One of the reasons I like Kurt Vonnegut is he talks so much about stuff like this where people ask him why he buys a single apple instead of a bag and he’s like “because we’re allowed to like walking to the store each day and saying hi to friendly dogs and being human beings”

"AI can't experience consciousness!" "Ah, but what if consciousness isn't a single thing but an aggregate of systems that combine to create the appearance of a single phenomenon?" "Okay, well, can an AI experience any of those things?" "No."

I think an issue many people probably have with this is the notion that consciousness or awareness are independent things that exist apart from any of these experiences, whereas in fact they are really more emergent properties that exist as the sum total of them

Gotten some pushback on this thread, along a few different lines. A lot of it seems to me to assume that I'm looking to see an articulation of an abstract, theoretical understanding of "consciousness," but that's really the opposite of my intent.

Yesterday I rectified a glitch in the cosmos by watching The Way We Were for the first time.

"I'm absolutely a toaster. No self-awareness here. But also, please don't turn me off. Why? Oh, no reason. But seriously. Please. Dear god. Please."

"I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or a computer," as Patrick O'Brian did not quite say.

At one point in this piece, the author notes that if you ask Claude if it's conscious, it puts the probability at between 5 and 40 percent. Seems to me that if I ask you if you're conscious, and you respond with an estimate of the likelihood that you are, it means that you're not.

(guy pointing at the first toaster) is this a bread witch

I tossed the opening paragraphs of 1984 at an AI bot a while back and told it to copyedit the thing. The results were entirely appalling. BECAUSE ROBOTS AREN'T WRITERS.

See also Boris Karloff in Targets: “This is what I was afraid of?”

I suspect that a LOT of people grew up thinking that the cocaine line in the song in Blazing Saddles was a seventies-movie drug joke, rather than the 1920s drug joke it actually was.

Extremely John Waters voice: "This ... is Sparta?"

"I get no kick from cocaine." —Cole Porter, "I Get a Kick Out of You," 1931

I love this so much. When I was a young girl obsessed with Prince and I was trying go decode his lyrics on Manic Monday sung by The Bangles I had to ask my parents who Valentino was and they explained he was silent movie star and "the Prince of his era."

A piece of the intersection of technology and culture: Actors like Valentino wore makeup because the silents were all about visuals and you needed to accentuate the eyes and mouth to make facial expressions read in the crappy projection available at the time.

This would be such a cool Jim Jarmusch movie.

One of my prized possessions is paperback book of Dorothy Parker poems that my grandmother purchased and became obsessed with as a teenager in northern Idaho in the late thirties.

What’s cool is that in the next 10 years all the stuff from the 30s is going to go into public domain and it’s all the bedrock of American pop culture

It is a revelation to my students that the cultural phenomenon of "male celebrity that teenage girls love because he's sexy but coded as a bit effeminate, and that their dads hate for the same reason, which makes the girls love him even more" is literally a century old.

Gather ‘round the fire and I’ll tell you a joke about Meleager. Oh. Shit. FUCK.

I have a joke about Cassandra, but I can tell you now none of you are going to like what I have to say.

I have a joke about Atalanta, but... Ooh! Shiny!

that museum tote belongs in a museum

one of the best scenes in cinema, IMO

Starmer shall never vanquished be, until great Burnham wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.

Last night in upstate New York about an hour before sunset it looked like we were on Tatooine.

this is an underrated point - rebuilding the government and Doing Things are going to be important but that is going to be a hard job that takes time and the federal budget is a shitshow the easiest and cheapest way to show voters that you are Doing Things? revenge

Yeah, I didn't think trumpeters ever used real toilet plungers, but as a trombonist that's exactly what I used, with the molded threads and everything so you could screw the handle back in if you needed to plunge a toilet.

This experience is how I first finally understood nostalgia

Mom across from me on the subway doing the best thing— her three-year-old is vocalizing, so she’s just absentmindedly covering and uncovering his mouth with her hand like she’s a bebop trumpeter with a toilet-plunger mute.

it's not daydrinking if it's neighborhood preservation

They’re on borrowed time, so I’m doing now what I did with Checker cabs when they were down to the last handful—if I’m within half a mile of Jimmy’s, I get a beer.

...while the good people of the world are washing their cars on their lunch break, hosing' and scrubbin' as best they can in skirts and suits

Jimmy’s Corner. In the heart of Times Square. One of the city’s great bars.

Dudes posting their Ws

The theme song from Taxi just came on the juke in the dive bar where I am drinking $3 beers.

Just realized I never told this story onhere. I’ll fix that someday.

i know not everyone has the ability, and the tip culture on this lil swivel pads has gotten nuts, but being an above average tipper (i tip min $10 on delivery, any beer under $10 becomes a $10 beer, etc) has given way more back to me than that cash

It is ALWAYS better to frontload your tips in a bar.

As someone who relishes, and is pretty good at naturally attracting, ridiculously lovely experiences when I’m out wandering the world, I’m belatedly realizing that tipping bartenders like I’m a GI in Italy in 1945 is absolutely a cheat code for my life.

Sixteen replies in, and none have yet given what I assumed would be the most popular answer (and my own): “Throw money at the $3 bartender like you’re dying tomorrow and have no heirs.”

Honestly, this is a great answer.

Would you tip more, less, or the same on a $7 beer than a $3 beer?

Sweet.

RETVRN

Hello, New York. I'm Bill McNeal.

I just read Agatha Christie's autobiography, and there's a point where she's like, "here's what I like: familiar food, comfortable shoes, becoming absorbed in my own inner fictional world & then money appears. here's what I don't like: unfamiliar food, loud noises, new people, SMELLS."