Strega

@jakelafort – I am a coward too when it comes to the midday sun. Anything over the mid 20’s and I am indoors.  Was I chopping chilies? No, just applying sun-cream. Now I can’t read for the next 30 minutes. Silly Billy. SF 50 good, SF 496 bad. If the logocracy takes hold in the mid 2020’s, I am sure you will be on the front line of the resistance,…[Read more]

Here is a recent story about humans ‘helping’ Mother Nature with genetically modified mosquitoes.

jakelafort wrote:
Recently i wandered lonley as a cloud by the boat launch awaiting a day of luxuriating in squamous surroundings under a beating sun.

Awesome prose, as usual. I was impressed enough to ask AI, and see if it seems smart enough to know if it was written by AI. IMO, it passed my test, although I don’t think the reasoning it gave was…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
All things domesticated for consumption by humans lo these past 11,000 or so years are “Organic” because they are Carbon-based life forms, and they are all “Genetically-Modified Organisms” whether by selective breeding or in a Petri Dish.

I think this is a more interesting topic than it first seems. At least one group o…[Read more]

I find that AI is good at summarising textual information, and keeping meanings largely intact, based (apparently) on the philosophical idea that the meaning of a word lies in how it is used.

I had it summarise my book in Adobe pdf reader, and it didn’t tell me anything new, just made a good hierarchical summary.  Maybe if someone started asking…[Read more]

Have a great week!!

“If your belief needs protection from questions, then it wasn’t knowledge to begin with.”

Me…

I rarely pay attention to up-to-the-minute news. But living in Trumpian times is unlike other times in US history. I heard news that Vance visited one of the Murdochs a few days ago, so the 25th amendment may become relevant? To be honest, I’ve lost sleep in some recent days.

Nine minutes long, if you don’t count the last two minutes of the video…[Read more]

Daily Beast interview with Michael Wolff, about Trump and a couple of his female staff. Eleven minutes:

Cluster B people are known for being thin-skinned: “emotionally unstable”, “impulsive”, and “intolerant of perceived slights or insults”.  If you’re a narcissist, you’re perpetually at odds with and competing with everybody; and human beings are not competition machines, we’re not built to cope with that, so it hurts personally when someone…[Read more]

I thought of this months ago but didn’t express it, but Kinzinger does it better anyway. Trump, et al, is the new cancel culture. Trump himself, is the thin skinned King Snowflake now.

4 minutes:

Not worth a new topic, so I’m putting it here.

MEIDAS TOUCH
(Trigger warning, pendulum swinging back to Lefties?)

I start this youtube video several minutes in, leaving 7-minute out take:

(I still hate the hyperbolic headlines, but they’re successfully grabbing lots of clicks. These guys are headed toward a million subscribers.)

TheEncogitationer wrote:
AI could provide vastly sped up analysis of drug interactions and side effects…provided, of course that it isn’t infected by Elmo Hitler. (By the way, would there be an Elmo Hitler if there were no Corporation for Public broadcasting to birth Elmo in the first place? 🤔😁)

[…]

A tall order, but it could be done if onl…

[Read more]

@Enco – This is just another day of government plodding with a different boss.

I can’t make a very strong argument against that. But this time, while it is a different boss, it is also a new form of plodding. Collapsing the FDA will be a mistake. Reforming it should be the priority. It should have happened a lot sooner, but meaningful reform can…[Read more]

Yes, it’s frightening how quickly all the rich and powerful (except Rupert Murdoch) are spinelessly caving in to kiss the orange arse.  After Trump’s reign is over, they will be called collaborators.

On Friday, during an interview on CNBC, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, claimed that President Trump was among the most popular people to ever occupy the Oval Office.

The president is the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics. There’s no question about it, but he’s also the most resilient. And you see…[Read more]

In 1946, George Orwell described good writing as “picking out words for the sake of their meaning,” a practice that dictionaries catalyze and writing programs stifle. Writers consulting a dictionary make a choice — writers guided by an app like Grammarly have their choices made for them.

Where Grammarly says, “Stay on-brand with consist…[Read more]

That sign is wrong on one point and only half-right on others.

Yes, but it is still the contents page from the “How to become a Dictator” handbook. The extreme right are all wrong.