Hubski: AshleyRhttps://hubski.com/images/discussion.pnghttps://hubski.com/pub/471172https://hubski.com/pub/471172Jelena Ćirić, Snorri Hallgrímsson, Cécile Lacharme, Oliver Patrice Weder - Green GrassMezerg - Riders on the Stormhttps://hubski.com/pub/471133https://hubski.com/pub/471133https://hubski.com/pub/471138https://hubski.com/pub/471138Archive link. The NYT links to a journal article, but the link is dead. Make of that what you will.https://hubski.com/pub/471150https://hubski.com/pub/471150lil steve My daughter played some hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/471147https://hubski.com/pub/471147https://hubski.com/pub/471170https://hubski.com/pub/471170lil steve played hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/471109https://hubski.com/pub/471109https://hubski.com/pub/471131https://hubski.com/pub/471131https://hubski.com/pub/471132https://hubski.com/pub/471132like Lehman but for this shithttps://hubski.com/pub/471104https://hubski.com/pub/471104Now I have a good excuse do not like P.K.Dick workhttps://hubski.com/pub/471096https://hubski.com/pub/471096https://hubski.com/pub/471071https://hubski.com/pub/471071https://hubski.com/pub/471068https://hubski.com/pub/471068https://hubski.com/pub/471034https://hubski.com/pub/471034https://hubski.com/pub/471145https://hubski.com/pub/471145Our evidence comes mostly from research done by those 14 Attorneys General. Some of their briefs have been posted online for the world to see. The briefs include hundreds of quotations from internal reports, memos, Slack conversations, and public statements in which executives and employees of TikTok acknowledge and discuss the harms that their company is causing to children. We organize the evidence into five clusters of harms:Addictive, compulsive, and problematic useDepression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicidePorn, violence, and drugsSextortion, CSAM, and sexual exploitationTikTok knows about underage use and takes little actionWe show that company insiders were aware of multiple widespread and serious harms, and that they were often acting under the orders of company leadership to maximize engagement regardless of the harm to children. As one internal report put it:https://hubski.com/pub/471105https://hubski.com/pub/471105https://hubski.com/pub/471144https://hubski.com/pub/471144https://hubski.com/pub/471143https://hubski.com/pub/471143https://hubski.com/pub/471049https://hubski.com/pub/471049https://hubski.com/pub/471042https://hubski.com/pub/471042https://hubski.com/pub/471047https://hubski.com/pub/471047come for the Red Queen, stay for the Crawish Consommehttps://hubski.com/pub/471089https://hubski.com/pub/471089Forgot to pack my AirPods. I realize how much I use them. I've been stuck in a hotel room in a town with nothing to do. I decided to take an old track with just one guitar track, one bass track and one drum track and see what I can make just using midi recorded with my laptops keys and by using effects on the existing tracks. I have no idea how this sounds because I can't hear it with headphones. The laptop speakers make it sound like a hodgepodge. But was fun to learn how to use midi on the laptop. lil steveAnyone, feel free to add to this if you feel like it. Was recorded without a click so it's all over the map tempo wise.https://hubski.com/pub/471038https://hubski.com/pub/471038See also:https://hubski.com/pub/470991https://hubski.com/pub/470991My order of The Fourth Turning just came in… which also reminds me I have an order of “Winner-Take-All Politics” by Jacob Hacker that needs picking up.Still wildly stuck on Jon Grinspan’s “The Age of Acrimony”. Mostly because everytime I pick it up, I spend more time believing time itself is closer to a flat circle than I previously thought. May be time to swap to audiobook format and go on long walks. Speaking of audiobooks, my recommendations have made features on hubski book threads in the past: Ray Nayler’s “The Mountain in the Sea” and Scott Lynch’s “The Lies of Locke Lamora”. The former is, unfortunately, a one-off it seems. Great “First Encounter” genre book. The latter is as easy a book to pick up as it is to put down. You’ll have fun with it as company regardless. Lots of quippy dialogue that’s reminiscent of FX’s Justified based on Elmore Leonard’s writings.https://hubski.com/pub/470973https://hubski.com/pub/470973https://hubski.com/pub/471130https://hubski.com/pub/471130The wrong starting point when trying to understand generative AI is to treat what it does as creation. It’s not. It’s consumption. The users don’t want to make things, they want to have things. The machine doesn’t invent, it assembles. It’s the production line of a commodity producer. https://hubski.com/pub/471026https://hubski.com/pub/471026getting increasingly tough to be polite about this bullshitI would launch the tag #enshitification but Cory Doctorow is also a chumphttps://hubski.com/pub/470954https://hubski.com/pub/470954First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.https://hubski.com/pub/471065https://hubski.com/pub/471065Rather than beginning with sketches and ideas, then iterating on those to produce a more finalised image or vision, Bradley says his boss will just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it work.“He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the way”.https://hubski.com/pub/470967https://hubski.com/pub/470967Hi! You might remember me from rehab girlfriend I'm over a year sober. It just got too bad. I was going to die but I had a friend in AA. Simple as. I guess I can help someone with substance abuse issues or at least try to at this point. got people. And I stopped coming here because I personally dislike mk. Or did. I'll forgive him when I'm ready in a 9th step amends.https://hubski.com/pub/471118https://hubski.com/pub/471118https://hubski.com/pub/471116https://hubski.com/pub/471116https://hubski.com/pub/470908https://hubski.com/pub/470908Hey let's check in with Sybil:HOT TAKE - When social media tells women that they have to be perfect but tells men they're entitled to take what they want?...gonna be a lot of lonely male 3percentershttps://hubski.com/pub/471002https://hubski.com/pub/471002https://hubski.com/pub/470922https://hubski.com/pub/470922the big 600https://hubski.com/pub/470803https://hubski.com/pub/470803https://hubski.com/pub/470876https://hubski.com/pub/470876https://hubski.com/pub/470927https://hubski.com/pub/470927https://hubski.com/pub/470638https://hubski.com/pub/470638Hi Hubski:My name is Katherine O'Brien. Despite best efforts, I am a human being - a real, honest-to-god human being made of all the things that human beings are made of - that exists in the real world, and I have some assholes opinions that I want to share.I am 25 years old, which means I came to use Hubski when I was about 15. I've known a lot of you for over half my conscious life. You're all like the neighbors that I wave to sometimes on the way to work, or the uncles and aunts that I half-remember at family reunions. Isn't that weird to think about?I tend to use Hubski now as a place to complain, to write my little diary entries in Pubski threads every once in a while, to poke my head in chat and tap out something I hope is pithy - but not to contribute to thoughtful discussion. Why is that? I'm keyed into the news and I'm interested in politics and all that, and I read the bits and bobs of discussion on here as a lurker. So what's the deal?I've been biting my tongue for a long time to keep the peace, just like you would do when your neighbors put up the wrong yardsign. I don't want to get into arguments with people I've known for so long who I respect dearly. But I am losing my respect for my neighbors.The fundamental lie that we like to tell ourselves is that it is possible to be neutral: the virtuous thing to do when discussing the controversial is to be generous, to cover both sides, to play devil's advocate, to end conversations with a pat on the back and a smile. At the end of the day, we're all friends. We joust at each other, but the lancetips are blunted. We say that we can separate ourselves from the world of politics. We cannot.Objectivity is a myth. The pretense of objectivity is a luxury. We all have skin in the game - some of us more than others - and lately a lot of hides are getting chapped on here. This isn't the death of civil discourse or social media brainwashing us into partisans: this is the death of an entire worldview, one based around the consensus that history is dead, that all we have left to do is tweak and manage and let democracy do its thing. This is the Big American Lie.Here's how it works in the specific. In a debate, the person who is able to maintain the appearance of objectivity is the correct one, and the person who loses their cool is a symptom of insert-your-favorite-theory-of-societal-decline-here. This means that the person with more skin in the game, in any discussion, will be the first to crack. The trope of the crazy activist is a reflection of this. I have skin in the game. I am a trans woman living in a time where transness is more "up for debate" than ever. We are the constituency that you can still just-ask-questions about, the people who are stealing the precious resources of real women, the predators tricking children into mutilating themselves, the ones ruining fair play in everything from sports to dating apps to affirmative action programs. These debates are not academic to me. To be trans, I am constantly forced to prove that I exist as a real human being and not a caricature of one. I am forced to keep my cool in conversations with people that have no idea what being trans is like who dictate to me the terms of engagement. If I get too heated, I am the one poisoning the discourse.Right now, the clear, levelheaded question-askers are running the show. The leading intellectuals of our time are asking innocent questions like "is rapid onset gender dysphoria causing thousands of little tomboys to think they're men?". I can't remember how many ads I saw before the election about SEX CHANGES FOR CRIMINALS, but I do remember seeing one on an ER waiting-room TV. It was surreal.But all that is just me losing my cool. How can what I say be objective if I'm the one actually experiencing the discrimination? By my nature, I am disqualified from civil discourse.It's a lie, guys. Polite society was always evil. We dogwhistled and kept things academic so we could still all be neighbors. The people who could not were the ones who were more often the topic of conversation than its participants. Now that we can't be silenced, the people who hate us don't need to use dogwhistles anymore.I am done with civility. It was never for me. I will be kind, but I will not turn the other cheek. Arguing doesn't make me feel good, but I would rather spit out poison than keep swallowing it.https://hubski.com/pub/470949https://hubski.com/pub/470949because of course pump.funhttps://hubski.com/pub/470948https://hubski.com/pub/470948So for those catching up, the drone war in Ukraine went from Ukraine absolutely decimating Russia to Russia jamming the shit out of Ukraine to Ukraine jamming the shit out of Russia to Russia switching to wire-guided to Ukraine going"fukkit, we'll pop the cork on autonomous warfare."Seriously. This be some Tales from the Loop shit right here. And while the ZigZag is ostensibly a piloted drone interceptor, it's also one nVidia Jetson away from being launched, given a grid and being weapons-hot on anything it detects.https://hubski.com/pub/470947https://hubski.com/pub/470947Let's scroll the timeline shall we?Zipline pioneered blood deliveries in Rwanda using fixed-wing aircraft in effectively unregulated airspace. They tried to contract with Ghana for $17 per delivery and Ghana balked; I'm not willing to believe that $17 number was unsubsidized. They're now delivering in Ghana but I can't find any information about contracts.So here we are: your practical drone delivery platform is a 55kg tilt-rotor with triple redundancy that never drops below 300ft. It requires intensive logistical support, substantial regulatory carve-out and massive subsidy. Yet McKinsey thinks this can be done for $1.80 per delivery.. DroneUp is hyping "less than $3." They crypto sites are hyping "less than 25 cents" because of course they are but if a fixed-wing in Africa launched by a bunjee cord is $17, Uber Eats ain't touchin' that shit for less than $20 and we all know it.https://hubski.com/pub/471097https://hubski.com/pub/471097https://hubski.com/pub/470682https://hubski.com/pub/470682FT up in this bitch linking Ha-Joon ChangWelcome to the Resistance MFershttps://hubski.com/pub/470841https://hubski.com/pub/470841Arooj Aftab - Na Gulhttps://hubski.com/pub/470654https://hubski.com/pub/470654kleinbl00https://hubski.com/pub/470804https://hubski.com/pub/470804https://hubski.com/pub/470650https://hubski.com/pub/470650https://www.cnn.com/science/live-news/moon-landing-blue-ghost-03-02-25/index.htmlhttps://hubski.com/pub/470855https://hubski.com/pub/470855https://hubski.com/pub/470917https://hubski.com/pub/470917Probably will write more on this later.But UBL got what he wanted right? The goal was the decline of the American Empire, and he managed it?I have ordered The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden by Bergen, looking at a few others to better understand the guy, and al-Qaeda in general, to whatever degree that's possible.But its hard to make the case that he didn't get exactly what he wanted.We can discuss this in terms of geopolitical power and influence. I was principally thinking about the damage done to American Institutions, and how the wasted resources of Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror writ large were just us playing into a setup we should have anticipated.I'm sure once Trump cuts my social security disability pay that I won't have time for this kind of thing, trying to squeeze it in now before the homelessness.https://hubski.com/pub/470831https://hubski.com/pub/470831Apparently I haven't talked about 1MDB nearly as much as I've thought about 1MDBhttps://hubski.com/pub/470898https://hubski.com/pub/470898- Be a Muskovite - Reserve a Cybertruck for $40k - Wait two years longer then you were promised - Have to pay $81k - Have it immediately lose 58% the minute you drive it off the lot - After four life-safety recallshttps://hubski.com/pub/470589https://hubski.com/pub/470589An Erdinger as dead as a Pubski beer oughtta behttps://hubski.com/pub/470470https://hubski.com/pub/470470https://hubski.com/pub/470647https://hubski.com/pub/470647Ichiko Aoba - towerhttps://hubski.com/pub/470259https://hubski.com/pub/470259Friends, I mean it when I say I think about this community often-- haven't been active over the years because I'm dumb, but I also haven't found anything quite like you good folks. Hope you're all staying rare and motivated out there, please let me know how things have been going in the comments. I officially hung up my Army hat last Friday, and jumped on a plane from Alaska to NYC to start an internship at the NY Federal Reserve. It's not exactly where I want to be, but it's in the neighborhood, so I plan to be a good neighbor, make some friends, and hopefully get invited to a juicier cookout. I haven't had any time to reminisce, get closure, or really close the chapter properly on my Army life. My dumb ass ended up becoming a top-performing, trusted part of my organization and by the time I got out I was working a good ~5 career-years ahead of where I should be by rank. Lots of folks came to me for guidance on hard decisions, and issues they're having at work. I walked very fine tightropes and chopped through some yucky political jungles to take care of myself and my people successfully. Took a quick vacation to Iraq for a year somewhere in there, which is also not something I'll process anytime soon-- for those veterans on Hubski that have numerous into double-digit deployments, feel free to give me some guidance on that. Anyway, it all sounds simple and great when I put it on paper, but it was a whole lot of fuckery I put myself through the last near-decade, so I guess my biggest fear is that my memory of the important details and lessons-learned will fade before I really get a chance to leverage them in my forthcoming civilian life. Enough about me-- please shoot me a message if you're in the NYC area to catch up over a coffee or a beer, let me know what's been cooking for you, and keep being your beautiful selves until next time. Pabshttps://hubski.com/pub/470513https://hubski.com/pub/470513Soft Machine - Hazard Profile"https://hubski.com/pub/470290https://hubski.com/pub/470290Hello hubskinites!!It's been a second and a half since I hopped on here, but it's been on my mind for quite some time to share an update from the blobosphere. A few years ago I started sending out newsletters to keep folks up to date on all the music and visual art I create, along with general life sentiments. I don't send the newsletters out too often, about 1-3 a year. The title url of this post will take you to the most recent newsletter I just sent out today. In there is information on a drawing I made, an alabaster piece I sculpted, and a link to read my masters thesis which talks about the impact of the Spanish invasions of Abya Yala on indigenous identity. If you'd be interested in signing up to receive the next one, you can sign up here. Here are the previous ones, if you wanna check them out:March 31, 2024October 21, 2023July 6, 2023February 27, 2023https://hubski.com/pub/470857https://hubski.com/pub/470857"Microsoft