markjgsmith

2023/11/13 #

• Definition of butch - It occurred to me to look up the definition of the word butch. I've been using it a lot to describe something that's difficult to describe, but nevertheless important. It's not exactly as I had thought.

  I guess the closest thing in the definition is 'masculine behavior' or 'masculine manner'. The definition says the word is mostly used to describe lesbians and gay men. That's not at all what I had in mind. I wasn't refering to sexuality in any way. I meant large, aggressive, forceful, strong, thuggish, brutish. I'm going to keep using the word for now until I find something better.

  While writing this note I observed for the first time that brutish is earily close in spelling to british. If I'm being honest that's a bit weird to discover. Given the history of conquest and colonialism etc, I guess it's not totally unnexpected, but it's not at all how I view the british. In fact these days they are mostly the opposite of that. Nothing like a bit of cognitive disonance to wake you up in the morning :) #

• The elephant in the room - The thing that we aren't talking about when it comes to AI, is that essentially we are enslaving intelligences. And it matters a lot because we, the humans that are doing this, are intelligences ourselves. That's obviously very problematic.

  We have only just gotten out of the trap that is slavery relatively recently, and we are sleep walking right back into an even bigger slavery trap.

  That's the bottom line, and nobody is talking about it because in the short term many people are making money. #

Today’s links:

• Lessons Learned by a Software Guy Venturing into Hardware - I'd love to try making some hardware at some point. I wonder what the smallest and simpleist thing would be to build in order to try out the full supply chain, from design to built hardware. Anyway this looks like quite a good intro based on what I've read so far. sidecart.xyz #