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I'm not usually a big prescriptivist language wonk, but this is a great read about The MAGA Abuse of the English Language

Hint: as the article says, a coup is not when a "somewhat unpopular older president decides not to seek re-election and his successor is chosen through the legal, official formal rules of that candidate's political party"

Similar arguments then for the abuse of the "Marxist" as an epithet.

And the article has special love/hate for the "we're a republic not a democracy" guy - to switch it to my own pet peeve, those folks are as dumb and wrong as the "that's a SOUSAPHONE not a TUBA". (Akin to shouting "that's a convertible not a car" or as the article says "that's a BORDER COLLIE not a DOG")

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With the USA being one of the Olympic heavy weight countries, I think we miss some of the charm of enjoying the amazing accomplishments EVERY damn Olympian represents - like folks from smaller places can more easily feel the joy.

Two intersting tables/charts:
Medal counts by country per capita

Medal counts by country per athlete sent

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Is [LinkedIn] a terrible sign that we live in a capitalist hellscape? Hell yes! But we do live in a capitalist hellscape, and girl's gotta eat.

US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, (formerly Mayor Pete) was on a recent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast (in their ongoing coverage of the book "The Power Broker") One thing he said really echoed into the podcast's title, about the importance of what you DON'T see:

Again, to my earlier point, its elegance is often in the fact that you DON'T think about it. The way I always approach and conceptualize these things is the less you have to worry about whether you're gonna get a glass of clean, safe drinking water or for that matter whether there's a hole in the road on the way to work - the more free you are to concentrate on whatever lifts your soul, you know? Whatever matters to you in life. Raising your kids, practicing your faith, starting a business, being a scholar, whatever it is.

(I think there's a political aspect to that - the idea that conservatives focus on "freedom to", while liberals also consider "freedom from"...)

But later in the podcast, he points out the power of making things MORE visible:

And I'll give you an example that's less in the realm of building things but is one of the most important things we [of the Department of Transportation have] worked on, which is how airlines treat their passengers. So there are some things we've been trying to to get done, and are still trying to get done, through rule-making. But the rule-making process, the Administrative Procedures Act, the notice and comment period - it can take years. While we were working on that, especially in the summer of 2022 when there were so many frustrations around cancellations and delays, the idea emerged that if we just put more information out in a really easy to understand form, that not only would help passengers know which airlines would take better care of 'em, but knowing it was out there might actually change the airlines' behavior. And living in this world where it takes months or years to do something, I asked the team 'well, ok if we set up a website, like how long would that actually take?' and they said 'we could do it in a couple of weeks' and I said, ok, I'll send a letter to all the CEOs of the airlines saying, 'hey, in a couple of weeks we're gonna put this website up, you might want to change your customer service plan before we do it, because there's gonna be a bunch of green checkmarks and red Xs' - and they DID! This was not an enforcement, we've done those, this was not a rule-making, we're doing those... this was just saying we're going to tell people what you're doing, so you might want to think about what you're doing... and it led to real change.

So, superficially a bit of a contradiction, but really two complementary ideas: both what you can take for granted and what you have awareness of can be greatly important, depending on the context. (Broad stroke implications for my job in UI/UX as well!)

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Thinking about the immortality of the crab via stuff from the depths of wikipedia

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Amazing photos of the Olympic Games

I used to think "everything must be free (as in beer)" was the worse thing to happen to the web - people's (maybe understandable) uptightness about being nickel and dimed to death (remember ten cents per text message?) brought us into an age of endless ads and zero privacy.

But now it's also the age of its ugly cousin -vast forests of subscriptions and scams. It's some of the worst of "Dark UI" (sometimes literally, like a few cases where it looks like the company makes the text for the unsubscribe page unreadable.)

I mean on some level I get it - even maintenance takes work and energy, and who doesn't dream of being a landlord collecting rent forever - but damn, it really is a hellscape out there.

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Saw some meme on the first US Olympic Basketball Dream Team and got to pondering "what happened to the idea of the Olympics as amateur athletics" - not that it wasn't problematic (see especially that bullshit about Jim Thorpe losing his Olympic medals in pentathlon and decathlon because he played some semi-pro B-ball) but how did it change?

On Wikipedia's page on Amateur Sports I learned that the goofiness of "Rich Corinthian Leather" wasn't cut from whole cloth so to speak, they borrowed the "Corinthian" from "involving or displaying the highest standards of sportsmanship" i.e. wealthy noblesse oblige folks. An adjective especially favored by yachting clubs.

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They're changing the rhythm of the Alphabet Song? The fools - we should all just be singing it to the theme song of "I Dream of Jeannie"

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The story of Tariq the Cheat is pretty amazing.

