Wow, what a take. Being the adventures of a race-baiting conservative commentator who comes to realise, with dawning horror, that Trump's ur-fascism might actually be a catalyst for - who'd have thought it? - fascism.

And he’s afraid to state that Jews do not openly support the “prosecution” of Christians (especially compared to Muslims, who are actively murdering Christians as we speak).

I'm going to assume this is a typical take from this chap. In spite of everything, he appears to be unaware that language like this has been instrumental to the creation of, and continues to contribute towards the advancement of, the fell juggernaut he fears is descending.

However, once the hype dies down at least we might be left with a bigger, stronger and cheaper energy grid in its wake?

I bet that's what this AI push has been about all along; a cabal of industrialists forcing the United States into the mass roll out of clean, renewable and affordable energy for all.

Re the Unisynk Stand 2 Magnetic Wireless Charger by Johan Thelander. When did we start putting magnets in wireless phone chargers? I grew up when magnets were bad for electronics.

Anyway, I like:

- The Ribbon Desk by Scot Distefano.

- Magician's rope by Hanqi Jia

Stripped back to its essentials, the argument for AGI rests on the premise that one technology, AI, has gotten very good, very fast, and will continue to get better. But set aside the technical objections—what if it doesn't continue to get better?—and you’re left with the claim that intelligence is a commodity you can get more of if you have the right data or compute or neural network. And it’s not.

This observation rings true.

I've just renewed my contract with the university that is my employer for three more years. The portfolio in which I work is likely to face some form of review and potentially restructure in the next six months. We'll see how that works out for me.

Higher education in Australia is tumultuous at the moment. There are currently three separate government reviews ongoing into university governance. There is a perception that the social licence of universities has diminished. Situations like this one haven't helped our case (I don't work at ANU, but I work at a comparabe institution), but it has been compounded by parts of the media working actively over many years to undermine the credibility of universities in public discourse, compounded further by a housing crisis that has fuelled alarm over the growth of international students (education is Australia's largest services export). Beyond that, I've a sense that the lack of equilibrium within our own institution and the wider higher education sector is merely a reflection of the greater disequilibrium at the macro scale, both nationally and internationally.

Sixty years ago Donald Horne described Australia as "a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise". I'm not sure that there's anything different about Australia today. Mainstream media has spent the past week crowing about our prime minister's successful if long awaited meeting with Trump, which landed a $13 billion rare minerals agreement and continued endorsement of the AUKUS deal. There is very little public questioning about the long term viability of AUKUS, which is a $400 billion joke, nor the hundreds of billions of dollars being handed over to advance it, nor about the merits of pursuing such an alliance in the first place. Just once, I'd like to see a leader in Australia publicly acknowledge that the post-war Pax Americana is gone, that we are in a new world order, which is a return to the older pre-war order, dominated by a handful of great powers that will do whatever they want to do, and where international law is reduced to a chimera. Perhaps when we are forced to realise that we'll be ready to start a discussion about who we are as a nation.

It's difficult because I don't know that I'm really qualified to speak compared to so many of you, except insofar as what happens in the US gets visited upon us here, one way or another.

But I think people relying on the midterms to turn this around are grasping.

I honestly don't know what you're supposed to do. The difference between what is accepted as normal dysfunction today compared to what was accepted as normal even a few years ago, when things were already well and truly not normal, is night and day. It feels to me as though it's accelerating toward something catastrophic, and that by design, but I don't even live there. It feels to me, a non-American who's opinion is worth little, that the time for urgent action is past high, but I don't know what the urgent action would consist in that does anything other that accelerate the catastrophe. We are in a time of monsters.

You explained the meaning of "six-seven" to me one week before it suddenly exploded in the media, which is great because thanks to you I was able to nod sagely in conversation and tell other people what it referred to as though I'd been there at the birth of it.

I also didn't know anything about cool S and Kilroy was here (in spite of the former being scrawled everywhere when I was in school).

Tool - Stinkfist. Been feeling the nostalgic allure of this song ever since it led into the credit scene of an Alien Earth episode a couple of months ago.

Update: One hour later, he appears to have moved on. People have troubled childhoods that they carry into the rest of their lives and that spill over into the lives of others.

Ouch. My sympathies on a very tough break for you, demure. Are you still living in France? Do you have friends over there to look out for you?

> 3. The idea is that ChatGPT will be your agent, but in reality you are ChatGPT's agent

Something in this that resonates with my own recent experiences of using AI at work.

Part of my role involves reporting on institutional performance against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. SDG reporting is important for universities; sustainability rankings like this one have started to compete with academic rankings as influencing student's preferred destination to study, and sustainability rankings assess universities based on how well they report on the SDGs (among other things).

It's a big university, so there's a massive amount of activity across research, education, engagement and operations aligning with the SDGs. Much of that activity gets reported on in news items or similar published by the university. We're now using AI to summarise those news items and assign relevant SDGs to them. The end result is a massive annual report based on thousands of news items, summarising all of the different activities under the SDGs. We review everything and correct any errors along the way.

Who's going to use the report? Who's actually going to look at it? The answer is AI. Including the AI used by the rankings agencies.

I feel as though I've reached a point where the job becomes working for the machine, rather than having the machine work for me. Is this what Kaczynski was talking about?

Mindfulness exercises and cognitive behavioural therapy have helped me with realising this. I made some big breakthroughs as a young man, but It's still a struggle for me.

At 5am we were woken by a knock on our door. I opened it to be greeted with the question "How many people live in your house?" by somebody who thought he was entitled to stay here. He was in rough shape. He did not believe or did not understand that this was our house. Four and half hours later, that same person is now sitting in the armchair of the verandah of the house next door (our neighbour either is not home, is out of it or has himself chosen to steer clear), muttering loudly and angrily to himself. I'm reluctant to call the cops on him, because they're not always helpful at this sort of thing, and I don't really want to cause him any more trouble than he's found himself in, but I'm also reluctant to leave our house empty while he's there, in case he takes another crack at the place while I'm away. I figure he's only got a couple more hours of muttering to himself before he moves on, so now I'm working from home this morning to monitor the situation.

So that's my morning so far.