medievalmvb

Photo: black-beaked trumpeter swan in flight against a white sky, its long neck piercing the air, the skeletal wing infrastructure clear in its upraised left wing

*max richter music plays*

Frætwe mine
swogað hlude ond swinsiað,
torhte singað

My finery
breathes deeply and makes a new sound
sings luminously

(Exeter Riddle 7 imagines a bright swan’s air/aria)

okay fair enough micro-niche 😀

but yeah it popped into my head and wouldn’t leave so I had to write it down

As Seattle’s movie theaters struggle, one kind of cinema bucks the trend Amid a national drop in moviegoing and more cinemas closing, some of Seattle's small indie theaters have found a way to lure people back to the movies.

really well researched report on the state of movie-going (in Seattle) kind of an unusual deep-dive for Seattle Times but it turns out it was funded by MJ Murdoch Charitable Trust #filmsky

er níu vetra at aldri!

this might be for a niche audience but it did remind me that “til” takes the genitive

Pet Shop Boys - Go West (Official Video) [HD REMASTERED] YouTube video by PetShopBoys Parlophone

Just in case your weekend needs more 'The Pet Shop Boys lead gay space communists to conquer America' vibes (and it probably does)

youtu.be/LNBjMRvOB5M?...

*assistànt

toe beans 🫘

Not so easy is it!!!

(Trying to do the chorus to ‘Graceland’ in Old Norse where they’re going to the Alþing at Þingvellir)

Ek gangi til Þingvalla
Iceland’s lava prairie, gangi til alþingi
Lög-maðr ok vegferlar med frændum
Ok göngum til Þingvalla

guy selling little boxes with “Cold fusion” written in Sharpie: we’ve finally done it!

bystander: how does it work?

sales guy *eyes narrowing*: okay poindexter, why don’t YOU tell me how cold fusion works?

It’s wild to me after all these years I still have to remind even close friends that I am literally always on their dog’s side and never theirs. Ever. I don’t care what you say the dog did. The dog is right and you are wrong. You are 100% at fault. And also a nark btw. Maybe try not being a snitch.

yes!

That’s roughly $71,400 per car at today’s WTI prices

just one of these babies would keep my 4.7L Jeep going for 7 or 8 weeks

iPhone photo of a train crossing with in fact a train crossing it, completely made up of black tanker cars as far as the eye can see

these are possibly (according to a quick search) 33,000-gallon cars of crude oil BUT today was not the that day, Satan

LIFE HACK: this couple keeps housing costs down by purchasing their SF Victorian in 1989

I asked an LLM to describe what happens when children are bombed at school. I asked that it avoid euphemism and abstractions. Its response was immediately retracted for violating usage policies.”

The challenge with probabilistic systems is that they can't be tested repeatably.

That one data point - "I tried X and it worked" - is pretty meaningless.

Foxy Cardigan sounds like maybe a Pynchon femme fatale

*The assault comes about when Decker catches someone trying to steal his camera gear, so actually the Fuji thing supports an overreaction because buying into a full set of Fuji glass will really set you back

‘RJ Decker’ (Hulu) is a Hiassen’s-Florida news photographer turned private eye after a short prison stint for assault. He shoots with a retro mirrorless Fuji, maybe an X-T5? Pricy quirk. Funny the show title is so close to TJ Hooker.

Low mileage cos they’ve only ever been driven from home to mechanic

Seattle* now has TWO light rail lines and someone decided to distinguish between them with different "Downtown" terminals. in the other direction, both lines terminate at "City Center".

None of these, however, are referring to Seattle's downtown or city center.

So much better than I expected or, let’s be honest, deserve from my detective fiction habit. There’s a whole monograph waiting for anyone who wants to tackle Keke’s micro-expressions registering being Black in a white-majority space, an endlessly rich text

This (and much, much more!) is all stuff that is available on the internet but which prior to now was only the domain of determined stalkers

Now LLMs can collate & interpret personal “info” at scale, which means millions of dossiers sold for cheap to the worst people in the world

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at hig...

large-scale de-anonymization is fascinating (derogatory) to me bc I just got a spam email concerning an actual office I rented 13 years ago, along with two snail junk mail letters “addressed” to family members who do not share my address

IC: You’re trusting the people leading the operation who don’t include the President?

GL: Well, I don’t trust that guy. Yeah.

IC: He’s the Commander-in-Chief, right?

the age-old problem of Mickey learning magic on the job

You’d think so, but no? this looks mostly due to a modeling shortcut that wanted to avoid how noisy actual sea level measurements are

It seems like they wanted to use “sea level” (measured as land altitude) as a benchmark but that turns out to not be a great proxy

“You Know the High Seas? Even Higher!”