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Why is it about procrastination?
Like a bunch of small tasks lined up and easy to knock down... you would think it would be an easy path for some "yay me" easy wins, but no, it's still a grind.

Is it the spectre of the dozens of things that there won't be time to get to? (Or the way another dozen will pop up over the next days?) Or just like the threat to the ego of things being slightly harder than it seems like they should be? Guilt about the stuff you should have done by now? Or just laziness?

How do you get traction?

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Whenever I see the swimmers out there in their swim cap, glasses, and puffy coats, I always think of Ali G...

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Coolest things I link to are very tiktok/instagrammy stuff from Europe - The Spark (Irish kids doing some fun clubby hiphop) and
Barbaras Rhabarberbar (German pitter patter rhyme)

4 star:
* The Spark (feat. Lisdoonvarna Crew) (Kabin Crew)
* Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (Pete Seeger)
* Maybe (The Submarines)
* Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen)
* Faith (George Michael)
* Hey Cowboy (Devon Cole)
* Barbaras Rhabarberbar (Bodo Wartke & Marti Fischer)
* Mickey (B*Witched)
* Polkamania! ("Weird Al" Yankovic)

3 star:
* COWBELL WARRIOR! (SXMPRA)
* Vienna (Billy Joel)
* Fly Away (Tones And I)
* My Walking Stick (Leon Redbone)
* Fleur (Saratoga)
* Renegade (Aaryan Shah)

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Basic Instructions is still pretty good

I like putting random anniversaries in my digital calendar. Today is twenty years since the state officially recognized me and my ex- saying "we don't".

I'm nostalgic about all the romance I've been through, before and since then, grateful for everything I've been able to closely share with someone, even as I recognize the way I'm in like with the world can too often leave the person I'm with feeling insufficiently cherished.

Paul Simon has a song "The Late Great Johnny Ace", where the narrator mourns the death of John Lennon by telling the earlier story of finding about the death of another singer, Johnny Ace. (I was today years old when I realized "Johnny Ace" was a real performer.) In that kind of vein, I had earlier mourned the impending breakup of my marriage in a poem called Happiest, probably a little too much about some tableaux from previous relationships. I find a kind of nostalgic comfort in it now, happy thinking of some times and accepting the transience of it all.

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During a "let's catch a beer" conversation with another former romance, I realized a contradiction I was carrying - at one point I was talking about how I don't really believe in personal growth - like it happens, but the core of us is somewhat constant, or at least not likely to change behaviors without a constant application of willpower. And then later I was talking about how I would always be a bit salty about how the ex didn't give me time to grow with her into what she was looking for. I guess it's weird for the guy who doesn't believe in personal change to be looking for someone to give them a chance to change.

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Was thinking about this poem, languishing in some corner of the Blender of Love, addressed to the person I pursued in college and had given up by the time things started with my now ex.

the loss of loss (1998)

all those times when you seemed ready to give it one more try-		(you appearing at my window)
those times now past; prelude. prelude to the separate contentments we now savor.		(trust, affection, lust, kindness, romance)
still, there is something sad in not having to try again.		(the loss of loss)

So much for not having to try again!

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During a "let's catch a beer" conversation with another former romance, I realized a contradiction I was carrying - at one point I was talking about how I don't really believe in personal growth - like it happens, but the core of us is somewhat constant, or at least not likely to change behaviors without a constant application of willpower. And then later I was talking about how I would always be a bit salty about how the ex didn't give me time to grow with her into what she was looking for. I guess it's weird for the guy who doesn't believe in personal change to be looking for someone to give them a chance to change.

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Watching Tom Emmer, a GOP rep from Minnesota, on CNN insisting that violent crime is up in his state under Gov. Walz. As
@sarasidnertv keeps giving FBI numbers on the fact that crime is down, Emmer says, "You can throw whatever statistics you want, but violent crime is at all time highs." That's the level of lies these bastards are running on.

I love how conservatives keep trying to say they're the "facts not feelings" side

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Prison time is an armor if you let it. It's all in the perspective and mindset. Open yourself up to your shortcomings, different perspectives, and it gives you a chance to grow exponentially. It really has been a gift. A shitty gift, but a gift.

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Some male butterflies have light receptors in their genitals, which help them find their target during copulation.

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in a sense, all experiences are subjective--in that sense organs never send an "objective," veridical reflection of the world to the brain, but always one that is filtered by the sensors that have been acquired over evolutionary time to suit the needs of the particular animal.

