「白馬と黒馬」 左は白い馬、右は黒い馬に見えるが、画像の輝度は同じである。 “White Horse and Black Horse” The left side appears to feature a white horse, while the right side displays a black horse; however, the horses are the same luminance.

dark gritty santapunk world where the Great Powers of Europe both mandate celebration of Christmas and encourage their subjects to be as naughty as possible to preserve unlimited access to coal and continued industrialization.

I’ve long thought that Scrofula would make a great name for a pet. It sounds so cute and fluffy!

This is a great slow burn of a piece.

Gauntlet but Alan Watts is the voice of the Dungeon Master: “Red Warrior is about to die. But is not death one of the great events of life? Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to s—Elf shot the food."

Space news is the best. Like, what do you mean there's a runaway supermassive black hole 10 million times bigger than the sun moving through space at 2 million miles per hour www.space.com/astronomy/bl...

In that third pic Epstein appears to have EIGHT pairs of glasses within arm’s reach, including two ornate trays holding three pairs each. Is this a They Live scenario? How do these people get so weird?!

It’s funny how reliably you can tell where someone grew up by (1) the shape of their campaign’s main continent and (2) where the main cluster of named towns is located.

Nothing will ever beat the science center where we saw a display on the Smart Toilet of the Future … and the demo toilet had BSOD’d. An inadvertently valuable lesson!

i asked chat gpt to fact check an article for me

Did not expect a capybara explaining brexit to be so affecting

Grateful to The Verge for publishing my essay on why large-language models are not going to achieve general intelligence nor push the scientific frontier. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Narratively perfect. It also has me mentally compiling a list of other organizations whose election mishaps could be predictably comical.

Truly smart devices would choose not to connect to the internet.

these charts show the relationship between zip code-level average income and individual probability of voting for democrats in different regions of the country. one of my favorite group fo charts, lots of stories to unearth

Been reading "What is Innateness?" by Paul Griffiths (2002) philpapers.org/rec/EGRWII in which he offers this very sound advice:

I instinctively respect anyone who has 1) a good natural smile and 2) a range of other smiles they can deploy that are plausibly polite yet unmistakably *not* smile #1. Zero interest in popes generally, but certain kinds of skill say a lot about the mind behind them, and so far I’m impressed.

OK done with meetings! Gonna take a nap

<creaking and bubbling sounds fill the darkened woods as my undead legions hasten to fill their quivers with fluoride-tipped arrows>

I’ve always wanted to do an eye-tracking study of academic/literary very-fast readers. My strong impression is that our eyes flick around the page (including back/up) in a way that would look insane if plotted against the linear text.

BBC Model Linear B

I watched this right before falling asleep, and wound up in an extended hypnagogic reverie about CONCEPTUALLY PALINDROMIC MEMES,* which are apparently a fitting thing to post on Michaelmas. ... so uh, thanks for that, @misterabk.bsky.social ?

@gelliottmorris.com with the best explanation I've seen for the puzzling tendency of big legacy media outlets to keep boosting and sanewashing the party that hates them. It's a cousin to the usual "owners are Republicans" and "can't quit bothesidesing" theories, but more grounded and plausible:

Extremely obvious level design in Shoreditch. It's a side quest, we get it.

This statue is amazing. My first of many questions would be: why does the devil look like he’s been *oiled*?! Also, read downthread for a twist that you will not have seen coming.

"oh wow Daniel Day Lewis is so good at acting" - sure, could he maybe play the role of an actor who picks better films then

Slightly diminish a book Nine Princes in Resin

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

I played Ultima Underworld on release, but would have gotten this sequencing very wrong. It predated Wolfenstein 3D by two months?!

At a base level this sounds like what you'd probably imagine ... but then it's executed with mad inspiration. I counted at least five or six separate, unrelated feats of brilliant, unexpected-yet-indisputable synthesis. You really need to give this one undivided attention for 3:44. It's worth it.

This is a tension that I feel acutely. No clue yet how it might be resolved.

It's quite funny that fairly early in its history philosophy invented writing well (Plato) and reasoning well (Aristotle) and made it clear you can only do one; subsequently clarifying that we'll typically do neither.

Ah, Larkin - yes, he’s glum and moody, but also comic, sweet, and sincere; alive to life’s humiliations and redemptions, neither of which are experienced on any grand scale. there is just the fleeting view from a train; the light of dawn around the curtains; the hedgehog dead in the mower

A very short post, that has deeper implications the more you think about it.

Step aside, carcinization!

1. Here's a fish swimming upstream. Nothing unusual about that. What's unusual is that this particular fish is *dead*. Vortices in the water as it flows past the fish cause the fish's body to flex, maintaining orientation and actually propelling it forward. (D. N. Beal et al 2006 J. Fluid. Mech.)

I enjoyed this because, like any good writing about a hobby, it’s really about mortality.

It's charming to see all the non-metalheads posting their favorite early-Sabbath proto-metal and 90s-Ozzy ballads, but it's weird that nobody's posting his 80s peak. Maybe it's because there aren't good Youtube versions? The Sabbath stuff was more enduring, but this is what made Ozzy a titan.

An incomparable legend.

This is true! [whispering] somewhat less dominant if you factor out the pre-laws and double majors. And presumably selection effects are a big part of it. But still: for the people who choose it, it tends to work out well!

Wonderful.

Do cities other than San Diego have the entire genre of “-bertos” restaurants serving interchangeable lower-mid-tier Mexican? Just from memory: Albertos, Alibertos, Albiertos, Al Bertos, Robertos, Robiertos, Roybertos … It was like an SEO thing, avant la lettre

@beschizza.com at BB linked to this 1984 demo by Susan Kare. I knew she was a design genius ... but how has nobody pointed out that she's casually using the mouse, live on camera, at a 90' angle to the computer?! Try it now, at your PC. It's impossible! I wonder what she used her third wish on.

Woah.

So clear, so sharp. I’d like to see a fleshed-out version of the analogy she makes here between the blood-brain barrier and (I think) the access permissions we expect apps vs the OS to have. It’s just made in passing, but seems like it’s getting at something important about privacy expectations.

The biggest unaddressed challenge with LLMs is how to get people to understand that they have zero insight into how or why they produced a given answer. These sorts of followup dialogues with the bot make for great stories but cannot, by design, be informative.

Beautifully put.