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If you think about it, Pascal’s Wager is the original bottom test. “God is a being so powerful that you simply have to submit to it whether or not it exists”

if someone is saying shit like "it's lowkey biphobic that you support AOC even though she won't legalize cannibalism" or "you realize that expecting your room to have windows a luxury belief right" what you're seeing are the charged particles being shot off from polycule fission

Yeah the wheelchairs you can make with the materials available in the high middle ages/early modern period are basically impossible to self propel. If your setting has people getting around on their own in wheelchairs it probably has bicycles.

One of the best nonfiction books I've ever read is Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters. Because it was written in the 1920s, before antibiotics were invented, it captures a certain terrible awe and respect for disease that we have almost completely lost.

That's a really weird skirt design, and I like it.

If you enjoyed 그 joke,

I like when an LLM emits a (contextually correct!) CJK token in the middle of an English sentence. I'm finally living in the cyberpunk future I was promised.

John McPhee, a layman deeply fascinated by geology, explores this tendency with literary brilliance, but a full-on geologist can only bewilder.

Geology is sort of similar: it is fundamentally narrative, but time and space switch places so often when working with stratigraphy that the brains of geologists grow twisted and incapable of constructing a linear narrative from linear events.

Something about chemistry makes chemists into good writers at a rate not seen in other sciences. I suspect the linear, narrative nature of synthesis pathways structures their thinking into a more writerly mode than the hypothetical breadth and statistical focus required in other scientific fields.

Also a personalized media demands personal appeals: it's really important to get your face right on it, otherwise there's no tangible connection to you.

I find all of this reassuring: before I was just some weirdo, now I'm a *type* of weirdo.

Yeah something I wish could be more easily distinguished is whether people are building tools to leverage LLMs on their work, or chasing the mirage of the "AI coworker." I think the latter is both more harmful and less likely to actually do something useful!

Something I've never really understood on social media is the expressive block. Unless someone is repeatedly replying to stuff I post harassing me, why block them? I just stop talking to them and they mostly stop existing for me.

C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute.

Yeah sliwa is fundamentally a local politician and local politicians of any kind are rare as hen's teeth these days. Almost everyone is marching to the beat of an ideology or focused on a national coalition.

Wanderer above the sea of Breezewood Pennsylvania

Has anyone done this yet

The scoreboard so far:

2024: Year of Getting Weirder ✅
2025: Year of Getting Stronger 🆗
2026: Year of Getting Prettier❓

Alright, it's time for the Year of Getting Prettier. Much remains to be done.

bsky.app/profile/aton...

Next year: the Year of Getting Prettier.

Me flexing in a mirror and showing off how I have actual muscles now?

I didn't really think my "year of getting stronger" was going that well but it turns out if you do landscaping work all year you end up with actual muscles?

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Oh God you can have a ham radio stalker?

Yeah I used to think it would take, like, a pandemic or an actual shooting war in our imperial core but then COVID and Ukraine happened and the US just kinda shrugged and went on with business as usual.

This is the right way to think about the "AI bubble" but I'm not sure it's very illuminating on the subject of AI itself. The lack of a materially based understanding of LLMs and other large transformer based models has led to the mistakes people are complaining about.

Yeah this sounds like an extremely above average culture with really good norms around documentation and sharing. I suspect that lawyers have a ton that they could teach other knowledge workers about this stuff, though maybe it all boils down to "have everyone be good confident writers and speakers"

GenAI is not some fundamental breakthrough, it's an application of established methods at a new scale. It is certainly hard to believe that scale is worth it at the present cost.

I have a weird materialist take on this stuff: it seems to me like the current AI development cycle is basically driven by the need for something to do with the rapidly increasing amounts of parallel computation that have become available in the last decade.

Yeah, ironically this was more or less the stated perspective of openAI before its recuperation under Altman as just another tech company!

I think people embrace this sort of attitude because they feel the only power they can exert over the world is through boycotts or harassment campaigns. This politics of abstention makes every issue into a personal moral choice, whether or not that makes sense.