TheVat

Yikes, I hope not! We have enough Damoclean swords mounted over our puny noggins (nukes, microbes, PFAS, nanoplastics, AI, bioweapons, etc) as it is. (I think you're being ironic, yes?) If we ever all agreed that probelm-solving comes from the barrel of a gun, that would set the Doomsday Clock in Chicago to ten seconds before midnight. Worth noting: Oliver doesn't linger on the lionization of Luigi (nor joins in), but only touches on it to show the crazy media reverberations of all the rage so many Americans feel towards the Big Healthcare behemoth. And Oliver, in full Angry Caffeinated Parrot mode, takes in some of that rage and channels it with eloquence. Good point. Our system of representative democracy is so broken. A majority have wanted SP healthcare for decades, even as billionaire donor run politicians keep trying to convince them it's a wicked commie conspiracy. Democrats gave up on real socialized medicine because they also were controlled by Big Money, and Big Money knows it would mean the rich paying their fair share and the Big Health behemoths know it would greatly reduce profits generally and including the profitable supplemental markets that might be left. In America, health is a commodity not a basic human right of access.

It's a curious mantra we keep hearing over here that the US has to somehow "beat China." With the data center boom there's this persistent question that no one is really answering: why do we need so many? This seems a standard theme of capitalism, an unquestioned ethos of "more is better," no matter what it's more of. IIRC Marx called it the "fetishization of commodities." @sethoflagos you're probably more up on your Marx than I am. But wasn't ol Karl kind of warning us about products of human labour taking over and running us? AI would be the apotheosis of this. Anyway, noone in power is going to answer the "why so many" questions beyond vague references of, "we need to beat China." Beat China to what? The PRC already has a horrifyingly advanced surveillance state and that is, erm, something that America, Land of the Free, should seek fecking primacy in?? Or is that we want to dominate in terms of sidelining our entire workforce with AI robotics? Underneath all the belligerent chest pounding talk of beating China seems to be autistic tech bros who haven't the foggiest notion of the societal implications of their work. Not the first time this trend is observed in Silicon Valley. This oligarchy-level of leverage, which has been spiking in the Orangeymandias admin is what people like Bernie Sanders have been trying to prevent with campaign finance and election law reforms, to rein in super PACs and corporate corruption and patronage. It's frustrating because so many information-poor voters, if you talk with them, actually want such reform if their attention is drawn to it.

Cumulus narwhal icosahedron pinky. Rhizome elocution wisp?

Thank you! I had just returned to post an accessible transcript, but yours seems more readable. Mine was still evolving from the fertile crescent in Mesopotamia. (Do I aim (A): to pose Mesopotamia? I do.) DK - no 'gram account. The full show is blocked in the UK, unless you have access to Sky Comedy. Or have a VPN - if the latter, you can just set it to some region like Bulgaria and the YT video will unblock. To which one replied "Socialism? You mean that broad ideological framework which has been implemented at all levels of government in the US since the 1870s, and which you know almost nothing about?" Or something like that? I guess people like healthcare to be profit centered when they get some of the profits and don't have to watch people suffer and die from medical neglect on a level most commonly seen in third world countries.

This is such a skillful evisceration of the largest company in US healthcare that I feel it's worth bending the forum rules and asking people to watch. However, to show a little deference to the discussion format here, here is a bit of transcript... ...and YT has in its wisdom chosen to block my copy/pasting of some introductory passages from the transcript they provide. Can I get a variance here? (At least until I can copy it elsewhere)

Swiss cheese has one of the lowest lactose levels of any cheese. This means the Swiss have better digestion, which causes them to be kinder and turn in wallets. PROVE ME WRONG!!!

Yep, I was going to suggest the part of epistemology which concerns itself with the limits of knowledge. The postulate that everything is amenable to some explanatory scheme lies within that branch. There's a scientific aspect, e.g. is a human brain limitation imposing limits on our knowledge, or is it the basic architecture of reality which forces blind spots, or a combination of those?

