Third Foundation

really tired of books, shows, or movies which only have jerks and assholes as characters

also really tired of sitcoms where all the characters are stupid all the time. I prefer shows where the smart people are stupid SOME of the time.

time to rewatch Star Trek, Stargate SG1, and The Good Place, I guess.

and reread Dresden Files.

and I'm dealing with migraines and/or sinus headaches.

RE: @gvwilson@mastodon.social

"… Paul Babiak and Robert Hare spent years studying how psychopathic individuals navigate organizational environments. Their estimate is that roughly one percent of the general population meets the clinical threshold for psychopathy, while corporate managers cluster around three to four times that rate. The mechanism is not mysterious. Psychopaths tend to perform exceptionally well in job interviews. They are confident, articulate, and skilled at saying what an interviewer wants to hear. They feel no social anxiety in high-stakes situations, and can fabricate credentials and relationships convincingly because they feel no guilt about doing so. Once hired, they are evaluated primarily on how they appear to those above them in the organization, and making a strong impression on a small number of people across a limited number of interactions is something psychopaths do better than almost anyone else. …"

"A simple 7-question test helps us realize how diverse a population is. On this quiz, the highest possible score is less than 7%. No matter how common you think your answers are, no matter how normal you feel, you’re actually in sync with just 7% (at the most) of all citizens of the US. My answers put me under 4.

“People like us do things like this,” is a useful definition of culture. But which things? Billions of people believe things you don’t, are unaware of things that are easily demonstrated, or simply don’t care.

When you decide to reach the masses, you’ve made a significant (and probably fruitless) choice."

https://www.atvbt.com/youre-weirder-than-you-think/

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/958776296/0/sethsblog~We-are-all-weird/

"Arison has admitted that the AI adoption process hasn’t been perfect. “We learned that A.I. agents learn off the code base that you have. Because that code had so many bugs in it, it put similar types of bugs in as it was writing code,” he said—which feels like a thing his tutor should have covered."

https://gizmodo.com/grindr-is-the-latest-dating-app-to-hook-up-with-ai-2000779592

"The Cold War was the reason. American planners in Tokyo feared that rural poverty and landlord domination were exactly the conditions in which communist movements flourished. They had watched what happened in China and did not want a repeat, so they did what they would never have considered at home: they redistributed productive assets from the wealthy to the poor on a massive scale and called it democratization.

"Between 1947 and 1950, roughly thirty percent of Japan’s farmland changed hands under the land reform program. […] The landlord class as an economic force essentially ceased to exist. What replaced it was a rural middle class of owner-farmers. In the following decades, those farmers’ children moved to the cities and provided the workforce for Japan’s industrial expansion. The land reform did not just change who owned the fields; it restructured the society that would industrialize in the 1950s and 1960s.

"South Korea and Taiwan followed the same template…"
https://third-bit.com/2026/05/09/land-reform/

"Microsoft fixes VS Code after app gives Copilot credit for human's work
May 4, 2026 at 2:13 PM
Imagine working your butt off on a project, only to have VS Code put an attribution into your commit that says Copilot helped you, even if it did not. Microsoft has reversed a change that added a default AI attribution notice after user complaints that the bot was claiming credit for human-authored code."
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/05/04/microsoft_reverses_ai_credit_grab/

"The Guardian: Flaws in Kenya’s AI-driven health reforms driving up costs for the poorest. “Through months of investigation, reporters at Africa Uncensored, in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports and the Guardian, were able to obtain key details of this system and audit how it worked. The findings reveal how, from the start, it was systematically overcharging the poorest Kenyans, overestimating their incomes, while undercharging the wealthiest by underestimating their incomes.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/may/04/kenya-ai-healthcare-reforms-driving-up-costs-for-poor

"This week, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law banning nudification apps that make it easy to “undress” or sexualize images of real people.

Under the law, developers of websites, apps, software, or other services designed to “nudify” images risk extensive damages, including punitive damages, if a victim decides to sue. Their offending products could also be blocked in the state. Additionally, Minnesota’s attorney general could impose fines up to $500,000 per fake AI nude flagged. Any fines collected would be used to fund services for victims of “sexual assault, general crime, domestic violence, and child abuse,” the law stipulates"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/minnesota-set-to-be-first-state-to-ban-nudification-apps/

"Supply chains that took forty years to weave were unwound and rerouted in eighteen months. If you set out to break American soft power on purpose, the policy you would design is approximately the one we ran. If you set out to enrich a small number of importers with refund checks while the consumers who paid the underlying tax got nothing, the policy you would design is the one we ran. If you set out to give the farmer a bailout funded by the tax that broke the farmer, the policy you would design is the one we ran. The question is not whether the policy succeeded. The question is at what."
https://surfnukumoi.substack.com/p/the-tariff-receipts-were-always-there

"When the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown won a Pulitzer Prize this week for exposing how the top federal prosecutor in South Florida gave Jeffrey Epstein a secret, illegal deal to avoid prison, the nation was reminded that powerful men rarely face justice. But here in New Mexico, all major news outlets have ignored a much worse story completely: that the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico — the state where Epstein owned and operated Zorro Ranch — not only never prosecuted Epstein at all, Epstein gave him personal power of attorney to sign documents to purchase the ranch on Epstein’s behalf. This news has only been reported here in The Pugilist, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why that is."
https://alisav.substack.com/p/floridas-top-federal-prosecutor-gave

"MIT neuroscientists have uncovered a surprising feature of the adult brain. It contains millions of "silent synapses," which are immature connections between neurons that remain inactive until they are needed to help form new memories.

