Air so polluted it makes people sick, but it's all worth it because you can't be arsed to remember the syntax of a for loop.
Nit: It's "Death and the Gorgon".
It's linked here, so I'll hazard a guess that the copy is intended to be public.
The pro-child-porn caucus.
Science writer Philip Ball observes,
Just watched Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) say "We believe as an industry... that within 3-5 years we'll have AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as [big deal voice] the smartest mathematician, physicist, [lesser deal voice] artist, writer, thinker, politician ... I call this the San Francisco consensus, because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco... Within the next year or two, this foundation gets locked in, and we're not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that...There will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans"
"Everyone who believes this is in San Francisco" approaches "the female orgasm is a myth" levels of self-own.
Back in the twenty-aughts, I wrote a science fiction murder mystery involving the invention of artificial intelligence. That whole plot angle feels dead today, even though the AI in question was, you know, in the Commander Data tradition, not the monstrosities of mediocrity we're suffering through now. (The story was also about a stand-in for the United States rebuilding itself after a fascist uprising, the emotional aftereffects of the night when shooting the fascists was necessary to stop them, queer loneliness and other things that maybe hold up better.)
Being unsure of whether you want to fuck robo-Maria or be robo-Maria is a classic sign of bisexuality among reconstructors of lost film media.
Yes, it's a niche, but you know it's not an empty niche.
I've noticed the occasional joke about how new computer technology, or LLMs specifically, have changed the speaker's perspective about older science fiction. E.g., there was one that went something like, "I was always confused about how Picard ordered his tea with the weird word order and exactly the same inflection every time, but now I recognize that's the tea order of a man who has learned precisely what is necessary to avoid the replicator delivering you an ocelot instead."
Notice how in TNG, everyone treats a PADD as a device that holds exactly one document and has to be physically handed to a person? The Doylist explanation is that it's a show from 1987 and everyone involved thought of them as notebooks. But the Watsonian explanation is that a device that holds exactly one document and zero distractions is the product of a society more psychologically healthy than ours....
🎵 I'm a drop-shipping girl / in a shittified world / chat me up / bot me down / let's go party! 🎵
Having now refreshed my vague memories of the Feynman Lectures on Computation, I wouldn't recommend them as a first introduction to Turing machines and the halting problem. They're overburdened with detail: You can tell that Feynman was gleeful over figuring out how to make a Turing machine that tests parentheses for balance, but for many readers, it'll get in the way of the point. Comparing his discussion of the halting problem to the one in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, for example, the latter is cleaner without losing anything that a first encounter would need. Feynman's lecture is more like a lecture from the second week of a course, missing the first week.
Comment removed for being weird (derogatory). I refrained just barely from hitting the "ban from community" button on the slim chance it was a badly misfired joke from a person who can otherwise behave themself, but I won't object if any other mod goes ahead with the banhammer.
Yudkowsky writes,
How can Effective Altruism solve the meta-level problem where almost all of the talented executives and ops people were in 1950 and now they're dead and there's fewer and fewer surviving descendants of their heritage every year and no blog post I can figure out how to write could even come close to making more people being good executives?
Because what EA was really missing is collusion to hide the health effects of tobacco smoking.
Aella:
Maybe catcalling isn't that bad? Maybe the demonizing of catcalling is actually racist, since most men who catcall are black
Quarantine Goth Ms. Frizzle (@spookperson):
your skull is full of wet cat food
Here, have a community ban to enforce that self-proclaimed flounce.