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  The most interesting technology these days is coming out of China, where interesting is defined as 1) it actually exists 2) you can actually buy it 3) you can actually afford it.

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  "the burrowing owl has developed longer legs than other owls, a trait which enables it to sprint when pursuing its prey, not dissimilarly to the greater roadrunner" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrowing_owl Ah, the most Loony Tunes of owls.

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  Traveling back in time to replace Dennis Ritchie with a clone who is identical in every way except for having a strong preference for length-prefixed strings.

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  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryweryn_flooding "By obtaining authority via the Liverpool Corporation Act 1957, an act of Parliament, Liverpool City Council would not require planning consent from the relevant Welsh local authorities and would also avoid a planning inquiry at Welsh level at which arguments against the proposal could be expressed. This, together with the fact that the village was one of the last Welsh-only speaking communities in the area, ensured that the proposals bec...

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  Due to the untenable cost of graphics cards, gamers have decided that graphics were a passing fad. All Microsoft-owned game studios are now to be shut down to or reorganized to work on Zork spinoffs.

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  I wonder if ray tracing acceleration could be useful for making some kind of puzzle game based on geometric optics.

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  @dan@discuss.systems I don't think Cheeto had a faculty page when I was still a student at Davis. Nice to hear he's been a productive researcher I guess.

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  Advertizements in SF really want you to know we're at the "adding one more AI will fix it man, just one more AI, I promise" stage of the bubble.

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  All this technology, and we're focusing our efforts on the wrong thing. The world's governments need to join together to start a collaborative project to bring josephoartigasia monesi back from extinction. The world need bull-sized rodents! I'm sure such a venture would have no unforeseen consequences.

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  If we simply require all pickup trucks to be painted in neon pick and green stripes and have a speed limiter that prevents driving over 55 MPH, it would suddenly become a lot less common for people to use a lifted pickup truck just to commute and buy groceries, while they'd still be available to anyone who actually needs one.

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  Everyone likes analogies to Dutch tulip mania, but maybe in some cases we should consider comparing things to the Scottish Darien scheme. (A lot of the capital in Scotland was invested in a scheme to colonize Panama. Which went... about as well as you'd expect a Scottish colony in Panama to go. This is cited as a motivation for the Acts of Union, and hence a reason why there is no longer a Kingdom of Scotland.)

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  "What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?" I ask the language model running on a Pentium with 16 MB of RAM and a tape autoloader to use as swap.

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  As your duly elected god emperor, I vow to make endnotes illegal. Why would I want to keep flipping back and forth to the back of the book? Have you people not heard of footnotes?

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  The problem with reading commentary on The Epic of Gilgamesh is that you get to learn that the original does also sorts of neat tricks with multiple meanings, alliteration, packing a lot of detail into just a few words, and such that aren't translatable, but you aren't exactly going to learn *Assyrian* to properly appreciate it.

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  Ah, has Copilot told Microsoft how to fix Github, so today it won't be gaslighting me into thinking I didn't write a PR by having it not appear in the list of PRs, like it did yesterday? (I do *feel* like I recall Github working better before it was bought by a major cloud company...)

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  Not the most topical issue at the moment, but the concept of a metaverse real estate market could only reasonably be conceived by a non-corporal being outside of space and time trying to re-invent real estate without really *understanding* any of the three terms in the phrase "location, location, location", nor understanding the concept of a physical commute that traverses space over a period of time.

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  Congratulations to human civilization for managing to not destroy itself before Artemis II returned to Earth. Let's keep it up, can we? (Also to the space capsule for making it back safely without burning up, but that was a little less impressive, really.)

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  Don't forget to use `-nostdinc` when abusing the C preprocessor to dubious ends.

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  Mark 9:1 really means that there are some Judean vampires from the first century CE (or earlier) who will yet live (for certain definitions of "live") to see the end of times. And killing ancient vampires will hasten the arrival of the second coming. Now that's a setup for some wonderful blasphemy...

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  2030s: Repeated mistakes by US solidify China as the world's leading economic superpower. 2040s-2050s: Chinese demographic crisis leads to India leading the world. 2060s-2070s: Brazilian world domination. 2080s-2090s: Human control of Brazil falls after repeated capybara revolts; Nigeria becomes leading economic power. 2100: Balkan states settle differences and unify. The Balkan Empire is unstoppable.

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  "'C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.28000.0\x64" seems like a kind of cursed path for a Windows 11 SDK on a 64-bit system... Paths like "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu" seems like the most intuitive thing in comparison.

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  There's something I find kind of inspiring about Humanistic Judaism, founded by Rabbi Sherwin Wine in the 60s as a non-theistic "religion" that adapts traditional practices to focus on how humans, not some personal god, have shaped the culture and history of the Jewish people. But I don't really care much for "cultural Christianity", nor has that been a big part of my life beyond things like highly secularized conceptions of Christmas and Easte...

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  The way people talk about purported benefits of generative AI for "democratizing" art should probably make us reflect on how our world perceives all creative endeavors in an increasingly professionalized and commercialized way. Which has been going on for a long time. Consider music. Before the phonograph, creating music wasn't exclusively or primarily the work of professionals. Professional musicians of one sort of another have existed for a *very* long time, but the...

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  It's probably a bad thing that the "Turing test" entered popular culture but the "ELIZA effect" didn't.

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  It's probably a bad thing that the "Turing test" entered popular culture but the "ELIZA effect" didn't.

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  If we call all Norse people from the Viking Age "Vikings", it's only fair to also call all British people from the Age of Sail "Pirates". "William Shakespeare was inarguably the most famous Pirate playwright." "Most Pirates at the time were at least nominally loyal to Pirate Queen Elizabeth." "Under James, the noted witch-hunting enthusiast, the Pirate homeland had finally been united under a single king." "Most Pirates practiced a r...