jbum

Me: I'm feeling really Sapphic

You: Tell me more 😏

Me: ............... and if
......... [thy]me......
..........................
hands.......... [swan, or possibly an extinct species of gourd]
.........................s

Programming the LEDs on ferris wheels.

Okay here’s my hot take on the NYT.

The new stats on the puzzle app are pretty, but they add nothing new, and you can no longer easily compare your current solve time against your historical average on the same graph.

Miss that.

To be fair, I believe someone left the cake out in the rain.

Happy Turkey Day

Screenshot of ADS-B Exchange.

Hexagons aren't always MQ-9s, but in this case, yes, there are two MQ-9 Reapers over LA today. Just ridiculous.

Bill Atkinson, Macintosh Pioneer and Inventor of Hypercard, Dies at 74 Atkinson’s gleeful brilliance helped people draw on computer screens and access information via links.

RIP Bill Atkinson. One of a kind www.wired.com/story/bill-a...

Katamari Damacy

I experimented with this and found that "really good" is an exaggeration. Resulting images are significantly downsized (to a max of 1024px) and image preservation is not great.

I don't doubt that we're going to see some widely available models in the future with this capability.

Generic doctor descriptions from chatgpt-4o-latest, as rendered in Imagen-3

Generic doctor descriptions from chatgpt-4o-latest, as rendered by Dall-E-3

This week I’ve been testing very generic prompts on a variety of text and image models.

Here are some doctors.

The image prompts don’t provide any clues as to gender nor ethnicity.

Left is Imagen-3 (Google). Right is Dall-E-3 (OpenAI).

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PENTAGON PRESS ASSOCIATION SUBJECT: New Annual Media Rotation Program for Pentagon Press Corps For over a half-century, the Pentagon Press Corps has benefited from working out of individual office spaces that provide coveted and open access to some of the Department's top military and civilian leaders. Known as the Correspondents' Corridor, this office space loaned to media outlets by the Secretary of Defense stands as a tribute to the importance the Department has long placed on informing the public about the U.S. military and all it does to project peace through strength. It also honors the many correspondents who put their lives on the line, and in many cases died, while covering our finest in battle. In order to broaden access to the limited space of the Correspondents' Corridor to outlets that have not previously enjoyed the privilege and journalistic value of working from physical office space in the Pentagon, beginning February 14, 2025, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs will implement a new Annual Media Rotation Program for those dedicated media spaces. Each year, one outlet from each press medium - print, online, television and radio - that has enjoyed working from a physical office in the Pentagon will rotate out of the building to allow a new outlet from the same medium that has not had the unique opportunity to report as a resident member of the Pentagon Press Corps. This year, the following news outlets will begin their rotation by vacating their physical office space effective Friday, February 14, 2025: Print - The New York Times TV - NBC News Radio - National Public Radio Online News - POLITICO In their place, the following outlets from each medium will be invited to move into the Correspondents' Corridor workspaces formerly occupied by the above four outlets. Print - New York Post TV - One America News Network Radio - Breitbart News Network Online News - HuffPost News (aka The Huffington Post)

To be clear, the outlets that vacate the spaces loaned to them by the Secretary will remain as full members of the Pentagon Press Corps. They will continue to enjoy the same media access to the Pentagon and will be able to attend and cover briefings and be considered for travel with civilian and military leaders in the Department as they have previously. The only change will be giving up their physical workspaces in the building to allow new outlets to have their turn to become resident members of the Pentagon Press Corps. Thank you in advance for participating in the Pentagon Press Corps Annual Media Rotation Program. By turning over the office space loaned to you by the Secretary, you will ensure that new outlets will have the same opportunity you have enjoyed covering our nation's finest up close from office spaces inside the walls of the Pentagon. (John Ullyot Acting

NBC News is being kicked out of its space in the Pentagon and replaced by OANN.

Chart showing demand for Python and Pants since 2004, on Google. Python is roughly 64% Pants.

Python (which LLMs really excel at) is 0.64 pants. The I Ching is merely 0.01 pants. So I would guess that the magic number for which a decent modern LLM can be expected to perform relatively well falls somewhere between 1% and 20% Pants!

4/4

Demand for Tarot and Pants since 2004 on Google. Demand for Tarot is roughly 18% that of pants.

A fun unit-of-measurement I like to use when researching demand is “Pants”, since demand for pants is something I assume to be relatively stable. The demand for anything else can be expressed in pants, kilopants, millipants, etc. Tarot demand is roughly 0.19 pants. I Ching is much lower.

3/4

Comparison of Tarot and I Ching demand on Google since 2004. Tarot demand is roughly 20 times higher than I Ching.

A comparison between Tarot and I Ching on Google trends provides a likely culprit. These models are generally trained on the open web, and the amount of available material on these topics likely mirrors the relative demand shown by Google trends. The I Ching is not well represented.
2/4

Madame Esmeralda, a classic fortune telling machine.

All the AI models I’ve tested lately are excellent at doing tarot card readings, and terrible at casting I Ching hexagrams. DeepSeek R1 knows all 78 tarot cards and can provide interpretations. But when asked to provide a list of the 64 I Ching hexagrams, it hallucinates like crazy.

Why?
1/4

Play Vermicelli by KrazyDad Free vermicelli puzzles

My latest puzzle game involves worms, or is it spaghetti? I’m pretty sure it’s worms?

krazydad.com/play/vermice...

My dog agrees.

“I’m sorry, but” is a douche-nozzle indicator.

My website has sucked all along, but still sucks in much the same way.

Better: Wireless earbuds for the price of a hamburger.

Worse: Burger for the price of a pair of wireless earbuds.

The person responsible should be trotted out before cameras and receive an air horn blast at 3 feet.

ABC7 confirms the Evacuation Warning alert at 3:57am was in error.

Anyone else get an Evac Warning alert at 3:57am?

Looks like another mistaken alert, no matching incident in Watch Duty.

It coincided with the Eaton fire being downgraded from Evac order to Evac warning. Hmm…

I’m not quite sure “Warm Regards” is the appropriate closer to an email sent from corporate accounting to thousands of recipients.

Maybe “Angry Regards” ?

tldr

🤞

If you follow me, and you are following a suspiciously large number of people, like 10k, you’re getting blocked.

I’m not interested in whatever you are selling.

The important story is no longer "What is flying over New Jersey and where did they come from?", it's "How are so many people, including government officials, so susceptible to this mass psychogenic illness, imagining that obvious aircraft are drones?"