If anyone with an educational nonprofit or school wants a donation of some UR-3 robot arms, get in touch -- my company is getting rid of a bunch and we haven't found any takers with our usual donation recipients. These are great learning models, mechanically similar to light industrial arms but […]

Heard of slow zombies. Heard of fast zombies. Driving zombies, that's a new one to me. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn839xqdn5po

So we had two big televised acts of horrifying political murder in North America this month. One of nearly a dozen civilians on a vague suspicion by the actual ruling political leadership of a country. The other of one off-brand white supremacist by a different off-brand white nationalist. And […]

To be against political violence is to be, first and foremost, against the largest and most severe forms of political violence -- the wars, the autocracies, the police killings, the deportations. The people who oppose those, can tell you that they oppose political violence today. The people who […]

I want to emphasize clearly, if you are going to have electoral politics, and those electoral politics are going to have Soap Opera State drama, and that drama is going to be intruding on the peace of my evening commute, It really must be Somerville Bike Path Mayor cat drama […]

the translation on Wikipedia vs my New Living Internet Translation. 🐴 #chinese #classicalchinese #translation #localization #autism #actuallyautistic #horses

In retrospect, the unlikely alliance of my incompetence and facebook's maze-like backend, appears to have thwarted a dedicated scammer for ninety full minutes, not counting the repeated email and messenger exchanges. I did my best to help the scammer get my page, but we were unsuccessful.

"Create a background thread that can terminate its own EC2 instance" not high on my list of good software ideas. "Log this termination only to a log on that same instance, with long buffering" somehow even lower than that.

Me to coworkers: Company policy lets you use LLMs, so just be sure to clearly label any PRs where you let LLMs write the code so I can employ professional side-eye during code review. Coworkers: So you're saying it's fine if I just ask the LLM to _design_ my code for me instead...

Mega Mosaic tells me that I burned 64 hours of anxiety compensation into this game. Honestly one of the best game purchases I've made; huge props to Mark Ffrench / https://dividetheplunder.com/ for this ultimate stimming toy.

Max Born, writing in 1945

As someone mainly working in open source land, I can't tell you how under-appreciated it is to be able to _look at what some piece of code does_ to shortcut troubleshooting. So much corporate "software as a service" stuff is poorly and incorrectly documented, and you have to take wild guesses […]

https://toyotaresearchinstitute.github.io/lbm1/ This is the big publication that my department at work has been working on for many months now; I think it's pretty neat. I am by nature an AI-skeptic, but this work has raised my personal estimation of ML-based vision, language, and action models […]

Transmetropolitan does such a good job of getting across how everything rural and exurban right-wingers hate about cities is what makes cities the best places on earth.

John Bradshaw was right.

Wait, you guys have been interacting with reality via a complex interplay between a physical body and a mental model of the world? I've just been predicting the next token since 2007!

Also, I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I'll say it again: Part of your job as a senior is to tell your juniors about your fuckups. The embarrassing cringe reckless and lazy bullshit that you did when you were new, and the various times you brought down Prod. We ALL did it sometime […]

One of the really depressing things about AI will be rapidly discovering that what we've really wanted all along is endless videos of Hot Person + Social Transgression It'll be nothing but "Do you think my giant-titted girlfriend should yelling at the barista? Respond in comments"

Unless for some reason the video screams fakeness, you don't bother to check its veracity. Which is... kinda weird? Meaning, the guy being punished for dog-kicking - you don't know his name, where he's from, when this occurred, and what the circumstances were. You just like feeling justice.

I get concerns on AI use in universities, but to my mind the utility of AI in college is the measure of how sick the system has become. If students view their job as playing a game to get a piece of paper that opens the gate to middle class life, rather than something idealistic, AI makes sense.

Fun #mbta fact, if you are packed up against the electronic farebox on a crowded #glx train, and have #google wallet on your phone, it will automatically bill a fare to your phone's stored card every few seconds for the full duration of your trip. This is the second case I've run into where the […]

If you distinguish the two by saying, "Well, the work my friends and I do is quintessentially human, and so should never be automated, but the work those other people do isn't, so it's fine to automate," consider that you haven't found a meaningful distinction, but are instead being an elitist snob.

IMO one of the most effective ways to cripple the global resurgence of fascism in the long run would be to start making fem-coded content about logistics and supply chains

Most of the past didn't happen and most of the present happened in the past.