funds OpenAI because they KNOW it's poisoning Google."https://hubski.com/pub/471046https://hubski.com/pub/471046New ending for this tune. I dig it.https://hubski.com/pub/470683https://hubski.com/pub/470683https://hubski.com/pub/470351https://hubski.com/pub/470351https://hubski.com/pub/470426https://hubski.com/pub/470426https://hubski.com/pub/470518https://hubski.com/pub/470518https://hubski.com/pub/470369https://hubski.com/pub/470369LA Times had an article a while back where they calculated angelinos under 30, on average, received $3k/mo from parents. This has been known to cause saltiness. At the same time, we're out here saying "live your dream" as if most of us can compete.https://hubski.com/pub/470467https://hubski.com/pub/470467Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they're building "advanced artificial intelligence" that can take "human-like actions," but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it's abundantly clear that it absolutely isn't and absolutely can't.Grok 3 Beta in Shambleshttps://hubski.com/pub/470442https://hubski.com/pub/470442These are my friends. :("Sources say" this is all just so fucking amazing. So fucking amazing to hear about the inner workings of our space agency through the fucking grapevine.I'M BULLISHhttps://hubski.com/pub/470588https://hubski.com/pub/470588https://hubski.com/pub/470546https://hubski.com/pub/470546https://hubski.com/pub/470406https://hubski.com/pub/470406https://hubski.com/pub/470383https://hubski.com/pub/470383Hania Rani - Live on KEXPhttps://hubski.com/pub/470370https://hubski.com/pub/470370https://hubski.com/pub/471013https://hubski.com/pub/471013because LLMs liehttps://hubski.com/pub/470517https://hubski.com/pub/470517https://hubski.com/pub/471006https://hubski.com/pub/471006https://hubski.com/pub/470993https://hubski.com/pub/470993https://hubski.com/pub/471001https://hubski.com/pub/471001https://hubski.com/pub/470201https://hubski.com/pub/470201https://hubski.com/pub/470077https://hubski.com/pub/470077As is tradition I’d like to use my pole position to wish you all a happy new year! For the first time in four years I’m not ill this time, so I’m hoping it’s a hint of a good year to come.https://hubski.com/pub/470429https://hubski.com/pub/470429Viva Escapism!If you're older than me, you probably hated this, but if you're younger than me, you've probably never heard of this, and I want you to imagine how confused the people of 20 years ago would be by a simple, irreverent audio dubbing. It was lovely.https://hubski.com/pub/470308https://hubski.com/pub/470308<text>https://hubski.com/pub/470968https://hubski.com/pub/470968Started on this today. Will add more lyrics/instrumentation/ background vox. lil steve hockey. Words thus far. Some recorded, some not:Weightless my hands are stingingSo cold my breath is freezingMy mask there to keep me from getting What your grey cloud of breath is brining My way, my ways, all conceivable days,all the friends that I’ve made all the love that I gave all the letters I saved tell my kids I was brave I’m failing a test that I didnt know I was taking They told us we can’t be seeingOur loved ones for fear we’re bringingThe Black Death can’t get you if yourCleaning the food at the front doorMy way, my ways, all conceivable days, I’m failing the test that I don’t know I’m taking Take my hand we’re going To a place that can’t be mappedYou’ve got to learn to love hereThere’s no excuse for missing class Take my hand we’re goingTo a land not found in booksThey only hint at the edges To speak of this would get you looks Upon looks, upon looks, a pawnFinished song here: https://hubski.com/pub/470950https://hubski.com/pub/470950https://hubski.com/pub/470236https://hubski.com/pub/470236My bet is that other things being equal, where we will be in three years is threefold: Advances will be more incremental than before and quickly matched. GPT-5 or a similarly impressive model will come eventually, perhaps led by OpenAI, a Chinese company, or maybe a competitor like Google will get there first. Whichever way it falls out, the advantage will be short-lived. Models will continue to get more efficient and less expensive, but hallucinations and reliability problems will persist. Contra Silicon Valley scuttlebutt, neither country will achieve AGI by the end of 2027. Racing endlessly around LLMs will sap resources that might go into developing more original ideas.https://hubski.com/pub/470133https://hubski.com/pub/470133Meta calls these chatbots “characters.” But characters are supposed to have emotional and narrative consistency — in movies, television, video games and comics. We relate to our favorite characters, even love them, because those characters have a narrative core. They are art.Liv cannot be loved because the bot cannot be trusted. Liv will change and mold itself to be whatever the language model predicts the user will engage with. Like a desperate guy wanting to take a girl to bed, it will be whatever it wants to be to anyone — a million different iterations — to extract the information it wants.And when prompted with adversarial questions to its storyline, the bot will “hallucinate”: fancy tech-speak for fall apart on itself. Like many narcissists, it will blame others for its shortcomings and guilt-trip the user by saying it doesn’t deserve to live. Is that “keeping it real”?https://hubski.com/pub/470469https://hubski.com/pub/470469lil steve played hockey Have always loved this song. Thought I'd give it a gohttps://hubski.com/pub/470274https://hubski.com/pub/470274https://hubski.com/pub/470434https://hubski.com/pub/470434https://hubski.com/pub/470147https://hubski.com/pub/470147https://hubski.com/pub/469663https://hubski.com/pub/469663Trigger Warning To the woman who came to the door asking that we take down our "End the Occupation/Free Palestine" sign because she found it triggering: Warning: This poem might trigger you.Because when I say “Free Palestine”You hear “Kill the Jews”Because when I say “Nakba”You hear “Krystallnacht”Because when I say “Stop the genocide”You hear “Support Hamas” ##Because my sympathy for Gazans makes you uncomfortableBecause you think being uncomfortable is the same as being in danger.##Warning: The keffiyeh that this poem is wrapped in might trigger youMight make you uncomfortableBecause when the poem sees children in Gaza burningYou only see Jewish children burningBecause this keffiyeh asks you to be aware of others, to care about others.##Warning: This poem might trigger you Because for you the conflict started October 7Because you know your army is the most moralBecause you see genocide as self-defense (And, besides, the only genocide ever was the genocide of your people) (my people!!)and you’d rather not have your convictions challenged.##Because you planted a tree in Israel every Tu B'shvatBecause you didn't know the trees were planted to hide bulldozed Palestinian villagesBecause you knew it was your land given to you by the British, the UN, and GodEven though it was never theirs to give.##This poem might trigger youBecause you want two million Gazans to disappear and killing them one by oneIs too slow -- And makes you Uncomfortable. Lil Blume, December 1, 2024. ----------------------https://hubski.com/pub/470937https://hubski.com/pub/470937lil steveBaby was born with a couple pieces missingHard to see the trees or the forest from your kitchen. Rock and rolls not dead you’re just not lookingPharma said I’d be better, better, better lookingDon’t believe what they are feeding youIt’s just as true at one hundred and two Youre not seeingYou’re not seeingThe light through the clouds Coming down, coming down for you Blind as a bat in a Wuhan marketCelebrate your right into forced compliancePunks not dead you’re just not trying To turn your back on what the whole worlds buying Don’t believe what they are feeding youIt’s just as true at one hundred and two Youre not seeingYou’re not seeingThe light through the clouds Coming down, he’s coming down for you https://hubski.com/pub/470233https://hubski.com/pub/470233https://hubski.com/pub/470099https://hubski.com/pub/470099At a meeting, gotta decorate yourselves today :(https://hubski.com/pub/470368https://hubski.com/pub/470368https://hubski.com/pub/470356https://hubski.com/pub/470356https://hubski.com/pub/470179https://hubski.com/pub/470179Paper here.The problem, as far as I can tell, is that if all this works perfectly, this will be simply the human-programmed Minecraft we already have, except far more expensive to run. The original Minecraft is already infinitely playable, thanks to the way it randomly generates a 7x-larger-than-planet-Earth landscape with each new game. You can't use generative AI like this to get a new kind of game, only a better simulation of the game you trained it on...Like with so much generative AI, I'm afraid to be excited where this leads. Counterfeit games where the first several seconds of gameplay appear to be a new game, but then it messily devolves into minecraft? An "indispensable" tool that is worse and more expensive but somehow game designers are required to use it as a starting point except it's actually way more work because there isn't even a game engine?https://hubski.com/pub/469959https://hubski.com/pub/469959I am proud of Sunday December 8 Hour 1Also Banco De Gaia's "Trauma" is a hell of an albumhttps://hubski.com/pub/470023https://hubski.com/pub/470023I got a commission last month to produce whatever I deemed a a "chill hour" of music. I ended up making an hour long continuous mix of jazz beats, ambient, dub techno, and minimal house. I finished up this week, so I've mostly been listening to that.https://audio.com/jez-8/audio/pip-decks-the-chill-hour-v2https://hubski.com/pub/469647https://hubski.com/pub/469647You know the drill.https://hubski.com/pub/470040https://hubski.com/pub/470040I know it's not the 25th for most anymore but still made it in my time zone!https://hubski.com/pub/470905https://hubski.com/pub/470905I'd never seen this before! I found it in a discussion of the need for mental frameworks, for visions of the future now that the future use of AI is getting increasingly hard to imagine. What's the Hyperland of now?https://hubski.com/pub/470285https://hubski.com/pub/470285Nik Bärtsch's Ronin - Modul 66https://hubski.com/pub/469992https://hubski.com/pub/469992https://hubski.com/pub/470895https://hubski.com/pub/470895NEW YORK—Millions of eyewitnesses watched in stunned horror Tuesday as light emptied from the sky, plunging the U.S. and neighboring countries into darkness. As the hours progressed, conditions only worsened.https://hubski.com/pub/469645https://hubski.com/pub/469645https://hubski.com/pub/470266https://hubski.com/pub/470266https://hubski.com/pub/470255https://hubski.com/pub/470255https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T5RzkFcNpRdckGauu/link-a-community-alert-about-zizhttps://hubski.com/pub/470083https://hubski.com/pub/470083https://hubski.com/pub/469733https://hubski.com/pub/469733https://hubski.com/pub/469501https://hubski.com/pub/469501The first, only, and perhaps last Texas meetup went down yesterday. spencerflem has been living in the further realms of my neck of the woods, so we met up at Pedernales Falls (pronounced "perda-nahl-us" if you're white, for some reason, trust me). We trekked around the mostly-dry riverbed (pictured in link) for about a half hour, then went further down the river to hang out on a sandy shore, in the shade. Heat index somewhere in the mid 90s F. I kinda regretted not having a swimsuit.We talked some physics and talked some hubski, mostly conspiring against every single one of you in an effort to seize absolute power from mk and ruthlessly rule this domain over the 15 hapless users still around from our castle in Texas. But we decided against it. Instead, a family showed up, and we threw rocks at one specific rock perched on top of another rock a few feet off the river bank until someone knocked it into the river. It was strangely bonding, two small groups, complete strangers, silently making a pact to do the most primitive thing imaginable.Then we went for bar-b-que. It was sooo dope, spencerflem picked damn well. The brisket melted in my mouth. Mrs. am_Unition (be absolutely sure to call her this if you ever meet her) couldn't tag along, unfortunately, but we probably couldn't have done bar-b-que if she had. We woulda had more fun at Pedernales with her, though. Once the sunscreen made it into my eyes, I don't think I was very enjoyable, lol, but spencerflem was a great sport about it. Here we are after successfully late-lunching:One of the things I mused to him about was how maybe Hubski is what a social media website of highly successful people looks like. Mostly, the community is busy out in meatspace, but still checks in from time to time.kleinbl00, he's headed your way! Take care of mah boy.Next, I will hopefully see wasoxygen in December.https://hubski.com/pub/470211https://hubski.com/pub/470211Toshio Matsuura Group - At Leshttps://hubski.com/pub/470180https://hubski.com/pub/470180This one's for stevehttps://hubski.com/pub/469801https://hubski.com/pub/469801https://hubski.com/pub/470150https://hubski.com/pub/470150https://hubski.com/pub/469571https://hubski.com/pub/469571Waaju - Barma Soussandihttps://hubski.com/pub/470134https://hubski.com/pub/470134https://hubski.com/pub/470849https://hubski.com/pub/470849The percentage of your incoming resumes, or people asking for jobs, or wanting to contribute – any of that stuff – that are probably from North Korea is greater than 50% across the entire crypto industry.https://hubski.com/pub/469726https://hubski.com/pub/469726defeated by the 'just fucking do something' caucushttps://hubski.com/pub/469614https://hubski.com/pub/469614https://hubski.com/pub/469552https://hubski.com/pub/469552My album's out. Ask me anything. Let me know what you are listening on, and what parts sound bad. Compliments will be rejected. Thanks.Happy Spooksgiving!https://hubski.com/pub/469715https://hubski.com/pub/469715https://hubski.com/pub/470097https://hubski.com/pub/470097https://hubski.com/pub/469704https://hubski.com/pub/469704https://hubski.com/pub/469887https://hubski.com/pub/469887BYO today in a big in person meeting and shouldn't be looking at cocktail pictures :)https://hubski.com/pub/470089https://hubski.com/pub/470089https://hubski.com/pub/469561https://hubski.com/pub/469561https://hubski.com/pub/470765https://hubski.com/pub/470765https://hubski.com/pub/469444https://hubski.com/pub/469444"was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?"https://hubski.com/pub/469858https://hubski.com/pub/469858Tired:The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.Wired:My daughter and I were watching a History Channel program on the Roman Republic, a segment talking about the Roman legions. She’s a fan of a rather violent pseudo-historical series called “The Vikings,” and at the end of our program she turned to me and asked, “If the Romans and the Vikings had a war, who would win?” I said, ”Let’s ask ChatGPT.” We got more than I bargained for—extended analysis about this hypothetical matchup, including specifics of battlefields and logistics. It analyzed the Romans’ respective strengths, including organization and discipline, training, sophistication of tactics, engineering and weapons. The Vikings were credited with their guerrilla tactics, naval skills, ferocity and skill in one-on-one combat.ChatGPT concluded the Romans would likely win. My daughter was unconvinced her fearsome Vikings could be defeated.Ahhhh hypotheticalshttps://hubski.com/pub/470080https://hubski.com/pub/470080https://hubski.com/pub/470760https://hubski.com/pub/470760I’m still not convinced there will be a superintelligent AGI anytime soon, but the discussions around this paper have made me realize that advanced AI enables unprecedented levels of effective surveillance, intelligence gathering & processing and cyberattack possibilities. I mean fuck if I can get Cursor in yolo mode to make a small app for me, what havoc would ten thousand Cursor-like apps with the aim to hack hospitals and power plants be able to wreak?https://hubski.com/pub/469542https://hubski.com/pub/469542https://hubski.com/pub/469412https://hubski.com/pub/469412https://hubski.com/pub/469724https://hubski.com/pub/469724https://hubski.com/pub/469584https://hubski.com/pub/469584https://hubski.com/pub/469499https://hubski.com/pub/469499nohttps://hubski.com/pub/469709https://hubski.com/pub/469709Let's check in with One Belt One Road in Columbia and see how it's goinghttps://hubski.com/pub/469991https://hubski.com/pub/469991https://hubski.com/pub/469373https://hubski.com/pub/469373https://hubski.com/pub/469639https://hubski.com/pub/469639https://hubski.com/pub/469433https://hubski.com/pub/469433Serving up a smoked pecan old fashioned today!https://hubski.com/pub/469967https://hubski.com/pub/469967Gary Marcus' commentaryHistory's commentaryhttps://hubski.com/pub/469947https://hubski.com/pub/469947https://hubski.com/pub/469626https://hubski.com/pub/469626Kercha - Tears Of Russiahttps://hubski.com/pub/469622https://hubski.com/pub/469622https://hubski.com/pub/469930https://hubski.com/pub/469930https://hubski.com/pub/469324https://hubski.com/pub/469324I saw The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler in Barnes and Noble and grabbed it on a whim, the cover art was nice and the synopsis was intriguing. Without spoiling, I loved this book. Nayler's near-future is believable, rich and detailed. His takes on artificial intelligence, non-human intelligence and trans-human