It’s when you combine sex toys with remote control, typically over the internet.

Applications include obvious things such as synchronizing a vibrator to the action in an adult video to enhance immersion, kinky play like letting a partner or audience member control a tactically placed vibe, or even humorously creative stuff like using an artificial vagina as a video game controller. There is some quite interesting and fun work being done in the area, such as the Buttplug protocol.

Based on your username you might already be familiar with all this, though.

Can we make “low-background media” a thing?

Works as a flex I guess. Does this government agency budget statement really include a multi-million dollar line for “arming fascist death squads to destabilize countries most of us couldn’t find on a map”? Why yes it does, what are you going to do about it!

The world was not quite ready for the FleshLathe.

I listened to parts 2—4 today and even with an above-average familiarity with rationalist weirdness it was a wild fucking ride.

Kinda wild to have a community of vegan trans women whose most notable victims are a border patrol agent and a landlord and who are still the baddies in this situation.

The HPMOR/LW parts and to a lesser extent bits of CFAR were absolutely familiar (and all the more cringeworthy for it). Never quite realized exactly how obviously psychologically torturous cult shit CFAR event were about.

Overcoming Bias (by renaming “bias” into “priors”)

or worse

Man, I’m getting tired of these remakes.

TechTakes (business model: potluck for n-gate)

Nice detective work. The second time I got one of those I figured it resembles the false flag channel ad spammers on IRC. I still wonder occasionally what #superbowl at supermets did for someone to go on a multi-year spamming campaign against them.

Unfortunately the stereotypical asocial shut-in types are not the only ones harboring misogynist attitudes. Unfortunately actually interacting with women doesn’t always make people have respect for them. Either way, there are a bunch of loner types with poor social skills in higher education.

“Elite” institutions such as Caltech are constantly mired in discrimination issues, and frankly I think some of that is perpetuated by the whole narrative of their supposed prestige to begin with. The need to remain at the top causes such places to turn a blind eye to smart or highly acclaimed people’s misbehavior and lets their biases show in selecting who to let in. Caltech in particular is an engineering oriented school and that field in particular has an ongoing history of hostility to women and minorities.

On a more personal note, I’m glad you’ve had the introspection to recognize your upbringing-related issues with women and that you’ve seemingly worked to get over those issues. That said, I’d recommend you to avoid things like using genitals as a synecdoche for gender, It reduces people to mere sex objects and bringing up people’s genitals when not called for is generally considered crude and embarrassing.

Hello from Radio Yerevan. Our listeners ask if it’s true that America is standing on the edge of a precipice. We are happy to report that not only is that the case, but the USSR is once again one step ahead of them!

It’s actually fine to be vague if you don’t want to go into further detail.

AI agent shaking hands with bail enforcement agent.

That’s about 800 characters, though. X the everything app has helpfully made it easier to ignore bluechecks by allowing them to make their posts tl;dr and saving me the trouble of accidentally reading them.

His picture is a generated picture so it contains none of the original pixels

Which is so obviously stupid I shouldn’t have to even point it out, but by that logic I could just take any image and lighten/darken every pixel by one unit and get a completely new image with zero pixels corresponding to the original.

Recommending this recent episode of TRASHFUTURE podcast featuring a great interview with film critic A. S. Hamrah about generative AI in film

Yep, agencies do track blood money on the chains and place sanctions accordingly. It’s just a little more complicated than checking “was this specific coin used in one of these crimes” and laundering is still possible through a rogue exchange or P2P/sneakernet transactions to parties that don’t care about the sanctions.

Programming by hallucination

Bitcoins aren’t really discrete individual units like that. Imagine you send me 0.1 bitcoin and my mom sends me 0.1 bitcoin and I then send 0.1 bitcoin to Alice (ignore transaction fees and such). It’s not really a meaningful question whether the sum Alice received was the fraction of a “coin” I received from you, from my mom or some specific mixture of both. The blockchain just records increases and decreases of a wallet’s balance.

It’s a pretty good way to condescend to annoying people to dunk on them while waiting for a mod to come along and escort them out.