< Notes...

“The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.” “Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?” The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bold of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

From Fedric Brown’s 1954 short story “Answer”.

➝ Via Hacker News.

“The party that controls both the House and the Senate, not to mention the executive branch, would like to remind you that the government being shut down right now is entirely the fault of the party that has no actual power right now.”

➝ Via @mattblaze.

‘We’ll probably have a shutdown’, Trump says in Oval Office press conference.

“They want to give Cadillac Medicare to illegal aliens… at the cost to everyone else,” the president said. This is a false claim that Trump and congressional Republicans have repeated since lawmakers have failed to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. A reminder, this lapses tonight.

Undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible to enroll in subsidized programs like Medicaid, Medicare or the Affordable Care Act.

➝ Via The Guardian.

This site is very neat. It allows you to play—albeit for a short period of time—a multitude of sounds. Amongst my many music likings is trance, and I am enjoying browsing their collection. Especially, psychedelic trance.

➝ Via @claudrod.

Truly enjoyed reading “Death and what comes next”. Some of the comments on its submission to Hacker News are food for the brain, and the closeted philosopher in me loves them!

“Astonishing”, said Death. “Really astonishing. Let me put forward another suggestion: that you are nothing more than a lucky species of ape that is trying to understand the complexities of creation via a language that evolved in order to tell one another where the ripe fruit was?”

➝ Via Hacker News.

My kid is one who often tells me, when I worry about his less-than-perfect password, “who cares, I have nothing to hide”. If you are one of those, please think again. I had a conversation, again, with the child about this last night.

“I find it fascinating when people say that they have nothing to hide. I usually jokingly say: unlock your phone and hand it to me. Your phone is a window to your life. Where a lot of people believe that it is possible to give full access to properly vetted authorities, in the world of security, when you open a door for one person, you incidentally open it to everyone.”

➝ Via Hacker News.

“You might not need tmux”, said no one, until now. I don’t subscribe to that point of view, I use tmux heavily. The author’s solution? Install shpool, which adds yet another daemon. No, thank you, tmux is just fine. Heck, tmux is superb!

➝ Via Hacker News.

The Em Dash has responded to the “if your writing has em dashes, it was AI generated” new fad.

I would like to address the recent slander circulating on social media, in editorial Slack channels, and in the margins of otherwise decent Substack newsletters. Specifically, the baseless, libelous accusation that my usage is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence.

➝ Via McSweeney’s.

With new capabilities come new dangers. The safety team finds that if Agent-2 somehow escaped from the company and wanted to “survive” and “replicate” autonomously, it might be able to do so. That is, it could autonomously develop and execute plans to hack into AI servers, install copies of itself, evade detection, and use that secure base to pursue whatever other goals it might have (though how effectively it would do so as weeks roll by is unknown and in doubt). These results only show that the model has the capability to do these tasks, not whether it would “want” to do this. Still, it’s unsettling even to know this is possible.

➝ Via ai-2027.com.

Coming across a few MacPaint arts from the mid-1980s brought me a lot of memories, even though I saw them in the early 1990s. I remember vividly when I got my very first Mac around that time (Performa 575) at Sears. Over $2,000.

➝ Via Decryption.

Came across this thought, which ended up being a partial quote by Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, which I liked quite a bit once I found it whole.

“If I am I, because you are you, and you are you, because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you. But if I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you, and we can talk.”

➝ Via Loon thoughts.