It seems to me like there’s a lot of talk in the vein of “AI will never be able to meaningfully replace humans at [Task X],” and not enough talk about what we should do to prepare for the possibility of AI replacing humans at those tasks.

Like, right now, AI can create shitty art and write shitty code, but are we prepared for what happens if and when it can do those things well? We’ve got to acknowledge that human lives have inherent value, and not just because they can do things that machines can’t.

I’m out of the loop. Is this ball balancing image a political metaphor with which I’m not familiar, or is this just demonstrating the weird arbitrary limitations put on AI image generators?

Adam Smith does pretty well. I’d say it’s Marxism, mushroom guides, and beekeeping that remain consistently at the top of the rankings. Then you’ve got whatever fiction is currently hot. For a while there it was Where the Crawdads Sing or Demon Copperhead. Sarah J. Maas is currently enjoying an extended streak of very strong sales. The Twilight series went through a bit of a low ebb for a while there but for some reason it’s been selling quite well again lately. Harry Potter used to be a rock solid seller, but one can see that J. K.'s attempts to alienate her fan base have been at least partially successful. It’s interesting to see the trends develop over time.

I work at a used book store. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is a great seller, one of the best selling titles we ever get in, in fact. As a result, we keep raising the resale price on the thing each time a new one comes in, and it keeps selling. I’ve never had to mark down a Communist Manifesto for sitting on the shelf for too long. It’s a textbook example of supply and demand in action… and I think that Karl would kind of hate that.

It’s a good change!

Mirrored:

No, I took it

I got his autograph at a convention once. Most celebrities fall somewhere close to the middle of the “smile, nod, sign autograph, receive money” curve. Tony Todd started asking me questions about what I was doing at the con, what sort of stuff I was looking forward to. He was sweet and kind and giving to a gigantic dork to whom he owed nothing, and he gave me a memory that I’ll cherish forever. He deserves every ounce of praise he’ll receive, and more.

It’s a little more expensive, but not dramatically so

Buying boxes of full-sized candy isn’t even that much more expensive than the fun-sized, and the psychological impact is immediate and dramatic. Every year I hear kids go “Woah, big candy bars!”

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

I didn’t even consider how many people with cardiac issues must be looking at that screen.

“Shrunken SUV” or “Took a normal 2- or 4-door and injected it with experimental growth hormones.”

I swear I see one once a week that would make sense and carry the same number of people and stuff at half the overall vehicle volume.

Qi users need not apply.

2, because then I get to sit between the two most attractive people in the galaxy.

I feel like with Sisko and Kirk it would be either Sisko fanboying over Kirk or an unending argument between the two, or possibly the first leading into the second. In either case, I don’t want to be in the middle of that.

Hell, I’m a married dude with a child, and I wear a rainbow flag. Ain’t nobody that straight.

I have real love for TNG S1E16, “Too Short a Season.”

The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he’s taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.

The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife’s eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole “Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides” seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it’s revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.

1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3)

Give me 320000 bps or give me death!