Yes. I've long thought it will be a soft power takeover. Wait for a good leverage point with the orange dotard, hint at a blockade, then offer Taiwan some softer alternative to invasion like a "treaty" where Chinese "consultants" are installed in key government offices. I suspect the Chinese CP learned some lessons about messy takeovers in Tibet, back in the fifties.

Palindrome season on the wane here. I noticed a couple words recently -"pollinators" and "aperitif" - and they seemed like 'drome material, but I had to stay with the meanings of the words that passed before me, striving to keep up with accelerating changes in the world. That said, it does sometimes feel like there's a magic in subverting our symbol systems, a kind of rough poetry or at least a whimsical experiment with meaning. Sometimes it's even charged with some teasing hint of a hidden order, like the voudon tossing of chicken bones or the scattering of 50 yarrow stalks of I Ching or reading the dregs of a tea cup. But I can settle for whimsy and the brief trip to a bubble universe where things make sense both forwards and backwards. (As opposed to our reality where people in power can spout jabberwocky in both directions). Cheers. And beware of women named Naomi.

No. Nothing but BS coming from the tech bros in their Patagonia vests. Who have started derisively calling anyone who questions their business model a "doomer." Or referring to AI agents who escape as "released into the wild," as if it's some earth-friendly thing in tune with nature. I wonder if they'd feel the same way about Gain of Function viruses escaping from a BSL-4 lab and appearing in their sandwich? Earth handed over to people with Asperger's.

If anyone wants to try a brew or other edible with gut comfort in mind, I've been having some good results from L. rhamnosus. I gather trad ginger beers tend to go with L hilgardii, but it looks like some other L. species will also serve as well. I was returning wheat to my diet a while back and trying to smooth the transition with some of the probiotics in non-dairy yoghurts which can help with grain digestion, especially those pesky gliadins. Tinkering with various blends, I tried adding some supplement rhamnosus at room temperature and giving it a day or two. Gut settled down rapidly after that. (A pitfall of trying no wheat for a while is enzymatic downregulation - basically, the gut colony scales back on the species that were handling wheat. So when you restart, the species remnants have to start reproducing quickly and that means gas. So if you can nutritionally inject some of those species in there, like L plantarum, L casei, B infantis, B breve, L rhamnosus, et al, it can help.) I had been eating some yoghurt brands that had some of those in the mix, but rhamnosus seemed to really hasten the flip back to normal. CAVEATS: This is anecdotal, so far as my experience goes, and gut biomes vary quite a bit, so I want to look into research some more on specific strains. Am also going to try L reuteri, another candidate. (Sorry, a little off the ginger beer rails.)

"It's not a god, it's a zip file." Amusing way to put it. Zip file + stochastic parrot + glorified autocomplete. And something about humanity's cognitive labours fed back to us for $20/month.

Precious and few are the moments We toucans share...

Hadn't known ginger beers used a SCOBY - a stunted knowledge due to commercial GBs here not really brewing anymore. So this is more like a kombucha, (the SCOBY I'm familiar with)? We also buy vinegar with "the mother" still in it - it's just little bits gathered at the bottom, not a pellicle. I had wondered if that mother could be used in kombucha brewing, but learned it was a little different in culture and insufficient in something (yeast?). If there's a nose numbing, you can sensitively test for H2S with lead acetate paper. Just hang it in the headspace. You can buy it almost anywhere (because people also buy it to test their water supply) fairly cheap. I had to test some well water some years ago and was able to just drive to a hobby store and buy some strips. Not saying it's that simple in Abuja (?) but seems possible if there are many people in the area on private water systems. (Also: please do not get kidnapped! New Yorker had an alarming article about massive kidnapping around your neck of the woods.)

Why would modeling ants be more useful than modeling high-functioning humans? Procedural logic is what unsentient machines do now.... it's just a step-by-step method of problem-solving or coding that tells a computer precisely how to accomplish a task through an ordered sequence of instructions. Been there, done that, going back to Ada Lovelace and Chuck Babbage.

