Curtis "Ovid" Poe

I went to college to be an economist. Why did I walk away? Scientific hypothesis: p → q. If p → ¬q, then the hypothesis isn't true. Economic hypothesis: p → q. If p → ¬q, then you're an idiot who doesn't understand how the world works and you need to die in a fire.. Hence: ¬economist #economics

It's a sensitive topic, but I'm aware that some of the people who read what I write are—to be delicate—not autistic. Even if you are not autistic, don't let the uneducated opinion of others get you down. You're as wonderful as anyone else. #autism www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrkh...

Woke up from a weird dream where every Trump voter was fired and the only jobs they could take are the ones immigrants used to have. Dream logic is usually broken, but often beautiful.

The things I do in my spare time are not normal. curtispoe.org/blog/a-geode...

The US government's flood insurance program now over $22 billion in debt due to flood-related claims over the past two decades. They're capped out at $30 billion, so we're about to hit the limit and then a new political firestorm will follow the floods.

Do you want a revolt of the proletariat? Because this is how you get a revolt of the proletariat. #8647

AI alignment is the idea that we want AI aligned with human values so that it doesn't do bad things. The problem is that AI *is* aligned with human values and therefore does bad things. #AI #GenAI #OpenAI #ChatGPT #Anthropic #Claude #Google #Gemini

Republicans ask "is this efficient?" Democrats ask "is this fair?" Politicians ask "will I get caught?" I wrote the above years ago. The last line should now be, "who's gonna stop me?"

I once attended a talk on "natural" interfaces which make doing the "right" thing natural. For example, a brass plate on a door requires you to push it. I realized that I could become rich by designing a condom which could never be put on incorrectly in the dark. Sadly, my idea involved a tack.

People love timeless stories, but only if they're written in the language of our time. When I reread, again, John Davidson's "Thirty Bob a Week," the greatest poem ever written, I'm sad that it's so inaccessible to modern readers. So I fixed it. #writing #poetry curtispoe.org/blog/thirty-...

My personal journey.

People sometimes wonder what it was like for Germans as the Nazis ascended to power. Now they know. Added bonus with the current administration: they're also learning what the fall of Rome was like.

absolute insanity as Mike Waltz suggests Jeffrey Goldberg somehow deliberately hacked his way into the Signal group

Elon Musk is on the verge of tears as he contemplates his imploding empire.

After Musk shared a tweet suggesting Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is involved in organized crime, Slim canceled his business groups investments with Starlink, redirecting further business dealings to Europa and China. That's about $30B lost from one tweet. www.msn.com/en-us/techno...

Europe needs to stop dithering and support Ukraine. That means troops, if necessary. After seeing Zelenskyy get ambushed in the White House, Europe needs to realize that the US cannot be trusted any more. #Ukraine #EU #Europe #Trump #Putin curtispoe.org/blog/europe-...

People have again been contacting me about how to escape the hellhole that the US is becoming. Here's how to move abroad: Skilled workers: curtispoe.org/blog/getting... Unskilled workers: curtispoe.org/blog/young-p... I've lived in numerous countries and have written on this issue for years.

It's a shame that Albert Einstein's younger brother, Frank, was so eclipsed by his older brother's fame. Frank Einstein was an accomplished body builder.

The United States Military Academy has just eliminated all Cadet clubs and activities for POC. Most of these have existed for decades like the Society of Black Engineers. They were there when I was a Cadet in 1987. All of the religious ones remain. This isn’t DEI. It’s white Christian Nationalism.

I get awfully tired of delivery people coming to our house. Seems that somehow, two houses on our street have been assigned the *same* number, with nothing to distinguish them. I could make a small fortune signing for our neighbor's packages and selling them.

You've heard of Project 2025. You wondered what it was. Now people are saying it's happening. But the project is huge and hard to read, so try it in comic form: stopproject2025comic.org It's horrifying. #Project2025 #Trump #SOSAmerica

We need a movie about an mad pseudo-scientist trying to wipe out New York city by homeopathically poisoning the water supply.

Well, that's the end of my multi-year run on Twitter.

Via @cuteosphere.bsky.social Can't find the link here, but the original was via Twitter and I'm not linking there.

Needing to check some data for my insurance, but my insurance web site won't let me in unless I type in the six digit code they're emailing me. Except their system is not sending any email. Technology sucks, but implementation of technology sucks even harder.

