Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Tired of feeling bad about what I’m paying for with my crossword subscription.

I was having unbidden pansharpening thoughts again, so I fixed typos and a pseudocode bug in my old 10,000 word gist on the topic: https://gist.github.com/celoyd/5bb5417b24801e0446ad5977cc3581e4

Proud to say that it’s the best non-academic introduction to the topic on the entire internet. Also, I admit, the worst, because it’s the only one. I don’t know why there aren’t more people interested in this.

Got that feeling I got when I saw the video of the first trucks full of covid vaccine heading for the highway. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(23)00026-9/fulltext

Sitting here angrily remembering the time I guessed that the distance between two randomly chosen points in a cube might be 1/√2, looked it up, and learned that it’s (1/105) × (4 + 17√2 - 6√3 + 21×ln(1 + √2) + 42×ln(2 + √3) - 7π) ≈ 0.661 and this was only worked out in 1978.

LLMs don’t actually know English grammar, they just abstract patterns from many examples of utterances in English. You and I, of course, humans, with a conscious mind that we can see and understand via the simple expedient of naïve empiricism, we simply read that book that fully enumerates the rules of English grammar (you remember? the book?) when we were infants. QED.

There are a lot of people who think they are making really impressive critiques of LLMs when they are doing the equivalent of saying “Dogs can’t eat chocolate because truly experiencing chocolate requires a spark of the divine, and as as we all know, dogs do not have souls. So don’t feed dogs chocolate.”

You have arrived at the correct conclusion that maximalist claims about LLMs are very wrong. But you did it with reasoning worse than the LLMs can do.

If I were a journalist covering the balloons, I would be talking to Ben. He seems to be finding them in open data, which provides some actual facts in a story that’s very short on them. https://mastodon.social/@benelsen/109881189772230247

The kids on TikTok are obsessed with this new trend called the Don’t Uncritically Platform Dangerous Transphobia in a Paper of Record and Deflect Valid Criticism Like a Coward challenge and you’ll never believe the dance that goes with it!

Last I played with consumer GNSS hardware much, the SiRFstarIII was considered very cool.

I just ran a new NEO-N9M overnight under a residential roof (no survey mode or anything) and got this wonderfully clean pattern.

All units are meters. I don’t know what pAcc actually is and neither does the official documentation.

This is like $50 for a USB-capable board with shipping and tax from a reputable seller. I’m delighted.

There’s what I would describe, in technical terms, as a “lazy fantasy map” vibe to the distribution of NGS survey markers.

I have quibbles with this but they’re “why didn’t you mention this important detail” kinds of things. I think it’s admirably clear and fundamentally right-headed. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

Amazing that so many dreams fit in one mid-size cat.

smarmy, painfully literal posters who seem to be typing out unconsidered impressions of the world ← [the infinitesimally small but infinitely correct space that I occupy] → internet-poisoned edgelords nine layers of irony away from their own feelings

Fissures across a railway and someone’s orchard just north of İslâhiye.

Türkiye is standard gauge, so that’s basically two offsets of ~70 cm just in this little area. (Pan pixels from Maxar 1040010082698700 at 31 cm resolution; the image is about 320 m or 1000 ft across.)

This is not the part of the image with the rawest human interest, but I think it shows some of the scale of what happened without feeding into voyeurism.

You know how you read classic works of cultural criticism and they’re talking about how public discourse is decaying into atomization, misinformation, and engagement-seeking, and their example is, like, newspapers nowofdays printing photos in color? Well, social media drama keeps reminding me of this demo from 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Jja5iWRp1w