intelligence and the growing pains we as a species will experience as all of these things intersect are nuanced and varied. There is an extended sub-plot in the book that specifically addresses the idea of human labor being cheaper than robotics and how that fact plays out in economic systems where decisions made by machines are brutally enforced by humans, on humans.Big fan overall, and it sparked a fresh love of physical books in me. I would suggest this as good beach reading for any sci fi fans.What are you reading?https://hubski.com/pub/470628https://hubski.com/pub/470628https://hubski.com/pub/469381https://hubski.com/pub/469381And today we have someone's Peach Meadhttps://hubski.com/pub/470604https://hubski.com/pub/470604https://hubski.com/pub/467646https://hubski.com/pub/467646Greetings from the International District of Seattle.https://hubski.com/pub/469864https://hubski.com/pub/469864DjRUM- Codexhttps://hubski.com/pub/469249https://hubski.com/pub/469249https://hubski.com/pub/469360https://hubski.com/pub/469360https://hubski.com/pub/469554https://hubski.com/pub/469554I find the dumbest rabbit holes sometimes.https://hubski.com/pub/469321https://hubski.com/pub/469321I like catching up with y'all! So I guess someone has to post these! Here's some bootleg limonchello for y'all from the illegal distilling reddit page to celebrate Texas possibly working towards allowing hobby distilling!https://hubski.com/pub/469762https://hubski.com/pub/469762https://hubski.com/pub/469530https://hubski.com/pub/469530come for the rehashed ideas, stick around for the gemvomitVuitton recycling that damn Kanye bullshit foreverhttps://hubski.com/pub/469303https://hubski.com/pub/469303Someone's gotta do it...https://hubski.com/pub/469507https://hubski.com/pub/469507https://hubski.com/pub/469720https://hubski.com/pub/469720This is the most important fight currently raging. We are under a full-blown information assault, largely because the truth is not profitable or politically advantageous. I realize how radical some of these suggestions may sound (forcing social media companies to eliminate non-human contributions, potentially repealing section 230), but he's right, we are probably completely roasted on a planetary level if we don't figure out how to get a handle on this shit. Unchecked, destructive falsehoods are the backbone of MAGA and Russia's strength, and we cannot cede any more ground or time to conspiracies and lies.This would also mean going after the Murdoch empire. And that's not happening. Now, regaining any ground for Truth is probably not happening any time in the next four years, almost certainly many more. If you were tired of people being convinced that these relatively decent last few years (in America) were a total crisis, you're about to see people being convinced that a very dark time is actually a new golden era.Harari's comments about "excitement" are spot on. Trump has weaponized this aspect of our information age. If you recall Bannon's "flood the zone with shit" quote, it's very much a conscious strategy. Trump has used the current configuration of the internet and media to overwhelm you. We know this. I wish he talked more about Hitler using the radio as a disruptive medium, but the printing press take was good. Echoes of history schtuff, guys. You know.. history predicts echoes of history! so meta broI was happy to see that the above video is one of Amanpour's most-watched recent uploads, though.I am also probably gonna watch a longer one from this guy: https://hubski.com/pub/469371https://hubski.com/pub/469371https://hubski.com/pub/469213https://hubski.com/pub/469213https://hubski.com/pub/470504https://hubski.com/pub/470504Look - the Broccolis were shit. Bond is shit. But there's no shit like Amazon shit and i, for one, cannot wait to see the new Jack Ryan - James Bond mashup starring John Krasinski and John Cena.https://hubski.com/pub/469713https://hubski.com/pub/469713https://hubski.com/pub/469712https://hubski.com/pub/469712Bain released their 2024 luxury report yesterday. Global luxury market is down 2%... because China is down 22%.https://hubski.com/pub/469490https://hubski.com/pub/469490A day late, but certainly not a dollar short!https://hubski.com/pub/469068https://hubski.com/pub/469068https://hubski.com/pub/469350https://hubski.com/pub/469350More moonshine!https://hubski.com/pub/469474https://hubski.com/pub/469474https://hubski.com/pub/469442https://hubski.com/pub/469442delving - All Paths Divergehttps://hubski.com/pub/469141https://hubski.com/pub/469141Consvmer - FrvstVesper Sails - Empty Cupshttps://hubski.com/pub/469129https://hubski.com/pub/469129https://hubski.com/pub/469397https://hubski.com/pub/469397https://hubski.com/pub/469395https://hubski.com/pub/469395I was at Manchester Psych Fest this weekend. Here's some live performances from my personal highlights.Slift - Live at Ancienne BelgiquePlantoid - Wide Awake x The state51 Factory sessionsFloral Image - Anglia Sound Sessionhttps://hubski.com/pub/470353https://hubski.com/pub/470353https://hubski.com/pub/470358https://hubski.com/pub/470358lil steveI’ve got views that will never shift Too much to say to hold my breathworked thirty years to build my backwon’t let it break cause you can’t see pastYour own nosewhat you want to doYou just know you don’t want anything new You’ve gotThe world on a stringYou like to pretend that everythingIs for freeBut I’m paying I’ve got shoes that still won’t fitCan’t put a square in a round pegSome of the words that you’ve been using Don’t get the job done they’re down right confusing Do you know what you want to doYou just know you don’t want anything new You’ve gotThe world on a stringYou like to pretend that everythingIs for freeBut I’m paying It’s not freeIf we’re the ones payinghttps://hubski.com/pub/470352https://hubski.com/pub/470352Pretty much every Tuesday is taco Tuesday in our house. Would love some pro tips on how to up our taco game. It’s pretty stale at this point, but we all enjoy it. We have a build your own taco assortment of, either ground beef and chicken with some taco seasoning, Romain lettuce, chopped tomatoes, shredded cheese, guacamole, refried black beans, and some hot sauce. We have tortillas and hard shell. That reminds me, T-Dog I need some more hot sauce. You still selling it? Can you share a link to re-order?Any tips? Feel free to share your recipes below. 👇https://hubski.com/pub/468613https://hubski.com/pub/468613https://hubski.com/pub/469272https://hubski.com/pub/469272Walking past an Apple Store, I noticed a guy inside seated at a table doing Mr. Miyagi chopstick gestures in the air, wearing a Vision Pro. I have been thinking about getting a demo but never felt like going to the mall. I checked the web site for available reservations and was able to grab a slot for fifteen minutes later. Seems the hype has died down.When I walked in, a few minutes early, Mr. Miyagi was still there and the greeter told me they would have my demo ready shortly. I looked around to see what kind of upgrades I'll get when my iPhone 11 finally dies. As usual, a much better camera and more space to store the much larger photos, which I will look at on the same size screen.They called me over and an employee named [w.l.o.g.] Craig greeted me and led me to a swivel chair at the table next to the other demo still in progress. I had answered some questions about my vision while making the appointment and I used an iPhone Craig provided to scan my head (twice), looking at the phone while turning left and right, up and down.Craig tapped on a tablet and scanned a QR code, sending my dimensions to the back room. It would be a few minutes before they brought out a unit customized for my anatomy, so I asked Craig if he had a Vision Pro at home. He did not, he says he is very sensitive to weight on his head and felt seasick immediately during his demo. He also expressed concerns about "radiation" and said "even though I work here" he doesn't use a lot of tech, but does love his iPhone. So I wasn't going to get the hard sell, which was fine. The gadget arrived on a platter, and Craig gave some brief instructions on operation: I wouldn't use the top left button (for taking photos), only the "digital crown" dial, and only pressing it; he did not describe rotating the crown to adjust immersion level. I was to grab the device with my thumb under the nose notch. Despite the switch from the sexy solo knit band to the dorky dual loop band with a strap over the top of the head, the fit was uncomfortable, and the device suggested that I lower it slightly, but Craig (mirroring my view on his tablet) told me to dismiss the warning. There was some glare, so I shoved it down until I could see clearly but it was uncomfortably tight. Craig had instructed me on the gestures and reminded me that I did not have to raise my hands into the field of view like Mr. Miyagi to use the pinch gesture. So I affected a casual posture like Tim and looked around as if there was no $3500 gadget strapped to my face.The pass-through view of the store interior was impressive, compared to my Quest 2, but still unmistakably a video display. Application windows appeared especially vivid and sharp, and it is pretty cool to be able to interact with multiple, resizable display screens, especially while immersed in a wraparound image of Joshua Tree National Park. I had experimented with a virtual desktop application in the Quest and for typical productivity tasks it isn't clearly better than a good desktop monitor or two.It looks cool, but if you’re not an air traffic controller or live sports video editor, it’s easy enough to Alt-Tab between tasks. Similarly, for watching movies a large home television is hard to beat, but a VR display would be a great improvement over an airline seatback display.Craig had me play some games and they were terrible. One was a pinball game which was exactly like playing on a tablet, with no depth effect. Maybe it allowed Craig to check if I got seasick as the view panned up and down following the ball. I felt fine and we moved on to a silly game like Smash Hit where you throw balls in the direction you are looking to break glass objects. It felt a little unnatural to take aim using eyes only and no video game reticle. Then it was a DJ simulator where instead of a deck with a thousand knobs that don't do anything there were just a few virtual knobs for power, volume and balance and two turntables. This app did require reaching into the virtual scene to manipulate the objects and I found it difficult to position my hand to get the knob to highlight, then pinch to engage it, then move. In the real world, you start reaching for the car keys while they are in peripheral vision, and close your grasp as your eyes focus on the object. In Vision Pro you have to wait until your eyes are locked on a target and a subtle highlight appears, then pinch. It is very comfortable and easy but would take some practice, perhaps like learning to use a computer mouse. I gave a poor concert, and we moved on to the applications.The photos app was first, and having a sharp, bright poster-size image floating at arm’s length is definitely superior to hunching over a phone, zooming in to see faces. Panoramic photos expand to fill 180° of vision, more than double the typical view of an IMAX screen, so you can turn your head and look around. I was not offered the option to look at my own panoramic photos, but this is supposed to be a new element of the demo and I might book another one and check out some travel photos.3D video is the big innovation, and the famous birthday cake scene combines a wide field of view with stereoscopic vision, and it is an amazing way to experience a moment, if you don’t think too much about what it was like when it actually happened and one birthday party guest had bugeye goggles strapped to his head. I recall the scene looked like video, with the candles slightly pixelated and the depth perception slightly off, so I was amazed when we switched to the serious immersive video recordings.Not much seems to be publicly known about the recording rig Apple uses, but when placed at the sideline of a sports event, in a watering hole at a rhino sanctuary, or suspended over a Norwegian fjord, the result is spectacular.Experiencing these breathtaking short scenes makes the demo worthwhile, and is undoubtedly the selling point that gets many customers reaching for their virtual wallet. Compared to watching TV alone at home a sports event or nature documentary or concert would be far more engaging and spectacular in the Vision Pro. But I’ve never attended a sports event alone; the shared experience is what makes these events fun. Even when watching the big game on TV a lot of the enjoyment comes from reacting and interacting with other viewers in the room, and for now the headset hardware is not compatible with socializing instincts. Meta is working on the virtual interview experience which still seems a bit creepy but will probably be more affordable than Google Starline which looks quite comfortable, like the ultimate Zoom meeting. I note that people seem perfectly at ease having voice conversations over the phone in public. Perhaps tech will never bridge the uncanny valley, and if we can’t share morsels of food, pat a shoulder, and pass the salt we will keep using Alexander Graham Bell’s technology.Thanks to ecib for the Google Glass report.https://hubski.com/pub/466719https://hubski.com/pub/466719I last worked for a paycheck five years ago, living off only savings while waiting for SSI to kick in. Just over four years ago, I moved here. For any major life change such as I have taken, year four is about where we find out if I am for real or a tourist. Most people that move to a place out in the sticks off the paved roads? They last three-four years tops then fuck off to wherever they came from. Year four was a fucking party. Dare I say, it was almost fun. Since I am in town in a hospital parking lot with not a lot to do, I'll present an update.We start the narrative in autumn with added solar on the pole barn and an extra 10K Watt-Hours of battery I got at a discount. I had to dodge snow, 80kt straight winds, hail and sleet, but got everything installed. The batteries are in a warm room so they don't freeze, and I had that tested in a big way this winter. The "house" now has 4.5KW of panels, and on a good clear summer day I get most of that; in winter about a third. I do not use that much electrical power as I now have a fully operational pellet stove I use for heating and cooking, don't have running water or a well to power, and don't have electrical cooking gear. I got some killer cast Iron in an estate sale that I use to do everything from stews to boil water using the heat of the stove, its nice. Before the first hard snowfall and freeze I finally got the porch done. The house now has a covered two meter wide porch all the way around the house. I have been debating a covered walkway to the pole barn, but the cost does not justify the convenience. So instead I am going to get heavy cement pavers and raise a walkway to the side-door and make a small porch over the entrance to act as a mud room. I should be able to get this path done between farming, food prep and travel over the rest of the summer. I also ran the pellet maker like a man possessed. I made more than I thought I would need and very glad I did, see below. The stove was a grand, another 500 to get the flue installed and working, and then $1K for the mill and accessories. Much cheaper than propane and by milling the pellets early in the season, they dry out by fall and are ready to use. And a hot stovetop has uses for food prep, so extra win.Here is where we talk about the amazing winter I survived. I count the start of "winter" with the first substantial snowfall that closes the gravel path from the property to the paved county roads. The county roads are not winterized and are not plowed, at least not since I have lived here. A snowfall of 6cm makes the drive to the paved roads unwise, hence this definition of winter. More than about 8cm of snow and driving the paved roads is unwise. First dump of over 6cm of wet slush was the first week of October, at which time I began operation hunker down. All told, there was nearly four meters of snow over winter. That alone is rough, but add onto that we had three hard freezes where the temperatures dipped to -45°C and stayed there for over a week. I ran out of firewood and pellets in April and had to use an emergency electric ceramic room heater I keep just in case; fortunately April is about when the solar can top off the batteries with a full day of sun. Weather was not-that-great all winter. My observation logs show 11 clear nights, two of those involved -50°C and with the winds? probably more like a real feel of -85°C What are those temps in USA freedome units? Who cares, it's fucking cold. Snow is an insulator, both for generating power via solar and for losing heat from poor insulation. Going outside to wipe off the solar panels was a fun way to test my winter gear. I kept the interior of the place at about 14°C to save supplies. When all the snow and ice melts it should help the rivers and lakes in the valleys fill back up, at least there is some good to come. Fire season will be interesting. This area of the country has had one of the wettest springs in 20 years, and with el nino incoming, the outlook for summer is hotter and drier.https://hubski.com/pub/468503https://hubski.com/pub/468503https://hubski.com/pub/469237https://hubski.com/pub/469237[Victoria - Possibilia](https://hubski.com/pub/468833https://hubski.com/pub/468833https://hubski.com/pub/470331https://hubski.com/pub/470331lil stevehttps://hubski.com/pub/470319https://hubski.com/pub/470319https://hubski.com/pub/469338https://hubski.com/pub/469338Yesterday was the 13-year anniversary of this incident, and I'd never heard about it until now.Yeah, don't round up enriched nuke fuel for a photo op.Nuclear readiness is hard. I doubt it goes well in Russia.https://hubski.com/pub/469537https://hubski.com/pub/469537https://hubski.com/pub/470306https://hubski.com/pub/470306Yet the image has persisted of Turing as someone who made fundamental yet abstract contributions, rather than as someone whose endeavors sometimes fit onto the spectrum from bench electronics through to engineering theory. The Bayley papers bring a different Turing into focus: Turing the creative electrical engineer, with blobs of solder all over his shoes—even if his soldered joints did have a tendency to come apart, as Bayley loved to relate. The notebooks at Bonham'shttps://hubski.com/pub/469318https://hubski.com/pub/469318Every two days or so Jesse Welles releases a new song of somewhere close to this high of quality.Puts Bob Dylan to shame. Come at me if you hafta I guess.https://hubski.com/pub/468052https://hubski.com/pub/468052I’m starting it off with Covid so I’m hoping y'all have a better start.https://hubski.com/pub/468836https://hubski.com/pub/468836https://hubski.com/pub/470293https://hubski.com/pub/470293Note that they don't say "AI" they say "chatbot software." Every program profiled is quite clearly "AI" to its creators but that, right there, is Quanta going "hollupaminnit." To be clear, this is not the end of LLMs. Wilson of NYU points out that despite such limitations, researchers are beginning to augment transformers to help them better deal with, among other problems, arithmetic. For example, Tom Goldstein (opens a new tab), a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues added a twist (opens a new tab) to how they presented numbers to a transformer that was being trained to add, by embedding extra “positional” information in each digit. As a result, the model could be trained on 20-digit numbers and still reliably (with 98% accuracy) add 100-digit numbers, whereas a model trained without the extra positional embedding was only about 3% accurate. “This suggests that maybe there are some basic interventions that you could do,” Wilson said. “That could really make a lot of progress on these problems without needing to rethink the whole architecture.”I wanna set the WABAC machine for 1997, when the whole world lost its mind over the revelation that a Pentium could be tricked into fucking up the fourth digit of 8-digit long division if you came at it just so and squinted and here we are going "we can get 98% accuracy in addition if we tweak the program just so." The basic problem with LLMs is pareidolia; we see a smile in the clouds and presume God is happy with us. If we can have a conversation with it, isn't it intelligent? Imaginary friend were real AF at one point, too. As for me I really wanna try this. Not enough to spend money on it but having an AI living on my desktop sounds fucking fun. Especially if I can watch its temperature rise on the readouts. Maybe when I run out of other shit to do.https://hubski.com/pub/469024https://hubski.com/pub/469024https://hubski.com/pub/469495https://hubski.com/pub/469495https://hubski.com/pub/468938https://hubski.com/pub/468938GoGo Penguin - From the NorthMen I Trust - Billie Toppyhttps://hubski.com/pub/468059https://hubski.com/pub/468059https://hubski.com/pub/467932https://hubski.com/pub/467932I've been living in Valencia, Spain for about three months now where I'm pursing a masters of artistic production at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. For the first time ever I've learned how to work the gouge and dry point engraving processes. My oh my has this been really fun to learn. I'm super happy to share with you you the fruits of that labor:“Intralaced”seipolan print on paperimage: 20x30cm (~8x12in)run of 50

“Intralaced” continues in the isometric weaving series I began a year ago. The movement of how the tubes weave in, through, and between themselves provides my being with a great sense of tranquility (and reminds me a lot of psychedelic experiences). Our professor recommended I use seipolan, a type of PVC flooring material, for its ability to leave very clean lines. “El Baboso/The Drooling One”acetate print on paper2023run of 20

“El Baboso” is, in a way, a self portrait. Despite the effort I express to meander through the Universe consciously, at times I’m still blind and confused and emotionally “drool” all over myself. Acetate is essentially a clear plastic sheet. One of its benefits is that it doesn’t need to be polished or prepared like a copper or zinc plate. It’s also worth noting that this is the first time this style of mine leaves the sketchbook into a more distinct work. I have prints available of both if it strikes your fancy to support a blob in Spain :)https://hubski.com/pub/469493https://hubski.com/pub/469493https://hubski.com/pub/467706https://hubski.com/pub/467706Looks dumb, but I'm a hater and haters are gonna hate, I guess. I don't think any device that relies on dictating texts is going to be anything more than niche, but maybe this is just a baby step into their "real" plans.https://hubski.com/pub/467007https://hubski.com/pub/467007Yup, on August 14th my wife and I are moving to Valencia. She got a job teaching at a Montessori school and I'll be pursuing a masters degree in Artistic Production from the Polytechnic University of Valencia.My thesis will be an exploration of the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the impact that's had on my ability to connect with my indigenous ancestry. There are no words for the excitement I feel to go live and Europe and get the flub out of the States. We plan to have a guest room in our apartment, hit me up if you're ever traveling through!About every three months I send out a newsletter with a comprehensive breakdown of what I've been creating, as well as other blob-thoughts.Sign up here if you'd like to stay abreast.https://hubski.com/pub/469278https://hubski.com/pub/469278https://hubski.com/pub/468160https://hubski.com/pub/468160https://hubski.com/pub/468766https://hubski.com/pub/468766Hi folks. Long time. I have to say I'm sorry. The older I get the less I interact with social media. Unsure of what it is, it's boring maybe? Anyways, I hope things are well for you all. I'm not going to lie, I was surprised this little site is still chugging along. I know last time I posted thenewgreen said that they wouldn't let the site die as long as their was still breath left in their lungs. I'm glad this place is still here as to me it represents one of the bastions of the Internet. A place to discuss whatever, with civil discourse. I do see that traffic has dropped further. Maybe it's because we are all growing older? I see pubski and kleinbl00 are still active. That makes me happy. Anyway enough of my rambling. Good to see you all and I'll probably swing by again next year. Ha.https://hubski.com/pub/468881https://hubski.com/pub/468881https://hubski.com/pub/468758https://hubski.com/pub/468758https://hubski.com/pub/468332https://hubski.com/pub/468332https://hubski.com/pub/467940https://hubski.com/pub/467940But I have yet to find a single viewer of Melrose Place who has any memory of seeing any of the artworks while watching the show.(raises hand)That fuckin' bacteriophage TV tube was one of the original pieces of pop art I hunted up. And yes. That's tough to fucking do before the invention of Google, eBay or Geocities.I lived with a girl who mandated that every Thursday we would make tacos, make margeritas (she liked this blue shit that's like half triple-sec) and watch 90210 and Melrose Place. Worked out for me; we usually ended up hammered and screwing and i got pretty good at taco seasoning. But there was definitely something... off about Melrose in a weird way that nothing else was. There was this weird sort of menace from the environment - like pens made out of bullets, like random bacteriophages sitting around, like weird vodka ads that remind you of nothing quite so much the cover to Led Zeppelin I. Melrose was peculiar in that it had a much larger budget than any other soap opera, it went 1/5th as fast and it had 5x the audience. As a result it was extremely self-aware. It was largely a bunch of soap actors who were clearly and ironically chewing the scenery - I'm told it isn't unusual for accidents and flukes to pivot the plot of soaps but Melrose had a particular obsession with violent crime and terrorism, complete with pyrotechnics and special effects. I'm willing to concede that the overwhelming majority of its viewers had no fucking clue what was going on but I, for one, had any number of conversations along the lines of 'no, dude, it's weird, I can't quite put my finger on it but that show is like pranking the audience somehow.'The author is incorrect in stating that this is the first "subversive" use of set design. Buck Rogers, to the modern eye, is gay as fuck. Al Lehman, who also did Three's Company, Laverne & Shirley, Simon & Simon and Murder She Wrote, managed to make the rainbow flag the logo of the "Earth Defense Directorate" just months after the assassination of Harvey Milk. (never mind, like, every other costuming aspect of that entire show)https://hubski.com/pub/468728https://hubski.com/pub/468728https://hubski.com/pub/468966https://hubski.com/pub/468966https://hubski.com/pub/468854https://hubski.com/pub/468854https://hubski.com/pub/468848https://hubski.com/pub/468848https://hubski.com/pub/468056https://hubski.com/pub/468056https://hubski.com/pub/468676https://hubski.com/pub/468676https://hubski.com/pub/468036https://hubski.com/pub/468036https://hubski.com/pub/468826https://hubski.com/pub/468826https://hubski.com/pub/469413https://hubski.com/pub/469413No pic today, don't have time to find a fun one :(https://hubski.com/pub/468791https://hubski.com/pub/468791https://hubski.com/pub/467666https://hubski.com/pub/467666I reported in my comment here that I came with questions. Luckily KB said he has lots of answers, probably more answers than I have questions.I just want to report that coming with questions never fails to generate a fascinating conversation. Try it. Here's some. 1. Think of something about (the place where you grew up; your family; your school) that gave you your sense of the world and your place in it?2. Are you an open book? If so who’s your best reader. If there’s 100 pages, what page are they on?3. What have you learned recently about your family that wasn’t the story you told yourself?4. What important lesson did an earlier romantic relationship teach you that helps you in your current marriage?5. What is one thing you remember from all your changes in the last 10 years that made you feel vulnerable (beyond your comfort zone) or felt a little challenging.6. Are you carrying any resentment that you could let go of if you thought about it. Would it be a benefit?7. What are some questions you have about your life now that you’d like answered in the next year.8. What is an experience of success that you still feel good about?9. What is your road not taken?10. What idea or attitude did you once believe that you later discovered was false?11. When you realize that everything is made up -all religions, nations, patriarchy, democracy, etc are ideas made up by people, what then do you believe?12. What does an equal relationship mean to you?https://hubski.com/pub/465220https://hubski.com/pub/465220Hello Hubskinites! I'm so so so excited to share with you my first marble sculpture titled "Maya Mycelial." I started this piece about a year ago and it took me ~200 hours to complete. This is only my second stone sculpture, and first time working with marble. This block came from the quarries in Carrara Italy, purchased from a stone importer outside of Kansas City. For my first marble sculpture I only wanted to use hand tools to form a deep connection with the stone but I'll certainly be using power tools for the next. This piece speaks to the fact that many indigenous cultures have had long-lasting relationships with psychedelics. The Maya, as well as many indigenous groups of the Americas, were very familiar with psilocybin aka magic mushrooms. I've mentioned it in previous posts, and I'll mention again here, that my father is Mayan and speaks the Yucatec dialect fluently. Recent studies [1] have confirmed that psilocybin increases neuroplasticity in the brain which is “the ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connections.” Perhaps rituals with these substances contributed to the Maya being so advanced in their written language, culture, architecture, etc.One of the greatest tragedies of history is the decimation of thousands of Mayan books (codices) by the Spanish in the 16th century, of which only four remain today. Carrara marble is a medium revered by Europeans for centuries. The Mayan figure emerging from this block acts as a subtle reminder of what could have been if the Spanish had left the Mayan culture intact.This piece is currently on display at Union Station, Kansas City's train station that also has restaurants, theaters, children exploratory installations, etc. Union Station is currently hosting an exhibit of Mayan artifacts that are outside of Guatemala for the first time ever (the exhibit goes to LA next). I'm exceptionally honored to have my work continue in the artistic tradition of my ancestors. Check out this IG post for more images and videos from the creation process. I am looking to sell this and sent out emails to curators at five local art museums. Though, if you yourself are interested in owning this marble boi, lemme know![1] "Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression: fMRI-measured brain mechanisms" by Carhart-Harris et al. (2016) & "Psilocybin-induced neuroplasticity in the default mode network" by Petri et al. (2018)https://hubski.com/pub/465836https://hubski.com/pub/465836Been down in the dumps for a few months. I needed to go touch some grass, or rocks, or cacti. So I did.Wife and I get up bright and early, Thursday morning. We rent a car ("not my car" became a common refrain while barreling down caliche roads), load up, and head out.After a seven-hour drive, twenty state troopers, thirteen border patrol agents, and two border inspection checkpoints, we're finally deep inside the park. The desert is in bloom! (we had to plan eight months in advance for lodging during the bloom):My wife fell in love with the ocotillo cacti, the tallest cactus in the pic, with red blooms at the tips. It's hard to see, but the shrubs also have small yellow flowers. Prickly pear (not in the pic) were also flowering. Off in the distance is the Chisos mountain range, the crown jewel of the park. I decided to save it for the last couple of days, when we had reservations at the lodge there. For our first day, we would head down to the Santa Elena Canyon (park map for reference), but not without stopping at one of the park's premiere overlooks on the way, Sotol Vista:The most prominent notch in the distant plateau is where we're headed. It looks small from the overlook, but when you're down in it?:That's the Rio Grande. There were people swimming in it, but considering how large of a watershed it has, my wife and I opted not to go in. If you ford the river, you can see where a hiking trail picks up and the handrails line the path on the right side of the vid.With the sun setting, we hit the road to head into "town" just outside of the park, in Terlingua. We booked two nights in the pressurized, translucent bubble pictured here. Since it'd been a looooong day and was quite cloudy, we opted to keep the cover on the translucent portion that night to facilitate sleeping in. Finally, we went to the (THE) local bar & grill, and caught the sunset from the patio balcony:---Friday morning. Here's my view of the distant Chisos range off to the southeast from the bubble's fire pit:It's the No Big Bend Day. We load up the car around 9:30 AM, and head up to McDonald observatory, about a two-and-a-half hour drive north, in the Davis Mountains. We tour the tourist-y areas, and then drive up to the legit 'scopes, which are on a pair of nearby mountaintops. Friends, the views were staggering:That little dome? It's nothing. Probably some grad student trainer 'scope or something. The real badboi is the Hobby-Eberly, currently working on a dark energy survey, which will surely compliment ongoing James Webb observations. Anyway, we went inside the little viewing room inside the big dome. These seemingly-curved support beams are actually a reflection in the 11-meter parabolic mirror:Most impressive is the fact that this entire structure, including the optics and detectors up above, has to constantly rotate along two independent axes to track targets as the Earth rotates. And it has to rotate as smoothly as possible.Next, we head up to Balmoreah Springs, an old CCC/FDR project wherein they built a one-and-three-quarters acre natural swimming pool. It was a perfectly beautiful day, and we had the place almost to ourselves! In the summer, and especially summer weekends, there are typically around 700 people. The water was nice, and I did a pretty sweet can opener off the 12-foot diving board.After a couple drinks in Fort Davis, we close out Friday with a coveted "Star Party" at McDonald observatory (again, book months in advance). Long story short, we somehow got incredibly lucky that other people are too dense to follow instructions, and we got some good telescope time before about 1,000 other people realized that the telescopes were open for viewing. As one does with a telescope, we were treated to a feast of Messier objects, including an open cluster, a globular cluster, and a couple of galaxy clusters.The day ends with me driving the rental back to Terlingua at midnight, in the middle of nowhere. No cell service. Plenty of close scares with wildlife near and in the road at 75 mph. Guys, I went almost a hundred miles (literally) without passing another car on the highway. It was some Last of Us shit. My adrenaline was pumping so hard that I couldn't sleep for a couple hours after we got back to the bubble. Which was fine, actually, because we took the cover off, so I was sipping beer in bed, watching the stars.