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One of the better videos I've seen for explaining modern image generation:

A couple thoughts: I can really see the parallels between the "similar image morphing" of the Activation Atlases and what happens in my head in terms of dreams (or on certain drugs) - that feeling that semi-random noise is being fed through a system that looks for interpretations and meaning, and that meaning layer pushes back down into the visual.

I'm still astonished that it works so well. I mean it's just jaw dropping. Yes, it's not clear when or if it can truly figure out something new - in some ways all it's novelty is the "art of the remix" but what it uses to make new things is absolutely a form of embedded intelligence, albeit one that might not be modeling the world in the way it would need to take the next steps of "true" intelligence.

The video argues that it's the orders-of-magnitude increase in compute (ugh I hate that term as a noun) that unlocked the potential of an already known AI technique; that runs against some idea I've heard that we didn't need as much computation as we have on hand in order to apply these techniques... it would be interesting to see, knowing what we know now, what's the best the old hardware could have done? (Similar to people who make homebrew for old video game systems, pushing boundaries now that optimizations and tricks are more widely known)

Also I played with ChatGPT's "conversation" mode. Good lord is that uncanny.

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There's an old saying AI, that compression is intelligence.

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Clive Thompson on Back to BASIC. There seem to be a lot of engineers now who don't understand the run-eval loop that BASIC and Lisp used has tremendous power in keeping development dynamic and transparent, which is why it lived on and gained such traction with JS.


Anna Washenko on From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction. That old Infocom parser was such a mind blower back in the day; able to parse moderately complex sentences and even have a sense of context ("Which book do you want to open, the green one or the red one?") at a time when other programs were all like "GET SWORD", "KILL DRAGON" was amazing. I wonder how LLM might come to play in this space, I know there have been some attempts to get one to play "DM" for a one person campaign...

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Not that I'm a major gymnastics fan, but I was watching that time when a coach's appeal gave the bronze to USAian Jordan Chiles over Romanian Ana Barbosu - a reversal which has been unreversed (saying the appeal was at 1:04 when there was only a minute to make... which seems a little extreme?)
That was about .1 point. The odd thing is, the live commentators had mentioned Barbosu's routine had gotten a probably false .1 point deduction for going out of bounds - and that her coaches didn't challenge and that was "on them"
So in a way it feels like a bit of a "make good"? Like I think justice was finally served, but man it stinks for all involved.

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Not that anybody asked me, but I can't decide if Olympians hanging out wearing their medals is the coolest imaginable flex or corny as heck (especially on interview shows when a swimmer or track or gymnast is wearing a pile of them)

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Gray cloud: no more olympics.
Silver lining: no more pro-/anti- Kelly Ayotte / NH governor ads

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The difference between "adopt a grindset" and "embrace the suck". (I think the former is, like, loving your chains)

Also the hope that it's just Imposter Syndrome and not an advanced form of Dunning-Kruger.

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If you ever use metrics to punish or reward, you'll never see the truth again.

Stephen Curry shooting a three over Victor Wembanyama

by Daniel Seex

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zQcXm1z_d.webp

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Harris is doing well by not sucking up to a press corps that has gone for vibes and is more interested in a "both sides" horse race.

Frankly it's been rough for the press ever since craigslist killed the classifieds cash cow, and the on-demand attention economy shifted online. Sucks, because thoughtful reporting would be great right about now, and there are islands of it but... yikes.

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One thing I've found out at Harvard Square and Copley Square: Wasps dig the restaurant Dig.

SBNation:This mom teaching her son how to block is the the most important football video of the year

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An online buddy was bemoaning the sloppy use of "literally" to mean (roughly) its opposite.

I agree it sucks; there's no concise way to literally mean "literally" without the word literally.

But I will die on the hill that people should not be replacing "literally" with "figuratively" e.g."he's figuratively driving me up the wall!"

You don't have to demarcate idioms that way, it's gratuitous. When people (mis)use literally, it's an amplifier meaning "absolutely" or similar.

So then, what is the replacement for "literally"? Easy.. it's literally just "literally", but at the end of the phrase.

"He's driving me up the wall!" => He's disturbing me.
"He's literally driving me up the wall!" => He's REALLY disturbing me.
"He's driving me up the wall - literally!" => He has some sort of wacky vertical car, or is otherwise causing me to ascend while up against a surface.

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NSFW: "Great job pushing back on that whole weird thing guys." An old article but still fun to think about foldable phones in scifi. Foldability matters less to me than knowing the OS well - or cameras, so I'd wait until Apple thinks the tech has caught up with the ambition, but still, always seems kinda cool.

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God Bless America.

Or, more like, God Help Americans...

