A few months back, Elon Musk, the right-wing owner of Twitter and Grok, his pet Generative AI project, posted something I wrote on his Twitter feed, with the caption "This is the quality of humor we want from Grok."

He even had it pinned to his profile for a short while.


( Read more... )

[Note: This entry originally started out as an answer on Quora.]

So apparently there’s a dude named Russell Brand. I will admit, Gentle Readers, that I don’t know who he is, except that apparently he does standup comedy and such, and apparently his YouTube videos have been demonetized after he was accused of sexual assault.

Now, I will freely ( Read more... )

For those of you who’ve been hiding beneath a rock these past few news cycles, the Internet Archive, the operators of the Internet Wayback Machine, was just handed a stunning defeat in a copyright feud with Hatchett, Random Penguin, and other major publishers.

Essentially, they had set up an internet lending library, and the publishers…didn’t take ( Read more... )

If you know any transhumanists or other forward-looking folks, you've probably encountered the notion of a "post-scarcity society ( Read more... )

On a casual browse of the Web this afternoon, I came across an interesting statistic: there are, as of last month, 9.6 million unemployed people in the United States.

More than nine and a half million people. That's three and a half times more folks than the number of people who live in Chicago. It's more than the entire population of New York ( Read more... )

Among the left-leaning progressives that make up a substantial part of Portland's general population, there is a profound fear of GMO food that's becoming an identity belief--a belief that's held not because it's supported by evidence, but because it helps define membership in a group ( Read more... )

Every time you buy a hard drive, some of your money goes to the German government.

That's because in the late 1990s, a physicist named Peter Grünberg at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (Jülich Research Center) made a rather odd discovery ( Read more... )

In part 1 of this article, I blogged about leaving iOS when I traded my iPhone for an Android-powered HTC Sensation 4G, and how I came to detest Android in spite of its theoretical superiority to iOS and came back to the iPhone ( Read more... )

I'm still in the process of writing about my experiences with my Android phone, which will see at least two more sections (on the OS itself and on T-Mobile). The short version is I started with an iPhone, got rid of it for a 4G Android phone, decided that Android just doesn't have it going on, and am switching back to the iPhone.


( Read more... )

( Read more... )