james

james

@jamesweir.bsky.social

ann arbor mi | burlington vt | shanghai ch | aa again birds, tennis, native plants, more housing, china, news and law, etc. volunteer (board and bird walks) with washtenaw bird and natural alliance he/they www.jamesrichardweir.com

929 Followers 1,203 Following 1,094 Posts Joined Aug 2023
1 day ago

oh yes that tracks, of course. also a good example of a certain kind of "big tennis fan" who only watches the men (an obvious sign of someone who doesn't truly appreciate the sport, bc the average WTA match is quite obviously as good, if not better, than the average ATP match)

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1 day ago

not sure! i love the tennis podcast, tho. i would imagine ellison shows up to many good matches; he's among the very worst people alive, but he does also seem to genuinely love tennis. so he probably knows how to pick a good session out of the draw. (i should reiterate that he is the worst.)

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1 day ago

just remembered that larry ellison owns indian wells and therefore the Tennis Gods of IW are, in this situation, lackeys for one of the most corrosive human beings alive. i hate it! i am glad that gods are not real

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1 day ago

incredibly rude that the Tennis Gods have scheduled fonseca-sinner at the same time as mboko-anisimova

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1 day ago

i have occasional damp walls and 1-2 times a year a very small amount of pooling in one area. two structural engineers told me to optimize exterior grading and then it wouldn't be a problem for decades, if ever. different considerations if you want to finish the basement, though

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1 day ago

if i recall correctly he was based in jackson. but he has been working with foundations in southeast michigan for decades and gave me a remarkable detailed report for a very reasonable fee (maybe a few hundred bucks?). he had detailed info on the composition of my cinder blocks and everything

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1 day ago

i bought a super busted up 1903 home two years ago and consulted James Standen (Standen Engineering Services was maybe his LLC or business name?) and he was crucial in helping me understand how to manage an old unfinished michigan basement. not sure if he's still working but can't recommend enough

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6 days ago

Telling Jesus he'll never make it if he keeps being so hostile to wealth. Advising him to moderate his message to appeal to the Galilee suburbs

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6 days ago
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Okay this made me cry

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6 days ago

i guess it's good that anthropic is at least pretending to fight back but it's hard to take them seriously when they call it the department of war, which literally does not exist in any lawful sense. how can you have a valid contract with a gov't entity that does not exist in statute?

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1 week ago

right now, in a conference room somewhere or in a signal chat, the PR teams for these war contractors and their tech partners are high-fiving about how easy it is to get good press for their war crimes

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2 weeks ago

🧵 Living in Michigan, if a political issue seems frustratingly impossible to advance, you can almost always find the roots in policies motivated by racial and economic segregation. When you scrape back the "housing theory of everything" you find racism and classism under the hood.

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1 week ago

possible the speed will work against them?? people are going to notice when everything sucks quickly, rather than over decades as has been the case elsewhere

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1 week ago
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Why AI Companies Are Suddenly Worried About Theft Models built on scraped material are now getting scraped themselves.

firstly, lol these companies can get wrecked, and secondly, once the algorithms have been stolen we should move onto the personal wealth and belongings of the entire ai executive class until they are impoverished and rightly shunned by polite society. just my two cents

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2 weeks ago
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Tech CEOs Confused by Why Everybody Hates AI So Much With public sentiment on AI resoundly negative, the tech CEOs pushing the new tech only seem to be doubling down.

just spitballing but some of it might have something to do with 15 years of sociopathic behavior culminating in the enthusiastic embrace of violent fascism

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2 weeks ago

my anecdotal experience with parents and family friends in burns park is that they don't have the juice anymore. what happened (or didn't) with the library lot left many feeling misled and it was a pretty clarifying for a segment of that coalition. i think some PTP rhetoric has had a similar effect

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2 weeks ago

do you genuinely think that one postcard, sent years ago, would have meaningfully changed the reflexive anti-CLUP reaction from aa's small but vocal anti-housing minority? CM Disch was not admitting to a comprehensive failure of community input and i don't think your characterization is accurate

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2 weeks ago

also curious what evidence you have for the top-down claim in this context, given that the current city council was explicitly elected on a pro-housing platform. and if council doesn't listen, i'm not sure how the anti-housing vocal minority received so many concessions during the CLUP draft process

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2 weeks ago

"rightly or wrongly" is doing a lot of work here and personally i think it matters quite a lot whether or not people were actually left out of the CLUP process or if they are saying they were as a bad faith political tactic

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2 weeks ago
Preview
Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude The allegations mirror those made by OpenAI, which told House lawmakers that DeepSeek used ‘distillation’ to improve AI models.

incredibly funny for an ai company to say this with a straight face

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2 weeks ago

i appreciate this! good to hear you think he upholds DSA values (which are broadly similar to my own). i am skeptical about some of what he has said since his mayoral announcement, but i’m open to his candidacy and he might convince me. but imo his policy statements have been discouraging so far

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2 weeks ago

oh, duh. missed the part about the intro meeting. and i realize the org voted on the mayoral endorsement but i still find it surprising that members backs the guy who immediately hopped into bed with the very worst of AA’s bad faith NIMBYs who have been poisoning city discourse for decades

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2 weeks ago

was rabhi yousef there? i’m still surprised they endorsed that guy

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2 weeks ago

one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever do it

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1 month ago
a picture of the last panel of a Charlie Brown comic by Charles Schulz of two kids sitting on a stoop, one looking furious and saying, "How I hate him!"

me whenever jeff bezos does another horrible thing so i have to talk shit about him instead of whatever it is i should be doing:

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3 weeks ago
A 3 panel comic where in the first panel, a cartoon genie explains that there are three rules for wishes: 1 no wishing for death 2 no falling in love 3 no raising the dead. In panel 2 the wisher says “I want Reeses cups to moan when I take their little panties off” cut to Panel 3 of our genie saying “There are four rules.”

You’re welcome! (Acquired via @trance.bsky.social)

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3 weeks ago
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Everyone in the world comes to get married at the NYC Marriage Bureau. Last week, the Mayor stopped by to officiate a few of those ceremonies. 
 
Thank you to all the couples who shared their joy with us. Happy Valentine's Day, New York. 
 
 Watch the full video at Youtube.com/nycmayorsoffice

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3 weeks ago

oh my god

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1 month ago

this story is a reminder that nothing beats a Good Blog

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1 month ago
screenshot of a new york times digital article headline that reads: Health advice from AI chargers is frequently wrong, study shows. In part, the problem has to do with how users are asking the question

remarkable that it only took ~2 years for the NYT to start victim shaming users of AI for their failure to identify the lies and inadvertent manipulations that are coded into the DNA of these applications. this technology is fundamentally incompatible with a society that values truth and nuance

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