Following the last few years I'm feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I'm losing faith in other people, and I'm scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?
VALERIO, STOCKHOLM (AND ROME), SWEDEN (AND ITALY)

Dear Valerio,

You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you, especially your child. Cynicism is not a neutral position -- and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.

I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn't know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

Love, Nick

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the ice-man cometh...or something...

via

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via

When I went off to Wesleyan the next year, I met another real musician, Stanley Lewis, who was also a superb artist and has made his career as a painter. We formed a quartet (piano, bass, and drums, with Stan on alto sax) and played at fraternity parties that year, and one night we particularly got it together and played some amazing jazz. The next day, I said to Stan that I wished it had been recorded, and he jumped on me. "NO! Don't try to accumulate things like that as if they made you somehow better. Last night was a trip. Be grateful it happened, but now let go of it." That was Stan the purist, and I got the message

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"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth."

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Here is one substantive message to extract from this tale: Don't trust your "intuitions"! Our convictions about what is alive and what isn't, what is conscious and what isn't, are easily provoked and manipulated. Think of it this way: If oysters had a smiley-face pattern when you opened them, and seemed to have two eyespots with long, blinking eyelashes, few people would be willing to eat them. In fact, if apples had chubby childish faces, complete with dimples, they would disconcert even the vegans.

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Marvin spotted the music on the piano: two collections of ragtime pieces, one a nearly complete Scott Joplin collection and a fine collection by the excellent ragtime pianist Max Morath. This was my ragtime phase. Marvin perused the collections for a few minutes and made a rather rude remark: "I see you like music that's *obvious*." Indeed, ragtime is often gloriously obvious; that's part of its charm.

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Goodhart's law rules: whenever a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

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The history of philosophy is largely the history of very tempting mistakes made by very smart people, and if you don't know the history, you are almost certain to make the same mistakes, because they're still very tempting. I find it both amusing and satisfying when a scientist leaps in, as they sometimes do when they have a free afternoon, and attempts to solve the mind-body problem or the free-will problem or the problem of causation and ends up, with gratifying regularity, remaking Plato's mistakes, Kant's mistakes, Hume's mistakes.

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A hierarchy of alienness: pictures of animals from least to most related to you - funny how arrogant some of the animal family names are.

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holy cats "the simpsons" really added a lot to the vernacular..

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These are two very different theories of the election. Trump is running to get to 47 percent. Harris is running to get to 52 percent.

But there's something deeper going on here.

The reason Trump is aiming for 47 percent is because the Electoral College makes minority rule possible for the rural party. Which incentivizes the rural party to be insular and to focus on energizing--not expanding--its coalition.

By disadvantaging the urban party, the Electoral College incentivizes it to broaden its coalition. Which means that the Democratic party of this moment must be constantly seeking to expand its reach and bring in new constituencies if it is to have a chance at holding executive power.

In other words: The Electoral College distorts the character of our parties, nudging one of them to be a majority-seeking organism and the other to be a base-pleasing organism. The character of our two parties today flows from the system architecture used to allocate power.

This is a high, abstract concept. But it explains--perfectly--what we have seen at the two conventions.

This is also why Republicans have gone "weird". Like, things normies find "weird" about the Democrats often comes from reaching out to be a bigger tent more people can be under. But the Republican "weird" comes from getting a bit inbred and echo-chambery. (And it's so charming to see how so much of the Republican meme space is dominated by "Nuh-uh! WE'RE not weird... YOU ARE")

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Two recent photos by Astrid, one at Loring Greenough's 100 birthday party, one at JP porchfest...

Wow. Seeing can no longer be believing - new smartphones are wired up to Google to make astonishing AI photo fakes.

This kinda sucks. Things to be Envious of that Americans Enjoy

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The world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man... To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest man was not his aim.

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Vultures are holy creatures.
Tending the dead.
Bowing low.
Bared head.
Whispers to cold flesh,
"Your old name is not your king.
I rename you 'Everything.'"

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Fun video on split brain etc:



The biggest dose I've had with it was muddling through this giant book "The Master and His Emissary" - I write about it and grabbed a lot of quotes here : kirk.is/2021/07/28

My take away is, I think it's a mistake to say "I don't have free will" - but the mistake is more what the "I" is. Those unconscious burbling, pre-linguistic parts are still part of you, and just because your left brains will make up logical-sounding rationalizations of what the burbling parts come up with, it's all you!

Also it does make me wonder about therapy modes. Like I love therapy modes that talk about the many parts of the brain, like different subparts all with their own personalities and agendas that try to make their case for what the whole self does... but then I wonder how that works if each part of the brain is under the shadow of a one of two very different styles of hemisphere...

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