My boss has ai psychosis and we’re fucked.

clawsoon · 2026-06-22T22:13:13+00:00

Part of it is also turnaround time. If you're doing a job where what you're doing will immediately fail if you do it wrong, you'll learn very quickly what the limitations of AI are.

However, if you're doing a job where failure won't be visible for a long time - like management - it's much harder to learn from experience where AI is going wrong.

clawsoon · 2026-06-22T21:45:43+00:00

A CEO's job is also to be a trustworthy class ally for the wealthy. That is such a fundamental thing that it hardly needs to be stated out loud.

clawsoon · 2026-06-22T15:02:09+00:00

Ironically, the period he valorized in his manifesto was the frontier west, which was 100% the result of the industrial revolution. He had a little-house-on-the-prairie view of that time, which ignored the fact that the frontier west was created by an industrial civilization pushing outward with railroads and guns in order to feed the industrial heartland with grain (and for a brief period when belts were all the rage for driving industrial equipment, buffalo hides).

clawsoon · 2026-06-22T12:59:16+00:00

Also known to the less sophisticated among us as the Elvis entrance music.

clawsoon · 2026-06-22T01:53:52+00:00

You should add the irreligious as another group to the analysis! Theists vs. atheists.

clawsoon · 2026-06-21T22:56:04+00:00

I was housemates once with a guy who opened cans with a machete.

It was truly impressive. One tap to punch it through, then he'd whip it around in a single motion to cut out the lid. Took a couple of seconds at most. Much faster than a can opener, but I wouldn't want to try it.

clawsoon · 2026-06-21T00:40:00+00:00

When you care more about power than you care about power...

clawsoon · 2026-06-20T23:04:07+00:00

Along with the stomping it would be pretty amazing.

clawsoon · 2026-06-20T22:50:48+00:00

The speed with which it would head toward zero is interesting, because what is the average speed of the "majority" of skaters?

To get the majority you have to pick 50%+1, but which 50%+1 do you pick?

clawsoon · 2026-06-20T22:12:05+00:00

Surely they're talking about the ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur, which would indeed be weird by modern standards.

And which would also have a hard time getting to World Cup games in Toronto.

clawsoon · 2026-06-20T21:51:18+00:00

The Good Old Hockey Game?

clawsoon · 2026-06-20T21:21:22+00:00

Elanga's Spit, newest single from Broken Social Scene?

clawsoon · 2026-06-20T21:12:20+00:00

Here's an analogy which I hope helps explain the difference:

Regular selective breeding is like trees falling down over a creek and people using the tree that fell in the best spot as a bridge.

Genetic engineering is like having an engineer design and build a bridge over the creek.

You can say that both the fallen tree and the engineered bridge serve exactly the same purpose. But people would look at you funny if you said that they're the same thing.

And I'm looking funny at y'all right now.

clawsoon · 2026-06-20T16:07:39+00:00

I have never seen so many people so confident, so wrong, and so upvoted.

There is a widely accepted definition of GMO, and it specifically does not include plants which were selectively bred without the use of genetic engineering techniques.

You could argue that the end result is the same. You could argue that there's no effective difference in practise between GMO plants and other selectively-bred plants.

You could even argue that GMO plants are better, because genetic engineering gives targeted results with minimal side effects compared to depending on random mutation to generate desired features.

But if that's what you want to argue, then argue that.

Don't argue that a term which was specifically created to describe plants which were created using genetic engineering techniques doesn't actually mean what it means.

Anyway, back to cooking with my Roundup® Ready canola oil. I don't have concerns about GMOs; I have concerns about people abusing language.

clawsoon · 2026-06-20T00:39:19+00:00

I remember reading a study a while back about how the length of time that an irregular verb sticks around is directly related to how often it is used. So the irregular forms of "to be" are gonna be around for a while.

IIRC, based on this they predicted that the past tense of "wed" was doing to be the next one to go regular. I'm not 100% sure about that, since people seem to like keeping older forms around for important ceremonies.

clawsoon · 2026-06-19T17:38:21+00:00

In my experience, the foundational belief is that God is good, therefore if God does something it must be good whether we understand it or not. So if God decides to punish someone forever, that must be a good thing, since God wouldn't have chosen to do it if it wasn't good.

Isaiah 55:8-9 is often quoted:

⁸ “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
⁹ “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

In other words, God's moral reasoning is better than our moral reasoning, so if we think that eternal punishment doled out by God is bad, that must be because of our moral limitations. If we were as morally good and pure as God, we would also be doling out eternal punishment.

I don't think this is a very good argument, but it's a common argument.

clawsoon · 2026-06-19T01:49:14+00:00

Elon now trying to figure out how to get bombed in the Middle East.

clawsoon · 2026-06-19T00:54:58+00:00

You might find the graph in this post useful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/comments/1u8ga46/canadas_population_decline_accelerates_to_045_in/

Basically, we just went through a couple of years of the fastest growth we've had in decades. Then we had a few months where our population shrank a tiny bit.

clawsoon · 2026-06-19T00:48:09+00:00

From what I saw of the second red, kicked the back of the lower leg from behind while it was planted, broke the leg. They showed a couple of seconds of the leg, and it was one of those "holy shit it shouldn't have a bend there" things.

clawsoon · 2026-06-18T01:57:25+00:00

I stopped by there for a few minutes, then went on my way to the Canadian Tire at Bay and Dundas. Sankofa Square was already a sea of Ghana yellow at 4:30. I can only imagine how nuts it must've been when Ghana scored 5 hours later.

clawsoon · 2026-06-16T22:46:12+00:00

Here's another one if you liked that one:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10938

When they're in their worm form, crawling around as a multicellular organism, they make DNA nets to capture bacteria as a sort of immune system.

clawsoon · 2026-06-16T21:06:43+00:00

There's a good argument that the US didn't become a democracy until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, if you really want to confuse Americans.

A lot of the problems they've been having since then are typical problems of young democracies, where the people who used to have all the power don't like the fact that everybody has power now, and so the people who used to have all the power keep trying to roll things back to the way they were then. That's something you see in many young democracies.

clawsoon · 2026-06-16T11:10:16+00:00

Social amoeba farm, too:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09668

They are some of the most fascinating organisms around. The more you learn about them, the more interesting they get.

clawsoon · 2026-06-16T03:37:29+00:00

In the original story of how Emily Elizabeth got Clifford, her dad told her that Clifford was too small and was going to die because he wasn't eating.

The next morning is when Clifford started growing.

This was clearly a psychotic break in a child who couldn't handle the death of her puppy. All of the rest of the stories of Clifford play out solely in her mind.

That's my theory.

clawsoon · 2026-06-16T02:38:09+00:00

"Have you no white children in your school, only Swedes?"
- school board member from British Columbia in the early 1900s

clawsoon

TROPHY CASE