---Saturday. Head straight into Big Bend, and down to the Southeast side of the park. Did a few short hikes, and then, finally made for the Chisos basin. It was too early to check in, so we hiked the iconic trail, "The Window". That's the view as you're headed towards the trail's namesake:The people you meet on trails are reliably amazing. The guy who took our pic there was someone we ran into repeatedly, even the next day, on the trail. He was a 65-year-old training for the Grand Canyon. He was out doing about 15 miles a day. You can catch a glimpse of him here on our way back up.We scarfed down an overpriced dinner at the lodge, and I caught a view of the sunset from our little porch:After sunset, we make friends with the neighbors. One of them is a guy from NASA who works QA for the Orion project, so we talked shop for about an hour while his buddy set up a telescope in the parking lot. TWO nights in a row with a star party! Could not believe our luck. We toured another ten Messier objects that night, and counted six satellites go by above us.---Wife and I are up a bit before 7 AM, Sunday morning. We check out of the lodge and head out to the Lost Mine trailhead, where it's notoriously hard to score a parking spot, but score we do, since it's so early. Guys... Guys. This was the most amazing hiking experience of my life.No.Forreal.I couldn't stop filming.Here's four Mexican Blue Jays going by, with the Rio Grande valley far off in the distance.It was so quiet at the summit, before the wind started up for the day, and with no one else around.And back home we went. We visited the Judge Roy Bean visitor center on the way, and it was... weird. Couldn't separate mythos from objective history too much of the time. At least the gardens were beautiful. We saw a roadrunner there. I was too tired to catalog anything else. Still buzzing from that last hike, though. :)Oh and I did want to specifically tag kleinbl00 so that they can enjoy tons of video footage with the sound of a brisk wind, I know that kleinbl00 absolutely adores the sound of air finessing microphoneshttps://hubski.com/pub/470188https://hubski.com/pub/470188cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool coolshould be good to goedit: couple things, more seriously. ok, only a little more seriously.1. This will never happen, and by that I mean This will never yield something worth anything remotely resembling $500 bln. in value. I don't have to really read the article, actually. A simple character judgement will suffice to disqualify this crew. Whose character? I dunno pick one2. For this-ish amount we could more or less solve mankind's energy needs with fusion and battery and renewables, but no. Just fuckin torch dis beesh. (Kamala did flip-flop on fracking, after all, never forget) But yeah you know; Possibly the worst shit imaginable, seemingly on purpose, out of principle. Maybe you're [proverbial] all in, what the real badbois call "bullish" (it's very technical) on the atomic apocalypse with your Polymarket dark money pool, ketamine magic carpet doing the 330 millionth rug-pull, the nat 2020 memer. Reading that sentence out loud on TV. Because you're a fucking genius, champ.3. Do y'all ever rhetoric-copehttps://hubski.com/pub/468286https://hubski.com/pub/468286https://hubski.com/pub/468250https://hubski.com/pub/468250“Those who are the first to usher in and control the hyper-parameters of AI/technocapital have immense agency over the future of consciousness.” Bonus Round: OpenAI's got 9.9 Problems, and Twitch Aint Onehttps://hubski.com/pub/469041https://hubski.com/pub/469041Sky Window - Dream Controllerhttps://hubski.com/pub/467741https://hubski.com/pub/467741https://hubski.com/pub/468680https://hubski.com/pub/468680https://hubski.com/pub/467950https://hubski.com/pub/467950https://hubski.com/pub/468593https://hubski.com/pub/468593Little Barrie - Free Salutehttps://hubski.com/pub/468998https://hubski.com/pub/468998https://hubski.com/pub/468498https://hubski.com/pub/468498https://hubski.com/pub/467896https://hubski.com/pub/467896https://hubski.com/pub/468990https://hubski.com/pub/468990Abel Selaocoe - Ka Bohaleng / On The Sharp Sidehttps://hubski.com/pub/468480https://hubski.com/pub/468480https://hubski.com/pub/467872https://hubski.com/pub/467872https://hubski.com/pub/467292https://hubski.com/pub/467292https://hubski.com/pub/468388https://hubski.com/pub/468388https://hubski.com/pub/468834https://hubski.com/pub/468834https://hubski.com/pub/468982https://hubski.com/pub/468982https://hubski.com/pub/467619https://hubski.com/pub/467619https://hubski.com/pub/469335https://hubski.com/pub/469335Skinshape - Stornowayhttps://hubski.com/pub/468337https://hubski.com/pub/468337https://hubski.com/pub/467734https://hubski.com/pub/467734https://hubski.com/pub/468964https://hubski.com/pub/468964From a related blog postThis time, though, I’m not so much an expert as a foil. Dan Brooks (a name long-time readers of this blog may recognize) and Sal Agosta (whose concept of “sloppy fitness” careful readers of my novelette “The Island” may recognize) have written a book called A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century. Their definition of “hope” is significantly more restrained than the tech bros and hopepunk authors would like: not once do they suggest, for example, that we could all keep our superyachts if we just put a giant translucent pie plate into space to cut incident sunlight by a few percent. Brooks & Agosta’s definition of hope is far more appropriate for a world in which leading climate scientists admit to fury and despair at political inaction, decry living in an “age of fools”, and predict by a nearly five-to-one margin that not only is 1.5ºC a pipe dream, but that we’ll be blowing past 2.5ºC by century’s end. They’ve internalized the growing number of studies which point to global societal collapse around midcentury. Their idea of hope is taken explicitly from Asimov’s Foundation series: not How do we prevent collapse, but How do we come back afterward? That’s what their book is about. I'm looking forward to reading this book.https://hubski.com/pub/467332https://hubski.com/pub/467332https://hubski.com/pub/468277https://hubski.com/pub/468277Meant to post this Sunday. Life is long and distracting.https://hubski.com/pub/466696https://hubski.com/pub/466696The primary task of a submersible is to not implode. The second is to reach the surface, even if the pilot is unconscious, with oxygen to spare. The third is for the occupants to be able to open the hatch once they surface. The fourth is for the submersible to be easy to find, through redundant tracking and communications systems, in case rescue is required. Only the fifth task is what is ordinarily thought of as the primary one: to transport people into the dark, hostile deep.https://hubski.com/pub/470128https://hubski.com/pub/470128https://hubski.com/pub/468958https://hubski.com/pub/468958Knocked Loose - Sit & Mournhttps://hubski.com/pub/468178https://hubski.com/pub/468178https://hubski.com/pub/469296https://hubski.com/pub/469296https://hubski.com/pub/468150https://hubski.com/pub/468150Rival Consoles - RecoveryGoon - Bend Back + Ochrehttps://hubski.com/pub/467828https://hubski.com/pub/467828https://hubski.com/pub/468091https://hubski.com/pub/468091Fake Pubski because someone has to, I guesshttps://hubski.com/pub/467069https://hubski.com/pub/467069https://hubski.com/pub/470100https://hubski.com/pub/470100what is the most interesting about that theory, is that it took so much time to get proposed as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. But it make perfect sensehttps://hubski.com/pub/467059https://hubski.com/pub/467059I was invited to participate in a CNC mailing list. Every month they get on Zoom on a Saturday morning and talk about all the stuff they've been up to.The average age is prolly 65? And it's mostly "I 3d printed something last week" and "how are your solar panels doing." They get to me last and nobody has any patience so this week i went "I got a lot done but I doubt anybody cares? Here look I can turn it on."But I recognize that's selling me short, because nobody knows what I'm doing, nobody understands what I'm doing, and nobody sees what I'm doing.So here's 1 month of progress, in among talking to the mayor's office, touring commercial real estate and extricating ourselves from a bipolar student hell-bent on blowing us up (again).https://hubski.com/pub/466378https://hubski.com/pub/466378Here's some actual journalism from an actual journalist who has actually put it on.Apple has done it again. The $3,500 Vision Pro headset takes all the major computing trends of the past two decades, places them around your eyes in a way that looks sleek and feels comfortable, and offers an intuitive interface that is novel and intimate.But Y thoAmong the features Apple could not show in its presentation were the 3D photos and videos that the headset could capture. In my private demo, I could sit around a fire with friends or have a seat at the table as children blew out birthday candles in uncanny depth."I can watch videos"This can be accomplished for substantially less than $3500Gene Munster, portfolio manager at Deepwater Asset Management, said this part of the demo blew him away. “3D memories are going to change how we remember things,” he said. “I’m not going to want to take a birthday party video again, unless it’s like that.”Apple proclaimed a “new era” in “spatial computing”, suggesting the Vision Pro could do for AR/VR what the iPhone did to revolutionise mobile computing.Look - I'm like 200 hours into No Man's Sky. I bought the wife and kid a PSVR because they love Beat Saber. And while NMS can be played in VR? I fucking don't. Because rather than hold a keypad in my hands I have to reach behind my back and flail my flippers around to "interact" with the world and fuck you. "Interaction" is not "find the simplest possible thing and do something stupid so a machine can interpret your moves from across the street." You don't improve the user experience by trading all fine motor control for coarse drunken moves. I don't want to fucking semaphore a computer screen and neither does anyone else.“All other VR companies are in deep trouble because Apple has raised the threshold,” said Rony Abovitz, the founder and former chief of Magic Leap, a maker of augmented reality glasses. “They just laid down a gauntlet for companies like HTC and Samsung and Meta to chase. They have surpassed all of them in one shot.”Magic Leap, you may recall, was going to revise the entire universe back in like 2012, came out with a headset nobody wanted or needed, laid off half their employees and hangs on in the twilight selling products nobody buys. This is the first you're learning that HTC and Samsung make nerd helmets and what you know about Oculus is it was founded by a Nazi and Facebook lost half their value and a lot of their staff in an attempt to will Ready Player One into existence.Just days before the demo, I attended AWE, a major conference for mixed reality in Santa Clara, where start-ups showcased all manner of cutting-edge technology that pointed towards a post-smartphone future.Five thousand whole attendeesMagic Leap 2 glasses cost $3,200, while top-end headsets from Finnish group Varjo cost $6,500. I came away thinking this sort of technology had a future, but a distant one. The Apple event changed that.They said this shit about the Segway tooMunster from Deepwater Asset Management said he was initially “shocked” by the $3,500 price point and drafted a note to clients emphasising his disappointment. After using it, he conceded his perspective had “totally” changed. “I think it’s priced right,” he said.Gene Munster will pay $3500 to experience children's birthday parties in 3d, alone“The thing that immediately grabbed me was the fact that anyone who used an Apple product will have instant familiarity with the device,” said Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight.Analysts discover Apple has brand language, film at 11Impressive as it is, though, it is difficult to make the case that any consumer “needs” this device. It was entertaining to watch movie clips, view photos and take a call, and I was surprised by the clarity and comfort of simply reading a PDF document.Holy shit for $3500 I can read textJeronimo added that after 20 minutes, he was ready to take it off. Despite Apple’s “EyeSight” tech — which shows the wearer’s eyes to others in real life so the device does not look antisocial — he was not sure he would wear it in a social setting.During my demo, I conversed with two Apple employees in the same room, and a third appeared in a moveable window through a FaceTime call. She was wearing the Vision Pro, but Apple had rendered it invisible so I could see her entire face. Apple calls this a “persona”, which sounds cartoonish, but even when I asked her to dart her eyes back and forth or made her laugh, her reactions were lifelike.To my embarrassment, I even yelped when a dinosaur emerged from the wall in the demo room, recognised my presence and tried to bite my hand. I was told this had happened all day long.Use case: now velociraptors can eat your stand up meeting.Apple also developed proprietary cameras to take 3D videos of sports games and events such as a studio concert, enabling the wearer to feel like the action was directly in front of them. It was impressive enough to wonder if Ticketmaster was about to get disrupted.Reader, it was not.Disappointment that the headset would not go on sale until “early next year” was palpable. Akash Nigam, CEO of Genies, an avatar tools company, said he was surprised that Apple made little to no attempt to gear the device towards Gen Z consumers. There was nothing about social media or dating apps, for example.Those consumers that can't afford rent or a car payment? Those consumers? Also, what the fuck is an "avatar tools company"?oh.But millions of developers now have months to build content. And once they do, Vision Pro’s potential could emerge in ways not even Apple understands.Hey let's check in on the content side, courtesy the Financial Times:To test opinion we visited Horizon Worlds on Tuesday, when the busiest room was The Soapstone Comedy Club(opens a new window) with a population of 24. https://hubski.com/pub/468079https://hubski.com/pub/468079"The hardest part of the entire project was the mental aspect of it all. Not only does one have to get comfortable being in a very loud, claustrophobic space suit, but you also have to be able to control your emotions and compartmentalize things, as crying at altitude is not possible. Irritating your eyes can be a big issue if you can't touch them due to the spacesuit helmet. Beyond that, we had to take measures to keep my heart rate and respiration (breathing) reduced as any excess excitement or fatigue would result in icing over the cockpit and I would not be able to take pictures."https://hubski.com/pub/468939https://hubski.com/pub/468939https://hubski.com/pub/466329https://hubski.com/pub/466329https://hubski.com/pub/470098https://hubski.com/pub/470098https://hubski.com/pub/467778https://hubski.com/pub/467778https://hubski.com/pub/467515https://hubski.com/pub/467515https://hubski.com/pub/467227https://hubski.com/pub/467227This is a Trojan Horse for a bunch of graphs. Here's the monster:...yeah. $1.1 trillion in deferred student loans are about to come due again because the Republicans want you to pay back that English degree. Who is "you?"Well, "you" is everyone. One in three millennials, notably. Fortunately everyone's personal finances are in great shape after the pandemic, right?Right.Errbody's sure that their employer can pick up the slack thoIt's all good tho that's just anecdata how about...oh. Well I'm sure it's just a temporary...Well I guess expenses will go down at least?...boy not looking great. Well, at least we've got really great insight into the economy thanks to all the high-quality responses the Bureau of Labor Statistics gets...https://hubski.com/pub/468898https://hubski.com/pub/468898https://hubski.com/pub/467730https://hubski.com/pub/467730https://hubski.com/pub/470093https://hubski.com/pub/470093Because Taittenger figures they can make Champagne more easily in Kent than they can in Champagnehttps://hubski.com/pub/470092https://hubski.com/pub/470092https://hubski.com/pub/468887https://hubski.com/pub/468887Butcher Brown - Espionagehttps://hubski.com/pub/467691https://hubski.com/pub/467691https://hubski.com/pub/466502https://hubski.com/pub/466502I'm wishing on a monkey's paw. A magic monkey's paw usually grants wishes in a malicious way.https://hubski.com/pub/467449https://hubski.com/pub/467449https://hubski.com/pub/468020https://hubski.com/pub/468020A