You want to never decline, you have to die at your peak. I didn't, and am grateful for it, people were depending on me. Here's to declining in style. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and whatever other holidays you celebrate, to all of you.

RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115771945778940589 It's likely that attempting to push logic through code that is designed to generate randomness, was always a mistake. There are reasoning models that don't hallucinate. But LLMs and diffusion models are built to do exactly that.

Jake Sulley is a dumbass, part three. Varang, the leader of the Ash people, played by Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter, is superb. The movie is Avatar Two Part Two, and whether that's a good or bad thing depends if you liked the original Part Two. Recommended.

Nicely written.

NBA GOAT? It's all just opinion, and everyone has their own way of justifying it. I've got Bill Russell -- man won 16 championships in 17 years, NBA, Olympics, NCAA, State. You have a different metric? Fine. But it won't reach 16 rings.

RE: https://basilisk.gallery/@dave/115757760534851761 Same reason they don't show wine experts blind tasting wine.

Most played music of 2025: Beatles, Meat Loaf, Stevie Nicks, Richard O'Brien, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Sarah McLachlan, Paul Simon, Eagles, John Lennon, Sheryl Crow. This is the list from my phone. Spent a lot of time listening to Social Distortion while I worked, but I lost my play […]

Tricky quoting John D MacDonald, this day and age. He was a sexist and a product of his time. But there's a piece of truth here, filtered through his time: “A man with no trace of the feminine in him, with no duality at all, is a man without tenderness, sympathy, gentleness, kindness […]

Athletes, on average, peak around 28. Chess players, by contrast, peak (average) in their mid-30s, or even into their early 40s. A lot of what we think about aging is an artifact of an era when almost everyone smoked and drank. And of course they aged and died young. With an understanding of […]

I stopped using pedophile when talking about Trump quite a while back. Child rapist is the only accurate phrase. There are celibate pedophiles in the world, and almost all of them are better people than Donald Trump.

20% lower risk of dementia for those given the shingles vaccine. I've had that vaccine, but if I hadn't, this would cause me to get it. Not only did the vaccine help prevent cases, it slowed the progress of existing cases. https://youtu.be/naT5JJtthVk?si=-rt6ArDww0SWUJYP

Not mine, but I wish it was.

FatSam, his sister and his nephew, were walking to breakfast together, a local Mexican restaurant they liked. FatSam was wearing a black and silver poncho, and black cowboy hat. As they were leaving the house, Jodi said, "Are you sure you wanted to wear that? Strap on a six shooter, you'd look […]

Most of the people in our jails are better people than Donald Trump.

Do I believe in alien life? I try very hard not to have beliefs. It's a poor tool for managing the universe around me. The existence of alien life? Near certain. There near certainly was life on Mars and likely still is in pockets. Intelligent life? Given the vastness of the universe, no […]

I managed to miss the 3i/Atlas psychosis. Read it was getting close, went to YouTube to see if any of my regular suspects were covering it. The entire first page of search results was crazy talk.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@linkingdot/115675231934269313 I'm modestly anti-Christian, in the sense that I'm anti all religion. Beyond that, none of this describes me. I'm pro trans people, but that doesn't strike me as radical. I'm in favor of neither mass migration nor open borders, I am an […]

Managed to completely blow up my new server. Had to have them reinitalize from start. Not sure I've ever done that before, in a forty year IT career. At least it was early in the setup.

Jodi's been patient as I rebuild my entire production environment on the new Strix Halo. But we got there. Her last book was good, and you can take whatever bias you think I have into account, it was. This one is great.

It's what I'd be doing if I was an enemy of America, and no mistake, every surviving democracy is whether they've realized it or not.

Fellow elsewhere observed fash have an end times vibe going on. Yup. And they're not wrong. They have a choice between California and Russia. Not much in the middle. They're opting for Russia, because they're white and racist, and they'd rather die than live in a world where other white racists […]

Fellow elsewhere can't see the difference between "corporatist" Dems and Republicans. Take any five D & R Senators. Any 5. Compare their voting records. I'll wait.

A piece of actual good news in our dystopian reality.

