TFW getting back into my cardio groove after being injured since the spring.

The untold details of career military life that you never see in recruiting brochures: we've had this shopping-bag-of-empty-shopping-bags for longer than we've had our younger kid. It's traveled something like 25k miles in that time.

this exists it is called thinking

The question that should worry people isn’t invasion, rather the behavior change from the PRC once such a safety blanket is established. Deterrence is the dance ticket. You’ve gotta dance.

Gang, go fill out this survey and tell the IRS you would like to have a free online way to file your taxes directly with the IRS.

Tell the IRS that we all love direct file (and that Intuit/Turbo Tax's lobbists can go pound salt)

[family evening walk] Me: "That's the Potomac over there. Y'know, George Washington once threw a dollar across that." Eldest: "He did not." Me: "Sure he did. Back then a dollar went a lot farther."

When the herd bolts, it bolts all at once in the same direction. Someone was telling me earlier they think investors have a good case here for claiming they were defrauded but I don’t know: if someone sells you a perpetual motion machine and you believe them, then surely caveat emptor applies.

Brandolini's law in the workplace: the amount of energy needed to understand that a request is bullshit is an order of magnitude higher than to shoot off bullshit requests in the first place. AI saves a minute of time for the people sending out walls of text, at the cost of hours of deciphering it.

This will save what, 3 seconds net, at the expense of a moment of remotely human interaction with your spouse? I'm reminded of the Brian Regan bit about microwave directions for Pop Tarts. "If you need zap-fry your Pop Tarts before you head out the door, might wanna loosen up your schedule."

Swords Without Master is an absolute gem of a tabletop RPG, one of my all-time favorites. I am hyped.

All must know where Swords Without Master can be found. For now, in Worlds Without Master issue 3. One day, in a new place, for those with the strength to seek it there.

Happy Birthday Coast Guard!

In a stunning moment of carnal desire, my calculator said “BOOBIE5”

wow I asked it if it's becoming conscious this is scary

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results. t.co/JXeTALBPds

This cannot be overemphasized. There's been so much screeching about "the AI people don't care to make their machines tell the truth," but "truth" as a concept does not even intersect with how these technologies function.

Today in "You have to be smarter than your tools:" overreliance on LLMs shown to literally decrease brain activity and memory. time.com/7295195/ai-c...

I have one about Sisyphus but it's a heavy lift

The professionalism of the military is not the guardrail for democracy. It is the airbag. People need to demand more from elected officials, and stop hoping the military will prevent serious problems or somehow fix everything.

LOL🌚

There’s a story which may well be apocryphal: at an art exhibition in the 1880s the Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin took General Helmuth von Moltke (the elder) on a tour of the gallery. There he led the general in front of his painting, “The Apotheosis of War,” (1871).

"Fuck you, sit closer to the salt."

Just a quick mention that... Swords Without Master is in Worlds Without Master, issue 3 ...in case you were thinking about playing a game that takes the tone of the tale you're telling and puts it front and center in the mechanics.

I have a pre-existing condition; it's called not wanting covid

today, when explaining to my partner how LLMs work (she wanted to know how they can make up something) I had the realization that STEP ONE of teaching people about LLMs is "they do not understand words as having meaning." Landed on the metaphor of legos; they are constructing outputs.

Inhumanity aside, current AI tools can't do any of this, are not precursors to tools that can do this, are not part of the development cycle of tools that could do this and are not being made by companies with any plausible path of development toward building tools that could do this.

Didn't PCS the plastic bag full of other plastic bags. This might actually constitute growth.

What is a cardboard tube but a highly processed stick?

Man, you have not experienced a PCS packout until you've had a typhoon of nine Japanese dudes descend on your home.

seinfeld characters as intelligence services: a thread

in retrospect it's kind of funny that sci fi was like "imagine a world where robots gain sentience, but humanity refuses to grant them personhood" but in reality every loser techbro loser thinks chatgpt deserves more rights than like, actual people

[family dinner discussion, "what did we learn today"] Wife: The platypus is a mammal but lays eggs, is duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed, venomous, has electroreceptors for locating prey, eyes with double cones, no stomach and 10 sex chromosomes. It's fluorescent and glows under UV light. 1/2

All we need to do is fire every service provider and we'll have billions of dollars to provide services.

"It’s said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable."

A reminder inspired by ongoing actual events: You never know when you're a single interaction away from your entire life potentially changing, or even what relationship today may yield such an impact years into the future.

Americans will go on vacation to a place that isn’t a car sewer, walk and take public transit for 8-12 hrs. a day, notice a change in their health, and attribute it to “they must not have the Illuminati chemicals here”

My own opinion is that it's good to signal (through words and/or actions) the virtues that you value; that's one of the most important parts of maintaining a healthy community.

Locked up my Twitter account because I'm largely done over there. (I'm not deleting it; preserves my DM history and negates any risk of impersonation.) The community there was a lifeline in the wake of the G+ shutdown and then COVID lockdowns. This places feels much like that, now.

Behold: the clam before the storm.

Looking to get the year off on the right foot with a little reflection? This is my third year doing YearCompass and it's really great. We've expanded it into a family ritual, and it helped make 2024 was our best year ever in a LOT of ways. yearcompass.com

Tonight, we're celebrating the arrival of 2025 at 7pm (JST), because that's midnight in the archipelagic nation of Kiribati, the farthest-forward time zone on the planet at GMT+14. (By *total* coincidence: also before everyone's bedtime.)

Started today's workout on my watch a little too quickly. Apparently I lifted a mile and a half.

I feel like if I wrote a satirical scifi piece about an AI company CEO whose kids refuse to play with AI toys because they're boring engagement bait compared to using your own imagination, I'm sure my edit would gently tell me to make it a little less on the nose.

Stop Forcing A.I. into Fucking EVERYTHING!

USMC Talent Management update dropped. Lotta good stuff in here! Looks like Senior Enlisted Career Designation is still happening, just years late. media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/19/...