Cerril

I couldn't schedule labwork / blood draws this morning and it took some time to realize this was why.

The AWS outage made it impossible to pay for parking outside the courthouse this morning.

Amazon should not have that kind of influence.

If you were at TwitchCon and experienced or witnessed harassment, especially from IRL streamers, I'd like to speak with you for a story.

Please signal boost.

The platform splintering is a huge deal in this. Every now and then I hear someone like Pargin say authoritatively that Mr Beast or this kpop star is objectively the most famous person in the world and I say understandably 'who?'

Yelling at the canary is basically never a wise strategy.

Bruce Campbell! This movie coming out when I was 16 is way up there is evidence that the world was made for me specifically.

To just trade from hitting a homer to immediately pitching dudes out is stressful just to watch! Baseball isn't supposed to have that much going on!

Every year there are better options both at the low and no ABV margins. It's not perfect and all of the mass market is still awful but the survey every year is less dire.

I'm increasingly part of the stance that's angry that OpenAI ruined the slow growth of the very limited use cases for grown up ML tools that don't pretend to be all things to all people, because we're seeing the tiny sprouts of a lot of those that will be strangled in the crib when the bubble pops.

If I had explain American history in one sentence, I could do worse than "John Brown was hung for treason, but Robert E. Lee was not."

I go back and forth. Overuse mine for awhile, go back to doing everything by hand and feeling great, then end a big party or family event with a sink full and very little feels better than throwing it all in the dishwasher, hitting go, and staggering up to bed.

You need a foundation of knowledge to evaluate the results, and you need skills specific to the tool set to maximize the quality of the results you get. Not to mention a firm understanding of the limitations of the tools in the first place. None of which is ever mentioned by the cheerleaders.

I have a modicum of respect for "prompt engineering" as a tool use skill. Very little for LLMs as tools to be clear but learning how to get accurate answers to technical problems out of Google wasn't dissimilar to other research skills. You can't go in with nothing and expect useful results

Ironically I'm reading Roadside Picnic right now which... is.

Absolutely isn't, I agree. Even in a philosophy curriculum you can stumble through memorizing and regurgitating what other dead white dudes said. I've got a lot of criticism for how it's taught but I have found my education in particular very useful for ordering and communicating my thoughts.

I live this phrasing. I'm always understandably leery about the tendency to go too far and say that means education is not helpful or even harmful but it's absolutely not a One Simple Trick to inoculate against being terrible.

a lot of people want there to be Knowledge That Makes You Good and unfortunately that is not a thing that exists

I'm pretty defensive of the concept of a philosophy education done right because of an emphasis on critical thinking that's lacking elsewhere, but I absolutely agree that the sort that gravitate there include the exact sort of argumentative shithead I was at that age.

I want to believe this! I thought he was perfect in Blade Runner and had high hopes for Tron. Well not high hopes, the whole franchise is a series of questionable decisions attached to amazing music. But he seems perfect to play an off-putting inhuman creepy villain.

Kojima is only maybe rivaled by Sam Lake

(forgetting the word for antibiotics) do i need cancel culture

I eventually got clear of the capital A Internet Atheism by understanding all the problems I had with 'religion' were just anti authoritarianism. Its not religions that I've got beef with, it's the power of the State regardless of how it's organized. (Simplistically)

The sort of person that manages to be wrong in so many directions at once. Not coincidentally adds fuel to the common trope from evangelists that Atheism is just another religion. To some people, apparently it is!

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

Also, I can't be alone in having a classification (increasingly inaccurate) for 'oldness' that is just younger than me = recent, older than me = ancient. Even if it's more than 40 years ago, it's closer to yesterday than any time that predates me.

That's incredible. At odds with the two things I had in my head about it: that it's absurdly simple in terms of ingredients and technique, and that during the ciabatta fad every restaurant and particularly fast food joint was pretending like it was something fancy. Would have said it was ancient.

That was exactly it!

Gonna be worth it. I've had to do two sinus surgeries since my early 30s and both times were pretty life changing.

This is the current step we're on along the 'GenAI sucks but AI has long been a label for a whole lot of different things and it's extremely confusing as GenAI/LLMs continue to try to hijack the entire term' path. Add on that tons of products staple on GenAI to follow the trend and it gets worse.