Are you fucking kidding me.

Fuck these fucking goons.

IT IS TIME.

Well things just got interesting again.

Whenever The Rapture comes up I think about these blog reviews I used to read of the Left Behind books from a Christian writer who said, over and over, "How exactly is God calling billions of souls up to Heaven one day not procedurally identical to God just killing billions of people?"

Whenever The Rapture comes up I think about these blog reviews I used to read of the Left Behind books from a Christian writer who said, over and over, "How exactly is God calling billions of souls up to Heaven one day not procedurally identical to God just killing billions of people?"

Either direction you take this, the epistemological ("What do people think they mean when they tell you what the crime rate is?") or the ruthlessly tactical ("We need to use state power to push certain ideas") has to, at some point, figure out "How do people form their ideas about their world?"

Its not *entirely* a product of new media technologies or capture of mass media by a small handful of capital holders, but its also very clearly not just organic emergent belief systems produced by the idiosyncrasies of intra-community communication.

I understand critiques that some people are giving the term "media environment" too much vague explanatory power but like...this is clearly a phenomenon emerging out of dynamics of social communication and nobody has really put forth a good comprehensive theory that we can start doing something with

really wish more people read/ engage with this book www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/elain...

Separate projects to redo both our building's front entryway and refinish the back steps have converged to a point where we could, in theory, schedule them to occur on the same days and I think that would be extremely funny.

I was walking down a street in New York and I thought how lovely it was, with the trees and the light. Tried to take a photo and this came out. It’s incredible how blind we become to the ugliness of cars. They really do mess things up. Yet somehow we manage to filter them out.

Thread for concerned Chicagoans.

Assuming this is...what it looks like: Brainiac is a villain I'm always way more interested in in theory then in practice, but the stuff he did in Superman with Kryptonian culture points to some potentially interesting directions to take things.

“It gives the illusion I was standing as some lone warrior in a cloud of gas,” Evans said. “It just happened to be the way the photo was framed. But people got hurt, people were hurt purposefully.”

Fun story this morning. I spoke with Curtis Evans, the retired Marine in the viral photo below who took part in the anti-ICE protest at Broadview. He's a thoughtful guy, well read and with a dry sense of humor. Story @taskandpurpose.com taskandpurpose.com/news/marine-...

I mean yeah this is exactly it, these are the actions of a nation extremely confident that International Law exists to serve them and never in any way bind them. Its the raw, bloodthirsty arrogance of a system that believes there is nobody else powerful enough to cause real reprisal.

I want to read the history of the NYSE to see how the two developed in tandem, but the case being made is that the rapid transformation of grain shipments into fungible commodities creates an entire parallel currency backed by grain instead of gold leading to an explosion of speculative trading.

It’s been a second since I’ve had a chance to really sit down and read, but I’ve come back to this and boy is this a thought provoking book. As argued, the development of Chicago’s grain trading infrastructure basically invents the modern economy.

Images from films shot by cinematographer Owen Roizman - BOTD in 1936 The French Connection (1971) The Heartbreak Kid (1972) The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Mangrove forests are a tremendous store of carbon, or quick cash if logged. In Indonesia, protecting forests for now and the future is undertaken by indigenous patrols, outpaced by those they seek to stop. The latest feature at @cipolicy.bsky.social internationalpolicy.org/publications...

GPT! GPT! GPT! GPT! “I hear those chats are awful loud…” It’s hosted safely in the cloud! “Is there a chance the bot could lie?” Not on your life, and nor will I!

Going to try and be out there again on Friday morning.

We heard you like irresponsible journalism so we did some journalism from our national platform as irresponsibly as humanly possible about a community going through a major crisis, pls subscribe

I've been trying to understand why this isn't generating as much fury as it should, and i think it's because there is a fundamental belief among many americans that the military can pretty much do whatever (which isn't entirely inaccurate.) that said, what the actual fuck.

This is a really good read, and I definitely see myself in some of the early misapprehensions described.

It’s been a second since I’ve had a chance to really sit down and read, but I’ve come back to this and boy is this a thought provoking book. As argued, the development of Chicago’s grain trading infrastructure basically invents the modern economy.

Working to independently confirm this if we can. Broadview mayor Katrina Thompson told us she hadn’t been informed of the plans. ICE, CBP and DHS officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

Like, I am just very skeptical that increasing the rate at which the system produces “I Don’t Know” responses will meaningfully reduce the rate of incorrect information provided in the remaining set of non-I Don’t Know responses.

Or, hear me out, we could have an honest analysis of what sorts of uses these systems are capable of reliably and safely providing utility for and we could not roll them out to all the other ones where they aren’t!

And the second and third points are just marketing. It remains extremely unclear how much representational or computational capacity LLMs even have, but based on even the studies emerging from the companies themselves my answer is “barely any at all.” It’s at best massively inefficient emulation.

Yes, a piece of information is more likely to be faithfully reproduced the more often it appears in the training data, but it’s not “less certain” in any way about information that appears less often. Training it to say “I don’t know” more frequently doesn’t make it smarter.

I’m glad these headlines are getting written but the paper in question, by OpenAI, still annoys me. It presents the problem as models being unable to deal with “uncertainty”, which I think is a misleading framework for understanding what’s happening even when they work “correctly”.

I’m at a community meeting about resisting ICE in Chicago. There are about 400 people in this high school auditorium. Chicago is showing up.

Apparently Furious Spoon ramen has closed completely, all of their Chicago locations appear to be out of business, and all the comments are just savaging them lmao. A lot of “Good riddance.” Can’t say I disagree.

Seeing the Bill Watterson originals full of pencil lines of stuff that didn’t work, scuffs the eraser didn’t pick up, white out galore and more was something I needed to see to remind myself that nothing is perfect the first go and tweaks need to be made and you’re allowed to try again.

I’m glad these headlines are getting written but the paper in question, by OpenAI, still annoys me. It presents the problem as models being unable to deal with “uncertainty”, which I think is a misleading framework for understanding what’s happening even when they work “correctly”.

The success of Costco really demonstrates how much other stuff doesn’t matter if you make your customers feel, on a basic level, like you respect them. I don’t think Target could get away with having receipt checkers at the exits. Definitely not today.

I was at an awards dinner with Weird Al when I was much younger, and I was such a huge fan of his, and we only got a few moments to chat but he was just the coolest, most gracious guy. He just seems to like that people like what he does.

I knew that people liked the Mike Flanagan Ouija movie but I did not expect it to *immediately* be the most Flanaganey movie imaginable in like 60 seconds lol. And two years before Hill House too.

I admit I did not expect them to publicly reveal that they’re huge babies and all this stuff is actually working super well. Thanks guys.

Basically there are only three things that can keep an American small town afloat: a regional hospital, a university, or a manufacturing plant. The H1B policy takes very direct aim at all three

What sort of scientific breakthrough do you really recall grabbing the public imagination recently? The only one I can think of is the MRNA vaccine, and the imagination around that one got completely hijacked by fear and paranoia.

I really do think part of the issue with modern Trek is just that there’s a significantly diminished culture of scientific interest from which to pull story ideas in the 2020s then at maybe any time in the last century.

Working my way through Season 2 of Star Trek: The Next Generation again randomly, and you know, every time through this season I start to appreciate it more. It’s like one good season of them actually managing to modernize the style and tone of TOS before they realize they have to grow beyond it.