Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

I think a lot of people who favor public ownership of publicly important things get tricked this way, into thinking that we should have the status quo but with different structures on paper.

Imagine a NASA that wasn’t being dogwalked by Congress, that got to apply most of its budget to weird-but-might-work stuff like New Horizons and the helicopter on Mars. Imagine a NASA with a 35% failure rate but a 65% “holy fuck, whoa” rate for uncrewed space missions.

Yes. SpaceX has done bad things and deserves to be criticized for them. But (and I think this is analogous to a lot of issues) the problem here isn’t that SpaceX isn’t NASA; it’s that NASA doesn’t have the political room to experiment and inevitably sometimes fail that SpaceX does. This is too complex an issue to fit all the layers and nuance into one honk, but “SpaceX is bad because their rockets explode” is not a good analysis. https://chaos.social/@russss/110249195107310284

The cat loves to be skritched but hates to be touched, and so far the best solution is for me to “lick” her face with a paintbrush, but she has to sniff it suspiciously before each session, make it take its shoes off, remove all electronics from its bags, etc.

Sometimes I feel like I’m still a kid pretending to be a grownup, but other times I catch myself thinking, as I just did, “The squares on this roll of paper towels are so well sized that I’m going to use fewer so the roll lasts longer.”

You see a lot of big black trucks with troubling bumper stickers on the highways, but null County does have a deeply rooted alternative arts scene and some gorgeous scenery. https://onewilshire.la/@CALandscapeBot/110228020545711615

We only have a couple grammatical markers for “this is a person and not a thing” but as long as we do I’m going to respect the hell out of them.

I understand how using “that” instead of “who” in contexts like “people that were there” is normal and has a long history and language changes and I’m the weird one, but wow does it rub me the wrong way.

Imagining an animist looking at this with the same eyes that mainstream Christian theologians used for Hóng Xiùquán saying he was Christ’s little brother. https://www.chatpdf.com/

Like, “Keeping orcas in captivity is unethical because they’re basically just hairy sharks” is not a good argument.

Actually, I’ll walk that half a step back. I think “just word prediction machines” has some value for introducing people to the idea of an LLM from scratch. But it’s a bit of a “whales are like fish that breastfeed” thing – an orienting statement that is true-ish but really not a good place to stop.

1. Without committing to any firm position, this is why “they’re just word prediction machines” is such a weak criticism of LLMs. There are things you can say about them that are both meaner and less reductive, so why turn to that one? But hey, I’m just a next-action machine, I guess.

2. More essays like this, I say. There are a lot of things I disagree with in it, but I never felt that my attention or the complexity of the issue was disrespected.

https://hachyderm.io/@jyasskin/110214994401056240

If technology continues to progress at current rates – and, more importantly, current rates of acceleration – we may soon live in a world where web forms don’t show giant red warnings like DANGER! YOU SCREWED UP VERY BADLY! THIS IS FALSE! IT IS A FEDERAL CRIME TO LIE IN SOME CIRCUMSTANCES! when you start typing your phone number because it doesn’t have enough digits to be a phone number yet.

Found it.

I’m like 90% sure Sir Thomas Browne makes this point somewhere in “Hydriotaphia”.

Kind of humbling to hold something in your hand, even just a chunk of cheap tea, that might last longer into the future than the Marvel movie timeline itself.