Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@llimllib I got one of those that’s still limping along with a shot battery and some loose fittings. With tethering and its original battery life, it was pretty magical back in the day. One of the most practical machines I ever had.

Like, look, there are real problems around how we think and act about expertise In These Times. That’s real.

In addition to (not instead of) that, it’s, you know, the thing where people complain about stuff posted by people they follow. If you don’t want to see people talking about what they had for lunch, unfollow @69_lunchlover_420. If you don’t want to see topical takes from people who tend to post a lot of topical takes, there is solution to that too.

I appreciate the “Amazing that so many submarine experts are also Kremlin experts!” zingers going around, because yeah, sure. But also, logging into social media and being annoyed that people you follow have opinions on issues of the day seems a bit narrow?

Neat. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

@robinsonmeyer Why am I such a good person? It’s because I’m always trying to pay off the debt I owe to fortune, which gave me the inestimable gift of membership in the one nationality that can joke about itself, and be joked about, in a completely normal way.

@kgjenkins Want more quality science? Smash that like button and join our Patreon!

Like I can totally see both the “AI now corrects itself, is unstoppable; how does this affect bitcoin?” headlines and the “Yes, I spent all of March calling people credulous fools for not knowing that self-correction is the exclusive purview of ensouled life, but nevertheless this is Just Math” takes and I wish we could just skip that part of everything.

As long as I’m in a listy mood, this language model that backspaces out of dead ends is interesting because:

1. It’s an example of something categorically less interesting than the pro-LLM camp is going to claim, and more interesting than the anti-LLM camp wants to talk about; that gap seems important.

2. It points toward the text diffusion models I keep trying to subtly warn people are probably coming without saying so explicitly, oops, backspace backspace backspace.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05426

@guncelawits Bullshit. No one’s a better cook than Fritz. Blocking you now.

It’s the time of year when you can see a little dab of blue on the far edge of the arctic sea ice. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/110580368514917463

1. From the abstract, I think the actual article is much less about blaming scientists for policy failures than the headlines make it sound.

2. I can’t read past the abstract of this article on interpreting science for public use because it’s paywalled.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4057045-catch-22-scientific-communication-failures-linked-to-faster-rising-seas/

Anyway, if anyone out there is thinking about developing pollen allergies, I guess my advice is to have a pretty careful think about it before you make the leap. Might not be as fun as you’ve been told.

Basically it seems like if there’s a window open I cough. This creates some difficulties because I like fresh air and dislike running the AC.

This seems to be the year I got allergies, and, wonderfully, the symptoms are somewhat like those caused by infection with SARS-CoV-2, the well-known novel coronavirus.

@beep If you think we don’t give the cat a little French accent when she’s in these moods (“lahf ees sheet … even le neck skritches ’ave become a ’atefool degradation … zees fookeeng birds viz ze chorp chorp chorp, zey know nossing, nossing … [takes a lazy drag on her cat cigarette]”), you’re being naïve.

@falxcerebri I’ve just been drinking a glug of the aftershave every day to build up a resistance. I can’t live in fear of things that happen to smell like the odor equivalent of the THX sound. It seems to help to wait until just before I want to nap anyway, because I usually get pretty dizzy.

Cover of a high school Earth science textbook–ass picture. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/110572308644962989