Rob Lion

just saw Herbie Hancock at the Strathmore. played almost exclusively progressive jazz, went ~1 hour over time, much of the overage stemming from a nearly 40m lecture on evolution, compassion, & futurism done entirely via vocoder, and saved almost all the accessible fusion for post-lecture. the GOAT!

Our Elevator Is Having Some Issues Dear Residents, While this elevator was being serviced yesterday, the emergency phone was inadvertently disabled. We are taping this note to the el...

"The emergency phone has been reconnected. However, the technician hooked the line to the wrong socket, and the phone now seems to call a different emergency phone in a different elevator."

Ughpdate: bsky.app/profile/midn...

But here’s the most uncomfortable truth of all: the parasites that have taken over so much of our country—pantsuited girlboss advertising executives, Skittle-haired they/them activists, soy-faced pajama-clad work-from-home HR apparatchiks, Adderall-addicted dog mom diversity consultants, nasally voiced Ivy League regulatory lawyers, obese George Soros–funded police abolitionist district attorneys, hipster trust fund socialists—are some of the least impressive people in the history of the world. The Uniparty would never have achieved what it has in this country without a great degree of rottenness, of decadence, of torpor, of complacency already

it's utterly wild how the Heritage Foundation president talks about other people

if you found a guy talking like this outside, you'd probably call the cops

i don't know or want to know what compels a man to burn a pair of pants in a public forest. all i can say is, you need to burn those pants at your home, or in a designated approved municipal fire ring 25 feet from structures and no larger than 3 feet wide and 2 feet high

A key reason you shouldn’t just go around and say “actually a LLM/Gen AI deserves to take your job and impoverish you because it’s morally equivalent to a human” to workers is because those workers, unlike an LLM, absolutely CAN get mad enough to kill you and burn down all your data centers

A long-nosed bat covered in yellow pollen from a cactus flower. The flower has been cut in half to give the profile view inside the flower. The bats face shades from a natural dark grey to pollen-yellow.

The nature of ecological webs is that they're only as strong as their weakest links.

But there's good news, everyone! You can make a difference by buying bat-friendly tequila and mezcal.

The bad news: there aren't many bat-friendly options.

Website here:
www.batfriendly.org/tequila-and-...

Also, 3oo degrees make a complete circle and 360 reduces to 9. Ovid says in his Fasti that in Rome on certain days in May the ghosts of the dead were believed to return to their old homes. To expel them, the head of the house, after midnight, washed his hands in water and walked through the house, throwing black beans behind him and saying nine times, 'These I cast, with these beans I redeem me and mine.' He took care not to look over his shoulder as the ghosts gathered up the beans and followed behind him. Then he ordered the ghosts to leave his house, saying nine times, 'Ghosts of my fathers, go forth.' Not until then was it safe for him to look behind him. Beans were used to purge the house of the ghosts, because beans have laxative qualities. To repeat the two sets of words nine times was to repeat them enough times, or all possible times.

The Romans had an annual ghost exorcism holiday with certain laxative-related themes.

For just as beans cause the body to expel certain substances, they apparently do the same to unwanted household ghosts.

As seen in Cavendish’s “The Black Arts,” following Ovid.

USB cables review and testing | TinkerVault Reviews and tests of USB-C cables: E-Marker chips, protocols (USB PD, Thunderbolt), resistance, dimensions. Cables for fast charging and data transfer

Does anyone wanna see a really granular list of different fast charge USB C cables? www.tinkervault.com/usb-cables

Vintage ad for Honeywell electronic mail, showing a photo of sparkly energy bursting from a stunned office-worker's desk top. "What the heck is Electronic Mail? Electronic Mail is a term that's been bandied about data processing circles for years. Simply put, it means high speed information transportation. One of the most advanced methods is terminals talking to one another. Your mailbox is the terminal on your desk. Punch a key and today's correspondence and messages are displayed instantly. Need to notify people immediately of a fast-breaking development Have your messages delivered to their terminal mailboxes electronically, across the hall or around the world. Electronic Mail is document distribution that's more timely, accurate and flexible than traditional methods. There's no mountain of paperwork. Administrative personnel are more effective. Managers have access to more up to date information. Decision-making is easier. Tomorrow's automated office will clearly include Electronic Mail. But like the rest of the Office of the Future, it's available at Honeywell today. For more information call Mr. Laure Reeves at (800) 225 3229/3 (within the 617 area, call 552-2048) Or write him at Honeywell Office Automation Systems, Three Newton Executive Park Drive, Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts 02162. Honeywell"

Honeywell discovered that electronic mail was a vengeful spirit living within emergent computer technology that only a corporation skilled in the dark arts - such as Honeywell - could possibly subdue and, when broken, make subservient to other lords of business for a fee...

