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Cranks and eccentrics
Note: This was posted last month and I finally got around to making the correct battery for Morse’s original. I’m reposting at today’s date to add the battery, and ALSO because WordPress did some suspiciously weird ‘optimizing’ on one of the animations. (It looked OK when first published.) Looks like they’re trying to gradually erase…
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Checking the source
In animating old tech, I always try to find the original patent or the earliest version. I decided to look at the (supposedly) original code for blockchain to see what’s really there, and to check if I was making any bad assumptions. In fact I have been making two bad assumptions. (1) I was assuming…
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That’s not the goddamn problem.
Email spam for this “election” is constantly bemoaning the fund-raising pains of the sender. Well, why should I sympathize? You are supposedly auditioning for a job as legislator or executive. You’re openly admitting that your sole PURPOSE AND FUNCTION is fund-raising. The audition is the job. Paper mail spam this year is entirely different. Nothing…
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Why anti-nuke?
Half-baked thought, sounds good at the moment… The anti-nuke movement started in 1946, as an INTEGRAL part of the UN. The UN was initially a continuation of the wartime alliance, US + UK + France + USSR, keeping Japan and Germany weak and unable to start more wars. The allies had plenty of energy. US…
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Fish in a barrel
Continuing from here. Zuck is pushing the envelope of hi-tech with new advances that nobody has ever thought of before! Via UploadVR, a tech-optimist puffery website: Meta Horizon Workrooms is the product name for the beta software on Quest 2 and Quest Pro that’s a cornerstone of the company’s approach to changing the way people…
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Britain works.
Well, that was quick. Liz only lasted six weeks. Britain’s system is still functional. A functional animal or company or country needs a negative feedback system to reject toxic inputs and toxic leaders. Britain’s parliamentary system has always been capable of rapid response and adaptation. Sometimes it waits too long, but it’s still vastly better…
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Kirn misses it
Here he balances out yesterday’s precise hit! We’re in what I’d term the “taste destruction” phase of cultural change. It’s similar to what food co’s did once to wean us off good food and prepare us for products like Wonder Bread, only it involves language, images, and music. You’ll accept less once you forget there…
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Taking on water
In the ’47-65 period when disc UFOs were reported everywhere, several people saw a disc hovering over a lake or pond, siphoning or pumping large quantities of water. This wouldn’t make sense for an electric motor or even a small nuclear plant. Our long-distance satellites have mini nuke reactors, and they don’t need water. Taking…
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Kirn hits it
Kirn has seemed quiet or preoccupied lately. Today he hits the HARDASS REALITY button: There is a terrible emotional drag on daily life now. One must try to be cheerful, but in simple public interactions one witnesses a blankness, a loss of a sense of ordinary honor & caring. Meanwhile, everywhere, people drifting, living in…
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Build what you know
It’s easy to see the goal of bitcoin and DAO projects. Pump and dump, often in just a few hours. Cheap riches for the real-world swindlers who run the fake world. The dumps aren’t especially large by Wall Street standards, but 100k for a few keystrokes is an extremely high ROI. Well then, what’s the…
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Wilt or Rubett!
Janelle at AIWeirdness ordered up a batch of Halloween candy customized for each state from the AI engine. Some of the sources appear to have picked up other food from the state. Connecticut got Craney Chowder. Kansas got Farte Cats, perhaps from online references to methane from cattle feedlots? Most simply jumbled up the name…
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Wonderful!
For some reason I missed this a couple months ago. If I had seen it, I might have been less quibbly about the project! Avi shows his work. The world is full of ‘alt’ tech and ‘alt’ social media and ‘alt’ money projects, which grind and grind and eventually dissolve into factions and fractions because…
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It’s always about caste
From a Louella Parsons gossip broadcast in Sept 1948: = = = = = Politics invaded Hollywood with a vengeance last week, when President Truman and Governor Dewey made speeches within hours of each other. Conspicuous on the Truman platform were Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Ronald Reagan. Equally conspicuous with Dewey were Barbara Stanwyck,…
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CMT
Still grinding on my Sputnik question, the failure of US education to teach skills. There’s an obvious line between physical skills like typing and soldering and cooking, versus symbolic skills like arithmetic and writing. New thought: There’s a more subtle line between symbolic skills like arithmetic and writing, versus symbolic description of the symbolic skills.…
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Mach wins every time
From one of Wolf Richter’s commenters: Buying the company you hate most has always been a profitable investment. Strict Machiavelli. Made me think of a question that has always bothered me… Divestment campaigns, where “socially responsible” fuckheads sell shares of uncool companies like tobacco and alcohol and Russia, make no sense at all. The “socially…
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