Does something technical in the Boston (MA, US) area. He/him.
Worm is great at what it does, which is to lure in people wanting to read power fantasies about being a superhero and then smashing every trope. (All the powers involve deep trauma. Everyone needs a therapist. Very few get any therapy. The world ends because we can’t take care of each other nicely.)
Every competent apocalyptic cult leader knows that committing to hard dates is wrong because if the grift survives that long, you’ll need to come up with a new story.
Luckily, these folks have spicy autocomplete to do their thinking!
I was going to make a comparison to Elron, but… oh, too late.
Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Upvote.
“Rationalism” is to normal logical thinking what blindfolded multi-board speed chess is to tic-tac-toe: you can only see in retrospect how anyone could get there from here. The things which occupy a Rationalist’s mind are completely divorced from ordinary concerns like ethics. Nobody would or could have predicted this quantity or quality of lunacy.
Seems reasonable. I assume one of your lights is on the left and another on the right, not two on the left.
Better sound recording would definitely be your best upgrade; you may be able to pipe your phone camera in to your PC as a video source (search DroidCam), in which case you can set up for simultaneously recording audio through some better channel – your initial capture determines the extent of what you can do with it, so a good mic -> USB is probably what you want.
Explanatory spoiler for those who don’t want to read Worm, a million words of deconstruction/reconstruction of superhero comics:
The source of superpowers is a pair of gigantic multidimensional alien creatures. Their eternal mission involves finding a planet with intelligent life, infesting them with powers via brain tumor neural links, and encouraging them to fight so as to generate new ideas – the aliens are profoundly uncreative, even stupid by human standards, but immensely powerful – and when the planet is no longer producing, they reincorporate all the changed and combined powers, then eat the local sun to power their next FTL hop.
When their experimental subjects aren’t moving fast enough, they open up their archive and resurrect the Endbringers – superpowered kaiju which provide a stimulus for cooperation by destroying cities on a schedule. Each Endbringer is unique. The Simurgh, or Ziz, takes the form of a giant statue of a woman covered in angel wings, and wings-on-wings, and so forth. Ziz has primarily psychic powers: telekinesis; a ‘scream’ or ‘song’ that drives people to violent insanity over the course of an hour or so; and mind-control that seems limited to slowly changing supers into creative serial killers and mad scientists and so forth. Ziz floats in orbit, preventing space travel, and periodically descends to the surface to terrorize a city.
Everything escalates. Every trope is explained.
Sure, but then you have to generate all that crap and store it with them. Preumably Github will eventually decide that you are wasting their space and bandwidth and… no, never mind, they’re Microsoft now. Competence isn’t in their vocabulary.
It’s not just going to return quotes! It will return distorted quotes! I suspect you can get it to totally reverse a Singer position within five or six interactions.
With luck, you can then show it to Singer and cause him to die of shame.
We don’t have that much luck, though.
I have seen some controversy about whether white-passing people of Jewish ancestry count as “white”
Let me clear that up: the people who ask if someone is actually white are racists.
“When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
I suspect that he is incapable of admitting to himself that he is in a hole, much less that he dug it himself.
The history of technology teaches us that every non-trivial problem – and a large fraction of trivial problems – require specification beyond the bounds of conversational language.
Greek geometers may have invented the idea of formalizing language with specific definitions, and inventing new symbols to represent special meanings. When important consequences accrue from getting things wrong, people develop jargon: knitters and sailors and shepherds and farmers; engineers and lawyers and plumbers. If you want to convey your knowledge and intentions, you can’t chat informally and expect a human to really understand what you want.
For about a century now we’ve had devices that turn instructions into actions. Everyone who uses these becomes an expert in the particular form of instructions that the device needs, or else they don’t get what they want.
No wristwatch, but I have glasses and without electricity I stop breathing. (While asleep.)
So, yeah, cyborg.
Charlie Stross called the Singularity “the rapture for nerds”.
Good luck with that – I’m a pzombie this year for tax purposes.
Is that actually true? Have they been audited? One problem with long-term storage is “long-term” is a thing that humans are bad at.
The main character commits rape because this isn’t a real universe anyway. You made the right choice.
It’s true, but they are still fairly easy to injure.
Try forming a fist and then hitting with the outside edge of the hand instead of your poor little fingers.
Or learn from your ancestors and become a tool-using mammal. I understand milkshakes have a distinct fondness for fascists.
Mike is a fed, yes.
So is Steve. The snack thing is left over from his previous undercover assignment at NORML. That didn’t end well, but he’s pretty sure he can get Mike to agree to buy explosives, which will be a good bust.
Nah, they all consider themselves justified in sociopathic behavior.