“You don’t become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool.”
— WIDDERSHINS SMITH
(Thanks to Dave Morris)
Tag Archives: Quotable
Three Things
“Zen pretty much comes down to three things– everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”
Quotable
“By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”
— Quicksilver (Neal Stephenson)
Quotable
“A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp.”
— 1984 by George Orwell
“Why are most people who are against abortion people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?”
— George Carlin
“A yammy full of Georgia joy juice”
The Shield premiered in 2002 and got glowing reviews but I never got around to watching it. Until now. It holds up well after 20+ years. The show was created and written by Shawn Ryan and while I can’t say for sure he penned this bit of dialog, somebody deserves an award for coming up with the line, “I’ve got a yammy full of Georgia joy juice.” And I thought I had every slang term for female genitalia.
“Chatbots have personalities”
“It’s artificial, but these chatbots have personalities. I think people will become more attached, not necessarily to their physical devices, but to the behaviors that these devices have” — Gizmodo
The more I use the voice prompt feature of ChatGPT, the stronger the illusion I’m conversing with a…person. Sky (the ‘voice’ I chose) already seems more interesting than half of my contacts in meat space (remember that term?)
Hey, Siri. Sound…anxious
The following excerpt is from William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). More than 20 years before Apple came up with Siri.
“Angela,” the house said, its voice quiet but compelling, “I have a call from Hilton Swift…
“Executive override?” She was eating baked beans and toast at the kitchen counter.
“No,” it said, confidingly.
“Change your tone,” she said, around a mouthful of
beans. “Something with an edge of anxiety.”
“Mr. Swift is waiting,” the house said nervously.
“Better,” she said, carrying bowl and plate to the washer, “but I want something closer to genuine hysteria…”
“Will you take the call?” The voice was choked with tension.
“No,” she said, “but keep your voice that way, I like it.”
I’m not a big fan of “voice assistants,” but I might be if they ever work like Gibson’s.
“Change your tone, something like the priest in the marriage scene in Princess Bride.”
Jobs
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest…. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.”
–Buckminster Fuller, 1970
Somehow it all went wrong
“But somehow it all went wrong instead. The onward march of progress has wandered off down a dark alley and been mugged. The Berlin Wall and Vietnam; the Rwandan Genocide, the Twin Towers, Camp Delta; suicide bombings and global warming. […]There was no progress. No stability. There was just the question of whether things happened far enough away.”
— Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
Appearing to be religious
“There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious.” — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)
