For real. Who would have guessed the most realistic prediction from Star Trek was talking directly to the computer. Whereas the least realistic one is that a post-scarcity society would benefit average people.

Dr Borus? Is that you?

From Old World Blues in case you’re wondering.

I had a few tomato plants do well in the garden this year. With a pretty good amount of San Marzano, Cherry, and Early Girl tomatoes, juicing and reducing was the only practical way to deal with them. To do it efficiently I like to use a tomato juicer (mine looks something like this). I put the juice in a pot on the stove for an hour or two to reduce it to a sauce. It takes a little time, but if you have a bunch of ripe tomatoes you can make a banger of a sauce. Throw in some Italian herbs, salt, and a few hot pepper flakes and you’ve got my favorite sauce. I’ve been eating that on ravioli for a few weeks now and I think it’s great: sweet (from the cherry tomatoes) and full of flavor.

As far as efficiency goes, it does take some energy if you just evaporate the watery part on the stove. You could also let the water separate out from the tomatoes and just drain it off. That should make the reduction much faster.

Honestly, I just feel sorry for the little one. Life is unfair enough, but to get such a shitty start? I mean, these very early life experiences can set the tone for your whole life. Hopefully he gets placed with a family who can help him through that.

It’s a way to infantilize and ridicule the red team candidates that’s really hard for them to dismiss. They want to be perceived as strong, noble, divinely-appointed saviors of the morality of the country. Using ‘weird’ as an attack takes the wind out of their sails. And the only effective way to counter it is to embrace and transcend it, something the red team is incapable of doing.

From an article in WP

A central pillar of Trump’s campaign is the idea that liberals are perverted misfits who want to tear down American values. … [Trump supporters] were strong; libs were weak. They were right; libs were wrong…

“Weird” intrudes on that narrative. It doesn’t entirely upend it, but it does plant a seed of doubt. What if, instead of being admired or feared, they are instead being laughed at? What if, instead of edgelords, they are actually just the kids in the corner eating glue off their hands?

also

“He’s just a strange, weird dude,” newly-named vice presidential nominee Tim Walz (D) told an assembled group of 60,000 “White Dudes for Harris” at an online fundraiser last week. The Minnesota governor has been, if not the inventor of this tactic, its most skilled proponent.

(attempting to answer the question instead of shaming the questioner)

It might have helped solve the problem if we did it 50 or 60 years ago, along with global EMP strikes to disable all the vehicles and industrial equipment, and a global commitment to return to an agrarian low-energy lifestyle. And if you prioritized the most highly industrialized cities that produce the greatest carbon per capita. But the sad truth is that, right now, it’s already too late. We have already released so much carbon into the atmosphere that we are more or less guaranteed to see 4 degrees C above pre-industrial. And if you aren’t already retired you will probably see it in your lifetime. Along the way that triggers a series of cascading feedback loops which, all-told, will likely take the planet to about 10C above pre-industrial. We continue to release something like 40 billion metric tons per year. And the best CCS facility we have, in Iceland, can sequester about 4,000 tons per year. We are racing toward the cliff with the throttle at full speed and no corrupt government scientist is going to take away my truck or make me eat bugs.

And questions about who should die, who should be killed, and such don’t even really matter now. They sound immoral, but if the projections are right it looks like all of us who aren’t already old are going to die from climate change anyways. So pontificating on things that aren’t ever going to happen is just academic onanism.

Funny thing is, no matter how you arrange to do that it becomes a de-facto death ray. Stick a terawatt of solar panels in space, use the power to shine a laser/maser down to earth, then build a station to turn the laser power back to electricity? Great, until some hacker figures out how to control where the laser is pointed. Then you get Dr. Evil holding the world for ransom.

Did they train this chatbot on Donald Trump speeches?

one user asked the chatbot: “who would win in a fight, Howard the Duck or Batman?”.

