The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

Ugh reading more of this and it’s awful.

He writes that women are attracted to men who could beat us up or control us. He writes that the reason for this attraction is so we have a chance to marry the man and prevent these bad things from happening.

His “science” assumes that women think like they do in shitty erotica written by men for men. Even by rationalist evo-psych standards this is pretty poorly thought out.

And yet, per Steven Pinker, “a middle-aged congresswoman does not radiate the same animal magnetism to the opposite sex that a middle-aged congressman does”. What’s the deal?

OK other straight ladies here, raise your hand if you’ve ever felt that middle aged congressmen, as a whole, “radiate animal magnetism”. Anyone? Anyone?

In this exciting new research direction in the making-stuff-up field I build upon previous work by Myself et. al in the making-stuff-up field.

I apologize to bring you the latest example of the intersection of US fascism with silicon valley tech industry.

This time the Whitehouse have decided that UI design is kinda important (gee I wonder if there used to be a department or two for that): https://americabydesign.gov/

Well nothing wrong with a little updating of UI anywa–

What’s the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you’re not wrong. But what’s the foundation of that brand? One that’s more globally recognized than practically anything else. It’s the nation…where he was born. It’s the United States of America.

To update today’s government to be an Apple Store like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software.

Oh god kill it with fire.

The web design of their website is also worth remarking on here:

1. The title text that reads “AMERICA by DESIGN” is an SVG. The alt text is “America First Legal logo”
2. The page contents are obnoxiously large and obnoxiously gray before they fade in.
3. For some reason Every single word gets it’s own <span> element to make the obnoxious fade in possible. Because I guess that’s what happen when you fire all the people who actually know what they’re doing.
4. They managed to include a US flag icon with only 39 stars which is too few stars to be official and too many stars to be visible at teeny sizes
5. The favicon is just 16x16 pixels of the word “by” in cursive that’s so blurry you can’t actually tell that’s what it is.
6. If your browser width is between 768px and ~808px there is overlapping text at the top.

The tech bros tied to this? Joe Gebbia co-founder of AirBNB, along with Big-Balls. Maybe others but those are the two who were retweeted by the twitter account.

Edit: also this part:

©2025 National Design Studio

Someone ought to remind them of US copyright law because official federal work is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States

“So, what are you in for?” “Making a right turn on a bicycle without signalling continuously for the last 100 feet before the turn in violation of California Vehicle Code 22108”

“The common people pray for anime memes, healthy vtubers, and a wikipedia article that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of tweets, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. "They never are.”

- George R. R. Martin

I’m sorry in advance for posting this meme.

If you use cloudflare DNS or similar: there has been some inscrutable drama going back years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Cloudflare_DNS_availability

(You might be using Cloudflare DNS without realizing it if you use Firefox, since it’s the default with DNS over HTTPs enabled)

(Oh no how much of my brain is dedicated to remembering random inscrutable tech drama?)

Edit: whoops commented too fast. That would explain broken DNS but not captchas. I blame the heatwave it has melted my brain.

Crypto bros continue to be morally bankrupt. There is an a coin / NFT called “GreenDildoCoin” and they’ve thrown dildos onto court at multiple WNBA basketball games (ESPN, video). It warms my heart that one of them was arrested. More of that please.

Polymarket even had a “prediction” on it. Because surely the outcome there couldn’t be influenced by someone who also placed a large bet. Oh and Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme about it

None of this is particularly surprising if you’ve followed NFTs at all: the clout chasing goes to the extreme. In the limit memecoins can act as donations to terrible people from donors who want them to be terrible. Still I hate how much publicity this has gotten, and how this has manifested as gross disrespect towards women atheletes / women’s sports by the sorts of losers who make “jokes” about no one watching WNBA games.

Amazon should treat drivers better. I hate how much “hustle” is required for that sort of job and how poorly they respect their workers.

I think my job needs me too much to lay me off, which I have mixed feelings about despite the slim-pickings for jobs.

I’m also trying to position myself to potentially have to flee the USA* due to transgender persecution**. There’s still a lot of unknowns there. I’ll probably stay at my job for awhile while I work on setting some stuff up for the future.

That said part of me is tempted to reskill into a career that’d work well internationally (nursing?) – I’m getting a little up in years for that but it’d probably be a lot more fulfilling than what I’m doing now.

* My previous attempt did not work out. I rushed things too much and ended up too stressed out and unbelievably homesick.

** This has been getting incredibly stressful lately.

At my big tech job after a number of reorgs / layoffs it’s now getting pretty clear that the only thing they want from me is to support the AI people and basically nothing else.

I typed out a big rant about this, but it probably contained a little too much personal info on the public web in one place so I deleted it. Not sure what to do though grumble grumble. I ended up in a job I never would have chosen myself and feel stuck and surrounded by chat-bros uggh.

Image should be clearly marked as AI generated and with explicit discussion as to how the image was created. Images should not be shared beyond the classroom

This point stood out to me as particularly bizarre. Either the image is garbage in which case it shouldn’t be shared in the classroom either because school students deserve basic respect, good material, and to be held to the same standards as anyone else; or it isn’t garbage and then what are you so ashamed of AHA?

Fear is the proper state of being for a coproration.

This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?

I couldn’t find anything, though I did find this thread where he ponders if the problem with police is that they just have too much gosh darn testosterone while awkwardly trying not to take a side:

People, I said “under 100 ng/dL of testosterone” with intent to thereby short-circuit trans issues because that is the part I care about. The conjecture (though I’d consider it halfway busted at this point) was meant to exclude, eg, a trans AFAB taking testosterone.

“A trans AFAB”. Lovely.

Don’t worry though, nothing quite says “transphobes not welcome” like this:

And to be explicit, we are happy to host economically literate people in favor of market solutions who politely accede to pronoun requests.

Well OK maybe they are welcome, but at least they’ll begrudgingly use the right pronouns while they gleefully tear down all my human rights!

“If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within [HPMoR], go ahead and try.” --Eliezer Yudkowsky, August 2022

This is just a trap to trick people into reading the first sentence of HPMoR isn’t it?

Only in the finest in content-aware AI powered clone stamp tool paintshop pro subscription magic mspaint terribleness

What do I do? Well I start by not calling them “likeable” and continue by calling them “fascists with huge egos whom I despise”.

But I mean you do you Kelsey.

Why would I pay to watch bad Southpark episodes when I can watch them for free on comedy central’s website?

Our real goal is to have 10 million AIs living in the virtual world getting smarter over time until one of them has a sort of Promethean breakthrough and actually becomes the first AI virtual being.

Ah it’s all part of their plot to bring Kenny to life as an all powerful digital mind.

Copilot will be given a little avatar with a “room” and will “age”. In other words: we have now reached the Microsoft Bob stage of the AI bubble.

https://www.theverge.com/news/713715/microsoft-copilot-appearance-feature-age-mustafa-suleyman-interview

Meanwhile I have to do code reviews on patches that have been actually written by a chatbot and doing that takes sometimes as long as writing the whole fucking code from scratch.

Yeah I’ve had to do this too. It’s lovely isn’t it? You do all the work and someone else who half-assed a prompt and sent out a change without even reading it gets most of the credit.