Racist Influencers Using OpenAI's Sora to Make it Look Like Poor People Are Selling Food Stamps for Cash Folks looking for evidence of SNAP recipients as welfare queens have no shortage of AI generated schlock to use as justification.

Blackface that exists without any actual human behind the makeup is a special kind of dystopian phenomenon

‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm – including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback, despite a myriad of iss...

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

I've been getting back into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series after many years, and the most relatable part is how everyday objects like doors and elevators have been imbued with artificial intelligence and it just makes them obnoxious and frustrating to use and everyone hates it.

I don’t think we should view this outside the context of DOGE, where young men were drafted into being shock troops for incredibly immoral and illegal actions because they lacked the judgement or experience to say “hey we shouldn’t do this, I might go to jail”

POV: Your city’s team wins a major championship and you put armed cops on horses to beat people who are just enjoying the moment

Many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.

This is from Autocracy, Inc, about how modern autocratic propaganda works.

I consider this every time I decide what to share and how to frame it.

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT

Hiding replies without my consent is *dangerous to me*

I use the mute function extremely carefully for a reason

I need to know if people are being violent at me so I can take action to protect myself

I need to be able to choose for myself who hidden

@pfrazee.com

INVENTOR: ive got a great new toy idea for you, it's called... the Radio Flyer

TOY EXEC: oh wow, so it's like a plane that flies via... radio?

INVENTOR: it's not a plane

TOY EXEC: oh...Kay, so it's

INVENTOR: its a little red wagon

TOY EXEC: with ... a radio on it?

INVENTOR: theres no radio

Full justification of typefaces used to be extremely technically challenging, so it was common practice for designers to take the single geometrically-simplest letter and stretch it as wide as necessary.

The internet age is fascinating cause it’s so much easier for these sort of niche schismatic factions both to form, and to watch them go insane together. It’s like if we got to watch the Japanese united Red Army Faction as a reality tv show.

Retailers Dealing With Increasing Levels of Theft and Violence Report emphasizes importance of preventive measures, coordination with law enforcement

can't believe outlets are running moral-panic headlines again based on flimsy anecdata from the *same* trade group (the national retailer federation) and sponsored by the *same* anti-theft company (sensormatic) that had to retract this *same* "study" just two years ago for being bogus.

Guys it's just a sweepstakes!
And you don't need to pay to enter.
You just need to handwrite a paragraph and a 14 digit code on a 4x6 index card with no lines!
And they get to judge whether it's legible or not!
Easy peasy!

Everyone should submit this

It is truly the most American thing that the World Series MVP needs a translator to take his post game interview

Mar-a-Lago face - Wikipedia

Present historians are already writing about Mar-a-Lago face.

Mee what can be done. Clear communication is key. In extremis, nation-states may sabotage or raid or use conventional strikes to disrupt nuclear weapons programs. The world stands in fear of global nuclear war, and so world leaders put a serious effort toward preventing nuclear proliferation. We sometimes meet people who are very sure that no major country's leaders will ever be able to see the threat from machine superintelligence, and thus that treaties and diplomacy such as this are impossible. Perhaps they will be proven correct. But we're not so sure. Human beings sometimes do things they don't usually do, if they realize that their freedom or their way of life is at stake, let alone their continued survival.

And this is where it again becomes clear that (a) they have no model of the political world and (b) their entire social world is built out of discussion board LARPing debates.

They imagine that humanity COULD rally to the cause, so long as our author-heroes sound the alarm effectively enough.

this is a dire mistake that contravenes the principles the web was founded on

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

CO2 is good proxy for measuring virus levels, but it would be really nice to see a scalable technology for measuring actual virus in the air. I’d like to see more particulate monitors as well!