Lol. I think it’s fair to say that any US Senator, and especially a US Senator who is on important committees, must rank decently high up on the “list of the most powerful people on the Earth.” To go from that to this is quite the fall from grace.

NFTs and now all the genAI bullshit is the stupidest culture has ever been.

I hate that Project 2025 has become some sort of buzzword for what is really the longstanding aims of the conservative political project.

Hey, Siri, what is Harlan Ellison’s “I have No Mouth and I Must Scream” about?

The goal, the researchers say, is to come up with a test to determine if a given AI is sentient or not. In other words, does it have the ability to experience sensations and emotions, including pain and pleasure?

I’m not a fancy computer scientist and I’ve never read philosophy in my life but surely if an LLM could become sentient it would be quite different from this? Pain and pleasure are evolved biological phenomena. Why would a non-biological sentient lifeform experience them? It seems to me the only meaningful measure of sentience would be something like “does this thing desire to grow and change and reproduce, outside of whatever parameters it was originally created with.”

A school district recommending its employees actively combat government agents trying to abduct children is pretty grim stuff.

https://xcancel.com/PerversePossum/status/1882206298089087094

https://web.archive.org/web/20250122192121/https://eu.telegram.com/story/news/local/2025/01/22/worcester-public-schools-no-coordinate-ice/77880130007/

Is it possible that the apartments above Costco would actually be too expensive for most Costco employees to afford rent?

Every fucking time. I swear I always double check to make sure I get the right mega and I still fuck it up like 30% of time. Oh well.

I’m definitely interested in Severance, it’s on my vague and worryingly long and growing list of shows I need to watch.

Started watching the show Silo on AppleTV a couple weeks ago, maybe 3/4ths of the way through season one now. On the whole a really well-made show, maybe a few pacing issues or the occasionally poorly constructed/lit/shot set that keeps it from being at the same level as the best prestige TV of the last 25 years. But for a sci-fi production that must require a fair bit of CGI or The Volume or just expensive sets it’s one of the best I’ve seen. But then there’s Common, who plays the main antagonist in the episodes I’ve watched, and who’s operating at a level far below the rest of his castmates. Every scene he’s in just drags down the quality of the show around him.

It’s like Common was cast in the CW or old SfyFy channel schlock version of this production that would’ve existed twenty years ago, but everyone else is in Apple’s post-GOT post-Westworld “we have to compete with The Boys and Rings of Power and Dune and The Last of Us” show.

Me: laughing at the European nanny states and the Oriental Authoritarian Socialist Regimes

Also Me: dying as a direct result of my precious Occidental Freedoms.