David Andersen

don't ever ask this agent how to lose weight

Um, ICE just coldly shot an unarmed PRIEST in the head w a pepper ball when he (and everyone around him) clearly posed no threat.

For the crime of … complaining about government policy.

Core 1A speech.

With cameras rolling, they’re sniping priests for sport.

I'm kinda positive about the long-term potential of modern deep learning, and I enjoy using coding assistants and think LLMs are a particularly good match there - but it's very, very hard to believe the short-term valuations of these companies.

they just slapped a surgeons general warning on RFK like he’s a pack of cigarettes

When Groundhog Was on the Menu in Punxsutawney From picnics to club dinners, the critter has a long culinary history in Pennsylvania.

Learn something new every day.
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/coo...

Sep 2025: Musk: 80% of Tesla's value will come from Optimus robots.

October 2025:

Whatever AI Looks Like, It's Not | Defector There is a very funny viral tweet going around that features a screenshot of a Google search result for “austria-hungary in space.” You can try the search yourself. This is what Google returns: In 188...

The worst part about this one is that this exact example has been known _for over a year_ AND PUBLISHED ABOUT and Google has done nothing to improve it.

defector.com/whatever-ai-...

Yeah, I use Kagi now and I'm really happy with it.

We stumbled upon this one because my wife still uses Google and was trying to come up with an analogy, and .. well, this resulted. I didn't realize most of the errors, but the Elijah Baley one jumped out at me so I dug in more. Depressing.

and even in the TV series is married to someone else. This is pure slop. Why would you put this front and center as the way you present to users?

Screenshot of Google search results AI Overview: Bayta Darrell is a character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels who discovers the Mule's identity and helps the First Foundation escape the psychic grip of the Mule, though her role in the tv series is different and she plays a central role in stopping the Mule in the books. In the tv series, she is revealed to be the powerful mentalic controlling the Mule, a twist on the original book's plot. In Asimov's Foundation Novels Bayta Darrell is the wife of Bail Channis and is instrumental in the discovery of the Mule's true identity and origin. She is the maternal aunt of Elijah Baley's wife, Bayta Mallow, in the second book of the Foundation Trilogy, Foundation and Empire.

Slightly niche, but Google, you should remain hideously embarrassed at having such erroneous shit in your AI summaries.

- The character is married to Toran Darel, not Channis;
-Elijah Baley is from an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SERIES and is married to Jezebel Bailey (née Navodny).
- Bayta Mallow is TV

I regret that I had but one NYT and WaPo subscription to cancel and already fired that shot, because good god, they're both managing impressive new depths.

Anyway, remember to throw some subscriptions to actual good sources of journalism, because it seems they're becoming more rare by the week.

Wonder what component of bsky is trying to melt down right now and why

(Loading profiles and replies is glitchy and slow for me for the last hour)

Encouraging distributed energy generation is a win - it reduces the load on transmission networks, which are one of the biggest costs to consumers.

If I were to need warmup music I would totally walk on stage to Ziggy Stardust.

Yeah, their math teacher is pretty good. Teaches middle school algebra + geometry + algebra 2 and is comfortable with the math. I like the teacher. I don't like the book. :-)

The AoPS books are MUCH better but are also MUCH more demanding of the student and need lots of hand-holding.

new_x and new_y are both linear functions of the original x & y, then if you have two such transforms and you want to unify them into a single one where you first apply t1 and then t2, the definition of matrix multiplication results in what you want.

I think for people with more mathematical sophistication, the real answer is "the way it's defined lets you represent the composition of linear functions/transformations as matrix multiplication". You can view a 2x2 matrix as a linear transform on inputs x, y that outputs new_x, new_y where

Part 1 is harder - The AoPS approach builds intuition by showing that you can use it to factor the x and y out of a linear system of two equations:
[ [x1_coef y1_coef], [x2_coef y2_coef]] * [[x] [y]]

and then asserting associativity and generalizing. That said ...

I find it much easier to remember that output_{ij} is the dot product of row i in A and column j in B -- because I have kind of a clear visual intuition for that.

You have to have learned dot product, but I think it's really helpful in memory b/c it simplifies & reduces to an earlier problem

Not sure. :) But I think there are really two parts to understanding matmul intuitively:

(1) Why is matmul defined the way it is? (not just "because the book sez")

(2) What's the easy way to remember how to matmul?

The dot product explanation addresses part 2

It feels like someone decided "we should teach some basic linear algebra stuff earlier" without asking whether it fit in nicely with what the students know already. So they can't really do vectors and dot products well b/c they don't have cosine/trig. So they get a formulaic matmul out of the blue.

simply being the dot product of the corresponding row/column for each output index. Instead it gets a big jumble of "multiply each element in the i-th row by ...". Poor kids.

(We cheated and grabbed the AoPS pre-calc book which teaches it the right way).

But also - why?? 2/3

Today in "god do most middle/high school math texts suck": daughter's algebra 2 class is covering matrix multiplication. I don't really know why. But the book throws them into it without first covering vectors and dot products, so it lacks the language and concept to describe the result as ... 1/3

MDPI continuing to show that its reputation is deserved

The kids have been building up their spicy tolerance lately so I decided to go for full strength tonight. 🤣 13 yo had some words for me...

And too self-absorbed to learn any lessons from Ukraine

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

👇👇