it's not Vera Tobin, it's some kind of Thing

the Tobin Unit is the unit of minimal forward progress on a project. if you do a Tobin Unit on your thing, you moved it forward and are good. feeling anxious and avoidant about a project? open that sucker up and do a Tobin Unit. maybe you moved a comma. great! now you are in good standing

It is, ultimately, damaging your ability to accomplish things long term or to win elections long term because you assume that you can't change the framing of the conversation even though changing the framing is a tool that's right there for you to grasp. It's incompetence. Malpractice.

After the first round elections, Congressman André Janones created a WhatsApp channel titled “Lula’s Army.” It ballooned to 10 million people following his commands on how to behave online to counteract Meta’s far-right-favouring algorithms. The right knows how to use socials. We must learn, too.

These are incredible!

I have a new newsletter today, about LLMs and interoception and introspection and narrative and definitely NOT consciousness why do you think it's about consciousness I would never write about consciousness buttondown.com/apperceptive...

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

elon musk absolutely 100% does not believe that any government that tries to hinder or obstruct or even gently admonish or fail to listen to him should exist, and will absolutely use his money to make that a reality, and will not stop doing that until he is stopped. carrrrrrrr kickflip!

logging on

actually, 4 is a very hard to guess number, and is secure from modern attacks

Funny old contingent universe of ours

Social technology should act as a facilitative system to enable and enrich human interaction rather than a capitalistic system for routing around them cuz they’re unprofitable. That’s right, we’re bringing cybernetics back, baby

fun and amazing people and things! like elon musk, catturd, and slurs

Happy Hangul Day! It's a Korean holiday honoring the best and easiest alphabet in the world! Everyone in Korea gets the day off work to contemplate it, but it only takes fifteen minutes to learn! So today, learn to read Korean in 15 minutes!

In my lane. Hydrated. Moisturized. Fearsome and fierce.

yeah there's like sort of this vacuum where the gigantic, economy-moving companies building the models do not give a living shit about using their systems practically and the dimbulb executive class is having vision quests and everybody being smart about it has between 4 and 12k followers on here

If, like me, you are someone who is interested in how AI works but doesn’t want to do the serious work that would normally involve, this is a great essay. It’s at (for me) the right level of abstraction: detailed enough that I can see how various types of models differ …

one of the great things about this whole delightful "Terrible New Hat" saga is that it suggests caroline cash may be constitutionally incapable of bringing herself to draw anyone actually looking terrible in a hat

Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.

You guys want to hear a short but adorable story that happened right in front of me at the baggage claim in NYC yesterday? I wasn't part of it and there are bits I didn't catch but holy crap, I can't stop thinking about it.

I want noon when the sun is at its zenith every day and we figure everything else out with computers or whatever. Why else do we have computers!

Before I saw a talk by Bevil Conway I figured color perception was basically comprehensible by analogy to the rest of vision. After his talk I had no idea how color was processed, what it was for, or how to think about it, and you probably could have convinced me it didn’t really exist.

Things Said of Seals (of one kind or other): is a relatively large and abundant true seal is a modest diver display their dominance by showing their noses develop quickly on their mothers' fat-rich milk attack, kill and eat several kinds of ducks have been some of the common vagrants in South Africa

Omigod, this is the most heartwarming story possible! Backpack (bear 89) is the son of the 2019 winner of Fat Bear Week, Holly (bear 435). In 2007, he injured his foot & a practice of riding on momma's Holly's back had a new meaning: he was mobility-restricted while it healed. So Holly moved him.

I say "I miss laws" out loud pretty often, and it sounds like a bit, and I wish it was a bit.

high decoupling is like the cartoon where the wolf and sheep clock in, and the wolf tries to kill and eat the sheep, but when they clock out at five, if the sheep is still alive they go shoot pool together, because it's just a job. one problem is that you can't clock out of life so easily

While Pounties and Mounties have such similar plumage that even experts have trouble telling them apart, Counties are easily distinguished with or without their characteristic prey

If you adopted a feral cat to the inside and he keeps meowing maybe he just really wants to smoke real cigarettes. You don’t know what he was up to before

retvrn

HE: people are savaging the new Taylor Swift song ME: the one about Cleveland? HE: yes. it sounds real bad ME: yeah, that’s what songs that aren’t good do

i have a firmly held opinion i want to get off my chest and here it is: Lowly Worm fucks

The whole speech is good, but this part in particular is particularly relevant now. www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/publ...

seriously. FOCUS, MOTHERFUCKERS!