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NO.
Latest from Kirn: The full story of consciousness can only come from literature. Read the best of the new stuff, not just the old. Don’t get jaded. NO. And FUCK YOU. I tried that for several years in the ’90s and found EXACTLY ZERO worthwhile fiction. EVERY BOOK was designed to destroy the reader’s soul.…
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Duane does Bud
Duane Jones dealt with the Bud Light problem. I cited it before, in a discussion of AI misunderstanding human motives: = = = = = START REPRINT: The Jones agency had produced a successful magazine ad for Heinz ketchup. A painting showed an elegant waitress holding a silver tray with a single bottle of Heinz,…
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The one thing
Duane Jones’s base phrase is Repeats when sampled. A product must first sample the customers. Sample is a transitive verb meaning send or offer a sample of the product. Repeat means that the customer wants to buy more than once after being sampled once. Both steps are necessary to sell the product. So far DeSantis…
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WTF is he thinking 2
Continuing from here. I didn’t waste time listening to the DeSantis announcement. Reading about it is bad enough. He’s doubling down on strategic stupidity by trying to beat Trump at the nastiness game. WRONG BRAND! Trump is the literal killer app of blackmail and filthiness, trained by Roy Cohn. You shouldn’t get into the nasty…
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Reprint on perfection
Reprint from 2011, linked in previous. = = = = = Why do I hate Romney so much? Trying to figure out why I hate Mitt so ferociously, when he’s by no means the only candidate of the Wall Street Mafia. Both Newt and Obama are Goldman slaves, and I don’t hate them in the…
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Speaking of Voltaire
Bari Weiss interviews Tim Scott, another fake Repooflican candidate. Scott is following Reagan and Mitt Romney, claiming that everything is perfect in this most perfect of possible worlds. Only the existence of TAX is imperfect. If we can achieve ZERO TAX for trillionaires, perfection will be total. Weiss does a good job of confronting Scott…
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Kirn vs Cervantes
Latest from Kirn: Privacy, censorship, surveillance, and freedom of expression must be explicit, top-tier issues in the upcoming presidential contest. All candidates must be pressed to take clear stands. First, there’s never any point in saying must. Government does what it wants. Government doesn’t care what peasants think it must do. Writers who put must…
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Hmph.
After going ahead for some distance with my “simplification” of courseware, I realized it loses more than it gains. (I was trying to remove some Twitter-derived JS/CSS code that the previous publisher insisted on including.) The new “simple” product looks OK in desktop mode, but it’s noticeably worse than the old “too fancy” code in…
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Meep meep
On this morning’s walk a cat was chasing a squirrel at HIGH speed, both at full gallop. Squirrel was chirping all the way. Can’t catch me! The cat seemed to be gaining, then the squirrel darted left and up a tree. The cat continued zooming ahead for 20 feet, then stopped and looked around. Huh?…
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Verified power
In the last 15 years Indian immigrants have been gaining economic power at the expense of NYC Jews and Silicon Valley Anglos. The Youngkin election in Virginia was the first manifestation of Indian political power. Older power factions always try to defeat newcomers. Vivek and Haley appear to be a split-flank gambit to neutralize Indian…
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More flip
Lately I’ve been noticing establishment types who understand reality better than independent types. This reversal happens only on specific issues. The debt ceiling stageplay is a good example. Yahoo Financial gets it. The whole thing is pure noise, and even the changes made by each “side” to finish the negotiation are marginal and temporary, reverted…
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Vision always wins
In 1918 most cars were still open, and many didn’t have windshields. Mirrors were an occasional aftermarket gimmick. The inside mirror finally became standard around 1935, the left side mirror waited till 1960, and the right side mirror until 1990. Before visual mirrors, at least one inventor considered an audio mirror! The gadget had a…
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New thought about Wilson
Continuing a random look through old arch stuff… Hotels in 1918 were struggling to keep up with Madman Wilson’s lunatic Food Administration. Like today’s Public “Health” psychopaths, the USFA sent out a paralyzing flood of ever-changing and impossible regulations. Hotels and restaurants were supposed to do without wheat entirely, which resulted in VAST WASTAGE of…
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Skills != books
Randomly looking through old architect books on the web, trying again to find an equivalent to Grandma’s apartment building, a fourplex with a separate service hall. Previously I’d looked through my bookshelf of Dover plan books from that era, with no results. There are some fourplexes but no service halls. While googling, another aspect of…
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Not the best argument
Via MindMatters as usual: New AI systems have carved inroads into many industries, not least of all those involving voice and audio. Now the audiobook business is in trouble; since AI has the increasingly good ability to mimic the human voice and generate words, many voice actors and readers have watched the demand for their…
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 