Bryan

We have designed literal and figurative machines and systems designed to feed us a bottomless buffet of reheated nachos, and created a culture where anything that dares make any changes or advances is subject to a barrage of the stupidest and often sight-unseen criticism.

Interesting how Matt Damon and Lupita Nyong’o both have exactly the same amount of Greek heritage (none), but the Internet is only furious about one casting choice and not the other. Riddle me that.

The media spent 2.5 years telling you this is “targeting Hamas.”

Kids dying of cancer almost always figure it out before anyone tells them. A 1978 study followed 40 children with leukemia, ages three to nine, and found that every single one of them had worked out they were dying. Most kept it secret, to protect their parents. The researcher was an anthropologist named Myra Bluebond-Langner. She spent nine months living on a children's cancer ward, watching the kids put it together for themselves. Even the three-year-olds figured it out. The most popular book on the ward was Charlotte's Web. When the kids understood what was coming, it became the only book they wanted read to them. They always picked the chapter where Charlotte dies. There's a name for what was happening between those kids and their parents. Two sociologists, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, wrote about it in a 1965 book called Awareness of Dying. They called it "mutual pretense." Both sides know the truth, both pretend they don't, and nobody says the thing out loud. The kids pick it up from their own bodies first. The fatigue gets worse week by week. They watch the nurses' faces tighten when they walk in. They see the kid in the next bed disappear one day and never come back. A pediatric psychologist named Barbara Sourkes calls this "the wisdom of the body," the part where your body can't lie to you about how sick you are. The biggest study on this is from 2004. The New England Journal of Medicine published a Swedish survey of 449 parents whose children had died of cancer between 1992 and 1997. The researchers asked them whether they had talked to their child about death. Of the 147 parents who said yes, not one regretted it. Of the 258 who said no, 27 percent did. Among parents who could tell their child knew but stayed quiet, the regret rate climbed to 47 percent. When a story like this goes viral, with the "beautiful lie" framing of a mother protecting her son, it sounds like the protection only goes one way. The data says it almost never does. The parent thinks they're shielding the child. The child has usually been shielding them right back.

Yes, this is slop—in part because the person making seems tasteless, dull, and infatuated with the tech itself rather than narrative art—but video gen is clearly close to *commercial viability* in the right hands. Especially for kids’ content, since they’re undiscerning. This is why I’ve been agitating for a leftist AI skeptical response bigger than “it’s slop, it sucks, it’s fake, it’s bad.” Because it has been getting vastly more capable, and is rapidly approaching the point at which *enough* people will be willing to pay for it—even if YOU don’t, even if LOTS OF US don’t—that it will entrench. Right now, we call it slop and get a lot of positive feedback and feel superior and good and like we are leading the majority. Give it two years and people will be parking their kids in front of AI-generated children’s shows without a second thought. They’ll be getting mad at you for calling it slop, because they’ll feel impugned as parents. Other people will be getting mad because they have AI “friends,” or they’ve gotten addicted to using it at work or school to take shortcuts. It feels so good right now to shit on AI on the basis of its capabilities, but that is clearly *time-limited* and ultimately a failing strategy to contain and regulate AI. we have got to come up with something better, stronger.

This is basically what philosophers and anthropologists mean when they say that the 'individual' is a relatively modern construct, and that many other cultures conceive of people in a more porous, contingent, interwoven fashion. Weird as it sounds, it's just observably true.

Every now and then I remember Tim Walz’s “they’re weird” campaign and how close the dems were to actually shifting the way people perceive the right in a very real way and then they just…stopped

Take the time to *look* at these.

Makassan trade with northern Australians leads to my favourite loanword journey: from proto-Germanic to Yolngu

I wish Daniel Dennett was still with us. I can imagine him coming up with a one or two elegant metaphors to cut through the temptation to see gen AI as conscious. And I think he'd be clear that "stochastic parrots" and the Chinese room aren't the knockdowns people think they are.

"Never again means never again for everybody." Deeply proud of this student at my university.

South Korea’s school lunches have been widely praised on social media as among “the world’s best.” But little is known about the women kitchen workers who make these meals possible -- many of whom endure grueling conditions at the cost of their health, and sometimes their lives.

I think it also makes trams and buses safer.

I've had a week of work placement in Melbourne so far and I don't think it's going to be easy for this city to go back to paid public transport. It's just so smooth and civilised not tapping on or off, it feels like it already has deep cultural grooves around it.

This is what's happening to YouTube. This is one of my most popular videos. It's how to fix a UEFI bootloader. As you can see the traffic has been cut in half over the last 6 months. But if you Google how to fix a UEFI bootloader, Gemini will give you my exact step by step process. Even the commands it cites are copied directly from my video. I got no royalty payments and don't even get a link to the original video. I simply lost the traffic and Google is able to provide more value from stolen content. AI is going to destroy the content industry on the internet and when it's gone, there will be nothing left to train the AI. Since AI can't come up with anything original it relies on stolen content and it can't steal what doesn't exist if it puts creators out of business.

How JK Rowling and Larry Ellison are promoting an international anti-LGBTQ+ fascist project disguised as children's entertainment. Every dollar spent on Harry Potter goes towards global exterminationist hate orgs that mirror fascism throughout history youtube.com/watch?v=A_dvAk…

Friendly reminder, Hinton is the same guy who told us this: "We should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.". That was six year ago. He was right about the AI. Wrong about the job. AI already reads scans better than any human. Six years after this nonsense prediction we have more radiologists. That's because Hinton and many others just fundamentally misunderstand that tasks are not jobs and that the job of a radiologist is also interacting with patients, being a light in darkness, providing hope and warmth and care and a thousand other things. Again we need to stop listening to these folks. I cannot say it enough, just because this fellow is brilliant with AI does not mean he has any clue how it will impact society. None. Zero.

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

#Peace is not something we must invent: it is something we must embrace by accepting our neighbor as a brother or sister. We do not choose our brothers and sisters: we must simply accept one another! We are one family, inhabiting the same home: this wonderful planet that ancient cultures have cared for over millennia. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon

I've been writing about the corner that the Australian film industry has backed itself into through a well-documented, intentional separation between screen industry and screen culture but David Field here is also right about what being a yank film subsidy country means as well.