Mikell Taylor

If children were more politically active they would be quite pissed to be told that their screen time is “the most urgent public health issue” while the largest measles outbreak since the vaccine sweeps their schools because of conspiracies that the adults in their life believed from social media.

I don’t often make scones but when I do I’m always disappointed to remember my husband is a “jam then cream” person instead of the correct “cream then jam”.

I don’t know how many times people have to say this, but if you really are and feel like a writer, you *need* to write. It’s the best part of your job, it’s the part that you find satisfying, it’s why you chose to do what you do. Writers are not trying to escape the writing part!

Everyone Deserves Sunshine: Girls in the Crease - A Heated Rivalry Podcast TV Reviews Podcast · Updated Weekly · A Heated Rivalry - inspired podcast about fictional people, real feelings, and the joy we find in a messed-up world. We’ll explore sex, masculinity, tenderness, r...

Such a pleasure to have this conversation with Everyone Deserves Sunshine pod about my essay on why Heated Rivalry is anti-dystopia art!

Enjoy my voice!

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

The US doesn't know what it's missing out on, it's literally 3 minutes and like 10 mouse clicks on a free government website to do personal and sole trader/LLC taxes for Australians.

back in 2023 i found this inexplicable shirt at a goodwill in columbus ohio. bought it immediately. one of my strongest $5 purchases of all time. its enigmatic origin haunts me, so if anyone from columbus ohio knows what the fuck this shirt is about please hit me up posthaste

Soft launch: soon I’ll be looking for researchers to give talks about Star Trek for the convention and another (as of yet secret) London event.
So get thinking 🤔

Aussie booted from US over plan to 'move into Billie Eilish's mansion' Controversial Aussie Drew Pavlou has been deported from the US after he travelled over there to 'occupy' Billie Eilish's mansion.

he wasn't deported, he was denied entry because he it was for the express purpose of making money while committing a crime

"sending him home because he did not arrive on a business visa"

but if he wants to call it deportation and blame Billie Eilish. sure

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

Saying English-Scots-Irish is like saying Judeo-Christian. It only has a meaning based on what it excludes, and it’s actually designed to carve off a piece of what it supposedly includes. You don’t actually want actually existing inconvenient Irish or Jews; you want their colonization as a model

medical miracle: this 75 year old man was born yesterday

1/3 What Musk is really referring to here is, of course “race” - that construct that served to define the hierarchies of wealth & power structured by modern colonialism. Like other far right racists though, he uses the word “culture” as a seemingly less pernicious synonym.

Screencap: Amodei: Every question you’ve asked me before this, as devilish a sociotechnical problem as it had been, we at least understand the factual basis of how to answer these questions. This is something rather different. We’ve taken a generally precautionary approach here. We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.

And here we go. I think one way to encapsulate part of the problem with these debates (not just Amodei, but all the AI tech bro wannabe philosophers) is that they've linked a thought experiment to massive and growing material infrastructures and impacts.

>>

I said, what’s more likely, that I’m lying about what we did on this project or that ChatGPT doesn’t have text describing what we did in its training data because we didn’t post anything publicly about it, while an alternative approach is well documented? But he took it as ChatGPT “reasoning”.

Instead of “search for” I think of it as “there hasn’t been a reason anyone needed to write out this out before”. Eg when I had a junior colleague argue with me about whether something was possible to do. I had done it in a previous job but we’d never posted about it. ChatGPT thus said impossible.

Ooooh good write up. I only realized my brain was weird about this like eight years ago, and only got the word for it a few years ago, and the ongoing research is fascinating.

SCREENCRAFT WHAT IS "MA"? In an interview with film critic Roger Ebert from 2002, Ebert tells Miyazaki he appreciates what he calls "gratuitous motion" in his films, adding that, "Instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are," said Ebert. Miyazaki answered with, "We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It's called Ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."

My piping hot take on PLURIBUS is that it’s one of the most Ghibli-esque shows on TV today, and people who think its pacing is too slow ought to really sit with and examine why they feel that slow pace = bad.

Its first season has several minutes worth of “mā”, and is much stronger for it, IMO

And in every case that I've been forced to use a new "AI-enhanced" version of something I had before, the experience is worse, the result is worse, and the task takes longer to complete

I still loled

Btw the technical term for AI bros is a tensorbro

Maryland health officials warn providers about an upsurge in mumps cases Maryland health officials are warning about an uptick in cases of mumps.

Measles is a bellwether. Because it’s the most contagious vaccine-preventable disease, when vaccination rates drop, it’s the first to start spreading.

Now we’ve got mumps rolling up.

Expect more.

This is just the beginning of RFK Jr.’s successful infectious disease reintroduction plan.

Hey UK folks:

A valentine from Public Health of Seattle and King County. A man shivers in bed while a smiling lady in a red mask shows off her bandage on her arm. Text: Noses are red Ice packs are blue I'm vaxed so miss me with severe symptoms of flu.

A valentine from Public Health of Seattle and King County. Two lady scientists shrug lackadaisically. Text reads: My love for you can't be explained by science. Just like the new federal vaccine guidelines.

A valentine from Public Health of Seattle and King County. Protesters in Minneapolis wear thick clothes and hold signs of support for immigrant neighbors. Text reads: To the health departments in the Twin Cities: Love unites us. Our hearts are with you.

Oh my GOD King County Public Health is just wilding out for Valentines Day (and a lovely one).

Pouring one out for everyone realizing that Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet was nearly 20 years ago 😬 #FeelingOld

Photo of a skull in a golden box on an altar

Roses are red,
They look nice on a shrine
Here is the skull,
Of St. Valentine.

(Photo taken in Rome’s Chiesa di Santa Maria in Cosmedin of the relic of the 3rd Century martyr, a cleric who ministered to persecuted Christians and could apparently restore sight to the blind.)

A pair of orange socks with yellow toes featuring a pattern of all NASA Mars rovers, from Sojourner to Perseverance, worn with grey pants against a grey wall.

They see me rovin', they hatin' 😎

Every NASA Mars rover ever is on these socks. From the microwave-sized Sojourner (1997) to the car-sized Perseverance (2021) 🤖

🔗 sciencesocks.co/prod...

#SocksOfTheDay 🔭🐡🧪🎨

if you don’t know this, I just haven’t hollered at you enough. get 1.5 mezcal palomas in me and I’ll tell everyone in the bar

I don’t know what this is called but I’m pretty sure it’s the cure for male loneliness

“But regulations get in the way of making money” yeah actually that’s the point and it’s a feature not a bug

I think this crisply highlights that fundamentally, regulatory controls on things are about incentives. We use them to check the “make more money at all costs” incentive of capitalism. The only way to incentivize any other behavior is to make not doing something hurt more than not making more $$.