One of my favorite anecdotes from THE PREHISTORY OF THE FAR SIDE: "That doesn't sound like the Jane Goodall we know."

Deep cut.

Somehow it feels really appropriate that this comes up close to learning about Jane Goodall's death. Somebody ask Kate what she thinks about that, so she can tell us all about chimpanzee sexual behavior.

My personal timeline is full of autistic people trying to explain that there isn't more autism than before, it's just that we're better at detecting it, and there's nothing more autistic than hoping explaining something at length will help matters when nobody is really listening.

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

Mamdani, @gregsargent.bsky.social writes, is campaigning on opposing Trump’s authoritarianism and on economic issues. Both. At the same time. It’s not either/or. The notion that working class Americans don’t care about rights violations, or can’t handle two things, is condescending and inaccurate.

Like we need this right now.

Also! If you have access to an indie pharmacy (I know, they're rare, but they *do* exist), they are much less likely to ask questions. I qualify under the exemptions due to a health issue, but nobody asked me about it when I got mine a couple of weeks ago.

Wait they're actually calling it "vibe working"?!

Rule 34 generalizes really well beyond sex, especially to imagined forms of crime.

The new W3 logo has to be on purpose

Everything about tradwifes only makes sense once you realize it’s fetish content. Taking it seriously is about as fruitful as a consumer reports study on what washing machines are you least likely to get stuck in

Anyone else remember the Pivot To Video era where it turned out that Facebook was counting 3 seconds of scrolling past a video as a "view"?

Good morning. The government is shut down because Trump wants to act like a king and steal from you. Democrats have no obligation to support a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy - and DOUBLES health premiums to fund a tax cut for billionaires.

In La Repubblica, really extraordinary text (look at alt text), essentially saying calling this fascism is too subtle, that it’s worse and Hegseth is a lunatic. Who am I to argue? www.repubblica.it/rubriche/l-a...

This clip highlights the degree to which much of business-speak is avoidance of the conflict associated with making a decision. LLMs are a mirror, it’s just our output in a probabilistic blender. bsky.app/profile/boot...

Trying to figure out how to apply 'x is the y of z' to this given Whiskey Pete self-describes as Secretary of War, not Defense.

Inhuman Centipede

I liked it better when they got weird. Now it's just some inane angst-free version of Waiting for Godot.

The people who were very temporarily opposed to violence last week are back to celebrating mass murder for its own sake with a zeal that can only be described as “outlandishly horny.”

Yeah seriously unless you routinely use text-to-speech & think it's totally cool to have full URLs read out to you, don't put them in alt-text. That's purely user-hostile.

Wait, so Noem's threatening us with a good time?

"Let me put it this way: I haven't run across anyone saying 'I'm thinking of growing something else' yet."

Ok farm facts are back! China is so much of the global soybean market, you can't make up losing them by selling to other countries. There isn't enough soybean demand in the world to fill that dent. And farmers... know that.

Ope this is going off Ok folks! My Congressman is a MAGA clown who's on multiple ag committees. As a farmer, I need ag policymakers who tell Trump no. So for every donation to Kim Hardy, who's running against my Congressman, I will post one (1) ag fact. secure.actblue.com/donate/nc07s...

US farmers are saying they "just need temporary help, until things get better." Here's the thing. US farm exports- which are mostly soy- CANNOT get better. Other countries expanded their soy industries to fill China's demand. We've walled ourselves out of the global market, folks. This is it.

ABSOLUTE BEST CASE from segmenting the spectrum the way Ghorayshi seems to want is that it'll take trivially longer to revoke personhood of 'higher-functioning' people. Regime's goal is to revoke personhood from as many people as possible, leaving regime free to do with them what it likes.

I do not know why STAIRCASE IN THE WOODS is a mere two ducats and ninety-nine chits at your favorite online electromagic bookseller, but it is if you’re so inclined to grab it on digital for cheapy.

For now I use PBS news. That will go away at some point without more mass crowdsourcing, but until then it's the most rational, non-screaming source for now.

'These guys, they're just like us' is a bravura tactic for conflating the audience with the guys writing the check & setting the speech restrictions.

This take only makes sense if we assume LLMs are equivalent to persons & the transformation that occurs through LLM "training" & text-extrusion is equivalent to human creative effort. They are not, & there's no jurisprudential reason to concede that they are.

This is f*ing cool, NGL.

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

SCOOP — The White House instructed all federal agency leadership on Tuesday to send out a mandatory message to workers blaming the impending potential government shutdown on House Democrats, The Handbasket was first to learn. Absolutely no modifications to the email were permitted. My story:

Re. Jimmy Fallon. Never thought about it that way but shit, yes, so much of his stuff is ersatz Sandler without the guts or talent. Sandler can annoy the shit out of me but by god that SOB is talented. & guts: lot of his swings don't connect but damned if he doesn't go for the fences on all of them.

Any time people start talking about weakening protections for certain groups I am always reminded of this quote.

The right did this by raising the cost of being on the left. So we learn that the way you win the centrists toward the left is not by compromising toward the middle, but by raising the cost of being on the right. Centrists, who have no principles, go where the comfort is greatest and cost is least.

Was just this past day having an exchange on this theme, with someone who insisted that 'conservatives aren't the problem, the problem is their leaders....they can have their weird beliefs as long as they don't force them on me.' Apparently not having got the memo that they are forcing them on us.

It's fascinating and revealing how many centrists think refusing to compromise on human rights to gain the support of bigots represents a "political purity test," yet also think that a bigot saying "I won't join you unless you accommodate my bigotry" does NOT represent a "political purity test."

Media outlets mostly not dealing with the fact that the United States Government just internationally-broadcast a speech from its Secretary of War that US military is here to "break things", then herded a senile President onstage to endorse it. Quiet part from a massive heavy-metal amp stack.

Fallon was always interesting to me because he always got by on being cute. Poehler OTOH always got by on being edgy in this way that's actually kind of rare with male comics, just constantly riding the edge. Where a woman stands out on SNL, that's typically how they do it.

this is the third time Donald Trump has shut down the government while his party controls both houses of Congress

This is only compounded by the fact that pretty much all speech and visual “AI” systems dramatically underperform for minoritized populations due to smaller training data, poor model assumptions, and the fact that tech companies DGAF about black people.

The central point is that when fascism came to America it wouldn't call itself that, nor would it be wearing a swastika. It would call itself "patriotic" and "100% American."

I hear the President has decreed that it is possibly a crime to refer to Americans as "fascists," but "fascism" is a word that has a relatively clear meaning that's worth understanding. Here's how an official publication of the US Army defined "fascism" in 1945.

A wise man once said, “you get paid more for linear regression if you call it machine learning and data science.”

Had insight 30ish years ago that most business innovation was akin to finding new ways of harvesting & exploiting waste heat from industrial processes, but LLMs are like creating an industrial plant to do nothing but generate waste heat.

My general belief is that Dems need to spend more time thinking about what they believe and less about what they think some imaginary swing voters want them to believe. Political strategy will stem from an authentic set of beliefs.

Nino Scalia was a MASSIVE fan of this kind of rationalization. It pairs beautifully with special pleading.

"Google appears to have blocked AI search results for the query “does trump show signs of dementia” as well as other questions about his mental acuity, even though it will show AI results for similar searches about other presidents."