Hehehe. Given Trump's revelation in the past that he had a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table, and his overall sympathy for Nazi ideology, I wonder if his handlers had to talk him out of calling it "Überintelligence." Perhaps when hyperbole doesn't cut it, Trump could select parabole - then he would just have a single focus in his presidency. Ha.

ACTUAL NEWS STORY (Source: AP) The U.S. president said he would “officially” change the name of artificial intelligence, saying the existing name makes the technology seem “fake.” “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” Trump told other world leaders at the United Nations. It’s not clear yet if there was an official order making the change, but it would likely mean adjusting the name of the “AI Force” that Trump announced this weekend to the “SI Force.” The president said at the U.N. that from this “point forward,” U.S. government documents “will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it’s super intelligence.” (Who needs parody anymore, when they parody themselves??)

We're here on Earth because the cats need someone to open and close doors for them. Once they develop some manual dexterity there's really no point to us. Nihilists:

A zoo has blamed a computer error after it advertised a "child predator tour" online to see its tigers and lions. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j4z27n8xyo Bosses at Chester Zoo quickly changed the 90-minute bus tour's name after it was branded "sinister" by visitors. A zoo spokeswoman said the error was "due to our default naming convention in our system", but it was "quickly changed". The name blunder earlier this week was part of the Cheshire zoo's ticket promotion to allow visitors to go on a tour showcasing its Sumatran tigers, lions, rhinos and Komodo dragons. The mistake was mocked by the zoo's customers and visitors online. One remarked: "I hope this has been cleared by Cheshire Police - seems a bit dangerous." Another said: "Staggering - how did that get approved?" The private bus tour cost £25 for children. 'Adult predator' tickets were also advertised by mistake for £30.

I meander through rock, roots, jazz, show tunes, folk, ambient, blues, and sometimes classical. This one's an old chestnut but I liked the young artist's energy and emotional investment. Good track. I remember liking their Birdland. Had a friend who would always assume a reference to Frank had to be Sinatra. I think he moved to Madagascar or someplace with lemurs anyway. Which he complained about. Maybe it's only Madagascar where there are lemurs. "Sheik Yerbouti" is a very Zappa kind of whimsy. My introduction to Frank was an epic glitch in the store muzak at a supermarket where I worked, ca. age 17. The manager, a very conservative Christian, had apparently not checked the tracks that would be on regular rotation and which included "Dinah Moe Hum." It was quite amusing for some of us to watch him take notice of the lyrics one evening and become fairly unglued. The Muzak was shut off a couple days until he could figure out how to remove the...hum.

No. And most genes do not express as simple specific phenotypic traits. For example, male baldness is mediated by over 250 gene loci and most of them are autosomal. The Y chromosome only has a regulatory transcription factor, SOX9, which gets gonadal tissues to differentiate into testes and gets other tissues to be androgen receptive, i.e. it turns a vast array of other genes off, or on, to foster male development. Again, most of these other genes are autosomal, since a transcription factor can migrate all over the DNA. For those wishing to further explore the teenage supermodel episode which @KJW mentions (which I warn also involves a disturbing theme of parental incest, as well as House's usual levels of insensitivity and bluntness): https://youtu.be/ZFWMIZsxIhs?si=29gHfbv175Gv1Z6f If you want to skip to the topic relevant (sort of) part, it's around minute 9:00.

Erich von Grahamcockiken.

"AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster,” one of the sources said. Succinctly put. And the strategic edge of acting more swiftly seems cancelled when you have a human in the loop who is inexperienced and likely seeking to impress superiors. AI magnifies what is already demonstrated to be a deplorable habit in both military and law enforcement, "Shoot first, ask questions later."

It's only low in NK because something or someone else usually kills you first. 😁 And it's low in Switzerland because they are, as @MigL alluded to, neurotically law-abiding. If you're Swiss and want to commit suicide you patiently wait until you're very ill and can obtain a doctor's permission.

Reviewing a summary of the Hugging Face incident, I don't see much use for models based on ant colonies. (From the HF entry at wiki) In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database.[21] Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models' AI safety features rejected Hugging Face's requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack.[22][23][24] The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party,[25][26] and has been called "the first true AI safety incident".