Oh shit it’s rooooose season

Why is it that if I get paid $200 bucks it feels like nothing but if I get billed $200 bucks it feels like a lot? I would like to be more rational about this, but have never succeeded.

Feeling oddly wistful as I cancel my prodigy math subscription. It was a huge help during covid when I was suddenly The Math Teacher. We did plenty of conceptual stuff, but for getting a kid to practice no-fun grindy math, it's fantastic.

One of the weird things for me lately is that, although I've always occasionally gotten emails from people who are clearly mentally disturbed, lately they're almost always inflected by LLM usage. I wonder if they're a kind of self-medication for a lot of people now.

The twist is that the wizard/mentor is actually evil and tempting various children with the evil of deterministic prophecy www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-ch...

This is the actual plot of The Hobbit. The entire journey is meant to convince Frodo to just stay home ever after. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/prophecy PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

I think SpaceX is a great company, but the IPO valuation their going for is just baffling. I have this theory that Musk is a kind of auto-generating Ponzi scheme, in which a lot of buyers are there purely because they think someone else thinks someone else thinks Musk is a wizard.

This comic is 5 years old now. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fsd

So, there's a book I'd like to read, which I don't think exists, on the question of why (if the premise is true) certain times and places seem especially productive of lasting art, philosophy, and intellectual ideas generally. Obviously it'd be hard to study and harder to quantify.

Really should've asked about the ship label before he got in. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/free-4 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

I have not confirmed this yet but there may have been quite a fireball (bright meteor) over New England, and it created a shock wave heard by a LOT of folks. Nothing on the AMS site yet. fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_...

Maybe we can measure economic progress by what the youngest generation is accused of doing that explains why they're broke? GenZ: Not working, too much doordash Millennials: Not working, too much avocado GenX: Not working, too much TV Boomers: Not working, too much not enough getting killed in war

You have to guess what year the Ai bubble will pop, meaning a substantially drawdown in valuations for ai firms and their suppliers. What year do you pick? (you are also allowed to say it's not a bubble)

Working on a more creative type of graduation speech in case I ever get invited

I find cheese really good for when I have a stomach-wants-cheese, or when my head feels a little cheese-wanty. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/debunk... PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Ernest Hemingway wrote poetry, spoke French, AND tried to machine gun nazis from a boat. The boat thing was mostly an excuse to drink at sea, I believe, but the point stands.

Saw someone arguing an image was Ai generated because the perspective lines didn't quite make sense, and BOY did that send a chill down my cartoonist spine. (then I realized it was a photo, so, fair enough)

Having a purpose was your first mistake. Wanting it to have meaning was a mental health calamity. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meanin... PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Dudebros. I gathered a bunch of wild American Persimmon last year, kept the seeds on the fridge, and then planted them in four spots, in tree cages, with the plan to graft on Asian Persimmon next year, AND THEY SPROUTED. I thought for sure I blew it.

Working on some relatable humor.

Good entry in the genre of "Kelly Ruins Everything"

Are rural raccoons becoming domesticated? And how well do we understand domestication overall? www.iheart.com/podcast/105-... Link contains audio and episode transcript

Reading this blog about mathematicians having feelings about the possibility of Ai outmoding them scottaaronson.blog?p=9782 Interestingly, what springs to mind is the book Akenfield; a bit of anthropological work done in rural Britain in the late 60s. ia601309.us.archive.org/20/items/his...

Daniel and Kelly dig into the mysterious concept of quantum contexuality: how measurements depend on each other. www.iheart.com/podcast/105-... (link goes to audio and transcript)

Separate from my particular opinions on the war with Iran... are wars today just generally less conclusive than in the past? Meaning, post WWII there are rising norms that seizing territory is bad. Maybe this will change, but it was unthinkable that the Vietnam or Iraq war resulted in conquest.

