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No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

There's a good version on Standard Ebooks. Greg Wagland's rendition is also great.^👂

For thirty years, I've sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views—amen, so be it.

A friend just asked me this. Might as well write it down.

I stopped eating meat when I was 17 because my girlfriend at the time was vegetarian, and I knew that it was one of the remaining ways I could significantly lower my carbon footprint.

I first saw this on Hakushi Hasegawa's website¹ and after a little digging around in the source, saw that it was implemented with a shader and three.js

But I had a hunch that it might be possible with CSS blending modes. Not because I fully understood them, but just because it seemed like the sort of thing they're made for.

Two years ago, a colleague asked me "concretely, what's a way in which you think AI is going to change the world?"

I said: the way we relate to and use software. We will stop writing or installing it.¹ We'll instead have an AIs that dynamically write our programs for us.

Two years later, I'm feeling even more confident about this. Claude Code and Codex are the worst they'll ever be, and they're already one-shotting simple webapps.

this isn't merriam-webster, but i reckon it's when you're motivated by something other than what you should be.

say you come out of the cinema with your friends and you start raving about how many of the shots were inspired by some french new wave guy.

maybe you're authentically stoked about the cinematography (the pretense), but maybe you mostly just want to sound smart about movies because of how it affects your status in the group.

More Perfect Union released a video on automated truck drivers (which are now on the roads in Texas.)

They argue:

1. The "driver shortage" framing is industry spin on the fact that employers are deliberately underpaying workers to increase churn and keep the average pay grade low.
2. Automation will lead to further degradation of the trucking career that has allowed many men to earn a decent wage and quality of life. The consequences of this will be dire.

Is automation necessarily anti-labour? Is it possible to automate jobs while protecting the people who do them?

When people say "the problem is education" they tend to mean "I want everyone to have the same beliefs as me, but persuading adults is too hard."

I think it's naive to assume that agreeing on a national curriculum is any easier, but assuming that you could, it's even more naive to assume that students would internalize the lessons you want them to.

For example: in high school, I didn't understand our English curriculum's emphasis on literary analysis essays. They seemed mysteriously tautological: fill in the essay template to demonstrate to the person marking you that you can fill in an essay template.^😱

Laura C by Big Supermarket is a song about Tomb Raider. I love it.

Part of the reason why, is that I cannot reliably hear the downbeat in the right place. There is a clear "right" way to hear it that my mind can snap into if I try, but most of the time I hear it spasmodic style.

belgian ISP Telenet remade a music video straight from the top of my childhood. it's cool/inspiring/funny to see how things have changed.