Brad Ewing

AI writing is like store-bought cake. It might be perfectly fine, maybe even as good as something you could make yourself, but it’s weird to give it to someone and say it’s homemade

tbf it's hard to tell a lot of the old ghouls apart

This is what a pro-housing mayoral candidate looks like!

the LA mayoral race is shaping up to be the most obvious local election in a while.

progressive YIMBY (Raman) vs. incompetent NIMBY (Bass) vs. insane NIMBY (Pratt)

Raman is like Zohran/Zellnor/Lander fusion vs. Cuomo (Bass) vs. Sliwa (Pratt)

forever wars? no! forever, wars.

Might An LLM Be Conscious: A Short Skeetfest

tldr: it depends on what you mean by "conscious", whether you think that's even possible, what you think you'd test for. some of this is pedantic and some of it is just weird

to do meta-discourse: Anthropic is the only company and major research group that takes the sentience question at all seriously, and people seem really offended by that. It is legitimately philosophically difficult, in my opinion, and it seems kind of unserious to dismiss the question outright.

Yeah, going to ride this out for as long as one can

The quality of this site suffers when good contributors are run off by the hot-head/bully culture.

The "at least it isn't as bad as Twitter" whataboutery is not the exculpatory argument that some think it is.

Autonomous, unattributed agents opening PRs on projects that nobody asked for is not good for the health of the OSS ecosystem :/

Now let me design the plan with a Plan agent. [...] Excellent analysis from the Plan agent.

claude giving claude a medal never gets old

Jack Dorsey really is trying to do everything like Elon Musk

Coronavirus and Chronopolitics | Gabriel Winant It is important to understand that chronopolitics is nothing more than the political and cultural modality in which class conflict in recent decades has appeared: the conflict between generations is n...

Original line from this COVID-era essay, always thought it was a great microcosm of the current political era:

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-37/pol...

"The young are trying to save the old, as well as themselves; the old are trying to kill the young, as well as themselves."

This is an urban policy issue for sure but I feel like it cuts into a broader cultural problem: This country cannot admit to itself that people in their 70’s have a rapidly declining intellectual capacity and this will create all kinds of issues as our society ages.

So this study is based on the Lived-Experience-of-Firefighters and not quantitative research or comparisons to peer nations? This does not seem to be an evidence-based approach to public policy. Very disappointing.

CAL FIRE report about single-stair is out. It recommends just one additional story (four stories) be considered now, and notes "near unanimous" opposition by fire departments surveyed. 34c031f8-c9fd-4018-8c5a-4159cdff6b0d-cdn-endpoint.azureedge.net/-/media/calf...

had a death in the family and was almost completely off the internet for a few days & my observation is that there is too much happening too fast such that basic facts abt the world are difficult to ascertain unless you are mainlining info all the time & doing that seems to drive people insane

we should form a support group; I will be caught dead before ever wearing boat shoes again

It's infuriating to me that younger people want dense housing because we know that building more is the only way we'll be able to afford to buy. This would massively benefit older folks who could downsize and live independent car-free lives as they aged in place.
But guess who fights it hardest?

*already creating all kinds of issues

🙃

It’s always wild to me that evidence of street interventions working (e.g., cars colliding with protective barriers) is used by opponents as an argument to remove those interventions.

We may soon have 70 million boomers too old to drive, too car-dependent to stop. As the baby boomer bubble pushes into its eighties, we are driving into a demographic wall.

In the last 18 hours:

(1) I had a 70+ year old almost hit my kids in a stroller, and
(2) had an elderly oncoming driver drift into my lane, passing me as I dodged her seemingly unaware of my presence.

lloydalter.substack.com/p/we-may-soo...

1. Economic growth is lagging
2. Start a war with Iran
3. Energy prices spike
4. ???
5. Profit

this is already an extremely unpopular war and it’s just going to get worse as more people die and oil prices go up

The “Listen to [blank] voices” school of public policy was a fun little intellectual exercise for American progressives in the 2010’s but I think it’s pretty clear by now how easily cute anecdotes can be hijacked by reactionaries.

this is, so far, the most interesting social media interaction about models i have ever seen, in that it appears to involve a real time demo of increasing capabilities being tested by an open minded but firm skeptic, outside of programming usecases

i am not reposting this to shame the guy in question but it's really easy to come to believe that someone who holds a position 90 degrees from yours believes something 180 degrees from yours. i do it too, and people should extend more grace.

“Silicon Valley companies are poorly run.” it’s this simple. The tech layoffs aren’t about AI. tech companies gorged on ZIRP-era hiring and at some point reality was going to show up and tap its watch