I bailed on Yellowstone after Costner left, and I should have bailed earlier. I'm done with Sheridan, until someone else tells me to try again. His abuse of his female characters is in every show, and not coincidental to the plots. I watched 4-1/2 seasons of Yellowstone. Never came back after […]

The "Evil DNC screwed Bernie" thing? Honest, I'll talk about anything to anyone who's not fash -- though I won't talk forever. But if you're still sore about the DNC, probably best we don't. Fellow flamed out here yesterday screaming that he was PAYING ATTENTION and I was gaslighting him and […]

Watching Google go fash, leap by leap, isn't what you could call a surprise. They've been evil for years. I won't pretend to surprise that they're propping up drug addict Jordan Peterson as an authority figure. This is on the Google search home page on my Android phone.

"Let us be the repository of your passkeys" and "We may terminate your account at any time and permanently refuse to communicate with you" ... seems like a bad combination?

When you assume it makes an ass of u and me. But really just you.

A Muslim stopped the anti Jewish murders in Australia. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3wkey5p33o

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis stated in 1933; “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.” Today, at a time of unprecedented income & wealth inequality, his words ring truer than ever. - Bernie Sanders

FatSam had married a woman with three children. In later years, his wife Amy had referred to this as the 0 to 60 course in fatherhood. FatSam remembered being baffled at first, when young children had gotten over-excited. It took him a while to realize that this usually meant that they needed […]

Genocide might not have been an option for the Aussie PM. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-says-australian-pm-did-nothing-to-protect-local-jews/

RE: https://writing.exchange/@golgaloth/115700478543613491 Can't imagine anything less relevant to me. I'm self published these days, make more from my SF than most literary writers. Goes both ways though. I don't go to science fiction conventions, and don't care very much what that crowd […]

Hey, I've been under distress lately due to personal circumstances that are outside my control. I can't find a permanent job that allows me to function, I'm not eligible for government benefits, my grant proposals got rejected, paid internships are quite difficult to find. Essentially, I have no […]

Nothing that will surprise anyone.

You tell a conservative that evil people are going to come to their town and set all their mom and pop stores on fire and rob and murder their young people and steal the medicine from their old folks, and they will meet you at the city limits geared up for war. The people they vote for do it to […]

Typo, but quite a good one. "Vegetative AI"

I was told to expect a cyberpunk dystopia, so no surprises there. But it's much brighter and hotter and people don't dress as well as I had been led to expect.

Resentment is the poison at the core of fash. They ended up hateful by looking at liberals, seeing people who were better than they were in most of the ways you can measure, and deciding to hate rather than do the hard work of fixing themselves. They're really shitty people. And they recognize […]

Grief bots, LLMs outstanding to be deceased people. Noooooo. Nope nope nope. People should have the decency to stay dead. That's not the same thing as a person who transitioned to a machine substrate. But fuck me, you think people are mad about gender transition, wait till you see that one.

They're not sorry they helped him get elected yet, but it's coming. "Donald Trump posted a lengthy rant on Truth Social Tuesday evening in which he called it "seditious" and "treasonous" for news outlets like the The New York Times to question his mental health, while bragging that he has […]

Modern conservatives didn't only invent a version of the Republican party that solely served fascist interests, they did the same to their churches.

"We are experiencing higher than normal call volume." Any service that lies to you every time you call it may have other bad experiences in store for you.

Finally did, after a couple years talking about it, sign up for two years VPS hosting at Hostinger. Probably set the Masto server up first.

23 years ago, now. I don't miss him, day to day, you get used to everything, even kids and wives leaving. (Even kids passing.) But I think of him fairly often, and with more fondness as I approach the age he died at. He hustled to the end.

I have helped design a couple data centers in my career, but I don't have this fellow's background. https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/

Netflix isn't fascist enough for the fash. "In a federal securities filing, Paramount said the hostile bid will be backed in part by funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates as well as Affinity Partners, an investment firm founded by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's […]

Coordinated Pro-Russian Propaganda Network Targeting ActivityPub and ATProto Services High-volume propaganda campaign promoting pro-Russian narratives: https://about.iftas.org/2025/10/05/coordinated-pro-russian-propaganda-network-targeting-activitypub-and-atproto-services/