Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

I have a question about this, and the question is: WWWHHHHHHHAAAATTT?! https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba86

Me reading things: That’s not a joke. That’s a reference.

Me writing things: People who read the pulp sf collection “Galactic Diplomat” (1965) and got past the absolutely terrible politics are going to love this one word choice! Haha!

Switching to a fully VR work setup just to stop having to worry about the seasonally variable glare from the window behind my screen.

I would really appreciate a paleontologist telling me there’s a good reason this doesn’t make sense, because it messes with the way I look at flowers.

You ever, you know, think about how butterflies and moths evolved coiling proboscises roughly 200 million years ago in the Triassic when the dinosaurs were around, and they still like to drink the tears out of reptiles’ eyes, but flowers didn’t evolve until about 125 million years ago, so what if flowers evolved to look like eyes?

If I ever finish this, it’s over for all my haters.

Even as a sports-negative person, I have to admit there’s a lot of truth in this. https://saturation.social/@bdeskin/110126857940803015

I like process videos, I like time lapse videos, and I like videos that get to the point (unless they are deliberately atmospheric, which I also like). But I just don’t have the brain gear necessary to watch a 2× (or heaven forfend a 4× video) of someone making something.

Social media video apps do not believe me when I try to explain this to them.

We used to have free speech in this country!

(There was something about zoo + earthquake that was ringing a dusty bell, and it’s exceedingly satisfying to actually remember it instead of wondering all day “why did that seem slightly more interesting than it should have?”)

Remembering: One of the last crowded things we did pre-pandy was ZooLights 2019 with friends. At the end of the evening, we’re on the balcony of the upper gondola station as the café staff is closing. There’s a rumble from some equipment and I say to a friend, who works in disaster management, that part of my brain irrationally worries that any big noise is an earthquake. She cocks her head and says brains are weird. Today’s earthquakes were (± margin of error) directly under us at that moment.

Good to have a “We know what we’re doing if the Hayward Fault goes today, right?” conversation after a filling breakfast.

The modeled hypocenter of the tiny earthquake just now was 7.5 km directly below the zoo: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc73865490/executive.

This reminds me of how, if I recall, the HayWired scenario put its nominal epicenter on some random private property. You have to wonder how the people who live there felt about that, and what it might have done to their property value.

(Another one as I was typing this.)

Can’t believe this absurdly puritanical interference with my artistic vision.

Had a lot of fun with @salkjorts on the other site, where I posted bad ideas run through Midjourney-or-whatever, so please welcome @salkinjorts. Or block it, if you don’t like this stuff. I’m seeding it with a few redos of classics from the old account.

I continue to feel pretty alone in the interpretation that these models are neither trivial nor conscious; that they are neither nukes nor penicillin; that practically all the urgent questions about them are really the same urgent questions we’ve had about political economy, offshoring, and corporate governance for decades; and so on. I finally get to be a filthy centrist on an important issue and it turns out it’s boring.

This statement combines a lot of what I think is good and less good about the thread of LLM criticism it’s from. I don’t think the stochastic parrot interpretation is more than one interesting model, I believe the relevant problems with longermism are almost completely disjoint from the ones mentioned, and I am unconvinced that marking media by consciousness of author is either philosophically clear or practically useful. However, I agree firmly with the tl;dr. https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023

If you know where to get originals of these terrestrial-but-field MSS images, I strongly encourage you to share.

I mention this like once a week, but since she’s just died, let’s all go look at the ~20 cm Landsat image of Half Dome that Virginia Norwood made.

«Norwood had researchers load a breadboard version of the scanner onto the back of a truck. It amounted to “just a bunch of boxes,” she says. “We could use all the weight we wanted.” […] Having labored so long over the specs, Norwood wasn’t surprised by the high quality of the test images.»

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1025732/the-woman-who-brought-us-the-world/