Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Vacation update: learned today that the ramshackle hotel-like building in the non-fancy hills above LA where I spent my first ~4 years in a group household of impoverished academics and LSD-addled post-hippies was not simply, as I had been told, “a former dude ranch”, but more specifically the vacation spot that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moye_W._Stephens built for rowdy weekends with his famous friends, and he would occasionally drop by to have an awkward conversation.

That explains this wind. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/110483994774840848

Am on vacation and thus less online than usual, and I can report that from this distance the bad discourse is still bad but the small amount of good discourse is still good. Hope this perspective helps everyone make good choices.

My homeworld? Oh, it’s beautiful. Covered in oceans and life. Swirling clouds everywhere. Plankton, whales, enormous trees with feathered arms. Ants! Twenty quadrillion of them! Elephants, manatees! The aurora. It’s incredible. And of course there’s 400 km of what looks like the binding of a cheap encyclopedia under you at all times.

The planet that’s going to get around to that after it gets the wood veneer in the basement removed.

Earth, the planet decorated like the pizza place you have to convince your friends is actually good.

“Me? Oh, Earth. Yes … yes, the one that looks like the plinth of a little league trophy. Very funny. We actually have a great food truck scene these days.”

A planet that looks like it was trying and failing to rip off Enya in 1997.

“Professional” Winamp skin–ass planet.

Planet that looks like the royalty-free texture on the back side of the lanyard badge at a weird conference you went to in 2014.

Cursed/blessed to live on a planet made out of someone’s car dealership owning uncle’s custom kitchen counter material.

Like if you inherited a glass table with chunky triangular legs made out of peridotite, you would roll your eyes and make a joke about what people thought was classy in 1991. And if you look up at the space station at night, a distance much greater than that in the other direction is almost all solid tacky table-leg.

Always a pleasure to think about how a substantial part of our planet, an unimaginably large mass and volume, is a kind of mildly dated-looking jade/moss-green rock. https://www.science.org/content/article/long-last-ocean-drillers-exhume-bounty-rocks-earth-s-mantle

Looks like some tiny, cow-shaped bugs got in the lens. Very embarrassing for them. https://onewilshire.la/@CALandscapeBot/110415940706902447

Slowly and systematically convinced myself that denoising diffusion models are basically as close as we know so far to The Right Way to do generative and restorative models today. Unfortunately, that means I talked myself out of my own GPU.

Thought of the perfect unimportant programming problem to think about while falling asleep, then forgot it, and will now be falling asleep grumpily trying to remember it.

Very mad at whoever did this to me.