Comma Chameleon

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen As a restaurant owner – I’m astounded at the rate of progress since microwaves were released a few short years ago. Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s m…

www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-t...

Thats not to say there haven't been growing pains. When a great steak comes out of the microwave I get really excited. But more than half the steaks that come out of the microwave get sent back by the customer. To solve this problem I now run ten microwaves in parallel cooking ten steaks. One out of the ten steaks will most likely be good. The number of microwaves has required me to upgrade my restaurant's electrical system and I now have a small nuclear reactor installed in the parking lot.

AI is the new microwave.

Superbowl for dweebs alerts, OpenAI open-weight models are out.

120b and 20b models available.

openai.com/open-models/

My son just showed me this "Ugly Gerry" font. Every letter in the font is shaped like a US congressional district. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_Ge...

Professor Alexander Abian would be proud

It might be useful for *testing* your surveys and methods with fake data before you roll them out to actual humans. That’s the only valid use I can think of.

Like yes, the AI knows that an atheist woman in California is more likely to support abortion rights than a Catholic man in Texas. It learned that from reading random scraps of data on the Internet. It can’t magically get inside their heads.

And yes it’s a whole burgeoning field

arxiv.org/html/2503.16...

arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01582

arxiv.org/pdf/2306.07951

There are a lot of good uses of AI, and a lot of bad uses of AI. Using it to survey populations (of AI generated people) is the single worst use I’ve heard of so far.

I don’t think it’s an unsolvable problem

Would just take $1-2 billion 🙃

I follow him!

China by contrast has Alibaba Cloud which is a true AWS competitor

OVHcloud literally caught on fire

They’re not very good, yet

I’ve looked into it

I’m sure there’s room for a true European-owned cloud

Would they hire me? I can do Paris or Barcelona … maybe a little village in the Alps too

In Italia they are called Macarancini

Why is it good to export cars, and bad to export education? We’re a whole lot better at exporting education than cars…

They also don’t pay well compared to the rest of tech. And Redmond is very very expensive.

Triangular Mac n cheese bites

I have absolutely no idea what a Sydney Sweeney is and at this point I’m too afraid to ask

Some kind of barber shop in Australia?

(And ‘classical’ is really really old, not like Jane Austen but like Cicero)

In Asian cultures, reading modern fiction is considered a form of entertainment

School is about classical literature + textbooks

I always thought that difference was interesting

Granted, in the modern world, peer reviewed articles are under way more scrutiny than mere books

I feel like maybe the education system hasn’t quite caught up to that

Video and audio can change at any time

There’s no accountability, the presenter can make up whatever they want and never apologize or correct themselves

Writing generally has some kind of standard

We teach kids to read books not because reading books is inherently good

We teach them to read books because truth is more likely to be found in books

It’s a grand piano. On a rug. Doesn’t look like much

The Musical Instrument Museum in St. Paul has Saddam Hussein’s piano

you walk in off the street with an issue

And if it’s cancer treatment, the result could be life or death

There’s actually a really good comparison with health care…

Technically, everyone is eligible for the same services as your local hospital

But in practice your gonna have a whole different experience if you work with a small private clinic that can schedule and advocate for you, compared to if

Big airports are converting more and more of their seating to lounges

And then credit cards are dangling lounge access

But lounge access is scare and unbelievably expensive

In this essay I shall compare airline lounges to the Enclosure Acts of 17th-century Britain…

It's true.