Strandsofpearl

Robin McKinley, Rose Daughter

This is really really funny

It would be so much easier if we pronounced it that way

I called this number and the caller ID on my phone said it was the number for "Georgian Chiropractic Health"

He has refused his Assent to Laws…

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world…

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury…

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences…

A Tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

I would guess the first one is from Melanesia

I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.

Another post in this vein:
www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fool...

Donate to Stand With Kseniia: A Harvard Scientist in Need, organized by Cora Anderson Hello! We are friends of Kseniia and are hoping to find others who will … Cora Anderson needs your support for Stand With Kseniia: A Harvard Scientist in Need

www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with...

Got forcibly "upgraded" to Google Gemini, had to turn off all Google's useful features to get rid of it. Wish Google was on here so I could complain to someone. They don't even have a support center. My emails have been getting lost for months.

Interesting. For the media I am familiar with, I can guess which is which for most of them, but there are a few that could go either way

Heard this ad twice on the radio during a short Uber ride in New York City. It felt like hearing Hitler speak

Let's add: Dr Brandeis Marshall, Aerica Shimizu Banks, Dr Emily Bender, Dr Sasha Luccioni, Dr Ruha Benjamin, Dr Sasha Costanza-Chock, Adrienne Williams, Tawana Petty

Tufts student detained by ICE in viral video is released, thanks supporters Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was released from ICE detention on Friday, offering brief words of thanks to supporters gathered outside the Louisiana facility.

Rümeysa Öztürk has been freed!!

Does every young cleric have his pope name secretly picked out, just in case?

This is nuts and hilarious
youtu.be/Zf_125ApDvw?...

"So let's go, shall we? [voice drops to husky whisper] Let's go."

I had no idea how much I needed this.

Jaran, Kate Elliott
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
Babel, RF Kuang
Embassytown, China Mieville
A Memory Called Empire (2nd book especially), Arkady Martine

Close up of my hand holding a green leaf

Sprig of green leaves against a beige blanket

Tree with a straight trunk and spreading canopy

🌿 Can any naturalist help me identify this tree in my yard and whether it is native? Montgomery County, MD

#nativeplants
How do I definitively identify a tree in my yard to see if it is native or non-native? The arborist and my naturalist friend couldn't ID it

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects

So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social?

And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

For Sale: The End, And The Means To Wait For It | Defector In one Super Bowl commercial, an octogenarian actor waxes lacrimal about freedom, a privilege bought for you with the blood of troops 80 years ago, a privilege whose outer bound and cleanest…

The theme of this year's Super Bowl ads was the soft acceptance of a comfortable death.

This is amazing. Via @nytimes.com

a friend of mine whose IES contract was just terminated is asking whether there are efforts to download the education data--specifically the data at sites/ed.gov/idea/...
does anyone know?

Organizing shifts with vuvuzelas outside certain people's houses, indefinitely. Is that anything?

2fa is out of control. Maybe part of the reason for increasing screen time is because we literally have to have our phones right next to us at all times for 2fa

Tried to get Novavax today but was turned away because I had an mRNA vaccine 6 months ago. Was told I need a doctor's order to go against the CDC recommendation. #covid

📌

My former colleague Mark Jeffreys passed away recently. Mark was a great man and a poet, and he leaves behind a middle-school age daughter. If you're interested in supporting an orphaned kiddo you can buy some of Mark's poetry here: markjeffreysmemorial.com/index.php/fo...