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There's a passage in "The Hydrogen Sonata" by Iain M Banks where the heroine, who has spent years learning this very complicated and difficult piece on a very difficult instrument, is rather pointedly outclassed by its performance by an avatar of one of the AI ship Minds. It works well as a plot...

Oh god dammit. If streaming services would ban AI music, I'd be fine with it, mostly. But at some point they won't be able to tell... and they make money if someone AIs a hit.

I don't think the discovery of dark matter/energy/neutrinos are quite analogous to Bigfoot. Physicists don't think of dark matter as a thing they are looking for evidence for based on hearsay and indistinct physical evidence; they are explicitly unknown things that must have very specific...

Mine will remain a simple push button with duck tape over it because it’s been broken for years.

Yep. I recently tried making a FB page for my band and kept getting all kinds of locked out for “suspicious activity”, unspecified, before even uploading any content, and even after doing identity verification. Appeal was autodenied without explanation. It’s the damn bots deciding there is a...

Does it never occur to these folks that perhaps it’s the other way ‘round, and the political views follow from understanding of the science?

Yeah same, and same with Logic: bought Logic over a decade ago, once and have had umpteen free major and minor version updates since. FCP for the last 5 years. So in that sense I've gotten more than my money's worth and would generally at this point be happy to pay for an upgrade, as I use both...

He didn't ruin it, the screenwriter with the hard-on for the giant steam powered mechanical spider ruined it. Yeah I agree, it was a moment of unclassiness but like he was being defensive toward his wife, right? It's an understandable reason to lose your shit, even if it was perhaps...

It trips me out that there is a single SpaceX employee who holds the position of managing, en masse, the orbital configurations of 2/3 of the word’s 14,000 satellites. We don’t have Mr Fusion but man this is still a pretty awesomely sci-fi dystopia we’re living in.

That’s where in-situ trainable neural networks will come in. I think we’ve read here about that already being done with simpler prosthetics, where desired actions are mapped to nervous system inputs by training a neural net using the real inputs from the individual user- no need for a...

Yeah I had Luke’s new hand at the end of ESB as my first mental image.

Is that a Minotaur in your pajamas, or just some kind of mammoth bone? :sneaky:

For a time the reintegration of the Black Sea with the Mediterranean following the -130m sea level of the last glacial maximum was considered a possible origin for the Great Flood mythos. Under some models the refilling could have occurred catastrophically, in less than a decade forcing rapid...

You shall not pass… without puff puff first! Anyway he went back to pipes for his pipeweed after burning his fingers thusly. … uh, cool article and as always with Jennifer’s work I appreciate the brief reviews of previous related research.

I don’t run that in iOS safari. Does it even exist? I run it on desktop Vivaldi etc. most sites I visit I either subscribe to like Ars or don’t run so many ads so it’s not a priority. Either way a site should not be so ad-ridden as to be unusable without a blocker or it comes off as spammy...

I played the crap out of Civ VI and I don’t like everything about VII but here is what I do like about it: endgame is waaaay less of a slog. You don’t have AIs building dozens of hideously OP giant Death Robots and then not using them in any effective way because otherwise they would always...

Wow, spacevoyaging.com puts interstitial ads between the manage cookies link and the manage cookies page, and then embeds more ads on the manage cookies /policy page. Somehow I’d not seen anyone stoop that low before. Also the article is credited to the site founder, fine, but really reads...

Curious to read the No Man’s Sky stories. My experience with it was enjoyable for a while, building some cool bases in scenic places, making stuff, moving on to get a small fleet together… then I put it down for a while and when I came back, I couldn’t remember what I’d been working on. So I’m...

I loved the era of games where you had to learn something about computers to even get them to run. Kids these days (TM) are constantly using what used to be insane levels of computing power and have no freaking clue how it works. Clicky, scrolly, swipey.

Most simply don’t understand it. They don’t know how any of the internet works. I have run across many students who don’t know that their professors can see on the learning platform whether and how much of an assigned video they watched. Or that the platform can report whether, when, and how...