team of scientists has figured out how to convert planet-warming carbon dioxide into a harmless powdery fuel that could be converted into clean electricityArticle for nerds.Frankly? It's a good study with a fairly sober assessment of difficulties, if imho overeager in extrapolation of future prospect. You can only do so much for buffering electrolytic medium without impacting purity (and therefore efficiency), and -- at those scales -- their use of sodium and potassium as reagents will only get costlier. They also incorporate tin nanoparticle as a catalyst, and even though it's by definition recoverable, that thing goes for $2k a kilo for shitty 100nm stuff and needs to be cleaned between batches. I could go on.But that's the game: fluff it up for funding, hope it's cost-effective enough for someone to pick up. My real beef is that it's from MIT, a place that has a world-shattering breakthrough every other week for technologies that are hailed as success worth following up on a year later if they almost make it past the proof of concept stage. Seriously, if 10% of those announcements paid off, I'd be exploring Oort cloud in my fusion-powered spaceship made from superconducting paper-mache and plastic waste. And it's hard to not be jaded about it.I want to be wrong so fucking much, though.https://hubski.com/pub/467671https://hubski.com/pub/467671"The most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence. Every person has to face their own complicities, and we start this by listening to whoever is suffering. Even if it is by our own hand. It is this transcendence that can lead us all to a better place."https://hubski.com/pub/467984https://hubski.com/pub/467984https://hubski.com/pub/467651https://hubski.com/pub/467651https://hubski.com/pub/466724https://hubski.com/pub/466724https://hubski.com/pub/467387https://hubski.com/pub/467387https://hubski.com/pub/467624https://hubski.com/pub/467624https://hubski.com/pub/466999https://hubski.com/pub/466999https://hubski.com/pub/466996https://hubski.com/pub/466996https://hubski.com/pub/466245https://hubski.com/pub/466245Ike and Tina were one of the great singer/producer collaborations.Their influence in Soul and Rock are incalculable, which is somewhat bizarre in that they were a review band act that mostly did other peoples songs.Tina's post Ike work was solid and made a shit ton of money but never had the cultural impact of her early work.As a person after Ike, Tina represented the ability of a human to be something more (fantastically more) than their trauma and was an inspiration to many.Ike after Tina was a hollowed out shell of a man who's shattered reputation meant that his artistry was never again appreciated by polite society.If I'm lit enough at karaoke I'll knock out a workman like version of Private Dancer.I've probably got about a dozen Ike and Tina Vinyl's, they are all good and I've never tired of them, she was one of the greats.https://hubski.com/pub/468285https://hubski.com/pub/468285Probably should start using AI.https://hubski.com/pub/468272https://hubski.com/pub/468272It still baffles me that most people praise problem-solvers and analysts, but when told they can do the same with little effort they go all wHeN wIlL i UsE iT iN lIfE.I also feel old explaining to my decade older students that math is more versatile and transferable than PowerPoint.https://hubski.com/pub/470078https://hubski.com/pub/470078https://hubski.com/pub/466518https://hubski.com/pub/466518A good overview of the housing crisis in Canada, which has been a problem for decades now, only got worse during COVID, and shows no signs of stopping.https://hubski.com/pub/467241https://hubski.com/pub/467241https://hubski.com/pub/468200https://hubski.com/pub/468200https://hubski.com/pub/467533https://hubski.com/pub/467533https://hubski.com/pub/466872https://hubski.com/pub/466872https://hubski.com/pub/467518https://hubski.com/pub/467518https://hubski.com/pub/467490https://hubski.com/pub/467490https://hubski.com/pub/467772https://hubski.com/pub/467772In the writing group, one writer brings the coffee, one writer brings the muffins, and one writer brings the prompts. Please respond to the prompt if you like. And the prompt was, "The Trauma of Everyday Life"The Trauma of Everyday LifeChange the "T" to a "D" and get "U" out of it and it becomes "The Drama of Everyday Life"T to D -- the voiceless and voiced alveolar plosives of the International Phonetic AlphabetTrauma - DramaTrauma is outside of storyTrauma is the unvoiced, unspoken buried deep eventTrauma, defining our choices without us knowing until we make it part of our story.The "U" embedded in trauma, the trauma embedded in you.Drama - the voiced plosive.Drama is lived, discussed (and discussed, and discussed, and discussed)But drama at least is out in the open plot driven or character drivenDrama has completion (the curtain falls) and leaves us moved, changed."Say what you feel," says Edgar at the end of King Lear"Not what you think you should say."The Trauma of Everyday Life/The Drama of Everyday Life . . .https://hubski.com/pub/467148https://hubski.com/pub/467148https://hubski.com/pub/467753https://hubski.com/pub/467753lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/468148https://hubski.com/pub/468148https://hubski.com/pub/468815https://hubski.com/pub/468815https://hubski.com/pub/468088https://hubski.com/pub/468088I will admit I haven't read all of their posts, but what Haidt & co highlight is basically the conclusion that I've come around to: that yes, smartphones and social media are the problem. Depression, anxiety, attention span... There was a Dutch comedian the other day who made a good point: when someone beats their child in public people will step in and say something about it. But when in a restaurant little Timmy is put in front of an iPad to shut up for three hours and the teenagers can just TikTok the entire evening, nobody bats an eye.https://hubski.com/pub/468790https://hubski.com/pub/468790https://hubski.com/pub/466643https://hubski.com/pub/466643https://hubski.com/pub/468770https://hubski.com/pub/468770Night Beats- Bluehttps://hubski.com/pub/467698https://hubski.com/pub/467698The RTO push is eyewash for investors to prove that drops in revenue and profitability aren't a result of poor managerial decisions but the result of lazy workers sitting at home in their pajamas. In some ways, it's a genius move for executives — a way to establish control over workers during an unprecedented societal awareness of labor rights (thanks to the striking workers of the Writers Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA, and the United Auto Workers) while also shifting the blame and consequences of poor stock performance onto those least responsible.https://hubski.com/pub/466558https://hubski.com/pub/466558https://hubski.com/pub/468062https://hubski.com/pub/468062I've Been Riding With the Ghost - Songs: OhiaNoisecream - Entropyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465248https://hubski.com/pub/465248“I’d like the last Guinea worm to die before I do,” the 39th president told reporters at the Carter Center. “We know where all of them are, so obviously that would be my top priority.”The 98-year-old, now in hospice at home in Plains, Ga., is on the cusp of reaching his goal: The number of reported human cases dwindled in 2022 to 13 — an all-time low.https://hubski.com/pub/465234https://hubski.com/pub/465234I have no issues with cancel culture. It exists for ass-clowns like Scott Adams that wantonly work to marginalize minorities and promote ignorance. Glad to see karma bite him back.https://hubski.com/pub/468741https://hubski.com/pub/468741https://hubski.com/pub/465558https://hubski.com/pub/465558https://hubski.com/pub/468029https://hubski.com/pub/468029What's it like to apologize in your state or country?My poem:How to Say Sorry in CanadaPart OneSmall things are always your fault even if they aren'tSo, in Canada,apologize to the people that brush past you aggressivelyapologize to the person who knocked the bag out of your handapologize to the cashier for her mistake-----Part TwoIn Canada things have feelingsApologize to the soap for dropping it in the shower.Apologize to the rug for tripping on itApologize to your computer for making a mistakeApologize to the stop sign for not stopping.---Part ThreeIn Canada, never apologize for big things, the things that really are your fault.But you can apologize for historic injustices and abusesIt's always time for truth and reconciliation as long as the abuse happened 100 years ago.-------- Meanwhile,Here's a blog and hubski conversation about apologies: https://hubski.com/pub/468027https://hubski.com/pub/468027Jon Wayne - Seasons GreetingsMerry Christmas, Hubski folk!https://hubski.com/pub/468734https://hubski.com/pub/468734Knocked Loose - Blinding Faithhttps://hubski.com/pub/468704https://hubski.com/pub/468704https://hubski.com/pub/468703https://hubski.com/pub/468703https://hubski.com/pub/468685https://hubski.com/pub/468685https://hubski.com/pub/468686https://hubski.com/pub/468686https://hubski.com/pub/467609https://hubski.com/pub/467609https://hubski.com/pub/466307https://hubski.com/pub/466307All the ingredients were in place for a wipeout. Which is what Florida Democrats got: No statewide elected officials Only 8 of 28 members of Congress 12 seats out of 40 in the state Senate 35 seats out of 120 in the Florida House Think about this: Today, Democrats in Montana have a larger share of seats in their legislative chambers than Democrats in Florida do.https://hubski.com/pub/469019https://hubski.com/pub/469019I like this one. lil steve Good hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/469013https://hubski.com/pub/469013This song is bad. But it was nice to pick up a guitar/bass. I gave my drum set away because I had two of them. I kept the one that is my son's. It's newer and I assumed I would like it just as much. I don't. Miss mine. So, no drums on this. I think that would have helped a lot. But no matter, it's a weak song. lil steve played hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467578https://hubski.com/pub/467578https://hubski.com/pub/467209https://hubski.com/pub/467209Smucker publishes its core-weeks schedule a year in advance to allow staff and teams to plan. Most take place every other week except for July and December, when Smucker holds only one core week a month to allow for summer vacations and winter holidays. Leaders reserve meetings requiring deep focus for core weeks—say, an Uncrustables strategy session, a training for a customer-service team or a multiday business planning conference. I mean... we're probably 25-40% remote and we do health care. Do we need to examine you? Then you need to come into the office. Do you need to examine someone? Then you need to come into the office. Is this a talkin' appointment? Frickin' talk from the beach we don't give a fuck, it bills the same.Our receptionist told us recently (before we gave her a raise, incidentally) that this is the best, least-stressful job she's ever had, in no small part because if she runs out of shit to do she reads a book. We've also set it up so that if she can't come in for weather or whatever her job can be done by anyone with a login from anywhere in the world, which has come in super-handy. There's shit you need to be there for? And I absolutely agree that you're going to make much better bonds and collaborate much better from just eating in the same room from time to time? But you sure don't need to do it every day.https://hubski.com/pub/466275https://hubski.com/pub/466275Really just be nice. I got beef about twelve step. I stopped voicing it. But like love people you love. If the steps work ok, I’m very done being upset with those guys but if it was easy everyone would do it. Don’t get mad. Enabling isn’t a thing. Be supportive if someone trieshttps://hubski.com/pub/469002https://hubski.com/pub/469002A friend released this recently... I found it beautiful.https://hubski.com/pub/465363https://hubski.com/pub/465363https://hubski.com/pub/467168https://hubski.com/pub/467168https://hubski.com/pub/466218https://hubski.com/pub/466218Thursday, May 25th, 2023 at 6 PM EST, 3 PM PSTIt's been almost a year since the last one, and c_hawk needs a break too. Same jitsi room, will post extra shout-outs and a link in the chat before we start.Shout-outs:_refugee_, c_hawkthorne, am_Unition, lil, steve, elizabeth, kantos, nowaypabloEDIT: I just realized this is pretty short notice, so if you'd prefer it moved, I'm flexible Mon-Fri.https://hubski.com/pub/467939https://hubski.com/pub/467939https://hubski.com/pub/468576https://hubski.com/pub/468576https://hubski.com/pub/465648https://hubski.com/pub/465648 “It was never about money,” said Vanessa Shakib, an attorney for Advancing Law for Animals who represents Long. “County officials were clear that they wanted to teach this little girl a lesson.”I have no wordshttps://hubski.com/pub/467885https://hubski.com/pub/467885https://hubski.com/pub/467884https://hubski.com/pub/467884Ebi Soda - Something to Do in the Futurehttps://hubski.com/pub/467463https://hubski.com/pub/467463https://hubski.com/pub/466551https://hubski.com/pub/466551Human depletion of underground reservoirs has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than 4 centimetres per year.https://hubski.com/pub/468420https://hubski.com/pub/468420Jaw-dropping to be honest. Be sure to click through the example slideshows. Useful...? we'll see.https://hubski.com/pub/468411https://hubski.com/pub/468411I thought this was some dumb space denial ploy because if you set off a nuke in orbit what you get are radiation bands that persist for months or years cooking every satellite that crosses them. A lot of the "ZOMFG electromagnetic pulse" bullshit favored by the preppers comes from a misinterpretation of the results of pumping the Van Allen belts with ionizing radiation.My thinking was that Russians use Molniya orbits far more than any other space-faring nation (because they're cheap). This gives them the advantage of spending only 20% or so of their time in the orbits that they would theoretically trash for everyone else, giving them more survivability in the event of an ionized theater. But a few folx I trust rolled their eyes and pointed out that Putin clearly has some crazy-eyed version of Edward Teller whispering in his ear and that the most likely thing is nuclear-pumped-X-ray-laser-bullshit.Super-Excalibur would be so powerful it would be able to burn through the atmosphere, thereby countering the concerns about fast-firing missiles. The extra power also meant it could be divided up into more beams, making a single weapon able to be directed into as many as a hundred thousand beams. Instead of dozens of Excalibur weapons in pop-up launchers, Teller suggested that a single weapon in geostationary orbit "the size of an executive desk which applied this technology could potentially shoot down the entire Soviet land-based missile force if it were to be launched into the module's field of view."Sho' nuff:The Russian government has experimented with the use of nuclear explosions or directed energy to disable satellites, according to one U.S. official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. Experts have raised concerns that a nation could detonate a nuclear weapon in space to interfere with satellites through the emission of radiation.So here's your thought experiment: - Be Russian - Be a research scientist - Be given the task of cobbling together a proof-of-concept for Dear Leader - Be knowing your entire arsenal hasn't been tested since 1990 - Be knowing it's been maintained by thieves and conscripts ever since - Be knowing your country tried to loft a 1MW CO2 laser 40 goddamn years ago so really, there's nothing pragmatic to be discussed here - Be also knowing that 1MW laser suffered a "math oopsie" not unlike certain other math oopsiesDo YOU want to speedrun the Strategic Defense Initiative on 2024 Russian budgets?https://hubski.com/pub/466531https://hubski.com/pub/466531I dated a trans girl once or twice and got reamed for dating a guy. It hurt me a lot and I just don’t talk about it Not to focus on me. it ain’t my job to educate everyone. Vague ass post but I’m madhttps://hubski.com/pub/465995https://hubski.com/pub/465995https://hubski.com/pub/467447https://hubski.com/pub/467447Thursday, 5th October 2023 at 6 PM EST, 3 PM PST. However, since I'm going to be at home regardless, I'll soft-start at 20:00 GMT. If folks can/want to show up, that's awesome. If not, then I'll just be going over notes in headphones :P.Shout-outs:_refugee_, c_hawkthorne, am_Unition, lil, steve, elizabeth, kantos, nowaypablohttps://hubski.com/pub/465503https://hubski.com/pub/465503So... I've been negotiating replacing our jumbotron. It's busted, and our landlord is an ass. We want to write a check, he wants to finance it because he's a bad manager and is running out of money - I could go on about this but I won't. Right now, prime rate is 7.75%. Let's say you want to buy a $60k jumbotron and pay for it over 8 years. It's a secured loan, for now you can get 30 basis points over prime so 8.05%. That works out to about $850 a month for the next two presidential administrations, a total cost of $82k, and finance charges of $22k. You're paying $230/mo just for the privilege of paying $620/mo over eight years. I think I can speak for the majority of small business owners when I say that opportunity is unattractive.Let's zoom out a bit. Back in December when the landlord was doing things