For many years, scientists believed these silent synapses existed only during early development, when the brain is rapidly learning about the world. But the MIT team found that in adult mice, roughly 30 percent of synapses in the brain's cortex are still silent. This suggests the adult brain holds a large reserve of unused connections that can be activated when new information arrives.

Researchers say this hidden pool of synapses may explain how the brain continues to learn throughout life without disrupting existing memories."

#science https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260504211848.htm

Montana Supreme Court Rules Its Constitution Entirely Protects #Trans Citizens In Landmark Ruling

The ruling will have enormous impacts for transgender residents in the state.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/montana-supreme-court-rules-its-constitution

"Inspired by those trials, I've proposed that Congressional Dems could form a "Nuremberg Caucus" that would publicly promise sweeping plans to denazify America after Trump and his allies have been swept from power:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

"The centerpiece of the Nuremberg Caucus playbook is a set of ready-to-file, public indictments against Trump officials who have violated the law, the Constitution, and the rights of the people of the USA. Dems should create and maintain a docket with exhibits and witness lists that gets updated every time one of these crooks runs their big, stupid mouths on Fox News or OANN or Twitter. The Nuremberg Caucus could even set dates for the trials of officials, with judicial calendars for each federal courtroom, starting on January 21, 2029.

"The idea here is to both demoralize Trump's collaborators and to stiffen the spines of the Democratic base who will have to be convinced that turning out for the coming elections, and defending them, …"
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/02/denazification/

"A serious investigation into institutional failure does not look like this. It does not hire a Texas personal injury firm with no government investigation experience. It does not route selection through a conflicted procurement officer. It does not hand 37.5 percent of its entire budget to a firm financially connected to the legislators approving the contract and to an accused abuser in the files it is supposed to be examining.

What this “investigation” does do — or appears to do — is create the public perception that New Mexico’s Democratic Party establishment is doing something to right the wrongs of the past, while ensuring the investigation itself remains safely in the hands of people with every reason to find nothing.

The survivors of Zorro Ranch deserve better. They have not gotten it yet."
https://alisav.substack.com/p/nm-epstein-truth-commission-hired

"Mashable: South Africa withdraws its #AI policy because it was AI-generated. “South Africa’s ambitions to become a continental leader in artificial intelligence have run into a deeply awkward obstacle: the country’s draft national AI policy had to be withdrawn after it was found to contain fictitious, apparently AI-generated citations.”"
https://researchbuzz.me/2026/05/01/south-korea-cultural-heritage-sites-delaware-school-boards-openai-lawsuit-more-friday-researchbuzz-may-1-2026/

"PROTECTING UNPUBLISHED WORK. The Authors Guild has devised contract language to address the use of AI in publishing workflows: “Authors Guild Statement on Use of AI in Publishing and New Model Contract Clause”.

"The Authors Guild is concerned about reports that some publishing professionals are uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into consumer-facing AI systems for uses such as generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy without permission from the authors or adequate guardrails to ensure that the manuscripts are not used by AI companies for training.

"Uploading or inputting a copyrighted work or an author’s personal information into AI systems without permission may constitute a violation of the author’s copyright or right of privacy, and it puts the author’s intellectual property and personal information at risk. Editors, agents, and others in the industry who have access to authors’ works should not upload any manuscript…"

#ai #publishing #authors
https://file770.com/pixel-scroll-4-22-26-to-scroll-in-ignorance/

https://www.tumblr.com/reasonablywittyatbest/815975302282051584

"I think about British Airways Flight 5390 a lot"

"OKAY STRAP IN because this is one of the WILDEST stories in aviation history."

"In 1990, a British Airways BAC One-Eleven, captained by Tim Lancaster and co-piloted by Alastair Atchison, was cruising at 17,000 feet. …"

[description of pilot's front window falling off the plane, and the pilot sucked out through the window, but his legs were caught by a flight attendant… somehow they landed the plane without loss of life.]

"Accidents in complex systems are very rarely one person’s fault and my original post indeed oversimplified the incident for the sake of telling a straightforward story. This was not the case of one bad maintenance worker; this was a systematic failure. The holes lined up and a tragedy nearly occurred because profit (short staffing, poor maintenance facilities, poor training and tools) was prioritized over safety at several layers. Any additional degree of safety would have prevented this from occurring."

"University of Southern California: AI may be making us think and write more alike. “Artificial intelligence chatbots are standardizing how people speak, write and think. If this homogenization continues unchecked, it risks reducing humanity’s collective wisdom and ability to adapt, argue USC computer scientists and psychologists in an opinion paper published March 11 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.”"

#ai #humanity
https://researchbuzz.me/2026/04/16/the-gas-index-google-finance-san-francisco-housing-more-thursday-afternoon-researchbuzz-april-16-2026/

"By comparing MRI scans with psychopathy assessment results, the researchers found that a larger striatum was linked to a stronger need for stimulation, including thrill-seeking, excitement, and impulsive behavior. In the published study, stimulation-seeking and impulsivity partly explained the relationship between striatal volume and psychopathy, accounting for 49.4 percent of the association.

Professor Adrian Raine from the Departments of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology at University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored the study, said: "Because biological traits, such as the size of one's striatum, can be inherited to child from parent, these findings give added support to neurodevelopmental perspectives of psychopathy -- that the brains of these offenders do not develop normally throughout childhood and adolescence.""
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260510030946.htm