This, to me, is Blueskyism

The Onion News Network truck is currently stationed outside the Broadview ICE Detention facility just outside of Chicago.

this is also my take. Yglesias is high-profile, very prolific, and iconoclastic, so it's easy for people to find strong takes to disagree with. but i think if you forced his critics to read everything he writes, the dominant response would be "meh, okay, i agree with most of that."

The worst part about aging is that no one wants to hear about the incredible new music you just discovered anymore.

California is best understood as a Greek tragedy. arguably the most beautiful territory in the world, with a perfect climate, yet its stubborn attachment to cars, roads, and (tiny) back yards dooms it to endless affordability crises and NIMBYist apologism

i felt rage at this on a regular basis living in SV. single-family zoning throughout almost the entire peninsula. buildings capped at 2 - 3 stories right next to commuter rail stations. want to put a corner store on the ground floor of a residential mid-rise on a busy street? lol, move to tokyo

this is canon

this story is delightful on so many levels

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

a song in every city was always a hopelessly ambitious goal, but two out of eleven ain't bad, right? here's my seattle song. lyrics in the description soundcloud.com/sadboneinsti...

many people who have no trouble understanding that evolution operates from the outside in, so to speak, seem to have trouble accepting that just because it's a language model on the surface doesn't mean it's a language model all the way down

prolonged inspection of Gemini's chain of thought has been causing me to speak in the present perfect continuous tense

All of NIMBY leftist housing policy is frustrated by the physical impossibility of building a used car.

If we write coherently enough about what bad characters do and what good characters do, then we can align models by setting the bad vector to 0. Unfortunately, then we create the "dark side" where making it do any bad thing turns it evil.

this is true, but fortunately, it's also easier for junior engineers to learn from AI code assistants than from curmudgeonly senior engineers

yes, and also, the little pockets are often abutted by other only slightly littler pockets whose entire identity revolves around the bigger pocket being utterly wrong, but nothing actually changes if either/both pockets go away, because the root sin is irrelevance and not incorrectness

and over here is my favorite chair. i've been spending a lot of time on it lately. painting it, moving it around, just trying to get everything exactly right. this concludes our tour of the deck of the titanic

keep an open mind. but not so open it's readily colonized by Corydalis flexuosa

nature as inverse Tolstoy: all gray skies are alike; each green space is happy in its own way

(2/2) He asked if I wanted to see, and of course I said yeah. So he pulled up a text with a picture from Guy—a shlubby 40 something Israeli dude—doing a mock risqué photoshoot with the new book. So now when I reread the stories and come across that name I get a good laugh out of it

(1/2) True Etgar Kerry book-signing story. I asked him why he named so many side characters Guy. He said they’re all named after his best friend. And then he laughed and said Guy actually offered to help promote his book by doing a revealing photoshoot.

a lovely little story by etgar keret, who is, after all, the master of lovely little stories

bedford farms (in, uh, bedford, MA) is pretty good ice cream (8/10). but their distinguishing feature is portion size. this is a small no one has ever survived a large

arethusa farm dairy sells some of the best ice cream i've ever had. we considered going 45 minutes out of the way for it between NYC and Boston but then i discovered there's one in downtown New Haven. this is butter pecan, raspberry, & maple walnut 9.5/10, would have driven the 45 extra minutes

philadelphia is hands down the botanic garden capital of the united states, and i feel like it doesn't get enough recognition for that (which kind of makes sense, philly is an amazing city but seems to get zero recognition for anything other than its sports teams)

as an added bonus, virtual friends have much smaller carbon footprints

people will believe anything

think about how crazy it is that one lunatic is able to do this, while billions of other much smarter, saner people lack any meaningful ability to stop it then think about how that lunatic is only in a position to do this because someone randomly made fun of him at a dinner once

As a serious SEM/structural junky I still approve this message (even though no one asked). The structural folks:

this is also known as "machine learning"

this is kind of a strange piece. it can be true (and imo, _is_ true) both that (1) OpenAI has no viable business model and will likely crash and burn, and (2) generative AI will reshape almost every aspect of our lives (and is already reshaping many)

congrats to canada but also it seems a little unfair that you guys won’t ever elect an evil fascist demagogue to shock US into voting for a liberal

🇨🇦🍦

my take (informed by both eating a lot of ice cream and reading a lot of studies) is that: 1. ice cream is probably not really good for you 2. ice cream is probably not particularly bad for you either 3. everyone (minus diabetics) should eat large amounts of premium ice cream regardless

five weeks into this road trip, i’m not yet ready to admit i have an ice cream problem—but i’m willing to share the evidence. p.s. the photo below isn't from the current trip; i’m just setting the mood p.p.s. the actual evidence follows

Muppets Tonight was something else

theseus shut up for one second. it's the same ship. it's called maintenance. that wasn't so hard now was it

this is probably ~true and at MS scale, it's plausibly also true that the difference between picking the right default font and the wrong one is millions of dollars in revenue

let's all get back to nonstop shitposting like god intended

if you're a PhD student or postdoc working at the interface of personality psychology and CS/ML (construed broadly on both sides), and are interested in doing a full-time, remote, 3 - 6 month internship/residency at MidJourney, please DM me some kind of resume or CV-like thing

It's genuinely hard to express to sort of normal not politically plugged in non-lawyers *how* lawless the Trump administration is, and I think that's some part of the problem. You sound like you're hyperventilating, but it's just a flat description of what is going on.

the other recommendations in this piece (the sims, van life videos) don't really do it for me, but this one resonates strongly—so many songs on youtube have beautiful, moving comments, and are a joy to read. what are some other joyful ways to spend time online? www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

leaving this here for #smallpoemsunday if you find, return to sender

friend is currently fostering puppies. fostering puppies is an excellent way for your friends to end up with dogs

perfect time to launch my new podcast

H-E-B is probably the best thing about texas, and possibly the best grocery chain in the us, but for years now they've been selling these undercover kaiser rolls in bags labeled "bagels", and, well, bagels they are not. it used to infuriate me when i lived here, but now i find it kind of cute

it was also nice to be in Boulder again (briefly, on Sunday). as a postdoc, this used to be the view from just outside our apartment just look at that beautiful court

it's nice to be in Austin again