"History roils. Its waves are cumulative, one rolling into another, amplifying their thunder. Or they become attenuated via energies pushing in orthogonal or opposite directions. Or they swirl into directionless eddies, with the ocean’s surface appearance as often as not obscuring grander currents just below." https://thebaffler.com/salvos/time-bandits-perlstein
Listening to Trevor Bedford has thus far always been the right move, and I don’t see that changing. (I don’t expect much/any help from e.g. mask orders in a big new wave, and the datasets no longer very useful, so we’re pretty much going to be going by wastewater and/or vibes until hospitalizations increase.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/05/05/covid-forecast-next-two-years/
drugs, family
I wonder/would not be that surprised if it's easier for most doctors to prescribed oxy than weed for pain relief even in places where it's legal
anyway excited to watch my mom blaze it lol
Honestly my only disagreement here is when Chiang writes that "it’s not the job of A.I. to strengthen capitalism...yet that is what it currently does." I think by the time of the Dartmouth conference John McCarthy had pretty explicitly renounced the Communist beliefs his organizer parents raised him on and IMO McCarthy's (and Minsky's, and the other guys)' political beliefs are part of the story of AI's intellectual history
I do not love that in 2023 a totally smart writer still has to include a disclaimer that "whenever I criticize capitalism, I’m not criticizing the idea of selling things" in the goddamn New Yorker
"Note that you cannot simply say that you will build A.I. that only offers pro-social solutions to the problems you ask it to solve. That’s the equivalent of saying that you can defuse the threat of McKinsey by starting a consulting firm that only offers such solutions." get their asses Ted https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey
https://www.ebay.com/itm/155121908850?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=hBb6LJJcS9C&sssrc=2047675&ssuid=s45yvgRWQCy&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY oh no a giant roll of tiny graph paper in LATVIA do...do I need this?
medical, family
just got mom home from the hospital, now the part where I try to maintain calm while being hella triggered by having to parent my parent like I'm 16 years old again!!
medical, family
surgeon just called to let me know that she's out and everything went fine! she's staying overnight and then I'll be taking her home tomorrow
academia gripe
asking grad students to contribute money to a fund that helps pay for undergrad internship stipends when my cohort includes new parents trying to make a $35K stipend work is a bold fucking move is all I am saying