The teenagers found the first 16 eggs in about 10 minutes, and have now spent an equivalent amount of time looking for the last two. At what point do I declare victory?

Discovered the horrors that Valmont has allowed to escape, and now they're spreading across the solar system! #Venture

Feeling nostalgic for the good old days when an aggrieved reply guy could stick the flounce and then actually stay gone.

At a recent conference, a Senior Investigator sat next to me at dinner and asked who I was and what stage of my career I’m at 🙄🥳

"oh so you're a socialist but you think rich people should get free healthcare!?!" yes. everyone should get free healthcare. EVERYONE. like, this isn't hard. also celebrities are starting gofundmes and athletes coming out of retirement to get health care! this system sucks for everyone!

If you score 99/100 on an exam, and you come to office hours to discuss "what you missed", you are getting this look.

Guys! Apparently there’s somebody over at Anthropic that knows how human feelings function. And apparently, we were all wrong about the dopamine and whatnot. 🙄

Or, hear me out, she never had any integrity.

WIRED analyzed Border Patrol use-of-force reports alongside body cam footage and public records to identify masked agents involved in incidents with US citizens. We found hundreds of names. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d73...

I think a lot of people my age and younger are weirdly desperate to believe their computers are sentient. ChatGPT isn’t Number 5 from Short Circuit. But a quote from that film is useful. “It's a machine, it doesn't get scared, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it just runs programs.”

I thought about your suggestion but in the words of a great American philosopher, yeah that's gonna be a no from me, dawg.

Is it a good sign that the White House commandeered prime time on the networks to broadcast what was essentially an unconvincing proof-of-life video?

PSA for university colleagues (and others, I suppose). It is now Passover, until the evening of April 9th. Jewish students cannot eat leavened bread products. This is a bad time to have a diversity, equity, and inclusion focused event that centers around eating pizza together.

Here’s the thing: the available AI tools for doing background research don’t save time. If you want accurate results. If you have subject knowledge, you know you first have to compose an effective prompt, which itself goes through several iterations (drafts).

Maaaaaaybe but LLMs hallucinate tons of shit and if you don't have domain knowledge (which is one big reason a writer might research) then you might not know what your LLM is making up. I tend to stick to primary sources whenever possible; I have a couple of decades of experience with Googling.

I do think it can be frustrating for people to confront the fact that you can do everything right in terms of skill, talent and work and still not succeed because of factors outside of one's own control. But this is just a fact of life, in writing and outside of it. Just do the best work you can.

Watching the original romcom with my daughter.

OMG, people, THE WRITING IS THE WORK AND LEARNING ONLY COMES FROM WORK. Sorry. But shit. You cannot take a shortcut to learning.

No. Using it at all is a trap. It’s designed, intentionally, to foster dependency & erode your ability to do things yourself. Just start writing, let your first draft be bad. You can fix a bad first draft if you learned from the experience of creating it. “AI” takes that experience away from you.

Why would you dance if you can’t fucking dance? Why would you sing if you can’t fucking sing? Why would you draw if you can’t fucking draw? Because it gives you pleasure and by doing it you improve and unlock more pleasure from it.

but before that, i wrote 10's of thousands of words making arguments in internet forums, i wrote endless papers in college and high school. my writing now is the product of years of work, why should AI be allowed to learn from that work and give it to people who never felt like doing all that work?

Write them out anyway, because bad writing can usually be fixed through revision and practice. Most of writing well happens through practice. It's a skill as much as if not more than a talent. Most people could write decently well, given time and effort.

I…but…okay, these folks are Gen X, right? I know they taught me that we didn’t win the Vietnam war in school. I guess they didn’t teach that to everybody?

We’ve done the impossible, everyone: losing a war with no objectives.

Rejoined Veronica and The Builder for a tense exploration of a Viking labyrinth #ZombiesRun

Where was all this fielding in the first inning, #Mariners?

Baby goose season (with bonus Kid 1 and Six soundtrack):

I'm not convinced Pratchett had a coherent ideology on trans rights. But he seemed to have a constitutional distaste for telling people what they could or could not be or do, and despised variants of biological essentialism. tldr imo you can invent trans rights from decency as first principles

I love this collection of his trans fans interactions with him. And the granny weatherwax quote: “And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." www.thepinknews.com/2021/08/06/t...

if someone is confused about trans rights or Pratchett’s support thereof, tell them to READ THEORY

remember: Terry Pratchett said trans rights, and he was a white man from Britain who started writing Discworld in the 80s nobody else has any excuse

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

So this administration doesn’t bother with oppo research on their own hires, huh? Or they’re really bad at it?

So Reuters has an entire gif for "Just in" when they could be posting an appropriate reaction gif like:

Reading comprehension here is at an all time low. Someone reporting on a thing does not validate the thing. It shows the thing is happening and deserves our attention. If you dogpile a reporter/ academic etc you will get blocked and reported. Get therapy and log off permanently.

A broader way of making the same point: in a formally egalitarian liberal republic, you prove your value through acts of service and consideration instead of having it handed to you based on inborn traits. That is way too much for a lot of people to handle.

Not one for theories of everything (other than the housing theory of everything, duh), but I do think "we undermined the material basis for patriarchy without destroying its grip on the collective imagination, thereby driving many people insane" is a sort of skeleton key to most of what's happening.

Many men are not psychologically equipped for a universe where potential mates are not entirely economically dependent on them. Nor can they handle the burden of freedom from prescribed gender-based expectations. The people least equipped for this are running the country. bsky.app/profile/drja...

Let me re-introduce myself: My name is Jasmine Clark. I'm a microbiologist and a state representative, and I'm running for Congress because GA-13 deserves a congressman who shows up in their community—not one who doesn't even show up to vote.

Lots of responses here could be slightly rephrased as "I know that this famous scientist sexually assaulted you, but he knows a lot about fish so you absolutely must continue to professionally reward him or you're the problem not him."

I love all you last minute people. If this is you, DO NOT FORGET. Yes, you have very little time. But yes, you still have time. GO GET YOUR DOLLARS.

we fucking told you so Griswold is next

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray on the street corners, that they may be seen by others." Matthew 6:5

National Review accuses me of lying about the rise in maternal mortality since the end of Roe: "It turns out that maternal mortality rates declined in 2024 according to the CDC." You absolute fucking tools, that's *national data*—take a look at what's happening in states where abortion is banned

Golden retriever runs 15 feet after owner mimes throwing tennis ball

There's not a lot of room left for him to fall. His diehard cultists will stick with him to the end. Nixon still had about 25% approval through his impeachment and resignation, and I bet Trump can beat that. But Republicans who are on the ballot this fall should be in full panic by now.

I think this is a faultline that runs throughout the administration: They have no theory of mind, and are completely baffled by any motivation more complicated than immediate material gain.

Also also, I just want to remind the world that Atwell had to get her CA driver's license renewed during filming so went out during a break in full Carter makeup so that was the picture on her license. screenrant.com/hayley-atwel...

What Courtney said. Get your money!!