Maybe the people truly do yearn for a return to true Tammany Hall politics but uh maybe they should think about exactly what that looks like

Tiny Tim, who did not die, unfortunately went on to a long and distinguished career first for the east india company and then the british raj, with a brief 1880s interlude in the highlands

This is Rankine erasure (which looks exactly the same as Kelvin here)

An old thread is making the rounds again, so here's an updated version. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is one of the most enduring and adapted works of literature in history. But did you know that he wrote 22 sequels? Some are great! Some are trash! Some are bizarrely fascinating.

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

a zoomed out view looking at language. might need to pull out all the language specific posts and do individual clustering by language

This politics - fascism with the leader as a meme - turned out to be FAR better suited for the insular bubble of right-wing media than traditional conservativism of every stripe. In fact, as far as we can tell, it’s the apex predator of open-ended, choose-your-own-reality modern media.

proposal: a css overlay of grass that slowly grows to cover your entire screen as the labeler detects hostile posting

I'm going to be mad about this for a while. One-offs in Q1 (tariff front-running, weak consumer spending due to flu season, winter storms, LA fires) created a completely inaccurate perception that "AI is the whole economy". This was never true even in terms of where incremental growth came from.

this labeler tells you a bunch of useful things but the killer app is the flag for if somebody’s caught 20+ blocks in a 24-hour period and I never want to be without it again

You're against the Pythagorean Theorem? How hyperbolic of you.

Seeing this play out due to a power outage is the best-case scenario; what would happen if the power were out after a quake or other natural disaster, where emergency vehicles needed to deploy through SF or LA at scale?

the guy responsible for the situation in boulder

Way to go everybody we broke Time

It's a funny story because the results were SO GOOD we couldn't publish it. (The RCT gods made it so the death rate in the control group was much higher than the treatment group, in a way that was clearly random chance and not related to the intervention at all)

i don't think "why is the left against ___" is as much of a fruitful question as "why are so many seemingly irrational left wing positions explained by online bullying?"

there are massive disincentives to building multifamily housing in the US... higher construction costs due in part to a bifurcated building code that penalizes multifamily housing v. low-rise, higher builder's risk. much harder entitlement processes. a lot more difficulty obtaining financing.

This is why i propose we create magneto, put him in a sphere, and send him to mars so we can settle there

There’s an old Kenyan proverb, often used when someone is being loudly ignorant, that goes something like this… “Unlike the stomach, the brain does not alert you when empty.”

gondolas as a gadgetbahn? in this economy

Alfalfa is much worse and isn't arguably in the best place to grow the crop, but yeah.

He doesn't but no one in DoD will say otherwise (much like the shutdown pay stunt there's a bunch of GS-13s and 14s who need to be facing ADA violation criminal penalties when this is over with) The bigger question is where is the $ coming from

Gallus Gallus Rex when da chicken is da dinosaur #art #paleoart #trex #tyrannosaurusrex #dinosaur

And here it is.

jesus fuck what happened in 2013. We went from "outlier but bad" to ~the only place with shootings. Kind of suspect a reporting change given how insane.

As someone who studies this stuff for a living basically thing amateur hour analysis actually offends me. Paradox has had it's issue to be sure but the actual problem surrounding Paradox Games and radicalization is not the content of the vanilla games themselves but the modding scene around it /1

I can't imagine why the aerial bicycle didn't catch on. 1885 (see alt-text for details)

Wow. This is an absolutely terrifying read. We now live in an age when a single company can, through what appears to be plain old bureaucracy, can more or less brick your entire digital life.

Out of curiosity for anyone familiar with this part of history, was there a similar rise in crunchy/woo/vaguely conspiratorial health consciousness around the time of eg asbestos — when a previously thought safe product was widely realized to be dangerous

It's wild that in California you're only required to have insurance covering up to $75,000. In the UK the minimum is £1.2 million (~US$1.6 million).

The most pertinent part of this story, to me, is that even someone who hasn’t substantially coded in years could almost immediately discover that the AI coding assistance products (like all Big AI LLM products) are designed to create emotional dependence in their users right from the start.

this is especially funny to do on a bike

there's a disjuncture too between "open source AI hacker on bluesky" and "big AI company." the former are enthusiasts that have vastly different personalities and lifestyles than the kind of institutionalized personality the latter has

%notin% is coming to Base R! Heck to the yes. We are truly blessed on this day, thank you R Core. 🤩 #rstats

Great read on the cumulative trillions of dollars of iterative engineering effort that has gone into developing the efficient, reliable modern gas turbine. It is an insanely complex technology featuring an unforgiving multidimensional tradeoff space

Data.

I am one of Naomi's friends who had shingles! I had it while I had appendicitis, so I got to say to the triage nurse, "I have shingles on my neck and left shoulder, and my abdominal pain is worse than my shingles pain." I got seen quite quickly!

I wonder why Christmas in the Trenches hasn't made it into the Christmas song canon. I suspect it is mainly because no one can cover it better than the original McCutcheon.

I love these snapshots of old training dates, it's about as close as you can get to proving objectively that something is very very wrong with the country. The machine built by feeding it decades of data and news stories is like "shut the fuck up, that shit can't be true." Immune to frog boiling.

Exactly, you'd have exactly the same problem in a centrally planned economy with the same people. Really, what we should have learned from COVID was that now is the time to go all in on ventilation and disinfection infrastructure for any and all closed spaces, starting with public buildings.

"My child was perfect and has been replaced by a changeling baby," but in the year 2025.

Crazy stat to contemplate: In 2024 China added almost exactly 1 GW of solar and wind capacity per day (358 GW across the year) – a pace equivalent to building a typical nuclear reactor every single day.

anyway my theory remains that genai is a keynan man with two PhDs who wears a suit to work, and you are a client of some kind whom he must be polite to. this makes the entire llm register stop seeming weird

Requiring homeowners to shovel sidewalks is the logical equivalent of mandating all cars be mounted with a snowplower attachment and rear salt/sand spreader so the city can retire its useless wasteful fleet of taxpayer funded snowplow trucks.

oh you mean the hinterlands tend to lose against the metropole when civil order breaks down? big if true, let me put an entire cup of coffee into my mouth, then check all of human history before I swallow it...

I am asking everyone to remind these dipshits that a civil conflict isn’t going to be army groups fighting on fixed lines, but packs of roaming death squads that will be more successful in rural areas than in urban ones, where densely packed communities can quickly mobilize a defence

definitely more than I expected from them. hopefully it's not just all talk but i guess we'll have plenty of opportunities to find out

But here's the real cherry on top re: discovering a published paper that I can only assume was written by an LLM, full of fabricated citations. When I was searching in various places to confirm that those citations were fabricated, Google's AI overview just kept the con going.

Study the sign and its reflection carefully 🤓

Ten Thousand Years of Solitude