This is not like anything I’ve ever heard. And it is pretty great.
Atmo
At sea level, the atmosphere presses on your body with a weight of around 41,000–45,000 pounds.
Luckily, the pressure is equal inside you and outside. And water is nearly incompressible.
ERPy Derp
Funny conversation at work the other day:
Work person: My kid just got a job at Love’s, the gas station and convenience store chain. Have you heard of it?
Me: I designed and built from the ground up their entire networking and server environment for their ERP system that runs their entire business. So, yeah, I’ve heard of them.
Work person: Oh. Well.
Heh.
Tax Freaking
The Great American Property Tax Freak Out by David Schleicher.
I am not against property taxes, per se, but it does feel very odd that we have to “rent” our own house from the government for ~$800 per month.
There is no way in hell that we are getting $800 in services in return for that. The roads here are terrible. Homeless people wander all over. The government is generally atrocious. I don’t know about the school quality, and I don’t begrudge funding schools at all.
But we get maybe $100 worth of benefit each month and pay eight times that. Sure, we have money, we can pay it. Whatever.
And yes, I understand all the arguments for property taxes, Georgism, etc. The problem is not lack of understanding; it is realizing that you pay vast amounts to a government that seems to do very little. And that’s the same government that could and would kick you out of your home if you stopped forking over.
But in human society those with the most guns make the rules. We can pretty it up but that’s basically how it works.
The Anti-AI mob lost its mind again— and Goodreads is helping it punish authors.
Did you know airports used to be fun? Almost like shopping malls. Flying was exciting and straightfforward. It was; a vanished, better world.
To keep drug prices high, pharma has been piling up the patents.
This study looks at how and with whom connected cars share your data.
The US state replacing power plants with home batteries.
AI and the Fall? of the Creative Class.
The night sky is getting 10% brighter every year. We’re forgetting what darkness feels like.
1 In 8 cancer cases worldwide is caused by infections, study suggests.
Turnover in the Labor Market Calms Down, after Chaotic Churn.
Stability
It’s always been a risk to men that consent can be revoked post facto when a woman “changes her mind” days, weeks, months or years later. It happens fairly frequently. This doesn’t make all women evil, but some are. Thus, it does mean being extremely careful, especially around those less stable.
And no, not even a videotape of you getting consent, having sex, and then verifying consent afterwards will save your ass when she does change her mind later.
Computin’
It’s seems an extremely difficult idea for most people to grasp that if a thing consistently produces reasoning-like results that are indistinguishable for reasoning, then what it is “really” doing is like asking if a submarine really has fins like a fish.
It does not. Fucking. Matter.
There is no “really” there. You’re looking for that pesky ghost in the machine. And it’s not in you! It is also not in the machine. It just simply does not exist. Why are people so caught up on the process, instead of the result? Yesterday I saw someone make the absurd claim that if we were to set up an enormous database that had stock correct responses to every question inputted into it, then this impossible-to-create1 system was not actually doing any reasoning.
First of all, that’s not how LLMs work. Like, at all. Second, if that tool existed it’d be the most amazing thing in human history and worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Third, creating artificial scenarios that cannot exist in the real world with absolutely no bearing on what’s actually occurring is like asking, “What if my dog were a chimpanzee with lasers on its forehead?” I mean, ok, but who gives a crap. You’re not doing anything useful. You’re setting up fake toy worlds to disprove something that is actually already occurring in our really-existing world.
The “reasoning” debate is a big nothing. Human reasoning is not magic. It uses very nearly the same bag of tricks, elisions, confabulations, wild-ass guesses and speculation based on bad information as LLMs do. What strikes me about LLMs and humans is how very close they are in their thinking. It makes me wonder if there are not hints there of something more universal related to cogitation and cognition, at least as we can access via our narrow window of shared space of possible minds.
Acou
The sound design in that video below is amazing. The sound engineer and technicians who did that are world class. They understood the acoustics of the space, the performer’s voice, what a lot of strings would do there, and how they’d all interact. Then they built out an ideal mic and capture setup for it.
It’s perfect. And I rarely say that.
Carlina de Place – No One Calls (LIVE SESSION)
Beautiful. That strings section is fuckin’ tight.
carmen – isobel
Well if this isn’t great I don’t know what is.
CRISPR Time
We already have caterpillars. We should create some dogerpillars.
Putin is testing NATO on Norway’s remote Arctic islands.
Workers Are Spending An Astonishing Amount of Their Own Money On AI for Their Jobs.
AI hyperscalers are transforming debt.
Soaring bond yields ‘not even close’ to cooling red-hot US economy, investors say.
California’s plan to save coastal homes from El Niño could end up killing beaches.
From $6 eggs to $50,000 cars, these charts show how inflation has defined the past 5 years.
Freight Costs Soar as Rhine Drops Below Shipping Threshold.
Job Titles Are Out. Now We’re All ‘Members of the Technical Staff.’.
AI Agents Are About to Flood the Workforce. No One’s Ready for It.
Automakers Would Rather Quit California Entirely Than Turn Off Their Snooping Tech.
Many surgical interventions are little better than placebo.
Adv
At this point, I don’t know how many sets I did of some exercises but I know it’s a lot. Without my partner here I lose count.
Such is life. But…STRONK!!!!!!!11111
To Failure
Remember about a year ago when all the clown-ass leftists were saying Starship would never reach orbit? Heh.
There is a reason — a very, very fucking good one — why rocket scientists test things to failure. Fucking idiots.
Never Should Have
Like a lot of modern women, she’s waiting for fantasy man she is very, very unlikely to be able to attract or have other than as a one night stand.
She looks ok, seems somewhat on the dumb side of average, but would’ve done fine 80 years ago. Most likely she would’ve ended up with some guy roughly her socieconomic status and appearance. As the first commenter points out, she thinks she deserves Chris Hemsworth and is holding out for that. But she’ll be holding out forever. That’s her prerogative, though. People are allowed to do dreadfully stupid things and think thoughts that are impossible to match up to reality.
People talk about the manosphere. In reality, women’s mental health and possibility of flourishing was utterly destroyed by social media and smartphones. She is the perfect example. It’s far more likely that she would’ve been happier in another timeline sans social media and phones.
I feel pity for her. She’ll always be yearning for something she’ll never have. And that is a terrible way to feel and I’m sorry that society did that to her.