Debiasing the BoardGameGeek ranking
Pretty interesting but unsurprising biases in gamers who rate things on BGG.
Read
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
I'm excited to read this even though it's not going to be a happy book. This touches on how biased our reporting is on the war and those who oppose it.
It's Okay to Hurt - The Phoenix
Dear friends, I know that many of you are hurting today. It’s okay to hurt. I know that many of you are scared today. It’s okay to be scared. I know that
Why pipes sometimes get "stuck": buffering
Something I knew intuitively but never thought about much in detail.
It's Good for Apple, and Okay for You
Apple Intelligence, so far.
A Quick Snapshot of the Microblogging Landscape
So given the post-election swell of BlueSky and Threads…and a far more modest but existent swell of new users to the Fediverse, it feels like the battle to be a non-X/Twitter microblogging solution is coming into view. Threads and BlueSky, each seeing a recent momentum of over 1 milliion users per day are the clear top two.
Notable that both Theads and Bluesky are built with the open social web, and decentralized open tech features are either inherently part of both, or soon will be.
Clack to the future: Typewriters are pounding out new roles in communities
A bit too much screens bad but I like the intentionality they mention.
OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now
I think this makes sense from what I understand about LLMs.
Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
Huh. Why the one model?
Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web
I think one of the challenges is I'm probably fine with AI training for general knowledge or search, but not for generative use cases where my content could potentially be reproduced... but those aren't separable.
How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
Deep dive into ATProto and ActivityPub and stuff about distributed identity I didn't even know.
Something about President-Elect Nyarlathotep’s Unholy Rebirth Feels Weird, Right?
I guess I’m what you’d call a swing voter, Jerry. I am not one to align myself with any political party. I listen to each candidate’s positions on ...
It's About Power
He lies that he can fix it, Dems tell the truth that they can't, and everything gets worse
Donald Trump made people feel powerful when they were scared. The Democrats just made people feel more scared.
The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due
A woman with dwarfism, Judy-Lynn del Rey founded the imprint that put out fantasy hits such as ‘The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever’ and ‘The Sword of the Shannara.’
Let The Bad Times End (1): Apartheid
Histories To Think On
Swarthmore and its Quintessential Tropes - The Phoenix
Hmm. Closest to LMHU The Wallflower? M is the only strong result though. Kinda like J for MBTI.
Small scale is the best scale – Manu
Two related headlines caught my attention the other day: “Bluesky crosses the 15 million user mark” and “Threads grew by a Bluesky this month”. This …
How ‘The Wild Robot’ Was Born in a Weedy Patch of Manhattan
We loved The Wild Robot
Only children are everywhere now — and they might just save America
Some cringe in this but also some interesting history on where some of the stereotypes about onlies came from.
Why are we using LLMs as calculators?
This is all so silly. Maybe there is interesting stuff there but in the meantime we're boiling the ocean for wrong answers.
Humans have been inventing machines to mostly do math for milennia, and it’s only recently that computing tasks have moved up the stack from calculations to higher human endeavors like writing, searching for information, and shitposting.
Work the Problem
A good framing
Making Money in the Next Four Years, and Why You Need to Plan Now to Support Your Favorite Creators
This starts out about me, and then becomes about others, too, so stick with it, it’s going places. Over on the former Twitter and elsewhere, at least a few awful people have been publicly cel…
Why Trump won: Democrats have a coalition, Republicans have an ecosystem
Interesting hypothesis but I'm not sure the same media mechanisms would work on a leaning Democrat compared to a leaning Republican.
My Post-Election Post, Different Than I Had Originally Intended It to Be
Why is it different? Because the version I was initially thinking to write would mostly have been yell-y, and while I certainly do yell-y well, at the moment I’m not feeling it. Maybe that…
America Defeats America
Feels like it
What have you done, America?
😞
And Yet It Moves
Thoughts The Day After
Trump Essentials (7): The Army of the Republic
Scary thoughts about how many rank and file military might doubt an election outcome.
Based on Our Election Forecast, We Are 100 Percent Sure Anything Could Fucking Happen
🙃
Trump Essentials (5): It's The Gender, Stupid
A good point on men seeking to put women "back where they belong"