“You hate AI art? Well name all real paintings!” the blog post.

Also talking about the urinal “Art, it seems, is most meaningful when it challenges our very concept of what art is.” No that was in 1917. Pretty sure that nowadays ‘what is art even?’ art is quite overdone and boring.

For example, future pro boxing matches will be performed by rock’em sock’em robots

As predicted by several science fiction movies iirc. (I’m ignoring the skin suits because oof mental image).

Just needs a guy who goes “if we don’t build the automated grooming machine, somebody else will”.

I’m just curious how many hits you would get if you searched for ‘4 hour work week’, as iirc that is where all these people stole the idea from. (well, not totally, the idea they are stealing is selling others the idea of the 4 hour work week, but I hope you get what I mean, 4 hour work weeks all the way down).

Well, at least they put down something. More than I expected.

And doing research on people? In this economy?

Post by Corbet the editor. “We get it: people wish that we had not highlighted work by this particular author. Had we known more about the person in question, we might have shied away from the topic. But the article is out now, it describes a bit of interesting technology, people have had their say, please let’s leave it at that.”

So you updated the article to reflect this right? padme.jpg

Watts has always been a bit of a weird vector. While he doesn’t seem a far righter himself, he accidentally uses a lot of weird far right dogwhistles. (prob some cross contamination as some of these things are just scientific concepts (esp the r/K selection thing stood out very much to me in the rifters series, of course he has a phd in zoology, and the books predate the online hardcore racists discovering the idea by more than a decade, but still odd to me)).

To be very clear, I don’t blame Watts for this, he is just a science fiction writer, a particularly gloomy one. The guy himself seems to be pretty ok (not a fan of trump for example).

Hold it right there criminal scum!

But things being real doesn’t stop the cranks. See quantum.

Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it’s crucial to the overall argument:

… if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do …

Does this proposition make sense? It’s not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I’m too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

lol hahah.

Sadly it seems the next one is gonna be Quantum.

Not only is the universe a simulation, the Catholics just had it right, isnt that neat.

Ha very clever, but as quantum level effects only occur when somebody is looking at it, they dont have to simulate it at quark level all the time. I watched what the bleep do we know, im very smart.

Still a bit sad we are not doing nano anymore.

Finally computer science is a real field, there are cranks! Suck it physics and mathematics, we are a real boy now!

Ah yes, the famous European Jewish run universities. You don’t have to be an idiot to be anti-Semitic, but it certainly helps.

I have no idea why it only serves up those three

Dune (2021) was released in 2021, so perhaps he wasn’t in enough of the data yet, or some other weirdness like that.

In fact it was quite the blow for them, it cost him at least 44 billion, and massive amounts of attention. (Not as much as diablo 4 however).

Story from .nl, after Wilders “won” (he got the biggest share of the votes, and quite a lot more than before) the election last year, instantly the amount of horrible posts towards visible muslim people massively intensified (other groups, women, leftwingers and lgbt people (and the various intersections) also got worse replies (which on Dutch twitter always was bad already)). So this advice is so dumb, yes expose your people to more risk and potential burnout. And guess what, as we are a year in and most of Dutch twitter is still on twitter. It doesnt help. (And I cant tell, as switching to bsky has made me realize just how much of a breath of fresh air it is, but to me it feels twitter has gotten worse, but that is more likely explained by me getting better).

E: there is also the ‘they need us more than we need them’ factor. I have not seen rightwing Dutch trolls on bksy yet, Catturd however made the jump (and was promptly banned by everybody).

Less election dreariness, Dr Michael Cook talking about the oasis minecraft ‘game’.