Of the many, many problems I have with the whole notion of AI, one that particularly bugs me is the baked-in assumption that if we were to build an actual artificial intelligence, then all this magical shit would start happening.

You hear these assholes on about it all the time. “Just imagine! We’ll be able to cure all the diseases! Solve the climate crisis! Unlimited free energy!” But how , assholes? How would that happen?

I generally like to think of myself as someone who is not overly into tools and gear. I have my specific tastes when it comes to this stuff and I like nice things, but the specifics of those tastes aside, that feels not all that different from most people.

After several months spent working my way through a stack of Rhodia compositions books, however, I am back to using Seven Seas notebook from Nanami Paper for my journal and I just can’t help but notice how vast an improvement it is.

I watched a few reviews of handlebar bags on YouTube the other day, so of course my recommendations are filled with cycling videos. I have now compounded the problem by watching some of them the last few days.

It is absolutely bonkers how much money people pay for bikes and cycling gear. Mostly it’s the bikes themselves. I think there’s something to be said for paying a little more for a rack or a bag or a pair of tights or whatever that’s going to last you for hundreds of rides and many years.

🔗 Three Album Run: How 20th Century Metal Never Bettered Slayer’s Unholy Trilogy | The Quietus:

With Reign In Blood (1986), South Of Heaven (1988) and Seasons, Slayer created a shadow world – a dark mirror to reflect the most horrifying elements of humanity. This three-album run – which functions as a diabolic trilogy though it wasn’t designed as one – ripped heavy metal out of its moorings and threw it into the fire. They transformed the genre with a musical radicalism and lyrical perspective from which there was no going back. The brutal innovations that followed – at the fringes of heavy metal and at its centre – were built upon the foundations of these albums. They constitute a revolution in twentieth-century metal, itself a revolutionary form, that makes them the most important sequence in the genre.

Finding a thumbdrive installer I made a while ago for BunsenLab Linux has sent me down a path with this ancient HP laptop I walked away from an old job with. While I didn’t end up sticking with that distro–it’s interesting, but a bit more finicky thanI’m looking for at this point in my life–I’ve ended up putting Mint on this laptop.

TBH it does not seem like all that much different an experience than when I used to run Ubuntu as my main OS fifteen years ago.