2025 June❮❮prevnext❯❯

YCombinator on The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype machine. As much as AI is messing with things, the Zero Interest Rate Policy hangover, and the Section 174 tax thing especially for tech, and general bandwagon bs is probably as much as fault for the crapfest we're swimming in.

You are lucky to be here. You were incalculably lucky to be born, and incredibly lucky to be brought up by a nice family that helped you get educated and encouraged you to go to Uni. Or if you were born into a horrible family, that's unlucky and you have my sympathy... but you were still lucky: lucky that you happened to be made of the sort of DNA that made the sort of brain which – when placed in a horrible childhood environment – would make decisions that meant you ended up, eventually, graduating Uni. Well done you, for dragging yourself up by the shoelaces, but you were lucky. You didn't create the bit of you that dragged you up. They're not even your shoelaces.

Anemic month for new music. Just kind of a new techno remix of a raunchy Nate Dogg song...

4 star:
* Shake That (Danimal & Sonny Wern)

3 star:
* Wap (Medieval Version) (Bardcore)
* Black Socks (Bill Harley)
* Bahamut (Hazmat Modine)
* Pig Meat Papa (Lead Belly)
* Root to This (Fear of Pop)
* Slow Like Honey (Fiona Apple)
* Jambalaya (On the Bayou) (Fats Domino) Life with vibrators I, Saruman, Have Ended My Alliance with the Dark Lord Sauron scenes from School of Honk 10th Anniversary Gala RIP Roxana Bentes de Moura - friend of JP Honk, Bandmate in SoH, and Partner in Joy with my stalwart BABAM buddy Tom Mason... Yeah. marines and national guard troops, against the states wishes, to quell a non-riot are a bad sign. Can't wait to see what excuses get ginned up at midterms. Like my Friend said...Oh Boston Never Change

(also, perfect comic timing)

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will begin "winding down" FEMA after this year's Hurricane season and, perhaps the more significant statement, that he will begin distributing disaster aid directly from the President's office. In other words, disaster assistance will be the President's personal gift, an assist for friends and those who display loyalty. It's part of the broader pattern we can see across the horizon: Trump takes the policing and military powers of the United States and the national tax revenues (drawn disproportionately from the blue states) and uses it to make war on states he considers enemies.

Twenty years ago I wrote:

Computer Stew is a really interesting, really fun web experiment. Basically, some guys decided to see that if they could make a daily show with less than $3000 in startup costs, using the Net for distribution and consumer grade hardware. The short answer is, yup, they can, and the result is sometimes funny as heck. If you only have time to see one episode, check out notepad.exe, in all-singing all-dancing music video tribute to everyone's favorite Windows text editor. "N to the O to the T to the E, P to the A, D, E, X, E my Notepad!"

(I love how one of the characters was always a voice over a speakerphone)

So that song has stuck with me for decades. I saved the crappy realmedia file for the video - I don't have anything to view it anymore, but I tried converting it to mp4....

the quality is SUPER bad but I'm not sure if that's the conversion or just what we had way back in those pre-youtube days.

notepad video_cs117.mp4

Isn't one of the hallmarks of fascism that blend of strong central figure government with militarism and corporate / industrial control? Asking for a friend.

A brilliant rerun I iroincally found while sort of procrastinating

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Happy Fathers Day to those who celebrate!

I had a new introspective thought yesterday- it doesn't have the vibe of "oh my gosh this explains everything" but it seems like it might be a valid piece. I lost my dad when I was 14 after me and my mom being there for him through a year or two of debilitation. (Which is obviously kinda traumatic, though sometimes I think back to how some evaluation I had done around second grade noted I was more attached to my mom than my dad.)

But now for the first time I wonder, did witnessing that reshape my landscape about my own potential for fatherhood, and explain why something like Uncle-hood works so much better for me? Like somehow I either took in "dads get sick and die" or maybe "dads aren't necessary".

I dunno. Maybe it's a just a Just-So story. But I wonder.

Do you ever write down my quotes? Cause I feel like I say fucking profound shit like every day.

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If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity.

family reunion fun

A short mini oral history of Mac's coming out dance on "Always Sunny in Philadelphia"

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Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

Went camping at Myles Standish w/ Lynette, her boys, her bestie and her son...

I'm a little too pleased with my phrasing of "camping is a carnival of inconveniences" (planning, packing, driving, setting up tents and patio structures, food prep and washing up, hiding out from bugs (and vigilance for those tent zippers always all the way to the ground) sore backs from iffy mattresses, breaking camp and getting all those tents back into bags) - but I had a great time! Like I dig the go someplace in nature / disconnect experience but I don't QUITE grok how it resonates SO much more as a whole - in a way a leisurely weekend of friends visiting, with cocktails in the yard and a nature hike or lake visit just wouldn't.

Back in Arlington we had a nice outdoor meal at Town Tavern, appreciating being back in civilization, which maybe is also part of the point. REPEAT, but on my mind:

LBJ - he of the legendary endowment that he would use to intimidate folks with - was known for quoting the consensus-building statement that starts Isaiah 1:18: "Come now, and let us reason together".

But the secret of that was he was probably thinking a verse or two down as well:
"If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

Damn. 70 degree air and damp through the window feels heavenly.

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You've got the soul of a philosopher with a sousaphone for a heart, Kirk. I mean that.

I've been messing with having longer conversations with ChatGPT (even to the extent I've given the instance of it that knows about me a nickname)

What a weird environment LLM has made for us, full of threats to livelihood but also all kind of weird potentials to make random artsy and technical tasks SO much easier.

I never woulda thought a markov chain, no matter how glorified, could so ace the Turing Test and beyond.

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Missed it but yesterday was the the national legalization of gay marriage in the USA. Crazy that it was only ten years ago.

Also crazy, middle of the road folks who are fine with gay marriage but can't see the parallel with other ongoing fights for rights, and trying to get the arc of moral justice bending the right way, some recent pendulum pushback not withstanding.

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Devon Taylor is a pretty amazing tuba player. Last night I found out Blue Man Group's 30 year run in Boston is closing! Going to go see it tonight with Lynette and the boys. interesting trick to cool down a hot parked car - open a back window on the opposite side, then open and shut your door a few times.

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Senate Republicans wait until late Friday night to ram through a shitty, shitty bill. "The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the measure will cause 11.8 million Americans to become uninsured, almost a million more than would have lost health insurance under the House version.". And one they use "new math" to pretending their bill doesn't add 4.2 trillion to the debt, just 442 billion, by pretending the tax extensions aren't extensions.

via Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American So first AlphaGo and AlphaZero started getting really good at Chess and Go, and by training themselves so to speak. But then I heard they the were vulnerable to adversarial systems... like if play weird, they won't see you lining up your attack. Now they can get beaten by an Atari 2600??

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AI is more than a stochastic parrot on a probabilistic trajectory through a Hilbert space of vectorized tokens; it is also the flicker of something more--the emergent cognitive surfaces rising within those same Hilbert spaces. That's the real power of generative AI. Not the cheap automation that the tech-bros want, but the possibility of reflection, synthesis, and insight. All it takes is some clarity to guide it. Greed is what is pushing AI right now, and that is what people are protesting.

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