Gregory Randolph he/him

me to my students: LLMs are like your worst ex. They will LIE to you with the most serene, most confident face

one of my students, quietly: I hate that guy so much

I do love me some squid facts… Really any cephalopod facts.

There was an old man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
But his daughter, named Nan
Ran away with a man
And as for the cash, well Nan took it.

(I don’t remember the original author)

Mark Zuckerberg has spent $110M to buy 11 houses in one Palo Alto neighborhood.

He's turning the homes into a compound.

That's on top of his 30 bedroom, 30 bathroom compound in Hawaii and another in Lake Tahoe.

I don’t want to hear that billionaires can’t afford a wealth tax.

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

I hate that. Where do I find the I-like-the-poster-and-I’m-commiserating-about-the-post-which-I-dislike emoji?

Did he actually think the war was a good idea? Or did he mean that for the be-awful-to-everyone party it was a clever move on their road to a fascism and totalitarianism?

I wonder why *in the intelligence world* it might be difficult to export information directly off a computer

Reminder that I’m happy to help you move your Substack newsletter to a self-hosted Ghost newsletter that you fully own and control (and that scales more cheaply than Substack if you’re monetized.)

Why Are They Hiding Their Faces? If ICE agents' actions are perfectly acceptable, they shouldn't have to mask their identities

After Rümeysa Öztürk wrote an op-ed about Palestinians in Gaza, masked, plainclothes ICE agents grabbed her off the street. No one knew who they were or if it was even a real arrest. In a democracy, that shouldn’t happen. And we can’t let it become the new normal.

Ok now that Rowling is actually funding discriminatory harassment suits against random trans women at the behest of her followers can we stop pretending that supporting or openly enjoying Harry Potter is a politically neutral act that doesn't harm trans people?

Yeah, I have three kinds (spoiler, they all look exactly the same to me). One has been in full bloom for a week. One is just kicking off. And one hasn’t started.

Just a bunch of very dark iris flowers growing in the sun.

Nice!
Down in Portland the goth irises are going strong too!

Same brown tabby but as a kitten.

Same girl in 2009 when she was still a house princess. (Don’t worry if you can read the phone number on the tag. It’s not my number anymore.)

Brown tabby looks very skeptical.

This is my house queen Penelope. She’s sixteen years old at some point this year. And this is the face she made when I told her we should get her a drivers permit.

It takes a certain kind of balls to argue what Catholicism means to a Cardinal. Specifically the kind that rattle around inside an empty head.

Gary Oldman from the series Slow Horses in a dirty trench coat and a loose tie.

Oooh. I get it. Slow Horses is Gary Oldman as John Constantine. Except, instead of a magician he’s an MI-5 agent.
…
Now I want to see Gary Oldman as Constantine.

it's propagander

The smooshing together of all these questions in the public understanding of AI is directly to the benefit of corpos pushing it. It *serves* them for us to consider AI == LLMs == Machine Learning == Neural Networks. The differences between these actually matter A LOT

Just FYI, Tom argued for universal welfare, abolition, public education, state-sponsored pre/post-natal care, family subsidies, & retirement for workers at 50 w/state pensions that would double at 60.

He also considered the American revolution a failure, co-opted by self-serving, landowning elites.

And with that, the curse was lifted. I can stop doom scrolling now.

I never really thought about it, but it’s so obvious. There definitely should be a drain down there. I’m team Orin on this one.

It does say something that the Europeans living in America feel like no where is safe right now, but it sounds like the Europeans in Europe have a very different feeling. I can’t help feeling like the message that no where is safe is part of the current American agenda.

If you're using substack and linking to it, everyone else hears it as you going "hey guys check out this cool Nazi bar I hang out in"

It turns out telling people you hang out in a Nazi bar is not a very effective way of advertising yourself.

There is an AI company called GeoSpy, the AI is designed to look at a photo (any photo) and tell the user where that photo was taken. They initially opened it to the public, but privacy concerns led to them going private. And now they sell to the folllowing: law enforcement, government and insurance. I know we’ve been saying “don’t fucking take pics at protests” for years? But I think we need to escalate that to “don’t take pics at pride. Don’t take pics at queer events” etc

IMPORTANT!! 🚨

Surveillance state update —

From a friend with informed intel. No more crowd photos of any kind, friends. I’m sorry.

It’s true. I was scrolling this app today, pleasantly surprised at not seeing any of the news in my feed, and then I remembered that I’d muted a bunch of words last November. No regrets. Do recommend.

But you gotta admit, that classic (potentially Volkswagen) beetle is a sweet, sweet ride!

At risk of repeating myself: The Luddites weren’t against technology. They were against getting put out of work by a technology that did a version of their job faster but worse, in the service of increasing profits for their bosses.

a woman giving a thumbs up in front of a poster that says ' altitude ' Alt: Max giving double thumbs-up in the abandoned bowling alley

I was going to suggest chapter 1 from Life is Strange as well. Such a wonderful franchise.