Good god, #AlienEarth 1.08 was a satisfying episode.

#OneBattleAfterAnother is SO GOOD. (Also, an interesting pairing with #Eddington from earlier this year. And maybe, uh, #HowToBlowUpAPipeline.)

There's a particular frustration in having a coupon for a free thing and then discovering that thing isn't for sale anywhere in your surrounding area.

Hi Internet! I'm Drew and THIS IS MY FACE. If this GIF has ever brought you joy in the past, I humbly ask you to consider making a donation to the National MS Society. It would mean a lot to me and to those I know affected by the disease! Donate at blinkingguy.com

This is Annie. She freaking loves fall. 13/10 (FB: James Osborne)

[1] it was not² [2] if it was, no-one could prove it³ [3] even if someone could prove it, is it a crime to appreciate a succulent footnote?⁴ [4] in some principalities, it is in fact a crime to enjoy a succulent footnote, particularly if that footnote is not so much a footnote as it is a human liver

everyone should try and ship a rarepair at least once in their life. it is very fulfilling work. no fretting about numbers. just pure being unhinged about your favourite characters kissing. you appreciate every kudo and comment because the max capacity of interactions you'll ever hit is 10

Y'all know you can support Black-owned, queer-owned and small businesses owned by other underrepresented groups at this nice lovely easy site, yes? Good.

BABES, I HEARD YOU LIKE QUEER SFF MYSTERY NOVELLAS FROM TINY PRESSES.

I FINALLY watched #FireIsland and it is frickin' DELIGHTFUL.

Disney adults canceling subscriptions, vacations, etc really are making the Harry Potter adults that threw a fit over a $60 video game look like huge bitches

In addition to scraping your uploads for "generative AI" training, Academia dot edu is going to start claiming rights to your personal info— *including your signature & voice*— for anything they see fit. So now'd be a good time to remove all of your uploaded works, & then delete your whole account.

Covid is gonna shape American politics for years and years because it was the first time most Americans were asked to make sacrifices and they lost their minds because of it.

It is continually disturbing to me that, because I have not partnered up and garnered children, a good slice of the people in my life will never really believe me to be a full adult with valid opinions.

A student recommended I try the Finch app (task and mood balancing, kind of) and now I am obsessed with completing microtasks to help grow my li'l bird buddy.

Anytime someone frames AI use as a neutral act, guaranteed the language used will be anything but. It always operates from the place of incorporation. If there are levels to use, there are no levels to not use it. Only the pro side gets nuance.

Sometimes you click your seatbelt in on the very first try as it’s like a REALLY crispy click and oh man that’s the good stuff

for decades, the entire immigration "controversy", the whole industry of pundits etc, has been about creating conditions in which some people, not incidentally non-white people, could be made to work for less. (Same with student loans.) Articles like this act like that's okay.

UwU

The #Peacemaker S2 opening has really grown on me.

All I saw was cheesecake boat and ocean for at least 5 minutes

I have not seen a more serious threat to free speech in America in my lifetime than the crackdown on people making fun of Charlie Kirk. It's blatant, openly endorsed and driven by the state, and nearly universal. Truly chilling stuff.

I am glad someone is saying this. To the extent google search is worse now it's due mostly to digital retrenchment. The world you long for is one where blogs, newspaper articles, magazines and the like were ad-funded and not paywalled on hit #1.

Me, listening to an #AlienEarth podcast on the drive to work: WHAT IF KIRSH IS THE PETER PAN IN THIS METAPHOR?!

#AlienEarth 1x06 "What do you recommend?" Yutani queried. "F*CK 'IM UP," I shouted at the screen.

I remember these words by @sarahkendzior.bsky.social "Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget. Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them." thecorrespondent.com/5696/were-he...

The most pervasively destructive and enraging aspect of our modern political media is that it clearly considers informing its audience to be a much lower priority than telling its audience what they're supposed to think

Just wept endlessly through #BridgetJonesMadAboutTheBoy, if anyone wants to know how today has gone

"So what if they're testing the fire alarms at work today?" I told myself. "How loud can they be?" I told myself.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

How many times, in how many contexts, from how many internal and external researchers, or from how many CEO's are people going to have to receive this message before they believe it: "Hallucinations" are an inherent part of the large language model architecture. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I saw a thing the other day that basically said “no matter what prompt you give it, the question an LLM is answering is ‘what would a plausible response to this prompt look like?’”

My hot take that's too late is that we each should have gotten, at a minimum, the cost of our advance on our plagiarized books in the Anthropocene settlement. If they'd negotiated payment they could have negotiated lower in some cases but they just stole. And that's the only objective market price.

Ruby Bridges turned 69 today. She is still with us. A blessing.

#AlienEarth 1×05 Wait, is the eyeball guy...the hero of the show?

Some wholesome Trek content to start the week right #startrek #tng #voyager #ds9

And no one’s even complaining about it that much. Can you imagine if we couldn’t get foreign mail under Obama? Let alone Biden? Christ on trial for impeachment, can you imagine this under Clinton?

#StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds 3×08 So, like, Rebecca Romaijn and Patton Oswalt have decent chemistry, it turns out?

The entire global economy is currently so over-leveraged on "AI" that if we don't find a credible use case for it, and fast, we're likely to tumble into an economic meltdown of 2008 proportions, so please, your corporate overlords beg you, use "AI" to write that fucking email

My eye skipped over the word "County" and now I am imagining a movie in which the lawyers are played by Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, and the manatee-to-English translator by Jim Carrey www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/l...

#Peacemaker 2x02 "I have bird blindness." Guys, it is not possible for me to have LOLed louder.

A huge institutional problem that I’ll bet none of us realized was any such thing, exposed in real time

This is the part that gets me as well. Sometimes people will say, “Well AI isn’t going to take Director level jobs.” And I ask them who the hell is going to be Director level when all of us who built our skills over a career end those careers.

Watching #AlienEarth and reading #MargosGotMoneyTroubles both feel intensely appropriate for Labour Day, honestly. Capitalism sucks; we all deserve unions and access to health- and childcare.

Graham Greene was one of those actors whose presence was absolutely, 100% guaranteed to make whatever movie or TV show he was in better. He added instant gravitas and authority, reliable stealthy humor and depth beyond whatever was on the page. Should've been Emmy nominated for "Reservation Dogs."

This is your regular reminder that rationality is an emotion. It is not the opposite of emotion. It is the feeling of being calmly certain. That is not the same thing as being right. It is the FEELING of being right.

#AlienEarth 1x04 got all the way to the 40-minute mark before I started bellowing "WHERE IS SMEE" like I'm Thor at the battle of Wakanda.

Writing teacher advice for Democratic strategists: Your audience is NEVER everyone, and acting as though it is will lead to generalities that appeal on average but not in specific. You find your audience through specificities. Relying heavily on polls and consultants leads to tepid messaging.

EdTech is not a friend or a partner to teaching and learning. EdTech is a multi-billionaire dollar industry that thrives on student data, faculty fear, and institutional impulses toward ever-increasing control and surveillance.

My bartender declared that I was in retrograde and honestly, I have no further questions