Tickle Me Kaczynski: How the Inventor of the Ultimate Elmo Toy Became a Unabomber Suspect
Wild
Read
The Democrats Nominate Role Models
They're among the best leaders and they barely won
As Go the Beach Readers, So Goes the Country
An interesting pair that for a more conservative audience hiding the reality of climate change in favorite romance series can be more effective than science messaging
Has NASA's culture changed since the Columbia tragedy?
Let's talk about risk evaluation for Boeing Starliner
Why We Need Fiction
A lot more of my inspiration is from fiction, and it triggers the asking of questions
Apple’s Just Fines
It's a really bad look.
Political Thoughts, 8/23/24
I think this is a very good summary of the energy and possibility coming out of the convention.
The Bro Science Delusion
I get so many of these YouTube ads when I don't have premium
The AI summer — Benedict Evans
I'm pretty sure it's still a bubble. Really like his framing around technology, not product
an LLM by itself is not a product - it’s a technology that can enable a tool or a feature, and it needs to be unbundled or rebundled into new framings, UX and tools to be become useful
LLMs look like they work, and they look generalised, and they look like a product - the science of them delivers a chatbot and a chatbot looks like a product. You type something in and you get magic back! But the magic might not be useful, in that form, and it might be wrong. It looks like product, but it isn’t.
LLMs look like better databases, and they look like search, but, as we’ve seen since, they’re ‘wrong’ enough, and the ‘wrong’ is hard enough to manage, that you can’t just give the user a raw prompt and a raw output
2024 Winners | The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Some great terrible ones this year
That sweltering Friday evening she not so much walked but slithered into my shabby strip mall P.I. office, showing off all her curves, and I knew then I was in for a weekend of trouble because Dave’s Reptile Emporium next door, from which the ball python had escaped, was closed until Monday.
Is this the slow decline of the Apple “cult”?
It is a bit sad as a long time MacAddict
Part of this is that Apple is no longer the underdog, they’re the biggest fish in the sea. It’s simply not as fun to root for the most successful consumer company of all time than to root for the upstart that’s trying to disrupt the big guys.
Tech has no answers for you
Everything I read about Silicon Valley’s support of Trump comes down to this: These are people who believe in spending massive amounts of public money to enrich themselves while they make shitty tunnels under Las Vegas or drop off scooters on city sidewalks or chase self-driving cars, so firmly believing that these are total solutions ready to solve all problems right now, in complete ignorance of any existing systems or mechanism or solutions that exist.
Biden, Harris, Trump and 2024
Slow news weekend, am I right? Some thoughts on the current state of things, in no particular order. 1. I was not a fan of the idea of Joe Biden leaving the race, and I still have my suspicions tha…
Ancient History Shows How We Can Create a More Equal World
Cities may not have always required a ruling caste
Would LLMs democratizing coding be a pyrrhic victory?
Capital wants to be able to generate profit without labor forever.
Trotter: IOC shows little courage in handling of Jordan Chiles ruling
Just give them all bronze, this isn't hard
The author of the viral joke post about JD Vance having sex with a couch breaks his silence
The man behind a viral joke post about Vance making love to a couch has stayed quiet — until now.
Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign
Good, but can't get complacent.
He had been on a glide path to an all but certain victory. Now, he needs to work for it.
Channel file 291 incident root cause analysis 08
Crowdstrike really obfuscating their lack of testing and deployment safety.
Extreme Strong Female Characters and the Transfem Gender Callus
I played the highly underrated Darksiders III recently and had a wonderful time. If you’re unfamiliar with the Darksiders series, each game is about one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Dark…
Heat pumps are expensive. What if billionaires bought them for everyone?
Now that's an effective tax
Study details 'transformative' results from L.A. pilot that guaranteed families $1,000 a month
Let's stop generating the same result from studies and just do it.
Indian vultures: Decline of scavenger birds caused 500,000 human deaths
A new study links the vulture decline in India to deadly bacteria spread, causing about 500,000 deaths.
Existential thoughts about Apple’s reliance on Services revenue
Hopefully the partial corruption due to services doesn't take over completely in a relentless pursuit of growth demanded by Wall Street
The Olympics Make It Clear How Much People Still Fear Powerful Women
Bullying the world's best female athletes for winning is not protecting women's sports.
A Crackpot Theory on Halloween Merch
Millennials are coping via nostalgia.
Everything men do is cringe
Read to the end for hit em
Context, Consent, and Control: The Three C’s of Data Participation in the Age of AI
Eryk Salvaggio says it is naive to believe tensions in AI policy development and norms of use could be resolved through a focus on copyright alone.
Poetry becomes a cluster of words to measure the weight of other words
I understand these as three C’s for data participation: Context, Consent, and Control.
many of us are fine with humans doing whatever they want with the things we share, but feel uncomfortable with the thought of a large corporation taking this material for inhuman processing at scale
It tells us that what is personal to us is meaningless, just another number in a system, and that we have no say in how our information may be used simply because of the vast sums of information that have been taken from so many people.
Inside the 'Nightmare' Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town
Definitely a face eating leopards scenario but this is the world so many conservatives vote for.
Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
An older one but Ted Chiang nails it. Corporations are the problem more than AI.
Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations.
we did nothing to ensure that Facebook’s and Amazon’s goals were aligned with the public good
they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI
We need them to behave better than the AIs they fear and demonstrate a capacity for insight.