Has Apple improved Siri yet? When I asked Siri “What are humans made of?”, she answered “Humans are made of human body.” Fkn hilarious. Meanwhile Android phones have had Gemini for a long time now. And now Apple is giving up on developing their own AI models and will be paying Google to use Gemini for Siri. Might as well just pay less for an Android phone and get the same Gemini model.

incest cannot be about ‘consenting adults’ because those adults psychology are incredibly intertwined

If you can provide a way to quantify the extent to which 2 people are “psychologically intertwined”, I’ll consider this, but at the moment, it doesn’t sound credible.

So after years of complaining that NATO members rely too much on military funding from the USA, he gives Greenland free military funding? What an adept negotiator.

Alita: Battle Angel. The setting is fascinating (Earth is wrecked due to one elite faction taking an opportunity to destroy the other elite factions, but enough time has passed that the world has mostly recovered but is still controlled by the 1 elite faction), but the plot (winning a sportsball game) is abysmally mundane.

I had to downvote due to the paywall.

Finally a good use of the “front yard”.

This was a missed opportunity to educate people about why individual, voluntary altruism will never achieve the scale or objectives of state-operated welfare programs.

International disdain.

Reminds me Uncle Iroh. “Sharing tea with a fascinating stranger is one of life’s true delights.”

If you protest the government or attempt to unionize, and then the government disappears you or threatens to disappear your family, it’s a dictatorship.

China can do it faster because it’s a dictatorship that simply takes the land on which it wants to build rail and pays the previous owner. In the US, there are far more legal hurdles for the government to acquire that land. Too many hurdles IMO, but going full dictatorship in order to have rail built faster is not the way.

🐱.sh

TIL Adele knows sign language

The bell curve part is fine. It’s the correlation between IQ and political orientation that is not. One of the biggest fallacies in life is that being smart automatically makes you a good person. It does not, and it also does not determine your political affiliation.

If true, then it would provide a way to redistribute wealth and measure the collective impact on IQ in a quantitative way, which would indeed make it a useful statistic

IMO the most pressing problem in the USA is that we have “consensus protocols” that can fail to achieve consensus. If the USA government was a software product, these would be considered massive bugs:

• The presence of both a House of Representatives and a Senate, and both bodies need to approve legislation with a majority in order for the legislation to become law. This is fundamentally broken, because there’s no guarantee that both houses will be controlled by the same party. Imagine if a database locked up because it had only 2 replicas, and if they ever became out of sync, all writes would stop, with no way to achieve a majority.
• The fact that the president can veto legislation. As above, this can result in a complete lockup of the government’s basic functionality, since there is no guarantee that Congress and the president are controlled by the same party.
• The electoral college. The fact that it is capable of installing as president the loser of the election is an obvious and massive flaw.

If we eliminated these bugs, then we would be able to achieve party-wise accountability; At the moment, when the House, Senate, and/or presidency are controlled by different parties, both parties can blame the other for inaction. In reality, the true problem is the fact that the Senate exists and that the President has veto power. If we had 1 democratic body (the House) and no Senate, then the party that controls the House would be directly accountable for its successes and failures, and I would expect American cynicism and apathy about “government not working” to decrease as a result.

“East”? I thought you said “Wy’east”.

Mitochondrion*

I wonder where all of those pacifist countries went…

Sounds expensive. Most nans weight a lot of pounds.