Several years ago, my wife was in an accident and had to sleep downstairs, so our daughter wanted to sleep in "mama's place." I covered my daughter with stuffed animals as a joke. Later, as I went upstairs, I found my daughter left a gift for me on my side of the bed. ❤️

A surgeon was interrupted during the middle of surgery by #UnitedHealthcare, demanding to know if the patient really needed to stay overnight. www.newsweek.com/doctor-says-... As this continues, Luigi Mangione's folk hero status grows. See also: curtispoe.org/blog/the-new...

"When they send people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." And then the first Europeans landed on American soil.

Thanks to camera placement, we no longer make eye contact with people on video calls. I suspect there are many people who prefer this. What long term impact will this have as this behavior gets normalized?

Note to self: #ChatGPT is awesome at #SQL syntax, but TERRIBLE at normalization. Fortunately, I've done enough of the latter over the past couple of decades that I was able to call it out repeatedly on bad decisions it made. Junior devs, on the other hand, would make a mess of it.

Want email with the latest news about AI? Check out The Neuron Daily. They have a free "Intro to ChatGPT" course with 13 modules to work through. If you're not familiar with what you can do with prompting, it's a great start. #AI #GenAI #OpenAI #ChatGPT www.theneurondaily.com/subscribe?re...

My wife was trying to remember the expression "head over heels." Because she's French she made the mistake of trying to reason her way through the expression and assumed "head over heels" is just standing, so she said "heels over head". We won't discuss the image that conjured in my mind.

When I hear people talk about deregulation, what I'm really hearing them say is: "any limitation on harming people is a limitation on profits".

Prior to #SQL, everything was #NoSQL. That's why we have SQL. Recently, when I wrote that, someone replied that I can't be old enough to know what it was like before SQL was invented in the 1970s. Apparently, people are unaware that reading is for things other than headlines and social media.

Having a lovely time in #Macedonia. Sad to leave so soon. Fascinating country.

Annual medical bankruptcies in major industrialized nations. 🇳🇴- 0 🇬🇧- 0 🇫🇷- 0 🇪🇸- 0 🇵🇹- 0 🇩🇰- 0 🇦🇺- 0 🇮🇸- 0 🇮🇹- 0 🇫🇮- 0 🇮🇪- 0 🇩🇪- 0 🇳🇱- 0 🇸🇪- 0 🇯🇵- 0 🇨🇦- 0 🇺🇸- 643k Why do the American people allow themselves to be treated this way?

For once, the "scare quotes" are appropriate.

It took me roughly two hours to delete all 23K of my tweets on Twitter. I used this script: github.com/lucahammer/t... Note that X is using your tweets to train his Grok AI. Deleting them might prevent that (I doubt it, but at least we can remove our content).

IVR systems are "choose your own adventure" games for masochists. (IVR is that annoying phone system which asks you to "press 3 to speak to a different random person")

If you're familiar with vector databases and you like Perl, you're probably disappointed that there's not much support for them. I've written an article and github repo showing how to use PostgreSQL as a vector database. curtispoe.org/articles/usi... #AI #GenAI #PostgreSQl #Perl #vectordatabase

I'm proud to say that my website no longer has a Twitter link in the sidebar. It links here, to Bluesky. I'm also downloading my Twitter info. I'll probably delete it soon. I kept holding off in the hopes that financial reality would change things, but I was wrong. curtispoe.org

I keep trying, and failing, to create seamless vector database integration in #Perl. I almost got there with #ChromaDB, but everything I'm doing says, "write all of it in #Python and spin up a server that Perl can call." (Before anyone asks, #PgVector isn't seamless)

Terrible sound quality, and first published 15 years ago, but it's still very relevant today. Trust me, you want to watch all of it. When it's clear what he's *really* speaking about, the cheers of the audience shows that many still don't get it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=O66q...

The joys of being married to a French woman. Her: What are you thinking? Me: Type annotations. Her: A hole in the skull? Me: You're thinking "trepanation," my dear. That being said, I don't think she was that far off. (A true story about obscure programmer humor)

Various ways I've discovered to lose friends: * Share your political opinions * Share your religious opinions * Tell people you work with #AI and yes, it's providing value #OpenAI #Claude #Gemini #ChatGPT #Anthropic #Google

what about other body parts

From the opening of the book, “The Shadow Cabinet,” by Juno Dawson.

Marisa Kabas has been doing excellent work on this: https://thehandbasket.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-the-newspaper @marisakabas.bsky.social

I want Jane Fonda to run for the presidency. It's not that I want her to win. And I don't want her to take votes from Biden. I just want to see the campaign slogan "A Wish Called Fonda."

RT only if you are NOT becoming more conservative as you grow older.