This book (out July 20th – preorder now) by @zachweinersmith.bsky.social is very funny and you should read it. Here are some summery pictures to inspire you to peruse it in the sunshine while you have nothing better to do – Sawyer would approve. (I, a chemist, particularly enjoyed “And shelves!”)

Funny, I just heard an ad for a company that lets you use Ai to set a day-trading strategy, and the pitch was "using YOUR ideas, not someone else's." And all I can hear is the designers laughing their asses off for building a slot machine for overconfident nerds.

This is one of those jokes you make, then realize people in the field have probably been saying it verbatim for 20 years. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-17 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

One interesting thing with LLMs to me is how they're going to change the way we send costly signals to each other. As an example, there's a little section in A City on Mars we were very proud of where after reading a high percentage of all astronaut memoirs, we listed all references to smell.

We are in the final hours of our "Parenting - an SMBC comic collection" Kickstarter! "Sisyphean" is one of the comics that will be included in the book. KICKSTARTER ◆ www.kickstarter.com/projects/wei...

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-17 Also last day to get my new book(s) on kickstarter! www.kickstarter.com/projects/wei... #smbc #comics #ai

I'm not saying this is a bubble, but if it *is* a bubble this is going to get some scary violin music behind it in the documentary. www.cnbc.com/2026/05/27/y...

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-17 Also last day to get my new book(s) on kickstarter! www.kickstarter.com/projects/wei... #smbc #comics #ai

I think the part that Zach's missing here is how this tension is impacted by the changing nature of university economics. Traditionally, the universities that most students went to in the US were *heavily* subsidized by the government. In the past 30 years, that's changed.

This is an interesting natural test I hadn't thought of!

One thing that amazes me about some of the current prices is who exactly is paying them. I mean like at a discount store it's 7 dollars for a big bag of Cheetos. And, like, I know wages have actually kept up OK with inflation, and I know I can afford it, but by GOD it's extruded corn puffs!

To what extent have you adjusted to inflation? Meaning, like, are there now prices that would've seemed high five years ago but seem low or normal now?

I ought to have deep, thorough thoughts on this, but I've never sat down to really formalize it. Certainly there's an element of empty gatekeeping to uphold class stratification. But for those of us actively doing the teaching, we genuinely believe (based on what we see!) there are real benefits.

A nice idea, in principle, but the workshop ended with, I shit you not, telling us we could solve AI-related cheating by USING THE RIGHT FUCKING VERBS IN OUR ILOs. (I'm still fuming. It was such an infantilizing insult that the organizer canceled the second one and emailed all of us to apologize.)

Not sure if this is a hot take, but the apparently frequent cheating or borderline cheating with Ai in University seems to me less about Ai and more about how sick the system has gotten. Compare for example to learning from a teacher to graft trees. In that case, cheating would be absurd. Why?

So there's this argument that utilitarianism doesn't work because (per work by behavioral economists) preferences are non-transitive. That is, you can't make a top to bottom list of preferences for each person where the higher position is always a higher preference.

In 1981, my father brought home my first computer, a Texas Instruments 99/4A. He was convinced computing would change the world. As "What Is Intelligence?" arrives in bookstores today, I’m reminded of how right he was.

Last chance!

This is the best book I've read yet on AI. mitpress.mit.edu/978026204995... Seems to have gone under the radar compared to some of the more hype-y stuff. Lots of deep dives on neuroscience and linguistics as well as modern A from someone who was in on it at the beginning.

Wow www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gates-2 #smbc #comics

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gates-2 #smbc #comics

I know it works. I understand the economic theory of why it works. But on some deep level I do not understand why musicians pitch beverages on commercials.

One of the weirder things about illustrating Open Borders was learning a lot of the more obscure antisemitic conspiracy theories. My favorite was someone who thought that drawing characters with large noses was a kind of secret signal. A schnoz-based steganography, if you will.

Hey artists, what do you do with your off-hand when you're drawing (and when your off-hand isn't doing something obvious like holding a piece of paper) ?