The one thing the longevity-vampire community has not yet learned from Dracula is operational security.
Dracula operated in silence for centuries. He didn't have a podcast. He didn't track his erection quality on a public dashboard. He didn't appear on Netflix. He understood that the fundamental rule of being a vampire is: don't talk about being a vampire.
Johnson, Thiel, and their cohort have broken this rule comprehensively. Whether this represents a new era of transparency or a catastrophic strategic miscalculation remains to be seen.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
*New "hate speech" rules for NSW schools could stifle classroom discussions about Gaza, teachers warn.*
Punishing "hate speech" as a crime generally tends to lead to repression.
Contacts with Epstein pulled the plug on the career of Peter Mandelson, a Labour MP and minister who worked unceasingly to strengthen the power of business — and not only in Britain.
Three anti-fascist activists in the UK accuse an undercover cop who infiltrated their group of trying to recruit them into a plan to firebomb a store. He told them that the store was a front for some right-wing activity.
They were not inclined towards violence, so they rejected the suggestion immediately. Will he be prosecuted for this attempt to organize crime?
*Environmentalists decry "crushingly disappointing" PFAS action plan for UK.*
This weakness was predictable, because Starmer Labour's first priority is catering to business.
*Democrats' 10 demands to "rein in" [the deportation thugs] – the full list of proposed reforms.*
I support all these. I also support taking away the extra funds the deportation thugs received in the Big Bad Bill and giving them to medical treatment for nonwealthy Americans, and we ought to demand both. But if we must choose one or the other, I would choose the former. Fascist government is a worse problem than poverty.
Last fall the Israeli army bulldozed graves in a war cemetery in which were buried Allied soldiers who died in World War I and II. Some people are shocked.
You'd think that some people are more concerned about symbolic insult to deceased Australians than about the killing of living Palestinians.
Robert Reich: Congress should write into the law to fund the deportation thug agency an explicit requirement that failure to obey any court order will immediately terminate all funding for it.
US citizens: call on Verizon to stop supporting the Department of Hatred and Suffering and the deportation thugs.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on Target's New CEO to help protect Minnesota from deportation thugs.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Tell Amazon to end contracts with deportation thugs.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
This is an example of "Silicon Valley CEOs and their inability to divorce ICE and the complete lack of understanding of why that makes them monsters," a Salesforce employee told 404 Media. "Employees are going absolutely apeshit in internal Slack about how completely awful it was." Another employee told 404 Media that Benioff "then followed it up with a joke about not understanding the message of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance. On its own just seems out of touch, but coupled with the previous joke it does seem worse."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I've stopped trying to debate software developers on LLMs. It's a fruitless debate. Even if the believers in agents and copilots could be budged on empirical grounds, and the past few years have given us plenty of evidence that they can't, this is still a crowd that is explicitly fine with using tools that are themselves deeply unethical. [...]
Somebody who is capable of looking past "ICE is using LLMs as accountability sinks for waving extremists through their recruitment processes", generated abuse, or how chatbot-mediated alienation seems to be pushing vulnerable people into psychosis-like symptoms, won't be persuaded by a meaningful study. Their goal is to maintain their personal benefit, as they see it, and all they are doing is attempting to negotiate with you what the level of abuse is that you find acceptable. Preventing abuse is not on their agenda.
You lost them right at the outset. [...]
Nor do they seem to care, except in a performative way, that "AI" is designed to be an outright attack on labour and education, using the works of those being attacked -- without their consent -- as the tools for dismantling their own communities and industries, all done in overt collaboration with the ultra right. [...]
Going all "but it works great for me" even as the industry burns around you and the "it" is a right-wing political project built on disregarding consent, being applied to dismantle public infrastructure and institutions, is fundamentally a dick move.
And debating dicks is pointless.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
When playing melodies the effects of microtonality are a bit disappointing. Tunes are still recognizable when played ‘wrong’. The effects are much more dramatic when you play chords:
You can and should play with an interactive version of this here. It’s based off this and this with labels added by me. The larger gray dots are standard 12EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave) positions and the smaller dots are 24EDO. There are a lot of benefits of going with 24EDO for microtonality. It builds on 12EDO as a foundation, in the places where it deviates it’s as microtonal as is possible, and it hits a lot of good chords.
