Ian Douglas Scott

There's something I find kind of inspiring about Humanistic Judaism, founded by Rabbi Sherwin Wine in the 60s as a non-theistic "religion" that adapts traditional practices to focus on how humans, not some personal god, have shaped the culture and history of the Jewish people. But I don't really care much for "cultural Christianity", nor has that been a big part of my life beyond things like highly secularized conceptions of Christmas and Easter.

So who wants to join me in founding a church where the liturgy is based on Anglo-Scottish border ballads about outlaws and fairies?

(I suppose various forms of neopaganism are just the more theistic form of the same idea. Though often also weak on historicity, since in many places we have extremely fragmentary evidence for what the pre-Christian religious practices were actually like.)

The way people talk about purported benefits of generative AI for "democratizing" art should probably make us reflect on how our world perceives all creative endeavors in an increasingly professionalized and commercialized way. Which has been going on for a long time.

Consider music. Before the phonograph, creating music wasn't exclusively or primarily the work of professionals. Professional musicians of one sort of another have existed for a *very* long time, but the average person's experience of music often involved them or other non-professionals singing and/or playing an instrument.

If you listen to some 1920s field recording of a folk song in a remote part of Appalachia, you might not care to buy an album by that performer even if they had a modern recording studio. Most people weren't experts at singing or playing instruments. But they didn't need to be.

A lot of resources on learning instruments (especially "classical" instruments) assume you want to get good enough to perform professionally. But you don't have to.

You don't need an AI to play or compose a song. There are plenty of instruments you can buy for less than what that AI will cost (at least once they're actually charging enough to not lose money). If you don't spend long hours in serious practice, perhaps no one will want to listen to your music, especially if that means paying for a recording. If you create it with AI, no one will care either. But art doesn't have to be about that.

"'C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.28000.0\x64" seems like a kind of cursed path for a Windows 11 SDK on a 64-bit system...

Paths like "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu" seems like the most intuitive thing in comparison.

2030s: Repeated mistakes by US solidify China as the world's leading economic superpower.
2040s-2050s: Chinese demographic crisis leads to India leading the world.
2060s-2070s: Brazilian world domination.
2080s-2090s: Human control of Brazil falls after repeated capybara revolts; Nigeria becomes leading economic power.
2100: Balkan states settle differences and unify. The Balkan Empire is unstoppable.

Mark 9:1 really means that there are some Judean vampires from the first century CE (or earlier) who will yet live (for certain definitions of "live") to see the end of times. And killing ancient vampires will hasten the arrival of the second coming.

Now that's a setup for some wonderful blasphemy...

Don't forget to use `-nostdinc` when abusing the C preprocessor to dubious ends.

Congratulations to human civilization for managing to not destroy itself before Artemis II returned to Earth. Let's keep it up, can we?

(Also to the space capsule for making it back safely without burning up, but that was a little less impressive, really.)

It's probably a bad thing that the "Turing test" entered popular culture but the "ELIZA effect" didn't.

It's probably a bad thing that the "Turing test" entered popular culture but the "ELIZA effect" didn't.

If we call all Norse people from the Viking Age "Vikings", it's only fair to also call all British people from the Age of Sail "Pirates".

"William Shakespeare was inarguably the most famous Pirate playwright."

"Most Pirates at the time were at least nominally loyal to Pirate Queen Elizabeth."

"Under James, the noted witch-hunting enthusiast, the Pirate homeland had finally been united under a single king."

"Most Pirates practiced a religion called 'Anglicism' that differed from that of pre-piratical Britain. But in the far north some adhered to the cult of 'Presbyterianism' and yet others clung to the ancient Catholicism of their heathen forebearers."

"The Pirates once again captured Napoleon Bonaparte, and left him stranded on the remote island of Saint Helena."

"I am descended from Scottish Pirates. Which sounds a lot cooler than saying my ancestors were probably farmers from Fife and sheep thieves from the borders."