Ori Vandewalle

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at your work.

"Sure, but we might need a new dictionary."

"The only thing prohibiting scoring right now is the defense."

"The only thing prohibiting blood flow right now is the arterial blockage."

"The only thing prohibiting falling to the center of the Earth right now is the ground."

Oh great we're doing "remember that guest star we had back in s1?"

This is why I stopped at a bachelor's. Just knew I wouldn't be able to handle such intellectually challenging concepts. :P

Oo, that will be very helpful for my organization, the Paladin Dispatch System.

TBF at least in my millennial public education we were never taught that the US had lost any wars.

"lol LOL"

Is that the technical term?

I don't see a cell. :(

:( bsky.app/profile/oriv...

TIL the "cut down trees and squeeze juices out of plants and animals to rub on the trees" technology doesn't involve environmental destruction.

Aye. In my teens, I was something of a Jesus mythicist. Allowing myself to be receptive to the scholarly consensus and evidence against that position (while still being an ~atheist~ generally) was a big part of my intellectual growth.

"I don't write jokes in base 13."

is... is there an option 4?

Yum, I've always wanted to try to an eldritch horror burger.

As always, Trump's "sir" stories are fiction, but if I had to guess at what really happened, it's a combination of admirals attempting to explain to him why capturing ships in wartime is impractical and Trump picking up on Hegseth's very poorly concealed bloodlust.

...but seems totally misplaced if UBI is possible. Jobs suck. We should just be able to do what we want to do. The current system is hoping you can convince society the thing you want to do is important enough to force other people to feed and clothe and protect you. Why would anyone want that?

I think historically speaking, overall increases in productivity generally lead to overall increases in prosperity. If AI leads to the former, I think we will eventually get the latter, even if there's a lot of messiness along the way. "What about my job?" is a legitimate short term concern...

I mean the "paper chase" is a thing. Academic culture has long been focused on a kind of "winning." That fuels competition and advancement... which is good right up until people lose sight of what it is they're trying to advance...

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Watched it on VHS/cable growing up, so it was my Robin Hood. Always gives me warm fuzzies now, even if I mostly watch for Alan Rickman's delicious scenery chewing, Morgan Freeman's exasperated amusement, and Michael McShane's bombastically lewd Friar Tuck.

The 1% has $50 trillion. If you confiscate all of that (which you can't, really), you can fund the US government for 7 years. Then what?

What seems noteworthy about this video is how clearly it's aimed at Americans, not Iranians. Really can't imagine "oh they bombed us because of the Epstein files" is what the average Iranian is thinking.

Pfft. Real Jews worship a pantheon of Canaanite deities with El at the top and have no holy texts. /s

Despite being intentionally childless, I stay awake at night dreading the knowledge that there are 2 marriages and 3 children whose existence absolutely depends on my presence.

And it's definitely not AI slop!

OK I'm not a lawyer just a guy who's watched the "What is a Photocopier?" video several times, but isn't this a "coached not to answer that question" situation?

Really doubt pro-war people arguing "we've been at war with Iran since 1979/1947/480 BC" would appreciate that logic being extended by, say, Native Americans.

Me: I think killing children is bad.
Interlocutor: But some Iranians cheered Khamenei's death.
Me: ????

(I am distinguishing between consciousness as a constructed sense of self with interiority and ~sentience/subjective experience/awareness of qualia~ because I have weird panpsychist beliefs.)

Yeah, this is why, despite thinking AI consciousness is possible, I think it's plainly the case LLMs don't exhibit it. The model is just a sequence of bits, and the thing producing text from the model has no history, no persistence, no locality, etc. It's just not the kind of thing we are.