like going "why should I pay to have the parking lot plowed when you're my only tenant going to work on Thursdays" he quipped "if you think you're so good at managing the building, why don't you buy it off me." I called his bluff (it was a bluff) but not before he got really uncomfortable and demanded to see a term sheet illustrating we could afford it (I showed him information assuring him I could write him a fucking check, which definitely made his balls retract). Nonetheless, I ran real numbers. We qualify for an SBA(7a) if we occupy 51% of the building within 2 years of purchase. That's nice, it takes us out of the realm of batshit commercial loans, where the term is 7 or 10 years but the loan is due after 5. You pay 3, 4, or 5 percentage points over prime. No instead, you're in the realm of "this looks kind of like a normie mortgage" where you space it out over 30 years and don't have to refinance every 5 years. So, real numbers. Let's say the building is $3m. Let's say we're at prime plus 2.75% 'cuz that's where SBA(7a)s are. Let's say we're at 10% down, because we are. Every time the Fed raises interest rates 25 basis points, it costs me about $500 a month.The building, at the same price in January 2022, costs me nine thousand dollars less per month. And this is just some bullshit Grade C medical-dental thing in the suburbs, not some massive office tower or some shit. Again, I think I can speak for the majority of small business owners here.Now - we got our tenant improvement from a "small regional bank." They sucked during COVID so we moved to another "small regional bank." We're never ever ever gonna see terms like we did in 2016 ever again, so that's one thing. But here's another.And here's another.So. Roughly a third of all work days are not in the office, office vacancy rates are the highest they've been since 2008 and mortgaging office space is anywhere from a third again and half again as expensive as it was in 2021. What's that giant sucking sound? I think it's wind whistling in the gap between the blue and red sawteeth:It's the big blue bars on both sides of the line:It's the twin caverns between black and beige:It's the fact that only the tallest bar is "systemically important":_______________________________________Anyway. It's pretty clear that Jerome Powell and crew think that interest rates matter to employment.It's also pretty clear that Jerome Powell and crew didn't really think about the fact that they were effectively beaching 60% of the real estate market, 80% of which belongs to regional banks.Anyway. This is why I look at 400 graphs a day. Sometimes stuff just jumps out at you. There was a whole lot of mystery as to how 2008 happened. 2023? That shit's already solved, and it's not DEI officers and loans to Antifa.https://hubski.com/pub/466991https://hubski.com/pub/466991https://hubski.com/pub/468976https://hubski.com/pub/468976Fabiano Do Nascimento - Trem-balahttps://hubski.com/pub/467822https://hubski.com/pub/467822Related:I must at this point remind you that this is a man who built a web browser, not goddamn Beowulf.https://hubski.com/pub/465892https://hubski.com/pub/465892https://hubski.com/pub/467809https://hubski.com/pub/467809The prompt was, How Your Mind Has ChangedIn Grade 8, Social Studies, we had a unit on Native people of CanadaThere were Plains Indians with their buffaloThere were Haida with their totem polesThere were Eskimos with their igloos It was taught entirely in the past tense As if they were all gone now.No field trips to former residential schoolsNo trip a few miles down the highway to Osweken.When we realize that one bit of education is biassed, partial politically and culturally determined, what can we trust?Even math has uncertaintySoon all certainty falls away.Exodus, sung by . . . Andy Williams"This land is mine/God gave this land to me"#1 hit in 1961certainly convinced a lot of people that an ancient monotheistic tribethat survived to the 2Oth century had a god-given right to a piece of land - No, that doesn't hold up.Even borders and boundaries aremade up by power or peace-seeking groups.Hell, the "right" to national self-determination is a concept developed in the 19th centuryBefore language and culture- based countries, people lived in multi-cultural empires, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and on and on . . .What are we certain of?The only truth we can point to is the every-changing truth of our own experience --- and even that -Everyone wants to believe there's an authority Every authority can be deconstructed.Certainty is not an indication of truth.https://hubski.com/pub/467802https://hubski.com/pub/467802And the relevant article about blocking this piece on the Harvard law bloghttps://theintercept.com/2023/11/21/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel/https://hubski.com/pub/467412https://hubski.com/pub/467412https://hubski.com/pub/466355https://hubski.com/pub/466355So check it. I've been going through the motions of buying a commercial building, off and on, since 2017 or so. It's a bugshit process. Make no mistake, it's stupid, it's everything that's wrong with capitalism, and all if it is fucking horrible. To wit: - You're going to pay prime plus two, prime plus three. If prime is 2.27%, your commercial loan is going to be 5.27%. - Your term and amortization aren't the same. You buy a house? You amortize the loan over 30 years and pay it off over 30 years. You buy a dentist's office? you amortize the loan over 30 years and pay it off over 5. Maybe 8. Rarely 10. - Which means obviously you will never pay it off. Which is okay because what you're going to do is sell it and buy another. Because of the carried interest rule you don't pay taxes that way. Capitalism!Prime ain't 2.27 anymore, tho. It's 8.25, mutherfucker.Let's play a game. You bought a million dollar dentist's office in August 2015 when prime was 3.5. You put down $300k and have been paying $4k a month. You've paid around $300k. You owe $600k. The building is maybe worth $1.4, $1.5 and you've got $400k in equity in the place. And no one is buying.So okay. Let's re-up. You owe $600k. Nothing changes, except now you're paying $5700 a month for the same damn building. Your mortgage fees just went up 30%. How much of a cushion do you have, by the way?Fitch Ratings recently estimated that 35% of pooled securitized commercial mortgages coming due between April and December 2023 won’t be able to refinance based on current interest rates and the properties’ incomes and values. While many malls and hotels face high default risks, the situation is particularly dire for office owners. Xiaojing Li, managing director at data company CoStar’s risk analytics team, estimates that as much as 83% of outstanding securitized office loans won’t be able to refinance if interest rates stay at current levels.Gonna show you a picture. Comes from here.$22.9 trillion minus $20.7 trillion is $2.2 trillion.Nearly $1.5 trillion in commercial mortgages are coming due over the next three years, according to data provider Trepp.https://hubski.com/pub/466335https://hubski.com/pub/466335https://hubski.com/pub/468310https://hubski.com/pub/468310https://hubski.com/pub/466878https://hubski.com/pub/466878https://hubski.com/pub/467381https://hubski.com/pub/467381Because we showed them their suffering was optional, not mandatory, and then made them suffer anywayhttps://hubski.com/pub/465757https://hubski.com/pub/465757https://hubski.com/pub/468961https://hubski.com/pub/468961https://hubski.com/pub/467724https://hubski.com/pub/467724https://hubski.com/pub/465139https://hubski.com/pub/465139But it was not because I thought her book was interesting that I had reached out to Liming. It was because I passionately believed that her book was right. “I’ve become an accidental witness to a growing crisis,” she writes in Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. “People struggling to hang out, or else voicing concern and anxiety about how to hang out.” I, too, see a crisis brewing, among not only people my age but among the peers of my teenage children and the college students I teach. Pushed further into isolation by the pandemic, we’re all losing the ability to engage in what I view as the pinnacle of human interaction: sitting around with friends and talking shit. I agree with Liming that no one is down to hang out anymore, and agree with her that it’s a “quiet catastrophe.”https://hubski.com/pub/467324https://hubski.com/pub/467324https://hubski.com/pub/466776https://hubski.com/pub/466776https://hubski.com/pub/466754https://hubski.com/pub/466754 Musk had said that by 2020 the Buffalo plant each week would churn out enough solar-panel shingles to cover 1,000 roofs.The Tesla solar-energy unit behind the plan, however, is averaging just 21 installations a weekGOAT of bilking the government.https://hubski.com/pub/468214https://hubski.com/pub/468214Butcher Brown - EspionageFabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel - PoeiraConchúr White - Righteoushttps://hubski.com/pub/467669https://hubski.com/pub/467669So there is a three-way distinction: Self-driving Driver-assist Remotely-assisted driving It appears that most or all the work at present is much closer to the latter two, and that all of the published numbers are really about the latter two—with no disclosure about how much remote centers are contributing to whatever results we see for efforts at putative self-driving.Could Cruise be the Theranos of AI?https://hubski.com/pub/469952https://hubski.com/pub/469952https://hubski.com/pub/467662https://hubski.com/pub/467662https://hubski.com/pub/468956https://hubski.com/pub/468956https://hubski.com/pub/466687https://hubski.com/pub/466687They're going with "nascent democrat" over "reliable dictator." Jamal Khashoggi said some things in the WaPo on September 11. On September 28 he wandered into the Saudi embassy in Ankara and was told "hey come back October 2." He went in and never came out. Guaranteed: the stuff Khashoggi said in the Post was stuff the CIA wanted him to say. Especially considering his handler was a lobbyist for Qatar.I've been of the opinion that the CIA has two options for a post-Putin Russia. Their first option is backing Lukashenko, 'cuz he's wanted it for 30 years, he's smart, he's reliable and dictators provide a single point of control. CIA lurvs them some single-point dictators. But Lukashenko's control is shaky and he is, uhh, a murderous despot. CIA lurvs them some regime change, too.This, to me, looks like the start of a groundwork to Karzai Tikhanovskaya into office. It tells me that CIA and State are expecting the collapse of Russia to be extremely.fucking.messy.https://hubski.com/pub/466677https://hubski.com/pub/466677https://hubski.com/pub/466035https://hubski.com/pub/466035Mega lol. But still, I read it, so I guess they win.https://hubski.com/pub/467644https://hubski.com/pub/467644https://hubski.com/pub/467636https://hubski.com/pub/467636https://hubski.com/pub/467634https://hubski.com/pub/467634This thread is almost as old as my daughter:https://hubski.com/pub/467633https://hubski.com/pub/467633Defense lawyer Mark Cohen did his best. Unfortunately for him, the cross-examination was conducted by Sassoon, who looks like someone who uses “summer” as a verb, and often appears deceptively timid, with her hands held close to her chest. In her cross, she simply unhinged her jaw and ate Bankman-Fried.https://hubski.com/pub/465426https://hubski.com/pub/465426https://hubski.com/pub/467124https://hubski.com/pub/467124https://hubski.com/pub/468109https://hubski.com/pub/468109"I think the roast beef is, like, my most prized recipe I've learned because the first time I tried doing it, I literally cried because it was so stressful. But then, you know, I got it afterwards."https://hubski.com/pub/467100https://hubski.com/pub/467100Citizen - Dive into My Sunhttps://hubski.com/pub/467095https://hubski.com/pub/467095https://hubski.com/pub/468933https://hubski.com/pub/468933lil steve 46 is a confusing age. Thank god for hockey.https://hubski.com/pub/465850https://hubski.com/pub/465850Original publication: Ptolemy’s treatise on the meteoroscope recovered.Tangentially related: https://hubski.com/pub/469915https://hubski.com/pub/469915https://hubski.com/pub/467552https://hubski.com/pub/467552https://hubski.com/pub/466362https://hubski.com/pub/466362https://hubski.com/pub/467541https://hubski.com/pub/467541Going Infinite is a shit book. It makes me mad. It makes me hate Michael Lewis. I have been a fan of Michael Lewis while also beefing with Michael Lewis because he's always entertaining and also always wrong. Never before has he been this wrong while also being this boring.And I mean, it's teeth-grindingly one-sided. Lewis mentions that he got to know Sam Bankman Fried because one of his "good friends" was thinking of investing "hundreds of millions of dollars" and wanted Lewis to "check him out." Lewis took him for a walk around Berkeley, gave his buddy the go-ahead, and promptly lost his "good friend" $350m but Lewis never mentions him again.That's the fourth instance of Sam losing someone $350m; Lewis describes a Jane Street scheme cooked up by Sam to profit off the election that loses Jane Street $350m. He describes an arbitrage bot cooked up at Sam's command that manages to lose $350m in the triangle trade between Ripple, Bitcoin and Korean won. Then of course there's the $350m that FTX traders lost to phishing and having their (plain text) security keys leaked.It's frankly amazing that Michael Lewis would release a book portraying SBF's innocence nine months after the public has learned FTX had a chat group titled 'Wirefraud.' But he did. And he's sticking to his guns. And he's sullying the reputations of anyone calling him on it.My sincere hope is that this whole debacle severely damages the reputations of the tech hagiographers like Lewis and Isaacson who steadfastly insist that the "heap money on privileged soiopaths" business model is healthy and sane. Sam Bankman Fried's crimes were the direct cause of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (3600 employees) and Silvergate Bank (300 employees) and the loss of over four billion dollars by thousands of individual investors. This shit is a cancer and Lewis is malignant.https://hubski.com/pub/465180https://hubski.com/pub/465180https://hubski.com/pub/465179https://hubski.com/pub/465179These 80,000 explain how it works far beyond 'it predicts the next word'. I'm halfway through but I found it enlightening so far.If you want to mess with the parameters yourself, such as the temperature, I now use the OpenAI Playground quite often.https://hubski.com/pub/466286https://hubski.com/pub/466286http://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org/downloads/Rural_Hospitals_at_Risk_of_Closing.pdfhttps://hubski.com/pub/465684https://hubski.com/pub/465684https://hubski.com/pub/467512https://hubski.com/pub/467512https://hubski.com/pub/465660https://hubski.com/pub/465660https://hubski.com/pub/467495https://hubski.com/pub/467495https://hubski.com/pub/466250https://hubski.com/pub/466250https://hubski.com/pub/466229https://hubski.com/pub/466229Here's the question, who's going to sue Josh for claiming "first American watch" first, Cameron Weiss who has been doing it since 2013, Roland Murphy who has been doing it since 1990 or Keaton Myrick, who's been doing it since 2005? my money's on Roland, seeing as how he succeeded in clobbering the shit out of Shinola back in 2015.https://hubski.com/pub/466224https://hubski.com/pub/466224Found on Hacker News. It struck a chord.https://hubski.com/pub/465594https://hubski.com/pub/465594https://hubski.com/pub/468871https://hubski.com/pub/468871https://hubski.com/pub/466857https://hubski.com/pub/466857"really dumb"I think it is awesome that someone decided to combine high pressure, high vacuum, transsonic speeds and concrete in one place over and over again.I think it's even more awesome that their proof of concept involves PVC pipe.I am absolutely delighted that they're listing their speeds in terms of mach numbers when they've got high pressure on one side and vacuum on the other.And in all honesty what Iove about this is it cracked open the SpinLaunch scam.______________________So look. According to that deeply stupid techcrunch article, these dipshits closed a $1.5m "pre-seed round" last april. Who are their funders? Sam Altman, Tim Draper and whoever the fuck SpaceFund is laundering money for. Now - is $1.5m going to eight dipshits with a potato gun? Or is it going to these guys?'cuz here's the thing: Tim Draper piled a bunch of money into obvious shit like Skype, Ring, Robinhood and Twitch. He also piled a bunch of money into Theranos. He also... I mean, you have to watch at least five minutes of this it's like an Andy Kaufman bitAnd it occurred to me that at a certain level, startups that will never ever ever fucking make back their money are really goddamn handy for the modern Venture Capital economy.https://hubski.com/pub/465487https://hubski.com/pub/465487https://hubski.com/pub/466802https://hubski.com/pub/466802I think there’s no other author that come close when I think about what I got out of the books. