Feb 032023
 

The video below is a bit yammery, but some important and interesting points are raised, discussed and… dunno. Apparently there’s drama going on among a number of twitch streamers; I’m a bit proud to say I don’t know who the hell these people are, but the crux of the matter is that someone set up a website that shows deepfakes of a number of these “e-girls” in X-rated situations. Some of these women kinda do that now; some of them don’t. What’s the law on this sort of thing? What’s the ethics? Is it wrong to look at such things? Part of the drama is that some e-guy was found to have, ah, utilized the website… and he and his wife are personal friends with some of these women. Awkward. Is he in legal trouble? Seems unlikely. Is he in trouble with the friends? With his wife? Seems pretty likely.

We are in early days of this sort of thing. With the rise of AI art generators and constantly improving deepfake-tech, this sort of thing will only get more prominent, and society is not even really trying to play catch-up yet. As always, people ignore science fiction at their peril.

Soon enough, it will be possible to spool up Naughty Imagery/Videos of *everyone*, made to order. Like do-it-yourself genetic tinkering, this sort of tech is inevitable and unstoppable, and lots of people will want to do it. How will society handle dirty imagery, fake vs real being indistinguishable, being readily available of *everyone?* Seems to me that, eventually as people grow up with it, people just won’t care anymore. You could walk past a giant billboard showing *you* going at it with a tapir and you’ll hardly notice. What effects will that have on society and on people? On one hand, it’ll be damned hard to blackmail people. The job of private investigators will become first really easy, and then really hard, as their photos and videos become unusable as evidence, much less proof. But a larger effect might be an acceleration of the baby bust. As such things become virtually universal, interest in going at it with the opposite sex might very well fall to prit near zero. And thus baby-making might become rather a niche interest, and the populations of developed nations will slip into the dark to be replaced with large numbers of imports.

That would doubtless be to *someones* liking.

 

 Posted by at 7:28 am
Jan 302023
 

Interesting if true. A 5.9 magnitude earthquake as a direct result of an explosion would indicate a yield on the order of one megaton. more likely would be a sizable *bang* near a fault line, which would be stupid in its own right. The epicenter was apparently a number of kilometers below the ground, so it was almost certainly a perfectly natural quake… but hardly impossible that it was triggered by a sizable explosion.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 8:00 pm
Jan 292023
 

Once again, virtually inevitable technology. And once again, people are dreaming up terrible uses for it. In this case, brain wave monitoring devices to track your mind while on the job to make sure that:

1) Your mind doesn’t wander from the task

2) That you don’t think about other employees

3) That you don’t make plans with other employees for things the company doesn’t want

 

 

 

Any tech like this that can be legally allowed to be mandated by an employer is tech that a government can make legally mandatory for all subjects.

 

 Posted by at 8:56 pm
Jan 262023
 

Yesterday Project Veritas released footage of a Pfizer employee on a “date” talking about how his company is “mutating” the Covid virus. I’ve seen a lot of people losing their minds over this, seeing it as evidence of the virus being weaponized. But I can honestly see it the other way: If you are in the business of producing vaccines, you want to stay ahead of the diseases out there. Figure out where things might be going so you can produce vaccines *before* nature does its thing. If the employee is a bit drunk, or not exactly scientifically versed in what’s going on (this is a marketing guy, after all), then a basic, valid explanation can be described poorly and come off like supervillainy. I don’t know, and since there’s legitimate room for doubt, I didn’t think much of the story. Seemed like a nothingburger to me.

 

But then today. As Project Veritas generally does, they released a second video where they confront the subject openly. Typically the subject does the only thing they can and scuttle away, saying little. But this guy… boy, he’s *special.* I think he’s borked both his career *and* his dating prospects.

 

What we seem to have here is someone who has lived a fairly sheltered and entitled life, and the moment things don’t go his way he loses his little mind. One minor decision different in his life a year ago and I suspect instead of a PV video, we’d be watching him on an Adult Daycare video showing all the snacks he eats in a day, then pissing about how unfair it is that he just got laid off from his six-figure, zero-effort job.

 Posted by at 11:12 pm
Jan 212023
 

Filming pistol rounds hitting a steel plate at 250,000 frames per second. Interesting detail: almost all impacts generate a flash. Since the bullets are lead or lead and copper and the steel plate is almost undamaged, it seems the flash is probably air being compressed to incandescence between hammer and anvil rather than superheated bits of metal sparking.

 

 Posted by at 7:46 pm
Jan 162023
 

I’m not sure how practical this is; the actual tabletop seems like it might not be extravagantly study, being held together with many, many glue joints. But as *art* it’s pretty durned nifty.

 

 Posted by at 1:39 pm
Jan 112023
 

If it works, if it’s affordable, and if it makes us that much less reliant upon the crappier parts of the world… hey, great, soy-infused tires.

Goodyear’s New Tire Is Made From Soybean Oil, Rice Husks And Pine Resin

 

At CES 2023, the company revealed a tire in which 90 percent of its components are materials that come from sustainable sources. Goodyear says there are 17 sustainable ingredients that include things like recycled polyester and plant-based components like soybean oil, rice husk waste, and “bio-renewable” pine tree resin. It also uses steel with “high recycled content” and “ISCC certified mass balance polymers from bio- and bio-circular feedstock.”

There have been concerns about the availability of natural rubber (i.e. from rubber trees on rubber plantations in places like south east Asia) due to the usual concerns: climate change, China, diseases, etc. So if a perfectly cromulent replacement for natural rubber can be had from stuff that can be grown in the US… yahoo. For too long has the wealth of the modern world poured into other lands.

 Posted by at 8:18 am