts. Such a figure could estimate their average accuracy. My guess is that it hovers between 1 and 2 per cent. If it were any higher, we would not have needed new ones every few years. This is a beautiful observation about…
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Some fishy rambling on AI
Creativity can be measured commercially. A new product gains profit when it serves some people better than an existing product. Duane Jones emphasized the need to find your niche and defend it. An older product generally broadens and simplifies to be halfway pleasing to a broad range of cultures and places and personalities, which leaves…
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Done with Substack
I had already passed through the point of not much fun, realizing that I enjoy writing more than reading. The facts and insights from various writers are not Shannon information. For the ‘cancelled’ elites like Dan Rather and Bari Weiss, Substack is just a money-making rest stop on their way back to the Real Establishment.…
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Might be on the right track
Most research on human vs chimp misses the point. Most research focuses on physical differences like skull shape and jaw shape to explain why humans speak and apes don’t. Feedback ‘factors out’ such differences. Within modern humans there are similarly large differences in size and shape of bones, and we all speak. Here’s a physical…
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For robber barons it’s a good thing
The videogaming industry is turning against the whole Web3 shit. VR headsets, blockchain “trading”, the NFT fraud. Minecraft, the biggest and oldest company, which is owned by Microsoft, recently banned the whole mess. Most corporations will stick with The Current Thing even when it repels their customers and employees, because most corporations don’t want customers…
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Just a rehash
I haven’t hit this theme lately. Time for a rehash. Free speech is a fake issue. Freedom is the goal of criminals and psychopaths. Normal people want to live a normal life and do useful work. Normal people want to be PROTECTED FROM THE FREEDOM-LOVING DEMONS. Freedom really means I win, you die. The high-status…
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Not unknown
LiveScience is all agog over a “newly discovered” aurora phenomenon. As Dyer noted, the strange sky glow called STEVE was first described by citizen scientists and aurora hunters in northern Canada in 2017. STEVE is typically composed of an enormous ribbon of purplish light, which can hang in the sky for an hour or more,…
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The real independents
While we bicker and squabble about “free speech” vs Woke, on Twitter and Google and Facebook “versus” Gab and Parler and Substack, the real independents are blasting away inside the very same tech pipes and companies. Who are they? Videogamers. The biggest games have about 200 million users each, the same size as Twitter. And…
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Natural beauty correlates with theft.
Still thinking about Bell Labs. I visited there once ‘on business’ when I was working in the acoustics lab at Penn State. I feasted my eyes on The First Transistor, which wasn’t under lock and key. It was just casually displayed in a glass case in the main hall. One of the Substackers wrote a…
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