It still feels like a personal defeat every time I dredge up my instagram credentials and log in to view a video. The video always turns out to have been disappointing and not worth it. But I always grumble and do it anyway.

The principle difficulty in carrying out a simple commercial transaction with a group of anarchists is that one is trying to carry out a simple commercial transaction with a group of anarchists.

[Spoilers for @scalzi@mastodon.social 's _When the Moon Hits your Eye_.] Just finished @scalzi latest, _When the Moon Hits your Eye_. It is an utterly absurd high-concept masterpiece, and is genuinely and maddeningly Art. However. The very end, the very last chapter, coming out at this very […]

A deep dive into all the ways ethics demands we don't be assholes—even if we really want to. www.aaronrosspowell.com/p/the-necess...

#til : If you spend enough of your time walking, fitbit's steps goal will tell you to stop and chill out.

For anyone who cares, a vehicle of interest was a black Ford Expedition distinguishable by its heavily tinted windows on all sides (including windshield) and what looks like a small aftermarket antenna in back. It seems to have been parked, and accompanied by 1-2 other smaller (but similarly […]

There is something inescapably cringe when someone finding a popular pointless pastime of backyard barbecue and semi-drunken dorm-room gab sessions and taking it _way too seriously_ -- like going pro at freeze-tag. If they are bad at it they raise amateur incompetence to professional […]

“In everyone’s pocket right now is a computer far more powerful than the one we flew on Voyager. I don’t mean your cell phone — I mean the key fob that unlocks your car.” — Rich Terrile, JPL scientist and member of the Voyager imaging team #space

The office is empty today and so I can brew lapsang souchong without fear.

Every time I get a journalist call for comment now I close my remarks with “members of a government that believes it is not bound by the rule of law are not entitled to its protection.”

Always read everything Elizabeth Sandifer writes, because she's an extraordinary writer. But particularly read this.

one thing that kind of bothers me about this post is that it feels like on some level I "should" be explaining what a login shell is (to explain the diff between .bashrc and .bash_profile) https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/02/13/how-to-add-a-directory-to-your-path/ […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

Went to report a bug on the Parallels forums and I just gotta say: I am impressed. Take notes, website hosts, this is how you respect your users in a dark political time.

This goes to a point I've made before that the federal government has been taken over by what I call competency cosplayers, and their appeal is that incompetent people who don't like the expert consensus can convince themselves these people who agree with them are competent experts.

This advance in data structures seems trivial but is actually super neat, and maybe makes dicts with fast insertion a whole lot smaller in the future. (But, I suspect, only in the future, because it's going to be an absolutely murderously bad constant factor in the present, because repeated […]

Good to see my favorite football player, the UR10e, getting some love.

In the absence of social media enabling them to find each other, form a movement, and seize political power, we'd recognize much of the far-right as just profoundly psychologically and emotionally unwell people, the way we can see that Kanye's Nazism is part of his acute mental illnesses.

Just watched _The Creator_, just the thing after a week's AI-and-robotics conference at mpow. It's a messy and didactic movie, aesthetically ambitious beyond reason and not especially successful in its climax. But it's also terribly right, and it is so refreshing to see a sincere liberationism […]

Practical, actionable advice for anyone concerned about saving government data.

It seems to me that Bluesky's principles -- treating an organization's own future self as an adversary -- and ActivityPub's architecture -- locally administered nodes advertising their content, policies, and affordances over a mix of technical and social links over a changing network of […]

Zizek is often wrong, but occasionally insightful, and I'm reminded, as I watch the cruelty of Christian nationalists inflicted on innocent and defenseless people, of this point he made in an essay titled "If there is a God, then anything is permitted" www.abc.net.au/religion/sla...

This is what I meant when I said ebooks are a mess The whole ebook scene is another one of those businesses where I have some money, someone has a thing I want to buy, and there's a whooooole lotta folks whose livelihood depends on getting in the way of me just paying for the thing

To the limited extent to which anything is the real deal, deepseek JanusPro appears in fact to be the real deal. GPT-level performance that runs locally in your terminal is a _huge_ change. Actual open source, multimodal, tons of complexity headroom for fine tuning, no cloud surveillance bungus […]

This leung yi bagua stuff will mess you up, man.