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Sorry about the messy format
I was screwing around with WordPress themes, trying to get tags to appear at the bottom of the post as they did in Blogspot. Now I’ve got the tags (by accident!), but the fonts and headers are messed up, and the top image is somehow minimized. Well, the tags were the goal, so I guess […]
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It’s all QA
The intense pro-college propaganda issued by Deepstate after WW2 always boosted “cultural training”. Supposedly college would turn you into a “well-rounded citizen of the world.” Thinking back to my time at Phillips (small ‘liberal’ Christian college, now extinct)… Did anyone acquire culture there? No. Everyone I knew was already familiar with classical music and classical […]
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Getting closer
Kirn has expanded his peculiar argument against AI “art”. He’s on the angelic side of the fight, but his approach is destructive. He focuses on risk and vulnerability as the important factors that make human products human. THE PRODUCT IS NOT THE POINT. Peter Biles gets a lot closer: For me, knowing that a specific […]
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Unwanted? Here’s the solution!
Nerds like me always complain about being unwanted. Well, here’s the ultimate answer: = = = = = Do Kwon is wanted in 195 countries. Prosecutors in Seoul confirmed Monday that the Terraform Labs co-founder had been added to Interpol’s red notice list, effectively making him a wanted fugitive in 195 countries. = = = […]
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Wisdom of crowds
Textbook example of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. EnidBuzz posted an apartment rental ad. It’s a big fully renovated 2-bed fourplex on the nicer side of town, not far from Vance AFB. The rent is $970. Half of the commenters said it was a good deal, half said it was way too expensive. Which is it? […]
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Pointless peeve
I keep hearing rumors and claims that the Repooflicans are learning lessons about the importance of JOBS and SKILLS. So far I haven’t seen any evidence for those rumors and claims. Here’s a column by AEI that doubles down on the same old shit in the WORST possible way. The column is mainly by Phil […]
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The techy president
Millard Fillmore is famously the non-famous non-descript nothing-much president. He deserves credit as an early adopter of tech. In 1851 he got the White House kitchen to adopt cookstoves instead of fireplaces. The cooks went on strike, fearing explosions or something, so he brought in tech advisors from the company that made the woodstoves, who […]
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Censorship or weariness?
Some of the definitely ‘clean’ non-establishment substackers are noticing a sudden drop in their views and subscribers, and readers are noticing the sudden appearance of Content Warnings in some browsers. (I’m not seeing them in Firefox.) I’ve noticed a decrease in my VASTLY SMALLER view count, which is probably meaningless. Monthly variations in a single-digit […]
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No, it’s the exact opposite of math
Bitcoiners constantly say they’re letting math rule. Math is god, math is supreme, math is unarguable. Nope. They’ve kicked math out of the house. Math is always formed in equations. Using math means screwing around with both sides of the equal sign, always keeping both sides effectively equal. That’s the original definition of algebra, and […]
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Key ingredient
Most inventions are very old ideas by the time they are turned into a practical product. Some ideas, like flying, are innate in our part-bird genome. Others, like communicating at a distance using magnets, were tried 2000 years ago. Practical inventions happen after the right MATERIALS and METHODS are in place.** The materials and methods […]
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Best prescription
Writing in City Journal, NS Lyons diagnoses the rebels of this age precisely and comprehensively, and offers the most REALISTIC prospect for a solution. Lyons gives too much credit to Trump. Like many other sympathetic diagnosers, he believes Trump was blindsided by Deepstate: = = = = = As the Trump administration belatedly discovered, taking […]
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Avi does Carver
Avi makes a nice strong Carverian point in this piece. He’s discussing astronomical stuff like gravitational waves and spectral lines. In each case the theoreticians predicted that the signal would never be there, or at best would be ferociously hard to detect among the noise. In each case the signal was perfectly obvious after the […]
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Fractal exploration
From the Twitter of Bitsavers, one of the Blessed Preservers of this world: Book that doesn’t exist that needs to: “The Fractal Geometry of Writing” The thought actually started out that whenever I start writing something, I end up going down ratholes that each turn into something that would end up being the length of […]
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Waaaaay beyond quibble
Latest from Kirn: AI doesn’t suffer from impostor syndrome, nor does it ever feel suicidal, which is how one knows it isn’t sentient in any meaningful sense. It can never be human-like until it possesses the capacity to review its deeds, judge them, despair, and permanently turn itself off. This is so fucking dumb it’s […]
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Cranks and eccentrics
Last week I took a linguistic look at Morse and cranks and eccentrics. This led back into the old material on Morse himself and his first prototype. The prototype certainly had cranks, but the commenters were talking about Morse himself. In his memoirs and letters he comes across as a manic-depressive. Up and down, up […]
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 