The number of times someone who didn't take performance enhancing drugs was described by anyone as "too muscular" in the entire history of humanity can be probably counted in one hand.

Suppose that "someone" is a woman. Would you stick to the same claim? Even my Dunbar-sized social circle includes people who consistently describe as "too muscular" women with any amount of visible muscle.

If someone told me they produced a 300-page novel by hand—I would be impressed. 

If someone else told me they produced a 300-page novel with the aid of an LLM (that wrote the vast majority of the book) and the human merely organized the AI-generated content—I would consider the real author to be the LLM and the human would merely be an editor (or, at best, an artist creating a collage).

Imagine a photographer taking pictures with a fancy digital camera. Should we consider the camera as the real author and the person holding it as some clever impostor?

I'm not trolling. This was a serious question when photography was invented. For decades, art critics refused to consider photography as True Art. If we can plausibly claim that a professional photographer can sometimes be an Artist, I think that we also should accept that a novelist writing with AI assistance could be considered as such. Note that typing "write me a 300-page novel" into the prompt won't get you good results, even with the most powerful models. The human has still to do heavy editing work... as long as not everyone can do that, the concept of "AI Artist" could be in some sense meaningful.

Italy outright criminalizes surrogacy. Rarely do we see such extreme moral confusion, or such clear cases of civilizational suicide.

Your periodical reminder that the Italian government meets within walking distance from the Vatican.

The linked article frames this as "the Pope obviously hates homosexual couples and doesn't want them to have children", but I think this quite misses the point. The Catholic Church has been advocating against IVF since forever, and they don't care if most surrogacy-seekers are heterosexual couples. According to doctrine it's morally equivalent to abortion, period.

I'm actually quite surprised that no one else outside Rome has tried to fully ban surrogacy on religious grounds. Is no other government Catholic enough?

Here are some examples, all said in a heartfelt, emotionally connected way: “I’m happy you are here”, “I start smiling when I see you, I like having you around”, “I like you”, “I like talking to you”.

I'm trying to imagine myself receiving this sort of compliments from someone other than a close friend, and I probably won't be very happy about it... "I start smiling when I see you" in particular is vaguely scary (while the others are just blunt and would leave me embarassed).

Yup, I know people among all age categories who basically never read books on their own. One of them was my grandpa (RIP), who once tried to read a long fiction book (I don't remember which one), managed to read one page a day with significant effort, and quitted shortly after.

We see similar patterns in the transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics or discursive Greek geometric algebra to symbolic Arabic equations or superstitious alchemy to physically grounded chemistry. There are thousands of other examples. It is not a general rule that all the past knowledge must be learned to create something new. Often, past knowledge is completely supplanted by a new discovery and progress can continue without increasing, and often decreasing, the necessary educational investment.

The Ptolemaic model is an extreme example. I doubt that we can actually find thousands of other huge corpus of accumulated knowledge who were later utterly trashed. Yes, students today do not learn the Ptolemaic model, because it was plain wrong. But the transition from Netwonian to relativistic mechanic is definitely not in the same reference class, since high school students today are still starting physics courses studying Netwonian mechanics, which are a very good approximation of relativistic mechanics in simplified conditions. You can't just dismiss Newton as superseded by Einstein (and I also doubt that Greek geometry is dead).

Moreover, if you sit in the frontier of knowledge developing a shiny new model, you can't just blatantly ignore the current model (even if it's wrong): that luxury will belong to future scientists. The developer of the new model must also master the old one in order to explain why the new one is better.

There's a thing in our very literate modern society which still survives following more or less the same pattern: jokes (and the longer ones in particular).

Think about it: even if you can easily find printed books full of jokes, in practice jokes are mostly an oral thing. You tell one to a friend, who in turn tells it to another friend, and so on. But unless the joke is a single sentence, at every step in the chain it will be distorted and retold a bit, even if it remains recognizably the same joke (for some people, adding a lot more words to the original version is also not uncommon). Nobody is expected to remember a joke word-by-word, and even the same person telling the same joke twice will probably not use the very same words. Yet it will be the same joke.

Maybe being a guslar is not so different from telling a joke 2294 lines long. Note also that "being able to repeat a joke non-exactly after hearing it once" is not considered difficult, even if the joke is 200+ words long (while "being able to repeat 200 words exactly" is basically impossible for the average person).

I find quite amusing for this post to have been published the same day as this smbc.

I'm sure that most cryptographers reading this post did not believe me when I mentioned that FHE schemes with perfect secrecy do exist.

This is a 2013 paper that was already cited 71 times according to Google Scholar... I'm not a cryptographer but I would bet that the average cryptographer is not fully clueless about this.

What does it mean to not even be trying?

It does not only mean the things Alexander pointed us to last time, like 62% of singles being on zero dating apps, and a majority of singles having gone on zero dates in the past year, and a large majority not actively looking for a relationship.

Maybe this does not apply to the Bay Area, but I find worth saying that if you live in the average town, being on a dating app comes with some social stigma attached, for both genders (much less than actively paying sex workers, I suppose, but still). I am on zero dating apps, but I'm pretty sure that my mother would scold me forever should I ever try that. Anyway, this has nothing to with the actual reason I'm not on dating apps, which is that I don't want a relationship in the first place (not in the usual "I stopped trying" sense, I literally mean "I never tried because I'm very happy being left alone"... can we please acknowledge that "no relationships" could be an actual preference for some people?)