Kazys Varnelis

The Salon and the Olympics - varnelis.net Nikolaos Gyzis, winner’s diploma for the 1896 Athens Olympics. Source: Wikimedia CommonsI rarely watch sports. The last Super Bowl I watched was in New Orleans, not the one in 2025, but the one in 1986, when the Bears won. Lately, bingeing Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive has sparked a renewed interest in Formula 1 ... <a title="The Salon and the Olympics" class="read-more" href="https://varnelis.net/works_and_projects/the-salon-and-the-olympics/" aria-label="Read more about The Salon and the Olympics">Read more</a>

Just in time for the closing ceremony, my essay on the Olympics, Expositions, and the Salon. I write about sports for the first time. Who would have thought?

It's wild how the best-kept secret in video is HDTV antennas. The quality is wildly better than streaming or cable, and it's free after the $50 antenna purchase.

Interesting. I got a much smarter version of ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode yesterday so I asked it what model it was. Normally, it always knows it's 4.0turbo, which is pretty awful. The new one did not know. I barely use ChatGPT anymore as Claude is so much better, but it's still interesting.

He would neither go towards a feeding grounds at the edge of the ice nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards we saw him heading straight towards a mountains, some seventy kilometers away.

MoMA PS1's wifi actively blocks Claude. This brings back such bad memories of trying to do a project here ten years ago. (this is the first time I've been back).

How is there no space for people in the humanities who actually work with *and* interrogate AI? not knee-jerk condemnation and not fanboy acceptance, but using the tools and thinking through their consequences. so strange.

So all the Marxist stuff, the conscience of the American left stuff, was a lie. He just hates the US and needed a good grift since the linguistics mumbo-jumbo was a dead end.

Biathlon is a great sport. It literally begins and ends with strapping on skis to shoot at invaders who, likely as not are Russian invaders.

The biggest problem with Bitcoin is that its proponents didn't understand that it is itself a fiat currency. Strip away the consensus that it's valuable, and you're left with valueless cryptographic proofs of work that nobody wants.

a late-night preview of the latest.

Man, you've got to wonder what's up in this Epstein email with Noam Chomsky's name on it.

epstein files pritzker on frank gehry, 2012

It says everything about the DOJ that anybody who had money at Deutsche Bank has their names fully listed along with amounts they had invested, but the names of sex criminals are redacted.

It says everything about the DOJ that anybody who had money at Deutsche Bank has their names fully listed along with amounts they had invested, but the names of sex criminals are redacted.

The incunabula period, during which we shifted into a print culture, took sixty years. We are under four years since the release of ChatGPT 3.5 and the era of actually useful LLMs.

ChatGPT is unwilling to tell me the date of the special election in NJ District 11 because it thinks it is harmful somehow. This still has me stunned.

ChatGPT - NJ-11 Special Election Details ChatGPT helps you get answers, find inspiration, and be more productive.

FYI

and yes, of course Claude just gives it to you.

ChatGPT is cooked. This is in the department of batshit crazy.

Another nice money making for the folks in the know about TACO.

The egregore, it seems, was a figment of network culture, nearly unimaginable today.

As soon as I encountered computers, I dreamt of a smart AI sidekick that could organize my thoughts and collaborate with me on them. Obsidian with @dereklarso's Claude Sidebar has done that. My life is transformed overnight again.

It’s terrible.

(Reagan is the one exception, Trump is not Reagan, and in any event, much of this still applies even for Reagan... take, for example, Reagan's ideas on tariffs).

The Trump era will end soon, in three years if not earlier, given his advanced age. Democrats obviously hate him like no other president. Moreover, Republicans absolutely hate their past presidents, and the purge of their ideas, staunch supporters, and projects will be as wild as the ride this year.

From the Lost Canals of Vilnius, a counterfactual history #aiart #counterfactualhistory

On a large desktop monitor, macOS 26 was ok. On a 14" MacBook Pro, it is repellent. Dark mode is a particularly ugly kludge. Why does Apple have to fuck with things? At least give us some options to turn the wildly curved corners off.

Whoever made the phone AI for UPS should be arrested. A horror show of sludge, which can only be defended by the reality that if you do get through to the outsourced call center staff, there is no hope of them helping you.

So old people drink peanut juice and it gives them Alzheimer’s? #aislop