Greetings! Since I’m a historian of science, I thought my first post in this space should celebrate the cyanometer, the device Alexander von Humboldt (among others) used to determine just how blue any sky actually is
Workshopping referring to academic talks as "show and tell"
This approach makes me sad, because it turns it into a question of "are you/your cheating tool smart enough to trick your dumb teacher?" instead of "do you want to learn anything here or not?". But what else are you gonna do?
Nw substack, with link to the relevant article: open.substack.com/pub/felipede...
"I was going to rob this bank, but I've decided against it as the cops are holding me to a higher standard."
I was going to say antisemitic punctuation but that felt too comical
It’s actually bad to use antisemitic dog whistles from the left too!
I think this is the longest continuous stretch of time for which I've ever felt this good about my job
I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...
What kind of questions do you have in mind here (genuinely asking)?
Whenever I sit down to write a great novel, I make sure to stick to standard syntax
I tried to do what we call, if I may be so bold, a "conceptual scoop"!!
Pls read my story on the most overlooked form of extreme confinement of farmed animals—the routine caging of millions of dairy calves in tiny crates less than 1/10 the size of a parking spot.
It's not about veal! (🧵)
Unfortunately I can tell you that he is 100% thinking about the extended Ender’s Game universe thing about “the old joke: imagine what someone smarter than you would do, and then do it”. So he’s also imagining himself as a child soldier when he does this.
Now that you know what it is, maybe you can sand it off, or give it to a museum. Those are actions.
There’s also the 2.5th order question of whether when you as a person who doesn’t have to steal from Whole Foods do it anyway, are you more “sticking it to Bezos” or “making it more likely they go the Walgreens route and hire armed security guards to follow people who look like they could be poor”?
There are contributions from both points of view, so on the whole...yes!
Largely that it's fun to talk about these things with other people who are interested in them, and that that can be useful for sharpening our own understandings. Of course it's also good to read what's been written (I have read large parts of that book).
Thoroughly yes, conclusively perhaps not
This is the right kind of question I think - "credences" shouldn't be fundamental objects in your theory
Just a quick clarification q, what does it mean to observe a probability? 😇
Also in many cases the only way people check if it went where they wanted is by asking the train
Sonny Burton is set to be executed by the state of Alabama on Thursday. There is a direct line between a government that murders its own citizens and the devaluing of life abroad. The sin has always started at home.
An extended analogy of writing to baking bread followed.
Overheard at coffee shop: “This is now the fourth time I’m writing this text, and I’ll probably write it two more times.” Apparently some people in this city are still doing things right.
I'm here to shut up and calculate. And I'm all out of calculate. 😎
Are either of you familiar with Zurek's Quantum Darwinism stuff? Can't remember if you were involved in the kerfuffle about whether or not that is just Everett last week 😂
I'd be so sad if it turned out that a collapse theory was true. So messy and unpleasant.
There's a lot of stimulating discussion in this collection. I read some of it after reading Wallace's book. I think a bunch of the essays are available elsewhere online. global.oup.com/academic/pro...
