Ben Schmidt

Bumper sticker that says "No Farms No State" above a mesopotamian cityscape and the phrase James C. Scott 2017

This holiday season, give the gift that lets your loved ones combine their affection for James Scott with their irritation that those "No Farms No Food" bumper stickers try to normalize agriculture.

Extreme armchair expertise here, but I'm a Chomskyite in believing babies are born with very firm opinions about how languages work, they just sort of do their babbling to work out things like 'ok I'm learning a language with gender' or 'oh crap I got one of the agglutinative ones'

A fair amount like evolution, absolutely nothing like childhood. This bothered me a bunch in 2023 when people say "but a baby can learn just a few examples."

The Jupyter parts of that make more sense to me, but the instructions there make running a python script is as simple as just picking a docker base image, writing a dockerfile, then make that into a k8s pod, and then set up a deployment, and now your .py file is *stateless*, ain't that nice?

Sort of, although TBH that sort of looks like the solution to the problem of how to do k8s instead of old fashioned HPC? Like IMO what most people will need is not the ability to spin up up a k8s pod, but to hit some well-designed service that offers sandboxed code-execution with tool calling.

The interoperability layer is going to be very much like AWS, or, for that matter, early 80s IBM PCs I think where there are a bunch of people offering "S3-compatible" APIs that bridge different surfaces…

TBH I never used GPUs at NYU because I was anti-cloud and they were under such heavy contention in 2021-22 -- my sense though is that most of the serious people there made accomodations with a company that owned GPUs. (I.e. everyone just followed Yann LeCun's lead).

was primarily CPU cycles on slurm batch jobs that didn't have any reason *not* to be on AWS except that we'd built this expensive other thing. (Maybe the physicists occasionally took advantage of it actually being one big computer, but IDK that it was a good use of tech spend.)

The US government's solution here has been to have Amazon build it and periodically threaten to give the contract to Microsoft to keep the costs down; and IDK what it's like at NCSA, but when I was at NYU I was on the committee that bought a $20m supercomputer and whenever I looked at usage it…

If AI becomes an interdependent web of smaller services that in order to run quickly (which also means, in the most environmentally responsible way) saying "let's build a public alternative" looks more like saying we should build a public alternative to AWS cloud. Which is pretty quixotic…

Introducing advanced tool use on the Claude Developer Platform Claude can now discover, learn, and execute tools dynamically to enable agents that take action in the real world. Here’s how.

Newer approaches may be *less* easy to distribute freely, though--one of our internal discussions in the couple months has been how fully we want to commit to Anthropic APIs because things like their new code sandboxes for tool call execution are really nice… www.anthropic.com/engineering/...

WASHINGTON, July 26.-Unless President Wilson withdraws the name of Adam E. Patterson of Oklahoma, the negro whom he nominated two days ago to be Register of the Treasury, he will have a fight on his hands that bids fair to rival the Crum incident in Mr. Roosevelt's Administration. Senator Tillman of South Carolina, who so violently opposed Dr. Crum's confirmation as Collector of the Port of Charleston, and Senator Vardaman of Mississippi, who was elected on an anti-negro platform, already are preparing to fight, and it is known that they have many allies. The opponents of the nomination do not make any charges against Patterson, and it is said that he holds the respect of the white people of his community. He is said to have campaigned at his own expense for the Democratic ticket in the late campaign, and that is thought to have been a reason why his candidacy was indorsed by Senator Gore of Oklahoma. The opinion was expressed this afternoon that there was little likelihood that the nomination would be confirmed. For many years the office of Register has been held by a negro. But Southern Senators find it impossible to support even a Democratic negro for a place that will give him authority over white men and women.

Also I did not know that the tradition that a black man be register of the treasury, shown starting in the show, was so strong that *Woodrow Wilson* nominated a black Democrat to the post in 1913 until the Southern Democrats rebelled. That is mind-blowing.

Also, and I mean it, it's shows a pretty admirable devotion to narrative economy that they made a four-hour political drama and I don't think at any point they showed a single Democrat on camera--they mention Hancock once or twice, and that's it.

When Garfield got shot with like 45 minutes left I was hoping we'd get a solid half hour of Chet Arthur in Congress, but TBH I kind of love that it turned a weird prequel to "The Knick" sermonizing about sepsis?

Only real sticking point for me is putting Bradley Whitford as a cuddly James G. Blaine -- not sure what I'd want there, but it kind of underlines too neatly the fairy-tale bits of the convention and the idea that the core conceit is that Garfield was, basically, a real-life Jeb Bartlett.

Just watched "Death By Lightning," the James Garfield/Charles Guiteau Netflix show -- went in w/ no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. Nick Offerman is now my heart's Chester Arthur, and the sets, especially the Republican National Convention, were impressive.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., 1857

"30 humanities scholars gathered behind the screen on Laugh In next to Richard Nixon who said 'sock it to me'"

Also why are you blanking out the location of the conference, does it give it away because it's like "the newly opened Disneyworld" or "The New York City World's Fair?"

1972

now we can use the 'equator' between the land pole and water pole (i.e., the points with the most land and water near them) as a first approximation to calculate the curve, and view it on a projection with those as the poles. That's faster than what I *was* doing, using latitude and longitude.

A few people ( @moebio.bsky.social, @yetanotheruseless.com, @miclugo.bsky.social) have pointed out that the intermediate value theorem proves there must be a value -- @elfprince13.mumak.app points out the theorem applies to each great circle between the land pole and the water pole. This helps, b/c…

OK, yeah moving to using the land-pole equator makes calculating the line much faster.

Statement of Agency’s Reinstatement of Terminated IMLS Grants Statement of Agency’s Reinstatement of Terminated IMLS Grants Washington, DC– Upon further review, the Institute of Museum and Library Services has reinstated all federal grants. This action supersede...

IMLS announces "upon further review" that it is reinstating all federal grants to libraries. It leaves out that it's doing this because a federal court told them a few weeks ago that the Trump admin's decision to destroy libraries was not legal.

www.imls.gov/news/stateme...

Although just because *one* hemisphere satisfies this property doesn't mean the *other* hemisphere does -- IDK how many pairs in the orthographic projection exist.

I like that, and it could be infinity (in the orthographic projection) but also could be any other distance on the vertical perspective projection, and that suggests there might be some weird set of paths going out in the sky going out to infinity from which looking at the earth.

I mean, three. Anyhow, I don’t know how big those sets are… I suspect the first two have one circle, but the third one I have no idea.

Is there exactly one solution on each axis? Or are there configurations where there could be multiple?