Contriving

Ok, so TayTweets is an AI Microsoft put on Twitter that learns from Twitter conversations.

This is perhaps the best thing any AI has ever said:

How Netflix uses computer vision to crop, resize, and select images to help people select movies and shows to watch.

In the next decades this is going to cause increased taxes on the young and/or cut benefits for the old.

Possible future:

Many diseases are especially dangerous for the old. Antibiotic resistance is on the rise. Elizabethkingia anophelis, the bacteria that has infected 50+ people in the Midwest USA and killed nearly 20 of them or some other contaigon goes on to kill large swaths of elderly citizens across the USA and saving social security to the sad relief of other citizens. 50 years later the country is back in the same boat because people and politicians suck at planning for the future.

Domestic policy chief for Richard Nixon about declaring the war on drugs that Nixon started and has been going on in the US and across the world for the past 40 years:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

I'm somewhere in the middle of Season 2.

I was 14 years old when I first starting watched X-Files in the early 90s and back then I just though it was so cool.

I still think it's cool, but now that I'm older and interested in philosophy, rationality, science I find a lot of the conversations and actions almost … uncomfortable.

Fox Mulder is almost always on intellectually untenable ground.

https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/711597683107106817?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It's gotten to the point where when Person A accuses Source 1 of being biased, I assume, until proven otherwise, what Person A is saying is "I don't like what Source 1 says".

Accusations of bias is also an intellectually weak argument. If Person B points to Source 1 to back up an argument, Person A shouldn't say "Source 1 is so biased", Person A should say "Source 1 is wrong because of X, Y, and Z".

Reshared post from +Kaj Sotala

Surprisingly, this didn't work and the kid died.

Thankfully, the Canadian government is prosecuting them.

What really struck me about this article was this:

David has dubbed the proceedings a “vaccine trial,” claiming the Crown represents the “vaccine agenda.” He says authorities are “looking to create the legal precedent through the court system that when a child falls ill, parents who chose not to vaccinate have a greater onus to seek mainstream medical attention sooner than parents that do vaccinate, and if any harm befalls the non-vaccinated child from an illness that there was a vaccine for, the parents can be held criminally liable.”

So, like….yeah, that is the point. It's like a rapist saying "the government is just trying to set a precedent that people like me have to not rape other people".

You know how Lifehacker and those types of sites are always telling us to use standing desks instead of plopping our butts down in front of our computer?

Well, turns out no one knows if that's any better for you!