Sore winners sure miss the mechanism of why they won and what's now expected with the victory.

Nobody seems to think the Heckler’s Veto cuts both ways. It’s basically a corollary of the face-eating leopards.

A family member deleted their TikTok account today. I asked why? They said, "I read the new terms of service".

Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now

A few days ago, I stood in the graveyard of an 1100 year old church, getting damper and damper in the drizzling rain. A woman walked into the graveyard, waved, said hello, and, as we had previously arranged, handed me a paper bag full of human bones. The life of a churchwarden is a strange one...

Let's talk about Cold Air Damming (CAD), specifically in reference to the southern Appalachians. Let's also talk about some struggles models have with simulating both the strength and the erosion of CAD. You will commonly read/hear CAD referred to as "the Wedge" in the south. Long chain incoming.

I am, once again, asking reporters to please link bill text/etc in stories that are specifically about new releases 🙏🏼 www.nextgov.com/modernizatio...

The Court of Appeals of Georgia is closed today to honor and celebrate the life and legacy of one our greatest Georgians and Americans: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

h/t @donmoyn.bsky.social. All of this past year and the reckless spending is still accelerating - and this is adjusted for inflation, so the constant dollar values are worse.

The best war exhibit I've ever seen was "A Distant War" at the Danish War Museum (Krigsmuseet) in Copenhagen, recreating a Danish military camp in Afghanistan. It showed the experience of the soldiers on the ground as they honored the alliance we now dishonor.

Had the realization a while back that I basically code switch in Slack between typing like this and typing like this depending on who i'm talking to and how they type lol and boy is that untenable once everyone's suddenly in this same channel

Increasingly it's clearer to a lot of people what i have been saying for a while: people use "inflation" and "prices" to talk about their own difficulty making ends meet or affording big ticket items once "inflation" became a big media news story. It's not actually about CPI or even increases.

On social media, there is no equivalent to a story on page A15. Either you are A1 front page or you are nowhere. Leaders who can fill that front page with content of their choice can effectively blockade anything they don’t want to get attention

The normalization of weaponized gerrymandering is going to continue to harm us all more and more as politicians follow their new incentives and become more responsive to the primary electorate vs the general electorate.

This is your regular reminder that viewing a systems problem as a morality play is both dangerous and counterproductive.

Text-based LLMs were trained on human speech and writing patterns. That means the interface looks like giving it human speech and writing and the output looks like human speech and writing. But none of this means there is any actual thinking happening. That seems to be hard for people to remember.

It’s good to see papers start to address LLMs as structural plagiarism — provenance, more hidden than the original words or training data. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

English is full of wonderful words as we have entirely too many o them but "creo que" is a beautiful turn of phrase.

This is fascinating, as an example of where an AI tool, used properly and carefully, can help people understand things. This is why I get annoyed at the people who insist that there are no positive uses of AI tools. Yes, many use it poorly. But used well, it can be very useful.

Listening to journalists try to describe the inner workings of AI systems is painful. LLM’s today do not think, have emotions, or “try to get us” to do things. They are pattern matching, mimicking, or remixing their training data using what others said in the past. That isn’t actual intelligence.

I’m getting more and more of these too. It’s depressing.

Liars and cheats convince themselves that everyone else must be doing the same, depending on us not holding them to higher expectations. Don't let those people create a world that expects and gives a pass to bad behavior.

My thoughts are with the victims of today's UPS plane crash, but they are also with the NTSB investigators who, tomorrow, will dig through half a mile of toxic debris to find the black boxes, all without being paid. Godspeed to them as well.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEYe... Wow.

Another reason to give blood: reduce the level of forever chemicals in your blood while saving others' lives! www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Happening right now: day 4 of Big's Backyard Ultramarathon, where people run 100 miles every 24 hours, with a lap starting every hour on the hour. Amazing feat of human achievement: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkAe...

All these people avoiding m-dashes because “AI uses them” simply means that there’s more for me!

There’s a lot of actual news in the world. I find it despicable that the top story in my email from an influential media outlet tonight is about fundraising totals.

Planning to watch a lot of this over the next few days: it’s amazing what willpower can do for people. www.youtube.com/live/kx7SO0v... (They are all running 2 and some miles every hour on the hour until only one is left)

The last Randian will die of starvation at Galt's Gulch.

Great video essay on how recommendation algorithms are changing how we use the internet: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJp...

This is a REALLY good video that gets into the *specifics* of how AI is degrading our information environment and putting truth further out of reach for the average person / the population as a whole

The rot isn't all recent. "When you try to build a single jet to meet the multi-role needs of at least 15 separate militaries, while also being a global jobs program and political patronage scheme, you get a $2 trillion albatross." responsiblestatecraft.org/f-35-failure/

Fun thread of airport observations about human behavior.

AI has actually impactful uses, but the news stories aren't talking about those. Clickbait and usefulness are orthogonal.

The Login.gov Anti-Fraud team is hiring: www.usajobs.gov/Search/Resul...

Looked at my data collections for state-backed activity. If the report were a picture:

The Toxic Avenger is clearing medical debt as marketing for the movie.

Called it guard.io/labs/scamlex...

Grateful tonight for officer David Rose, so sorry for his wife and children, and thankful for everyone who runs into fire if that moment should come. www.decaturish.com/public_safet...

maybe there's still some good left in this world after all

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

when i think of Colbert, i think of an interview he gave to GQ when he first took over The Late Show, and had this to say about losing his father and brothers in a plane crash. www.gq.com/story/stephe...

Actual news alerts sent this a.m.: Financial Times: “US inflation rose MORE THAN EXPECTED to 2.7% in June" WSJ: “Inflation picked up AS EXPECTED, with consumer prices rising 2.7% in June from a year earlier" Bloomberg: “Underlying US inflation rose in June by LESS THAN EXPECTED for a fifth month"

Good day as any to delete Facebook, Instagram, and/or Threads if you have not already The fact that Meta will not rule out using private photos on your camera roll to train AI is abominable, full stop futurism.com/meta-sketchy...