I watched a documentary about elephant seals the other day and the narrator said the dominant male protects his harem of females from other males. And I’m like, protect them from what? What’s the new guy gonna do that the old guy isn’t doing? Then he ran over a baby to mate. 🤷♀️
People visualize future people as if they are already real, the same way we imagine lottery winnings with no grasp of their probability. We are bad at that sort of thing.
Every atom that moves changes who all the kids will be next generation because of fluid dynamics in sperm. So every sneeze is a holocaust to all the kids who won't be born because of it. Only real people can possibly matter, then.
If Elon wanted to be a trillionaire, they'd expand StarLink to include our Moon. Probably just an extra 20 some satellites at first.
Then they would own an information toll road that every Moon-ambitious party on Earth would have to weigh against the cost of building their own from scratch.
This is not a software glitch, it's the Y1C problem: old mainframes were so storage-constrained that they only allocated two decimal digits for passenger age, and adding another digit would mean rewriting software that in some cases has been in use and constantly patched since the late 1950s. https://press.coop/@BBCNews/112345996328670433
If I had more energy I'd be tempted to write a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetson's style short story set in a future where all the dot-com 1.0-3.0 hype turned out to be true and faithful predictions of our lives in 2025. Just so I could explore the unanticipated drawbacks ("oops, the Amazon drone delivering your neighbour's new dishwasher just fell through your roof; meanwhile trades.com only shows you roofers who live in Boston, England, not Boston, MA"). https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112317411058906212
WHERE THE WEB IS GOING: The convergence of LLMs and web advertising will lead to "ads" consisting of several hundred gigabytes of javascript containing a (weighted) neural network designed to generate unique per-user video advertisements—generated on your computer at your expense to ensure the imagery is unique and evades AI-based ad-blockers.
"AI spam" is an entire AI, squatting on your CPU and making it glow dull red as it works out how to capture your attention.
We're really going to have to find a way to make open hardware work. Not even for ethical reasons, just to have computers that function as more than space heaters.
Now that's a new one... And a level that I never managed to reach on "good old Twitter": Weird emails as replies to a post of mine. And a totally innocent post asking folks for recommendations for reviews for a series 🤷♀️
my husband just did the most disrespectful thing I've ever experienced. He asked me to detail classifications and after several seconds I remembered King Philip Came Over For Very Good Sex and before I even got to the end he interrupted me to ask Siri to search for Jurassic World
We all are hearing about how the Dutch are making their country from the sea - and somehow I was not really aware about how much of the land got lost over the centuries...
The US forked British Monarchy™ in 1776, but froze the dev branch with Constitution 1.0, so didn't bother to backport any of the subsequent bugfixes and security patches (1831, 1918, 1938, etc.) from the main British branch.
Anyway, you've got a bunch of British Monarchy™ users who instinctively want to tug the forelock but don't have anyone to tug it at and it upsets them because homebrew is no good—it takes 700 years of inbreeding to roll your own nobility.
There's a growing call for a sex strike amongst Orthodox Jewish women in an attempt to force leaders to grant a divorce to a woman trapped in an abusive relationship. Let's talk about the complicated history of sex strikes, from Lysistrata to Liberia https://skepchick.org/2024/03/the-orthodox-jewish-sex-strike-to-let-women-divorce/
I just set my account to no longer automatically accept new followers.
I'm getting so many follow requests from new users that appear to be very spammy businesses—from AI-generated porn peddlers to web design shops in Arkansas—that it's annoying the hell out of me. And they all seem to come from mastodon.social.
If you're trying to follow me, sorry: it may take a day or two longer, now.
I heard that a lot of Trump's lenders figured out he was bad but didn't call in the debt because they'd get more from whatever he was paying than if he declared bankruptcy and the whole thing collapsed.
So, one possible nearterm use for AI is as a concierge for purchases, e.g. "find me the best place(s) to buy the following 14 spices online; my budget is 60 dollars" How does this affect advertising? Meaning, part of why advertising works is individual people don't have the time or expertise to do a careful analysis about quality and cost, so brands try to capture attention and then to display quality/desirability.
Tired of this: "learn C so you can understand how a computer really works."
So much of modern computers is not visible from C (pipelining, virtual memory, branch prediction, cache misses, etc).
I guess what they mean is, "you learn about pointers and consecutive memory locations"? How is that helpful for programming in other languages without pointers?
C teaches you an abstraction of computers based on the PDP-11. It's interesting, but it's not essential.
Check out the book 'A Cat's House'. It's a color photo book by a carpenter who made his house into a similar playground for cats, decades ago. He may have started this whole thing.
Private spaceflight in the US now seem to be in an infrastructure bubble, with VCs and PE firms buying into launch providers.
(Barring external disruptive events—a new 9/11 or equivalent—I don't expect this bubble to burst until both Starship and New Glenn are flying, probably by 2025. SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin are almost certainly big enough to survive the coming crash, but a lot of smaller launch providers will go to the wall. See also dot com 1.0/tulip mania/etc.)
My home town just voted overwhelmingly to adopt #RankedChoiceVoting. It's the first city in Illinois to do so, but I don't expect it to be the last. We've been working on this for 2 years.
Whatever else happens tonight, this feels dammed good.