25.05.2025 11:08
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I’m saying this in my capacity as an author and once and future library worker:
Read whatever the hell you want.
I cannot impress enough on you that the “important” books aren’t important if you don’t jive with them. The popular books, the canon, the whatever. Read what you want.
Welcome
Standing with Hinton, standing with science.
Please @standupforscience.bsky.social March 7, links enclosed.
open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...
👇🏻👇🏻
Wait!
🤯 Do you mean to tell me that a bunch of massively hyped biotech companies haven’t remotely returned on their investments, driverless car are still just geofenced demos, & GPT-5 still hasn’t arrived after two years of hype?
The media did a great job tempering expectations, though, right?
Some federal workers are ‘getting wealthy at taxpayer expense,’ says Elon Musk, whose companies have received at least $20 billion from the government
See here's how to do a headline.
fortune.com/2025/02/13/e...
I’d just like to shout out humans for at least seeing through NFTs as the most idiotic idea possible.
Thank you Meta for finally addressing my biggest problem with your apps (they protect my privacy too much)
This is not just a musing from a dude with some various ideas. The next step is to hollow out the judiciary and also not follow their rulings, which have been against Musk’s efforts. This is a very obvious coup, for those not paying attention.
ChatGPT ad shows generative AI is totally washed. Impossible to tell what it was the first half until it started saying random prompts like "write me a business plan." Two years in and they don't have a better sales pitch than "summarise this article for me." Washed!
Still hustling those one-drop blood tests even though he doesn’t know how to make them.
Or, um, still hustling those next-gen models.
And in July 2024, just before he came out in support of Trump, he accused Democrats of trying to “import as many illegal voters as possible.” And in this way, I think what is going on with him is a little bit distinct from a lot of the people who superficially have similar politics. Because I think he’s really bought into a lot of great replacement theory. Yes. So have a lot of people in Silicon Valley. Let me say: He’s not alone. This Curtis Yarvin stuff. They’ve all sort of been taken by these — it’s almost religious, if you think about it. One of the things that I think it goes back to — and I hate to say this — is: sad little boy who wasn’t loved enough as a child is searching for meaning, is searching for love. And again, not an excuse, because I think he’s become a terrible person, and he should get therapy. But when there are easy answers like that — Oh, this is why you’re so unhappy. Oh, this is why the world is the way it is — these right-wing conspiracies do scratch an itch for these people. It’s a religion. It’s their answer to the world.
Right. It’s sort of the rid me of this annoying priest kind of thing. Rid me of these people. Again, it’s a king thing. The way they set up their companies is a kingship. Mark Zuckerberg has complete control. He can’t be fired. He’s there for life. So they like that. But in practice, it doesn’t work that way. Because he’s got reporters annoying him. He’s got his staff. He’s got to at least give a nod to diversity or else he gets shamed. He doesn’t have the fortitude that Musk has in that regard. So they are trying to assert themselves in what they consider a man. This is the definition of what a man is. A lot of them were not considered manly when they were in high school. Revenge of the nerds. With Mark, it’s the stupid chain and the T-shirt, which — good luck. It’s fine. I think it looks ridiculous, but fine. He likes it. Or the mixed martial arts. Or I’m going to hydrofoil. Or I’m going to work out. I’m going to show off my muscles there. That’s what Jeff Bezos is doing. Like: Here’s my muscles. Here’s my pretty fiancée. They’re trying to cosplay a version of a man. It seems pathetic to me. But I think it gives them great comfort.
This Kara Swisher interview is both revisionist history and empty pablum. Shameful for Ezra Klein and his people to help her launder her reputation as if she wasn't enabling every single one of these guys and literally doing her book tour with them!
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/o...
no funding if it seems like the research MIGHT involve a woman or a nonwhite person
The DEI caused the plane crash narrative is a distraction. The tariffs are a distraction. Whatever insane nonsense Trump spews that the media will chase like cats chasing a laser light is a distraction. The only story that counts right now is the wholesale hijacking of control of the US government.
Ive said this before. Unions have a moment in time to create parallel, Non Profit Trust or Associated Health Plans and
offer them to small to medium size businesses.
Unions can negotiate far better than SMBs or associations .
Imagine if millions got their healthcare from unions ?
Thoughts ?
"A private citizen with zero Constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The Constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power"
www.techdirt.com/2025/01/31/e...
Radical publishing notion, right here: if your publishers are making a living from publishing and selling your books, then you, the author, should be making a living from writing them.
hey anyone who needs to send flowers in like two weeks, now's a good time to buy them
How else could chatbots be made more appealing? The popularity of r1’s chain of thought suggests that they should communicate more about their process, and in particular offer the user guidance on how to refine their queries when they don’t get the answer they’re looking for. Just telling users how a chatbot understood their question seems to build an outsized amount of trust. I also think there’s something appealing about r1’s humility — in conveying its own lack of certainty, it sounds less like the authoritative robots we have come to expect and more like Star Wars’ C-3PO. That’s somewhat counterintuitive — I don’t know many people who think the final form of superintelligence is a bumbling droid — and yet too often we forget how alien and unapproachable these systems remain to all but the most devoted AI nerds.
DeepSeek took off in part because, in a first, it offered a reasoning model that explains to you what it's doing. Its success shows how little AI product teams have done so far to make their products appealing to normal people: www.platformer.news/deepseek-des...
‘Phonetic’ is not.
‘Abbreviation’ is 12 letters.
‘Thesaurus’ doesn’t have a synonym.
English has a sense of humor. 😀
If you don’t need to wear a mask because “God will protect you,“ then why do you need a gun?
OpenAI says it has evidence China’s DeepSeek used its model to train competitor White House AI tsar David Sacks raises possibility of alleged intellectual property theft
OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. The San-Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of ‘distillation’, a technique used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable models. This allows them to achieve similar results on specific tasks at a much lower cost. OpenAI declined to comment further on details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”.
I'm so sorry I can't stop laughing. OpenAI, the company built on stealing literally the entire internet, is crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT. They're crying their eyes out. What a bunch of hypocritical little babies. Cry more, freaks.
www.ft.com/content/a0df...
Don’t want to jinx it but I’ve made it to the second round of interviews to be the editor of Pornhub’s new book reviews section. They seem open to my idea of using Christgau’s bomb/scissor emoji rating system
Down with *UnitedWealthCare* Up with Universal Health Care. 💙
Tonight, I made a professional poker player laugh till he spat out his wine. I feel my work here is done.
I killed a spider Not a murderous brown recluse Nor even a black widow And if the truth were told this Was only a small spider Sort of papery spider Who should have run When I picked up the book But she didn't And she scared me And I smashed her I don't think I'm allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened.
"I don't think I'm allowed to kill something because I am frightened."
—Nikki Giovanni 💔
#poem #poems #poetry
At this point it’s been said in a hundred different ways, so I think people are being intentional about not getting it.
