Stuart Presnell

Reading the paper I've been assigned as Reviewer 2 and shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disprove

I just realised that yesterday was the 7th anniversary of the "me sowing/me reaping" meme

Trouble is the plans are all in the form of written documents rather than cartoons where the Iranian missiles make slide-whistle sounds as they plunge into the strait

Why, does roko's basilisk also have a 'send (into simulated torment) later' function?

bear

Can this be a solution?

Ok, hear me out, I'm looking for 800000 patriotic volunteers and 1600000 buckets

6 months until every smoker in Södertälje is being stalked by crows all day, waiting for them to light up

This is rather lovely and somehow relaxing - an interactive map of lighthouses of the northern seas lighthouse-atlas.netlify.app#3/48/-30

After the wound closes, the blood will come back in

How to make yogurt: milk a cow, homogenize + pasteurize the milk, heat up the milk again, let it get back down to 110 F, stir in some bacterial culture, let it sit for 8-12 hours, add fruit/sugar to taste.
How to make ultra-processed yogurt: Do all that and then add a drop of food coloring.

I came up with a solution so cool the predictor gave me a third box. I opened it up and, as expected, it contained a note saying "Wow, that was amazing, but don't tell anyone how you did it"

Q: Which renowned linguist and leftist critic of US foreign policy always waits until after 12:00 noon to chew winter sports gear?

Mother's Day card with the words "caring and war" followed by a very large M

"Graphic design is my passion"

Power at Scale with this Sun in a Box YouTube video by ASME American Society of Mechanical Engineers

Cool video on Fourth Power's thermal battery. Incredible stuff.

"A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A sense of smugness"

Iran_epicfury_v2-Final-FINAL-THISONEv3.war

I'm "old study no much talk"

Screenshot of a Google search for "Lorenz machine", the first promoted result is for a Nespresso coffee maker

"Don't talk to me until I've cryptographically secured my coffee"

I've deleted it, sorry for being annoying

"The Anubisian Woquisition has examined your posts and found you guilty of using the ableist slurs 'd*mb' and 'l*me' with malice aforethought. You are hereby Cancelled to the Re-education Oubliette (formerly known as Twitter)"

Adding a third celestial body to a gravitational system makes things wildly chaotic and unpredictable. Hence the 'Three Body Problem'. Some beautiful examples of periodic 3-body systems:

(via instagram user data__is__beautiful)

Could have been worse, could have been bags of rice
@nameshiv.bsky.social

C'mon Alex, do you really think Dubai would use a tiny portion of their vast wealth to buy the support of an amoral influencer who still holds outsized sway in the British right-wing media?

Or — much more plausibly — maybe this is just one of those "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" situations

We face two urgent challenges concerning consciousness and AI. Challenge One is that millions of users will soon misattribute human-like consciousness to AI friends, partners, and assistants on the basis of mimicry and role-play, and we don’t know how to prevent this. Challenge Two is that profoundly alien forms of consciousness might genuinely be achieved in AI, but our theoretical understanding of consciousness is too immature to provide confident answers one way or the other. Centrism about AI consciousness is the position that we must take both challenges seriously. The two challenges interact in ways that make this difficult. Steps to address Challenge One might undermine attempts to address Challenge Two by portraying the idea of conscious AI as impossible or inherently unlikely. Conversely, attempts to address Challenge Two might lead to higher levels of misattribution from ordinary users. This “manifesto” attempts to construct mutually consistent strategies for addressing both challenges.

Since people are doing "is AI conscious?" discourse on here again I feel like this philpapers.org/rec/BIRACA-4 by @birchlse.bsky.social remains my favourite piece on the current state of affairs.

Sure, if there's another rule for turning amplitudes into probabilities that's self-consistent and self-advocating then you have a dilemma. But is there such a rule?

They'll have to build a whole new prison for all the too-online incel-culture troll-bros that this government's infected with

Call it Stockade Channing

Over in the real eternal steady-state universe someone's posting on their social media: "Imagine if anyone lived in one of these temporary cosmic bubbles that sometimes arise. They'd think that was the entire universe! That everything that exists had an origin and was expanding! Those poor losers"

This seems analogous to the position of a civilisation that arises in the late universe with no other visible galaxies around, who therefore conclude that they're alone in a steady-state universe. Sometimes the truth is inaccessible and there's nothing you can do about it