Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies […] we spent weeks conducting research into air purifiers we reviewed (including models that don’t exist) to determine whether Google Search results and AI Overviews are leading consumers to good advice. It turns out this rabbit hole is deeper than we thought, with ramifications that span […]
Category Archives: serious stuff
Security? Politics? Life?
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Rational Astrologies and Security In 2003, [Bruce] Schneier coined the term security theater to describe security measures that provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually achieve it. […] There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these […]
so you will remember
Saturday, December 7, 2024
This Strange MomentA message to you from the fleeting present. For when this moment passes (and it will pass, as all things do), every effort will be taken to erase it from memory, to exclude it from the official record.
interplanetary neurosurgery
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn The practice of neurosurgery on Saturn is almost identical to the one practiced on Earth. Because the art of practice of Medicine was transferred by homo sapiens sapiens “exearthed” 30 years ago from Earth to Saturn. […] These cases give us the means of reflection to improve the practice of […]
the fascination index
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Jon Bois’ REFORM! Bois also criticizes the whole practice of pigeonholing voters into two established categories, of forcing people to have to reduce themselves, essentialize their political views. He criticizes the aforementioned political compass charts. It is reminiscent of Edouard Glissant’s idea of the ‘right to opacity.’ Bois destroys and humiliates this essentialization, this hijacking […]
The sun goes down alone
Sunday, November 3, 2024
A Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac: Don Henley’s ‘The Boys Of Summer’ at 40 Instead of the counterculture being a metaphor for lost love in ‘The Boys Of Summer’, therefore, the lost love is a metaphor for the counterculture.
Universe 25
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Universe 25, 1968–1973 Writing in a report summary in 1979, Calhoun noted that “no single area of intellectual effort can exert a greater influence on human welfare than that contributing to better design of the built environment.” Universe 25: The Mouse “Utopia” Experiment That Turned Into An Apocalypse […] the experiment design has been criticized […]
another day, another reason to distrust
Monday, December 25, 2023
[why am i posting Serious Stuff at 7:25 am on Xmas Day? well i could explain why i’m up, and it isn’t because i’m excited about my presents. maybe i can explain why i have nothing better to do, even. but for now, i just was surfing a bit, while waiting for the oven to […]
Power laws
Friday, December 8, 2023
Million Dollar Murray by Malcolm Gladwell Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn’t just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It’s hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn’t know […]
