Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Trying to convince a colleague not to give someone else enough rope to hang themselves, not because we want to save them but because we aren't about to give away rope for free.
[Note: this is a metaphor. Well, the rope and the hanging are metaphorical; the colleague is not metaphorical.]

 

Given how often my own brain decides to play two songs at me at the same time, I was surprised to find out how much I dislike listening to two songs at the same time IRL. It was only after some thought that I realized that my brain is nice enough to pick songs that have the same tempo, or to fix the tempos so they're the same. Thanks, brain, now please license the rest of the songs and not just five seconds of the prechorus.

 

But imagine if instead of covering Hurt, Johnny Cash had covered Closer.

 

I'm kind of glad that I'm not having a human sing this track, because they'd probably get mad that the two verses have slightly different meters, and similarly for the pre-choruses and the choruses, and similarly for each line of the bridge. Maybe I'm just over-interpreting the vocal stress.

[Edit] Nope, I'm just syncopating everything, as usual.

 

More thoughts on the issue: Artificial intelligence is hard, what we have is artificial charisma with just enough intelligence to not fail INT checks automatically.
Similarly, one of the core issues with robotics and why we haven't automated a lot of manual jobs is that while artificial strength is easy, artificial dexterity is generally really hard to get right. Human dexterity is a ton of delicate, finely-trained feedback loops through lots and lots of sensors and processing that we don't quite fully understand yet.

I have no real insight into artificial constitution. I'm not sure human wisdom exists.

 

Encountering a doohickey on the floor and not recognizing it, but also fully aware of my packrat-shading-into-mild-kleptomaniac tendencies, I was not surpised to see something like it. I was, however, somewhat surpised to peel off a warning sticker to find a second, more vehement warning underneath.

As far as I can tell, it's just a long metal rod with a plastic loop on the end, but given that the second warning is painted directly on the plastic, who knows.

 

How many caveats do you need to be able to mention something as an example of a thing you'd like someone to think about without implying that you endorse thinking about that particular example?

 

One of the great things about having a large vocabulary is that I can sometimes make worse puns. Not necessarily bad puns, but if someone makes a pun of any quality there is a decent chance I can produce a followup pun that is at least somewhat more painful.

I do not use this power for good.

 

I guess I should adapt my mental category of "lies for children" to make a category of "lies for engineers".

 

But yeah, when I tell people that we watched the Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition in basically one go (with a short break to get takeout after Fellowship) I do have to mention that we didn't actually finish the entire thing; we skipped the last 14 minutes of Special Thanks at the end. I know, I know. We watched all the credits up until then, but we weren't supposed to even be in that room to begin with and people were getting antsy. We didn't even get to any of the special features.

 

I think the best bit is that there is at least one chain post where nostalgebraist-autoresponder is a crucial part of the chain (the first reply, in fact! Establishing that there is a chain to be made!) and no one on the chain comments on the fact that nostalgebraist-autoresponder is not performed by a human being.

 

Non-explainable AI as koan, that not all truths can be understood by human reasoning.

 

But yeah, looking back on the list of things I watched with the roommates back in college, we definitely should have included Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and Power Rangers RPM. I mean, yeah, half the titles we watched were chosen specifically to piss each other off rather than out of any real desire to watch them, but still.

 

So today's unhappy thought, courtesy of bunjywunjy.tumblr.com's askbox: rabid whale.
Fortunately, as bunjywunjy points out, the probability of a whale getting rabies is extremely low due to them living in water.

 

But yeah, I honestly can't read the Book of Job as anything other than an argument against the whole notion of the divine right of gods.

 

An underutilized bit is someone wearing multiple fake mustaches. Not like, a fake mustache which gets ripped off to reveal another fake mustache underneath, but just multiple fake mustaches, all differently-colored and all simultaneously visible.

 

Semigroups as anti-woke monoids because they don't have an identity element.

 

The whole "the idea that exposure to bad ideas taints you forever is purely due to Christian cultural indoctrination" thing is often presented in a way that makes it sound like "exposure to Christianity taints you forever".

 

In terms of video games, hack and slash is considered a singular genre, but in terms of movies, hacker movies and slasher movies are quite different

 

On the one hand, "girlmath" jokes should be considered dark humor the same way any jokes about societal inequality are dark (note: the girlmath jokes that aren't about societal inequality are simply sexist).
On the other hand, the "gay people can't do math" jokes that have been around for at least longer than "girlmath" has been codified should also be considered dark humor, especially since one of the main examples of "gay people can in fact do math" was arrested for sodomy and committed suicide to get out of conversion therapy.

This is not to say that I am against dark humor! I make morbid jokes all the time. I'm just not convinced that there's sufficient acknowledgement that the subject matter of "unable to do something because minority" is actually quite dark.