Earw0rm

The heck kind of lights are you running that won't go all night on a battery that fits in your palm?

I'm too old and boring to go to cultural events that are likely to end in brawls.

And yep, I get it on the booze thing, but they'd have to confiscate a ton of handbag booze for the nylon jacket army to make economic sense.

Festivals is one thing, sure, but we're talking theatre shows and comedy nights as well.

Yep. Most "journalism" now is opinion columns.

Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff.

National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.

They're doing this in the UK right now with security for cultural events.

Since the Manchester Arena terror attack (awful, tragic, evil, and an isolated event), it has been mandatory for music and live theatre venues to have an absolute army of "security" staff checking people's bags.

A full 95 percent of whom would be entirely and totally useless in any actual emergency or danger situation.

It's one of the things contributing to the ever increasing price of show tickets, but basically it's a tax on people who can afford live shows to create jobs for an otherwise fairly unemployable sector of the population (young and not much education - way too little natural demand for that in central London to mop up all the supply).

It's not that the machines were ugly or badly designed (albeit not as good as the 80s heyday), but they were unable to compete on price/performance and OS tech stack, and that in turn was making them uncompetitive in application support, which would likely have killed them.

It's an interesting alt history - who would have won with no Apple around? I reckon we'd all own a lot more Sony and Nokia gear, it's possible the Cambrian explosion of weird featurephone form factors would have carried on a lot longer, perhaps the black rectangle form factor would never have won out.

That's because Microsoft understood taste as aesthetic - "we can put it in a pretty box", rather than ethic - fundamental to the process of making the product.

Most of their endless UI/UX fails are organisational in nature, no amount of design can create beauty from an org structure which generated stupid requirements.

And nobody there cared enough or had enough power to force the org into a shape compatible with Apple-level design outcomes.

Most people love to drive, but hate to be stuck in traffic. Or for the countryside to be all freeways and the city to be all parking lots.

It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.

Mostly in the past tense now, for better or worse.

The current El Niño hasn't really had time to affect NW Europe yet, there's quite some lag there AIUI.

Sheep and slow growing trees of course don't get along well, you have to choose one or the other at least while the trees establish, which for oaks is measured in decades.

In Wales and Ireland we have the opposite problem, the sheep strip everything bare, the old trees die and the forests cannot regenerate.

The timing is curious to me. Atmospheric CO2 didn't really start picking up bigtime until 1970, and trees, even fast growing pines, take decades to grow.

I'm thinking of flying over on the Spruce Goose to watch the first operational launch.

Yep, exactly the sort of thing I was alluding to.

The "DNA is a Turing computer and everyone is born a blank slate" model is a bit too intellectually convenient for a 20th century that gave us egalitarianism and Turing computers.

It's mostly true, but not entirely, and the few percent that doesn't fit that model is enough to matter, and perhaps explains some persistent social phenomena which don't fit the picture.

A study has found that urban air pollution - ozone and nitrogen dioxide - causes changes in general expression in sperm, with potential impacts on foetal development.

More evidence of the environment producing subtle heritable modifications to DNA.

The world we live in is still far more Mendel's than Lamarck's, but it's perhaps more like 95:5 rather than 100:0.

Nope, sorry.

As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for.

But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.

There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres.

The industry is saturated at the B tier, sure. But without a market for that stuff, how are the labels supposed to grow and develop the few-times-in-a-generation talent that matters?

This is a recent phenomenon.

The original reason for low population density was agricultural work, which - even in the early days of mechanisation - was plenty physical.

Living in exurbia to work and consume like a city dweller is a new kind of stupid.

How old were you at the time? Mid 40s here and can comfortably sustain low 150s, but burn out quick past 160.

Absolutely, if you do strength/resistance work that'll counteract the tendency of long cardio to burn muscle.

My point is just that if you /only/ do long cardio, it'll reduce the mass of muscle that you need both to burn calories and remain uninjured. Good to mix it up a bit.

Strength training has more of a positive effect on body composition.

The problem with doing a lot of cardio is that you need muscle to burn calories (especially so without injury and as you get older), and too much medium intensity cardio will start to chew up lean mass.

No harm in doing a bit of both though, especially if your goal is fitness/maintenance rather than maximum strength or a particular look.

This feels like a generalisable cognitive bug with our species.

"Kill all the wolves, die as a result from invisible bacteria carried by tiny arthropods - or from Type 2 diabetic heart failure, as getting out for a hike and staying safe is now too much hassle".

By the time you're that sick, you've likely had years of compromised health. That's going to affect personality to some extent.

It's massive, hugely traumatic surgery, taking the patient past what was considered the point of death a century ago, bringing them back alive, and all with the aid of some of the most powerful drugs in modern medicine's arsenal.

And if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.

It'd be more surprising if it didn't result in significant change.

IMV creativity that matters contains a third ingredient: intent, purpose, the will to make an artistic statement of some kind about how the world is or should be.

That's quite a leap. The idea that _semantic_ memories are encoded so as to be transmissible via blobs of neural tissue stretches plausibility.

AFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures.

The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.

Flatworms branched off our side of the animal tree of life very early on. They're on the same side as molluscs, some of whom (cephalopods) are famous for having a more distributed nervous system.

Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.

And while there's no challenging the underlying proposition "AI has value", right now 95% of corporate users are still at the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" level in terms of model usage compute.

It's sheer brute force, tons of waste, seems like very little thought going in to fitting the implementation to the problem.

The value of compute can drop significantly in the event of users figuring out how to optimise for their particular need. And yep, there are wasteful applications that can burn whatever compute is available, but how much demand for that is there when it's properly priced?

Extreme example. Generating novel 4K VR video on demand. I'm certain there's a market for it, at $10/hour probably quite a healthy one, at $100/hour not so much.

It's ethnically rational, and morally right.

However.

It's not rational relative to the short-term incentives of a typical corporation or investment vehicle. PE, VC, fund managers aren't paid to give a fuck about the social contract. Literally not in their job description.

So I think you're right, but my diagnosis of the problem is a little different.

As in: _why_ does everyone want a middle class life? _why_ is only a middle class life that's seen as being dignified?

I've friends across a wide range of ages, from late 50s to mid 20s, and it's notable that the older ones have stories of some incredibly grimy circumstances from their 20s which today's 20somethings would be unwilling to endure, they'd rather stay at home with their parents. Living in squats, bedsits or mobile homes, sofa surfing for extended periods, etc.

Lots of people in previous times started families when they were flat broke. Some out of choice, some it just happened. Granted that's not ideal, but they made it work.

Yep, we can measure ATP and so on at the cellular level, but we don't have much of a picture of how that maps onto the physical/psychological sensation of "energy".

Like we know at a crude physical level, we can give someone a bit of a boost with glucose and sympathomimetic stimulants, but sometimes it works a lot better than others. And it's ineffective for fatigue syndromes, but they can't be the other mechanical things commonly associated with fatigue either. (lactic acid, micro-tears and so on).