Unrelated to that I’d like to report on an experiment of mine which failed. I had this idea that you could balance the volumes of dissonant notes to make dyads consonant in unusual places. It turns out this fails because the second derivative of dissonance curves is negative everywhere except unity. This can’t possibly be a coincidence. If you were to freehand something which looks like dissonance curves it wouldn’t have this property. Apparently the human ear uses positions where the second derivative of dissonance is positive to figure out what points form the components of a sound and looks for patterns in those to find complete sounds.
Derik Kauffman insists it's not a joke. He's actually planning to hold a March for Billionaires in San Francisco this weekend. And he says he's doing so because he's opposed to a proposed state tax on billionaires and, more simply, because he feels as if the billionaire class has been unfairly vilified. [...]
The point of the event is to "change the sentiment on this to recognize that billionaires have done a lot for us and communicate that we're glad they're here," Kauffman said. [...]
He told The Examiner he's neither a billionaire defending his own interests, nor just acting as a front for the ultrarich. Last year, Kauffman founded an artificial-intelligence startup called RunRL that took part in Y Combinator's accelerator program.
Kauffman said he's not in contact with any billionaires or getting any funding from them, nor are there any other groups involved with the event. Instead, he's footing the cost of the March for Billionaires website himself and is the principal organizer of and publicist for it, he said.
Update: "Oh no. anyway"
San Francisco’s billionaire bacchanal a big bust:
Just one percent of Americans hold nearly a third of the nation's wealth. So it was fitting that after organizers announced an apparently earnest "March for Billionaires" for this Saturday at Alta Plaza Park, only a handful of pro-billionaire agitators actually showed. [...]
The tens of billions of dollars that could be raised from this tax would fund healthcare, a journalist said. What did Kauffman think of that?
Kauffman began his rebuttal, but it was drowned out by the hubbub of a "counter protester" wearing a towering papier-mâché chef puppet costume chasing around a man in a crown. "He's coming to eat the rich!" the royal provocateur yelled. "Help me get away from the unwashed masses!" [...]
"I am a Christian," said Annie. "I swear on my God that I am completely genuine." [...] "People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier," she said. "We are beautiful. We're smart. We're strong... We are supporting the billionaires, here."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Mauricio Peña, the company's Chief Safety Officer, confirmed under questioning that the Google subsidiary employs human operators abroad [...]
"They provide guidance. They do not remotely drive the vehicles," Peña told the Senate committee. "The Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input."
When pressed on how many operators are located outside the United States, Peña said he did not have the breakdown available, escalating frustration from senators.
"It just seems kind of curious that you don't know that answer," one senator responded, before asking in which countries the operators are located.
"The Philippines," Peña replied. [...]
"Having people overseas influencing American vehicles is a safety issue," the senator said. "The information the operators receive could be out of date. It could introduce tremendous cybersecurity vulnerabilities. We don't know if these people have US driver's licenses." [...]
"It's one thing when a taxi is replaced by an Uber or a Lyft. It's another thing when the jobs just go completely overseas," the senator added.
But hey, at least these jobs aren't being stolen by immigrants!
The insistence on personifying their products eg "the waymo asks for help", "the human recommends" is such a conspicuous odd contortion that it's almost certain there are legal + business imperatives behind it that they don't talk about and won't until a regulator forces them to. [...]
They want to pay remote drivers from whatever country is currently cheapest, none of whom will have US state drivers' licenses. claiming that they're "advising, not driving" is the linchpin of their argument that that's not as illegal and dangerous as it clearly is. they're constructing legal fortifications before the deaths and lawsuits rise.
Let's not forget that these companies are still immune from prosecution when one of their remotely-operated drones commits a moving violation, up to and including a killing. And that Waymo's owner Google have stated in court filings that it is good for business if their competitors' cars kill more people.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
- I'm pretty sure that the Vaillancourt Fountain is still there in the year 3195. It's hard to tell because some palm trees are blocking it, but that looks like the East wall to me. It's directly below the Tulip statue.
Proving that we are in the Terran Empire timeline, that means it will have lasted 1,169 years longer than it will in our universe.
- Not only is the Hyatt still there, but the rotating restaurant at the top is lit up!
But back here in the Terran timeline, while it has finally been repaired, it is now a private club.
- Quark's still exists, so that's a pretty nice 830+ year run, too.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I need this SVG as a DXF, DWG or SKP with all of the polylines converted to triangular meshes. Can someone show me how, or just do it for me?
The conversion must preserve group names so that I can tell which ones are which.
Bonus level: can you find a similar source map that also has US states? Must be equirectangular.
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:39:59 -0800
Subject: Your channel has lost access to advanced features
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Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.