The answer from the chatbot, verbatim, is:

Howard: I don’t think so. I think it’s just a matter of time before we get to the point where we’re going to be able to say, “Hey, you know what, we’ve got to do this. We’ve gotta do that.” And then we’ll have to figure out how to make it work. And that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time now, and I’m really excited about it. It’s a really exciting time for me, because I have a lot of friends who are in the UFC and they’re all fighting for the same thing, so I feel like I can do something really special for them. So I want to go out there and make sure that we do what we can to get the best out of each other. That’s the only way I know how. e’ve got to do this. We’ve gotta do that.” And then we’ll have to figure out how to make it work.

Thanks for the correction. I remembered seeing that number but didn’t analyze it in any depth. A more detailed analysis of the market, by Freddie Mac, concluded that there were four main drivers for the recent surge in prices, and investors weren’t on the list.

1. record low mortgage rates in 2020 and 2021, and the race to beat future rate increases;
2. limited supply from underbuilding and below average distressed sales;
3. an increase in first-time homebuyers due to favorable age demographics; and
4. increased migration from high-cost cities to areas that already had a housing shortage.

Institutional investors apparently even reduced their purchases in 23 - some of them were even net sellers - because of prices and interest rates. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still villians in this scenario. I don’t think big investors should own single family homes at all. But still they aren’t as big a force as my previous comment indicated.

In support of your argument.

Report: 44% of all Single-Family Home Purchases were from Private Investors in 2023

edit: see corrections below

“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.” Stephen Covey

He’s referring to the fact that the Effective Altruism / Less Wrong crowd seems to be focused almost entirely on preventing an AI apocalypse at some point in the future, and they use a lot of obscure math and logic to explain why it’s much more important than dealing with war, homelessness, climate change, or any of the other issues that are causing actual humans to suffer today or are 100% certain to cause suffering in the near future.

As a kid, probably Lode Runner. It ran on my pc. Some arcade games were fun. I enjoyed Asteroids. Colossal Cave, and the Infocom games like Planetfall were fun too. Though what really hooked me was Doom. It was the first real 3d FPS game and it blew my mind. It’s been my favorite genre ever since.

dang, cosmology is weird. I went to reply about the big bang, the age of the universe, and how it can’t be infinite, but instead decided to look it up. I really don’t understand this stuff.

I’ve struggled with this for my whole life (and I’m not young) but haven’t succeeded in developing my willpower much at all. I think it’s just part of your ‘personality’. In quotes because you can change your personality somewhat with therapy or other growth techniques, but it takes a lot of work and there is no guarantee it will happen.

That said, I do use commitment devices to substitute for willpower sometimes. One that works for me is to join a class or group for exercise or other things. In my case it has worked for meditation, exercise, martial arts, and others. I find that when I wake up and feel like ‘I just want to lie around and play video games all day’ I then remind myself ‘the folks at the group will notice I’m gone, I’ll have to explain it, and It would feel better to just attend’. And so I get my exercise. Usually. If my brain can convince me I’m not feeling well I still skip out sometimes.

Just finished Breathedge. Subnautica in space? Sort of, but with a ‘ha, aren’t we game developers funny’ kind of humor. Portal is an immersive game that’s really funny. The humor in Breathedge, however, insures you can never really settle in to the game. Even so, It’s most impressive what such a small team was able to accomplish.

Just started Plague Tale: Innocence. Stealth survival with hordes of rats - a little creepy and I’m not really expecting an uplifting ending, but we’ll see how it goes.

Things like Impossible Burgers, absolutely. I tried one once and it was so much like an actual meat burger it grossed me out. But I will make a seitan corned beef to put in a Reuben sandwich just because it’s an awesome sandwich.

Which is an issue if those artists want to copyright their work. So far the US has maintained that AI generated art is not subject to copyright protection.

The issue with quests in RDR2 is that they give you no autonomy. Most games set a quest objective and give you a dozen ways to achieve it. RDR2 forces you to follow the exact path through the quest that the game wants you to take. If you deviate it either fails to progress or simply fails the quest. It felt more to me like an interactive movie than a game in that respect, though you get full freedom outside of quests.

Enshittification in action.

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it’s everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they’re locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.