I feel this won't necessarily be a popular take here but I really don't like things like Idiocracy. To me it comes across as deeply misanthropic, and kind of ignorant of what human nature actually looks like outside of our very specific cultural window. It's the same deep misanthropy that makes me really dislike most post-apocalyptic fiction, look at actual how actual humanity behaves in disaster conditions for five minutes and you'd see most of it is just misanthropic nonsense. We haven't let go of this Victorian idea all that separates man (particularly working-class man) and beast is a thin veneer of civilisation that can collapse at any minute. To me Idiocracy is a product of that mentality, it's a satire of Western consumer culture but this idea is not presented satirically, Idiocracy seems to believe this earnestly.
You can look at skeletons of prehistoric man and see bone healing which can only have occurred if the group decided to look after someone who couldn't work at that point. Humans are inherently stupid and selfish, but they're also inherently clever and cooperative; it's all so dependent on material and cultural context. It's true in my view that the general culture of late capitalism makes people inclined towards stupid and selfish ideas, but the idea this could actually do serious long-term damage to humanity's actual nature until everyone is a bumbling moron is absurd. Not just absurd either, but fundamentally insulting to all of us in my view.
Culture is often a product of material conditions, if Idiocracy's premise that it's possible to make humanity dumber on a lasting basis had the slightest merit then it would have happened already a hundred times over. Not least from the amount of lead we were pouring into the environment from the 1930s onwards! In reality if humanity did get dumber for cultural reasons, the material conditions associated with that culture would soon collapse and there'd be a new selection pressure to avoid the same kind of stupidity.
This sounds a tad misanthropic, if I had the choice to opt out of working full time making music is one of the primary things I'd spend my time doing. I like software but at the end of the day to me it's the most creative job I can do while still putting bread on my table reliably.
The reasons I don't do music full time are purely economic ones, far from wanting to 'free up' my time to do other things with AI music I'd rather have more of my time occupied by working on music. I want AI to automate the things I don't want to do, I want it to automate the mindless drudgery that is required to exist in a society. Automating art so that I have more time to work is a philistine position in my view, and one which reveals a somewhat dystopian vision of humanity's relationship with both art and work.
A third of a pint is 189.3ml, a large glass of wine 175ml. Two thirds of that (2/9 of a pint) is almost bang on a small glass of wine, 126.2ml vs. 125ml. Could work if they wanted
Personally I'd have us use what the Royal Navy used to serve its rum ration in, the half-gill. This is 1/8 of a British pint or 71 millilitres, and the rum would have been a minimum of 54%!
Fractional gills were the pre-metric shot measure in the UK, but they were still pretty stingy. 1/6 gill in England, 1/5 or 1/4 gill in Scotland, and 1/4 gill in Northern Ireland.
When my mates at school had the aero glass effect on the new Windows, my ancient hand-me-down laptop wouldn't even try to run it. It could however run Compiz somewhat if it was persuaded very hard!
That's basically the reason I learned Linux initially, and those hours debugging video driver issues would serve me well later on.
> On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Politics and the English Language aimed at the language sins of attention economy era social media.
A post to the Truth Social account for Donald Trump included: "The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!"
That's the closest thing I'm finding. Not seeing reporting that he literally said "war is peace".
There's a vast gulf between "having" superior firepower as a deterrent and "using" superior firepower for mass murder, particularly against elementary schools and desalination plants. The latter is war, at its worst.
Sure, but it's not equating the states of war and peace, but asserting that war is a method for achieving peace, presumably when everyone on the other side is incapable or undesirous of attacking or threatening same.
What I mean is that it makes no sense to say you're fighting a war to achieve peace if you're the one who started the war, breaking the peace that existed before then.
If peace is your goal, then the status quo was already in line with your goal. Starting the war contradicts your stated goal of peace.
There are at least two ways to view this in the "war for peace" proponents' favor, I think:
First, it could be that you believe that war is already happening. In this case, Israel and other opponents of Iran might think that the status quo was a shadow war, and they are just continuing the war in a way that is to their advantage.
Second, even if peace technically exists at the moment, one side might believe that the other is moving toward war, and if allowed to complete preparations, will be significantly harder to overcome when they start a war in the future. In that case, preemptive war might be thought to engender peace in the medium or long term.
We don't have to agree with these casus bellis to acknowledge that they are at least superficially reasonable justifications, presuming they fit the facts.
There's still one example of a working offshore radio ship, the Ross Revenge in southern England which you can go and visit. She's one of the former Radio Caroline ships, the studios are still fired up every month for a weekend of broadcasting and they run tours. Radio Caroline themselves are still alive and kicking as a legal station broadcasting 24/7 online and on 648 AM; ironically the latter transmission comes from a former BBC World Service site. She wasn't really a 'pirate radio' ship as she was a Panamanian-flagged vessel in international waters so not subject to the Wireless Telegraphy Act in theory, but British citizens specifically would have committed an offence working on her in her free radio days. What really did Radio Caroline in as an offshore broadcaster was the Anglo-Dutch action against the clandestine organisation which supplied the ship, that and the move from a 3-mile to a 12-mile limit which forced her into more exposed waters.
Other than the RNI ship she was probably the best-equipped radio ship that ever put to sea, and certainly the strongest. She was a long-range trawler built for Arctic conditions, and the engineering which went into the radio station was really impressive; Peter Chicago her engineer by all rights should be up there with the greats in hacker lore. Most radio ships were clapped-out old vessels at the end of their lives, they were essentially slapped with transmitters and sent to sea to die since you can never take a radio ship back into port once it's broadcast. The Ross Revenge on the other hand was a very strong ship who was left purposeless midway through her life due to the Cod Wars. The generating and transmitting facilities were really sophisticated for radio pirates, there were plenty of redundancies and the ship could radiate multiple medium and short wave services.
The broadcast studios and accommodation are still active but most of the machinery spaces and the hull itself aren't in good condition. They've raised half a million pounds for repairs, but that's not actually all that much in the maritime conservation game. Hopefully it will be enough to stabilise the immediate problems with the hull and open a door to lottery funding though. If you're in the area I'd go and see her while you've definitely got the chance!
My favourite OSX in terms of visual design was the Panther/Tiger era personally. Leopard looked good, but there was something really cheerful and friendly about Tiger. The iPods of those days were also really well thought-out in my opinion.
Definitely a world apart from the utilitarian Windows 98 UI.
That's wild to think about, I've been playing the guitar longer than that yet his are heights I'm unlikely to reach. He was such an innovative guitarist.
You can look at skeletons of prehistoric man and see bone healing which can only have occurred if the group decided to look after someone who couldn't work at that point. Humans are inherently stupid and selfish, but they're also inherently clever and cooperative; it's all so dependent on material and cultural context. It's true in my view that the general culture of late capitalism makes people inclined towards stupid and selfish ideas, but the idea this could actually do serious long-term damage to humanity's actual nature until everyone is a bumbling moron is absurd. Not just absurd either, but fundamentally insulting to all of us in my view.
Culture is often a product of material conditions, if Idiocracy's premise that it's possible to make humanity dumber on a lasting basis had the slightest merit then it would have happened already a hundred times over. Not least from the amount of lead we were pouring into the environment from the 1930s onwards! In reality if humanity did get dumber for cultural reasons, the material conditions associated with that culture would soon collapse and there'd be a new selection pressure to avoid the same kind of stupidity.
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