✨🚲 scoops 🚲✨

I sorta did this when buying my house - I drew a 10 mile bike catchment around downtown St Paul, downtown Minneapolis, and my office in Eagan and looked for houses in the sweet spot (it helped that all my most frequent friends already lived in the union of the three circles)

Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prediction is, famously, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The kind of technology Clarke had in mind was one that truly works, but in such a sophisticated way that it is entirely opaque to the ordinary people who use it. The optimistic reading is that Clarke pictured our descendants in the role of the makers of such technologies as people who actually understood it. But perhaps not. Magical technologies work... mostly. When they fail and you ask for an explanation, they present you with a blank face. When you try to intervene to fix them, they offer you no purchase on their surface of smooth glass. Instead of controlling technology as a wise wizard might wield a staff, you are forced to fall back on magic's traditional social function-namely, the ritual performance of specific but obscurely relevant steps meant to compel the gods to do the thing you want. Yet the gods care nothing for ordinary people; their ways are mostly unfathomable, and our means of control over them are obscure and unreliable. Instead of elevating us to a world of magic, the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning reduces us to it. A final wrinkle is that, as it advances, this process tends to shrink and ultimately undermine the caste of priests. In simpler technological worlds, the gods may communicate more directly to supplicants. They speak cryptically, but the initiated understand what is being said. Beyond a certain point, though, there is both less room for understanding and fewer means of intervention. With few exceptions, technology's priesthood may find itself degraded to the unhappy state of the laity. It, too, must confront what it means to live in an age where a sufficiently advanced technology really has become indistinguishable from magic.

The last and most important skill we must acquire is how to write begging letters to an opaque machine.

Why AI Safety Can’t Work At least AI safety the way that people talk about it with me on social media and in person. I’ve had this conversation often enough online and in person that I believe that I am not in a mean…

I keep saying that if we really want to align godlike AI there is some proven technology that we can adopt (slaughtering oxen)

free-dissociation.com/blog/posts/2...

I am told that the wire has been fixed and onlookers are dispersing

My reporter on the ground says there is a single wire down, that neighbors report it was lying in the street and a car hit it and that's when there was a big explosion of sparks. Big charred hole in the street

Looks like a short on a distribution feeder in the Midway, tripped everything downstream of the Merriam Park substation in the Midway, between Smelling and Lex. Some lights and sound reported near Hamline/Thomas (a tree branch???) probably the culprit

Oh, hmm wow interesting

the real alpha gal is the gal reading this post

I'm not home but I just got an email

Damn it spread that far?

Alpha-gal? I hardly know'er

Annex NE Minneapolis. From the River to Woodbury, Greater St. Paul shall be free.

YouTube video by YinzerTracy Fast Food - Stevens & Grdnic (Dr. Demento)

I actually find that speaking to ChatGPT is similar to

youtu.be/y4EuZIcHxE0?...

I like telling people I'm from LOMM and they're like "where's that?"

Dinner entree menu that lists choice of potato including French fry, hash brown, or wild rice

In Minnesota, sometimes your choice of potato is wild rice

The dream of reactionary elites is to harness all of the power and wealth created by cities while denying them any political power. Essentially, they want to be antebellum planter aristocracy, beholden to the law only as a courtesy.

A large orange tabby cat with an indignant expression on his face. Why haven’t you adopted him yet?

Have a kitty. This handsome orange boy is Cheddar Bob. He’s available for adoption in Minnesota through Ruff Start Rescue. You can learn more about him here: ruffstartrescue.org/view-pet/?id...

Baby Goose Abandoned by Its Parents Learns to Be a Tall Bird After Finding an 'Unexpected Family' with 3 Cranes A baby Canada goose abandoned as an egg found an 'unexpected family' with a pair of Sandhill cranes, and their colt, in Madison, Wis., in the spring of 2025. Madison-based photographer Alan Ginsberg h...

Meanwhile, in Madison, "a pair of cranes is raising an abandoned goose as their own." people.com/crane-family...

So, anyways, our annihilation hangs on the ability of the US to tell our neighbors, through delicate pantomime, the subtle logic of our nuclear strategy and I was not confident about that BEFORE the suggestion that nuclear actors may be putting Grok on the horn

The effect of knowing your counterparty has a random number generator controlling their missiles should make everyone else much more conservative, but it is a sort of stochastic race to the bottom strategy that is likely to reward wild behavior and destabilize the chess boards

And, yes, ultimately the president has the keys, but the apparatus has an explicit predictable logic that prevented him from ever needing to think about the button

Classically, these would be calculated moves telling their counterparties exactly what to do to prevent escalation.

Most of nuclear diplomacy as I understand it is yes making nuclear weapons but mostly it is RAND Corporation acolytes writing very explicit position papers on not just when and why and with what formula they would choose to strike, but also telling other nuclear actors their game theory

This is what basically every AI company has been doing for the last couple of years - offer this product, have people use it to hollow out their team's technical depth, and then they'll be left, after the trial period, dependent on the stochastic search engine and on the hook for a fat contract

I am donating to Jason, and I am invoicing them for the cost of my cellular phone

Nut Roll invite card - Saint Paul Nut Roll IV, August 23, 2025 1PM, Bang Brewing. Get Ready to Get Nuts! The logo is the crest of the St Paul flag, except with peanuts, the Pearson's crown logo, the Predator handshake meme clasping hands, and a bicycle wheel

The fourth annual St Paul Nut Roll is back - August 23, 1PM, Bang Brewing. Bike a little. Eat a some Nut Rolls. Invite your friends! Get Ready to Get Nuts!

www.eventbrite.com/e/saint-paul...

I hate this stupid country so much. What if we had a 100% tariff on bad ideas for once.

Damn that's crazy

You can tell if a cog is worn down if the teeth look like a non-symmetrical triangle

My first suggestion would be chain lube (like $5 at any bike shop). If it feels like it is skipping or if it's falling off the hub, you may want to ask a bike shop to look it over. After a couple thousand miles the teeth will get worn down or the chain may stretch out of alignment