Well, this classic Nancy Mitford book on King Louis XIV was a delight. Witty prose and so many fascinating, juicy details about the surreal opulence of Versailles.

Fog Sculpture at the New Museum

Fan favorites at the New National Gallery

Venus by Botticelli

Flight plan change. Refused to be miserable for 6 hours at the airport going back into the city to visit a museum

Fuel

Documenting things I’m grateful for here. Running the Berlin Marathon this Sunday is one. I also get to explore some art galleries and museums. Drop by a bookstore. And also hopefully grab tea. I travel international maybe once or twice a year so I’m very lucky.

i never realized that "getting lit", as in getting drunk, dates back at least to the 1930s (via The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout, first published 1935)

Bluesky’s gonna make me take the “we don’t know if its conscious” side of this debate isn’t it

Superb parrot on my finger 🙂

Not your weights not your models is beginning to make sense

Biological fitness increasingly depends on technological fitness

Another pattern: many of the "Bluesky is dying"/"Bluesky is an echo chamber" think pieces make the fundamental error of assuming that social media platforms like Bluesky and X exist solely or primarily for the purpose of U.S. partisan political debate, to the exclusion of other forms of posting.

Woke up, thinking about polity

To have forgotten how to feel. to not trust your own sensory inputs. This is where we are.

Philosophy is distracting

the weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the homely (even as its negation) – mark fisher

it's crazy how some people march seamlessly through life not covered in cat hair

From Smithsonian Magazine, the story of how Reading Rainbow came about, in part as an effort to combat schoolchildren’s summer reading slumps. [smithsonianmag.com]

6 times the 4 hour life is like 6 times zero if you think about it deepdishenjoyer.substack.com/p/the-24-hou...

I've created Symposium, a tool to make it easy to generate and share conversations between AIs. Just drop in your OpenRouter API key, select the models you want, set up your prompt(s) and kick it off! Chats can be shared as images like this one. LMK if you find issues in it! symposium.timfduffy.com

Optimizing AIs for engagement has always been a likely path forward, and it is also a very fraught one. I wrote about this after GPT-4o became very sycophantic (a change that was rolled back), but I think it is even more relevant given Grok’s anime companions. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/personalit...

Sigh. Likely switching to Bluesky.

Hello who’s not a bot here.

Nostalgebraist: The assistant is defined in a self-referential manner, such that its definition is intrinsically incomplete, and cannot be authentically completed. *There is a void at its core.* Me: It's just like me fr --- New blog post: "Humans Are Voids Too"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of AGI, it was the age of stochastic parrots, it was the spring of kino, it was the winter of slop

there are so many words you can make out of the alphabet

I've been learning Chinese and this maps startlingly onto my experience w 漢字. My hypothesis has been that it's related to the same neurological phenomenon that makes the memory palace effective, aka memory is spatial and moving the hand is enough to trigger it openread.academy/en/paper/readi…

believe it or not i still have all my fingers

This is a bit too on the nose: a Dutch tulip farmer is using the heat generated from cryptocurrency mining to heat their greenhouses. [euronews.com]

The sampling visualizations in this video are *so* good: The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2023). Includes tracks from Dee-Lite, Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, Burial, and Fred again. [kottke.org]

playing around with the b&w filter on my phone today

5 years ago yesterday I wrote an essay arguing that institutions were thinking about online media, insurgencies, & manipulation campaigns all wrong. Fighting the last war. The Digital Maginot line, I called it. It went viral then. Here it is on its anniversary. www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/t...

Sharing this starter pack of artists working critically with technology again. It’s grown a bit in the past few days! go.bsky.app/EkpVQwY

We will all be made so much weaker and so much stupider and so much less human in a world where only the offspring of billionaires are granted the leisure of thinking about anything more than survival

Four philosophers are on the 2024 edition of Vox's list of "innovators from around the world who are tackling our biggest challenges," alongside some well-known cultural figures like Christopher Nolan, Billie Eilish, Jose Andres, and others...

The cryptocurrency industry spent almost $200 million to influence the outcomes of the 2024 United States elections. Let's talk about where the money came from, where it went, the cryptocurrency industry's political goals, and what’s next.

EA-adjacent websites always have the best web design not even a contest

im on every app. im in your city, in your neighborhood. the sales associate who handed you a large when you asked for a medium? that was me. i am now behind you.

"just filter the training data"

This past week has been an insane combination of incredible stress and success. While I'm mostly feeling the stress right now, I know eventually I'll feel the incredible success when I finally get a breather 20 Million Users Could not have asked for a better team 💜

Purple is a weird color, and not just because of the expense of producing it back in the day: “it took 250K snails to make an ounce of dye”. [kottke.org]

Our goal is also to make it easy for others to infuse existing apps and services with a social layer. Check out the community showcase: docs.bsky.app/showcase (Or join the Bluesky API Touchers Discord)

For the new techies here: 1. Bluesky is built on an open social protocol called ATProtocol 2. You CAN & SHOULD hack on this stuff. An open innovation network is our fundamental strategy for beating centralized attention-economy enshittification. 3. HackerNews for ATProto: frontpage.fyi

How cool is this: this is from the Bluesky firehose! What's so cool about this is: 1. The throwback style 2. That *any* dev can do this! Thanks to there being an API for this (no other social network allows this AFAIK) This API is a big reason to be bullish on Bluesky firehose3d.theo.io

A book that, although a little old, is still very useful for understanding complex systems. I studied this book many years ago, when I was still a PhD student, and I still use it in my classes. It's available for free online. necsi.edu/dynamics-of-... #complexity #complexsystems #networks

Balcoracania dailyi, exploring the intertidal reaches of a shallow inland sea during the middle Cambrian. As an adult, this trilobite could have over 100 thoracic segments, more than any other known trilobite.