maize2man.bsky.social

trying to maintain a veneer of positivity in the increasingly desperate voicemails I’m leaving for the 12-year-old neighbor boy on whose little league performance I’ve staked my 401k

Transition lenses that keep getting darker the longer someone is talking to you.

this situation is literally nightmare fuel for anyone with imposter syndrome

No joke. I think this is the most important video I have ever seen about mobile games. This guy breaks down how this game psychologically profiles you, and makes the game harder or easier in order to show you ads

Now, if like me you believe that Europe can beat China on value add manufacturing and services, and you have no great desire to see the return of mass manufacturing, there is a path forward. But political leaders do not currently like that answer.

guys please stop falling for this, this is not “rogue AI” it’s “environments with lax cybersecurity controls”

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

...we said "a prompt management program". There are not separate chatbots at work, they are not "interacting" or forming civilizations god help us. It is *one* LLM, being repeatedly queried by a program which uses the results of queries to build new queries in a structured way

Spain on the other hand needs to install a lot more batteries quickly if it wants its own solar boom to continue.

This is pretty catastrophic and I'm not sure how either of these companies reverse the trend. It really appears the AI bubble is based on the whims of maybe a few hundred companies spending money on two companies to justify five companies spending money with one company.

Large portions of the data center backlash are based on moral panic, but the the tech right VC types upset by it are very funny considering how gleeful they were about the demise of ‘legacy’ media. What’s that? You’re missing epistemic gatekeepers who would place complex facts in context? Tough shit

It's the 1st of September and the new academic year is starting! #Academia #Teaching #University #Research

The world's most notorious custard-pie thrower is dead. What an obituary. He got Bernard-Henri Lévy seven times.

Of course the UK government did have folk in from Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc to tell them about negotiations. But it was all about the technical stuff, when the real substance is building the right senior official / political level frameworks. Still not sorted.

One of the guys who helps me out on the farm said "The one thing nobody tells you about farming is how much of it is texting people" it's nice to know nothing has changed

People are gonna be mad about this but yes it's a MASSIVE failure that the Biden admin failed to do the basic mechanics of engaging with the press and pissed them all off. "The press shouldn't base its coverage on whether we answer their emails on time" ok but they do. So answer the fucking emails.

What of innovation? "It reduces capacity that produces the model cycle arriving 2029-2031, because product planning, powertrain engineering, software development are the functions being thinned."

So, who wants to vote for the next euro banknote designs??? There are only two groups of design (culture, or nature), but there are a few design variants in each group and I have to respect some of them for being more interesting than the usual banknote design. surveys.ecb.europa.eu/10b/banknote...

Ossoff: “You refuse to answer a simple matter of the fact about the 2020 election.” Clayton: “I’ve given you my answer.” Ossoff: “What is your answer?” Clayton: *doesn’t answer* Ossoff: “Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question?”

Weizenbaum was an MIT computer scientist who built one of the first chatbots, ELIZA. He wrote the book out of a growing sense of horror as he saw how “extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people” ...

That the media keep running cakeist pieces by politicians with regard to the EU is really quite the sign of a lack of seriousness all round.

I'm not normally alarmed about privacy hacks, but this looks bad/inescapable: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Job Hunting in January vs Job Hunting in June.

tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.

There's a persistent fantasy that maybe some other nice countries will start mass-hiring US scientists. That's not going to happen. A few high-profile, big name researchers will get poached, sure. But most countries, including some very nice ones, are underemploying their own scientists already.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this car does not actually cost $9,000. Chinese cars outside of China cost what all other cars cost. They are MAYBE ten percent cheaper for comparable equipment. The prices in the domestic market are not real prices.

A good example is jet fuel in Europe. A lot of preemptive cancelling of flights, the importation of a load of American jet fuel much faster than I thought was possible & some fast adaption by European refiners has - so far at least - meant avoiding a real crunch.

the 10x framing is a little cliche but a good way to think about AI tools, I think. the thing is 10x 0 is still 0

It makes many online spaces intolerable. If I want to talk to ChatGPT or Claude, I'll just talk to ChatGPT or Claude, I don't need to talk to Claude pretending to be a person with mediocre prompts. You can use AI to help with writing, but you need to actually do some writing to be helped with.

So we get the extremes in the UK, of people saying the EU isn't interested, or those thinking one more ask and they'll finally give us everything we've been asking for 10 years. Such a dismal spectacle, almost a celebration of ineptitude.

Found it. Something the "just build" crowd should ponder youtu.be/_YBY8EHkZK8?...

interesting rationale from a prospective juror in the Elon Musk Twitter stock manipulation case

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

Flooded rice paddies. Amber waves of wheat grain. Second-growth forests. Canalized rivers. Removed mountains. Flooded valleys. Graded plains. So much of the landscape that seems so natural and eternal is recent and transient Not even the river and mountain are immortal

The economics are brutal. Anywhere that a litre of diesel costs more than 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity, an EV truck pays for itself in 12-14 months. After that, it will be more profitable than diesel every single month: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Soniferous Aether xkcd.com/3238/

“This report exposes a ‘stone age’ system where major operators often fail to even display – let alone sell – available cross-border connections. “We are making it structurally difficult for even the most climate-conscious travelers to choose the greener option.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Sweden and German intelligence agencies report that Russian official economic data is fake www.ft.com/content/04a9...

France announces 'massive' plan to tackle carte de séjour delays

It's a good point here from Eliot Cohen, though ironically European and Gulf commentators have sometimes been prone to churning out the same tropes when discussing the strategic chaos generated by Donald Trump www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

I think its really funny when people complain about AI generated playlists in music apps, like girl what do you think shuffle was

The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications. No denials. No refunds. Just silence. This is the largest fee fraud in the history of the American immigration system. Here's what's happening. 🧵