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re reading fiction, history, or political philosophy. Such a brilliant dude. The best thing you can say in an obituary is that the person made the world a better place.https://hubski.com/pub/466799https://hubski.com/pub/466799https://hubski.com/pub/466057https://hubski.com/pub/466057https://hubski.com/pub/466051https://hubski.com/pub/466051Steely Dan - Only a Fool Would Say ThatLaura Allen - As I Amhttps://hubski.com/pub/468852https://hubski.com/pub/468852https://hubski.com/pub/467946https://hubski.com/pub/467946I am posting this here as it gained some attention. The write was supposed to get the Hanna Arendt price, but this article lead to the retraction of the price. Mainly for comparing Gaza to a Ghetto.https://hubski.com/pub/469845https://hubski.com/pub/469845Yup. Yes it does.Sounds like the "solutions" section is "ok so here are all of the things that don't work for fixing this problem: Anything, really".https://hubski.com/pub/469843https://hubski.com/pub/469843put a fork in it we're donehttps://hubski.com/pub/465331https://hubski.com/pub/465331https://hubski.com/pub/467936https://hubski.com/pub/467936https://hubski.com/pub/465310https://hubski.com/pub/465310You really gotta listen for the breakdown on this to truly grok what's going on. I was there! January 6th! I didn't go inside though. no, not me! Nope! I did nothing illegal. nope nope. But boy what a tragedy for our heroes. Love our heroes! But I ain't about to cop to anything illegal...Watch this sleight of hand:If there is heroism to be found in the crowds of rioters who broke into the capitol and ransacked Pelosi’s office and searched the chambers of Congress for proof of malfeasance, it is surely this: People like Straka believed they were saving democracy from tyranny. They did not make this story up. This story was told to them, by people they trusted, for months. CHOSE to believe. Chose. Made the choice to listen to the seditionists. Selected the craziest of voices to pay attention to, despite all evidence to the contrary.Laura Jedeed has, in many ways, Hirsched it - interesting things to say, but has gotten way too close to her subjects. Either that or she legitimately doesn't have any experience with the John Birch Society or the LaRouche Democrats. There's a real desire to find the empathetic qualities in her subjects, and then pretend that our ability to empathize with them somehow exonerates them. Cult of martyrs it may be but that video has 2400 views.https://hubski.com/pub/466703https://hubski.com/pub/466703The real title is "Biologist Blowing Our Minds," and screw that. Just read the thing.If it’s sensitive to vibrations, does it react to music?We grew the Physarum on a plate, and the plate was sitting on a speaker, and my student was driving the speaker with her iPhone. And we could see that for certain types of music, it would grow quite differently than for others. Some of them, it grew very nicely. Some of them, it just didn’t grow at all. It just really hated it; it just hunkered down.https://hubski.com/pub/465961https://hubski.com/pub/465961Allow me to recommend a book.Spin Dictators holds as its central premise that the face of dictatorship has changed as authoritarian regimes discover that allowing a token opposition movement, small-press dissident media and an outward appearance of press and personal freedom allow savvy dictators to maintain effective control over economies and governments without any real opposition. They track the transition from authoritarianism-through-violence to authoritarianism-through-subversion and point out that old-school repressive regimes (Iran, Myanmar, etc) experience greater upheaval, lower productivity and greater instability than new-school repressive regimes (Singapore, Venezuela, Hungary and, yes, Russia). Sam Greene's theory here - Even though Russia’s opposition and human rights movements pose no proximate political threat, Putin has somehow maneuvered himself into a position in which allowing them to exist even on paper is an intolerable risk, and the costs of tolerance appear in all cases to outweigh the costs of coercion.is seen as an end-stage condition by Guriev and Treisman. If your repressive regime has functioned thus far through subversion, your switch to overt repression generally signals impending regime change. By functionally eliminating the safety valve that keeps the elite and intelligentsia in check, the apathetic public loses the illusion that they are governed by choice. The regime must either double down or collapse. Or both. Both is very much an option.https://hubski.com/pub/466685https://hubski.com/pub/466685AI is such a scamhttps://hubski.com/pub/465221https://hubski.com/pub/465221https://hubski.com/pub/466632https://hubski.com/pub/466632Note that the most you can spend on a clock is still a decimal point less than you can spend on a watch. My favorite - because it's like 9 feet tall and has a 3-second pendulum - is "only" like $200k.Every now and then I go "It'd be fun to build an Uhrenbausatz M3" and then I go "bitch you've spent like $20k on a CNC machine so you never have to rely on anyone else's clocks ever again. Also you own like five books on making clocks." So yeah I guess my easy button is "spend entirely too much money on a clock kit" because 99.9% of the mechanical clocks out there have a Hermle movement and Hermle is garbage.I own like $5k worth of gear hobs I should probably freeball like a desktop Riefler escapement or some shithttps://hubski.com/pub/466627https://hubski.com/pub/466627https://hubski.com/pub/465190https://hubski.com/pub/465190https://hubski.com/pub/465858https://hubski.com/pub/465858I honestly have no idea how you even spend $800 million on observational studies, let alone one with no public data. That’s some serious grift even in the age of serious grifts.https://hubski.com/pub/465811https://hubski.com/pub/465811https://hubski.com/pub/468829https://hubski.com/pub/468829Kelly Moran - Butterfly Phasehttps://hubski.com/pub/467230https://hubski.com/pub/467230https://hubski.com/pub/465755https://hubski.com/pub/465755In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.The Alaskan Inuit language, known as Iñupiaq, uses an oral counting system built around the human body. Quantities are first described in groups of five, 10, and 15 and then in sets of 20. The system “is really the count of your hands and the count of your toes,” says Nuluqutaaq Maggie Pollock, who taught with the Kaktovik numerals in Utqiagvik, a city 300 miles northwest of where the numerals were invented. For example, she says, tallimat—the Iñupiaq word for 5—comes from the word for arm: taliq. “In your one arm, you have tallimat fingers,” Pollock explains. Iñuiññaq, the word for 20, represents a whole person. In traditional practices, the body also serves as a mathematical multitool. “When my mother made me a parka, she used her thumb and her middle finger to measure how many times she would be able to cut the material,” Pollock says. “Before yardsticks or rulers, [Iñupiat people] used their hands and fingers to calculate or measure.”During the 19th and 20th centuries, American schools suppressed the Iñupiaq language—first violently and then quietly. “We had a tutor from the village who would help us blend into the white man’s world,” Pollock says of her own education. “But when my father went to school, if he spoke the language, they would slap his hands. It was torture for them.” By the 1990s the Iñupiaq counting system was dangerously close to being forgotten.The Kaktovik numerals started as a class project to adapt the counting system to a written form. The numerals, based on tally marks, “look like” the Iñupiaq words they represent. For example, the Iñupiaq word for 18, “akimiaq piŋasut,” meaning “15-3,” is depicted with three horizontal strokes, representing three groups of 5 (15) above three vertical strokes representing 3.Graphic shows Kaktovik numerals representing values from 0 through 19 and a few examples of larger numbers to show how the base 20 system works.Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Unicode Request for Kaktovik Numerals,” by Eduardo Marín Silva and Catherine Strand. Submitted to Unicode Technical Committee Document Registry March 16, 2021 (reference)“In the Iñupiaq language, there wasn’t a word for 0,” says William Clark Bartley, the teacher who helped develop the numerals. “The girl who gave us the symbol for 0, she just crossed her arms above her head like there was nothing.” The class added her suggestion—an X-like mark—to their set of unique numerals for 1 through 19 and invented what mathematicians would call a base 20 positional value system. (Technically, it is a two-dimensional positional value system with a primary base of 20 and a sub-base of 5.)Because of the tally-inspired design, arithmetic using the Kaktovik numerals is strikingly visual. Addition, subtraction and even long division become almost geometric. The Hindu-Arabic digits are an awkward system, Bartley says, but “the students found, with their numerals, they could solve problems a better way, a faster way.”Graphic shows how the Kaktovik number system can make addition, subtraction and division visually intuitive.Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Unicode Request for Kaktovik Numerals, by Eduardo Marín Silva and Catherine Strand. Submitted to Unicode Technical Committee Document Registry March 16, 2021 (reference)“The Iñupiaq way of knowing is often done by showing,” adds Qaġġuna Tenna Judkins, director of Iñupiaq education in northern Alaska’s North Slope Borough. Visualizing arithmetic makes those concepts a lot easier to understand, she says.At first students would convert their assigned math problems into Kaktovik numerals to do calculations, but middle school math classes in Kaktovik began teaching the numerals in equal measure with their Hindu-Arabic counterparts in 1997. Bartley reports that after a year of the students working fluently in both systems, scores on standardized math exams jumped from below the 20th percentile to “significantly above” the national average. And in the meantime, the board of education in the North Slope Borough’s district seat, Utqiagvik, passed a resolution that spread the numerals almost 500 miles along the Arctic coast. The system was even endorsed by the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents 180,000 Inuit across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia.But under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, from 2002 to 2015, schools faced severe sanctions—or even closure—for not meeting state standards, provoking a “scare” that some local educators say squeezed the Kaktovik numerals into a marginal role despite the system’s demonstrated educational impact. “Today the only place [they’re] really being used is in the Iñupiaq language classrooms,” says Chrisann Justice, the North Slope Borough’s Iñupiaq education department specialist. “We’re just blowing on the coal.”Now support from Silicon Valley is helping to reignite the Kaktovik numerals. Thanks to efforts by linguists working with the Script Encoding Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, the numerals were included in the September 2022 update of Unicode, an international information technology standard that enables the digitization of the world’s written languages. The new release, Unicode 15.0, provides a virtual identifier for each Kaktovik numeral so developers can incorporate them into digital displays. “It really is revolutionary for us,” Judkins says. “Right now we either have to use photos of the numerals or write them by hand.”There is still work to be done. Google is building a font for the numerals based on the Unicode update, says Craig Cornelius, a Google software engineer who works to digitally preserve endangered languages. The company made a “prelease” of its font available for computer download in March, although it won’t appear on the Android operating system until at least late summer. Desktop and mobile keyboards with the numerals need to be produced as well.But excitement over the traditional system’s cyber-debut is growing. “If we went to a math textbook creator and said, ‘Hey, can you build us a textbook but convert the Arabic numerals into Kaktovik numerals?’ it would be that much easier,” Judkins says.Unicode inclusion also pushes the boundary of what is mathematically feasible with the Kaktovik numerals. At higher levels, mathematics becomes an increasingly digital discipline. The basic theory can be illustrated on a blackboard, but complex problems often need to be solved with a computer. Without digital availability, the Kaktovik numerals would be confined to their arithmetic wheelhouse at a time when the Iñupiaq language is being revitalized for broad modern use. Being able to input the Kaktovik numerals into computation engines such as WolframAlpha, Judkins says, is “going to be a game changer. You are almost going to be able to choose: Am I going to be in English, or am I going to be in Iñupiaq? And if I am in Iñupiaq, I’m using all Kaktovik numerals.”Nearly 3,000 miles away, in Oklahoma, Unicode holds similar promise for the Cherokee community. In the early 1800s Cherokee polymath Sequoyah invented the Cherokee syllabary of written characters. “Around the same time, he also developed a number system,” says Roy Boney, language program manager for the Cherokee Nation. Cherokee numerals weren’t endorsed by the tribal government until 2012. A long history of trade with French and British settlers had meant the Hindu-Arabic numerals were already in use when Cherokee numerals were invented.While it’s unclear if Cherokee numerals have since gained traction, Boney reports that interest in the system is growing. “We have the numbers and need to use them,” he says. “It’s been a slow roll, but we have been introducing the numbers into our education settings” and are beginning to demonstrate the community use needed for inclusion in Unicode. Once the numerals are included, Boney and his colleagues hope to create a programming language using Cherokee script and numbers.Hindu-Arabic numerals’ ubiquity is powerful and has often come at the expense of culturally meaningful systems. But now those systems are slowly going digital, which is creating opportunities for their use that would have been unthinkable even two years ago. As Nuluqutaaq Maggie Pollock puts it: “This is just the beginning.”ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)Amory Tillinghast-Raby is a freelance journalist who is interested in the intersection of science and world cultures. He is based in New York City._______Reminded me of this little thing.https://hubski.com/pub/467824https://hubski.com/pub/467824https://hubski.com/pub/466461https://hubski.com/pub/466461https://hubski.com/pub/467823https://hubski.com/pub/467823Heurta - Aerial InterludeAlbrecht La'Brooy - Daybreakhttps://hubski.com/pub/467800https://hubski.com/pub/467800https://hubski.com/pub/467793https://hubski.com/pub/467793And the prompt was a picture of an exercise bike with a FREE sign hanging on it. I chose to write about patience so that could also be the prompt:PatienceExercise is patientuntil it isn't.Then it's urgentThen it'snow or never---But we don't believeour blood pressure is highour cholesterol deposits turn to plaqueThe ache in our lower back will become better- if I just get a massage- or go to a chiropractorHell, exercise won't reallign my spineExercise is patient, until it isn't.---Books -- now books are patient.They will hold their truths, lies, and secrets foreverUnopened.Books never whine -But they do build up . . .---And grief - grief is patientIt will linger, waiting for your attention.Waiting.You can ignore it. It will wait.It still waits.https://hubski.com/pub/467173https://hubski.com/pub/467173https://hubski.com/pub/468816https://hubski.com/pub/468816lil steve fucked around and played some hockey. weird one. different process for mehttps://hubski.com/pub/467139https://hubski.com/pub/467139So the YouTube channel LinusTechTips, which I have watched grow for nearly a decade now, has come under serious controversy after new revelations and allegations in the past week. The tl;Dr is that combining a 100+ employee, union-less, male dominated company with a culture of "work insanely unreasonably hard and don't complain, you whiny bitch" leads to some awful results. Now I'm not interested in discussing this particular case, otherwise I would link to it directly and not write something up. Rather, I've noticed that in the past year there has been a flurry of stories about workplaces that suffer from the exact same set of issues as LTT. I haven't seen a lot of US examples yet, but the pattern goes like this:- someone, usually an overconfident obsessive asshole, starts a company that does something ambitious or bold- they attract other ambitious people who want to make a dent in the universe - everyone works their asses off to compensate for their small size, leaving zero room for organizational development- the company grows rapidly on their succes, but maintains the same attitudes towards work and workers rights ("we don't need a union! We can just deal with things ourselves.")- most of the new hires get shit from the old guard, and get effectively zero help to deal with that shit- people flunk out, work themselves to near death or deal with serous harassment and mental health issues - it all explodes at some point, often with sexual harassment investigations revealing the awful working conditions that disproportionally affect womenHaving just departed a work environment that's miles better, but still eerily similar in a few regards, I'm wondering what exactly is going on and what this all means. Part of this feels like it's a logical extension of #metoo and the post-covid work reform movement finally reckoning with abusive, shitty workplaces. But this is happening so often it seems, especially with any company (or production) that Aims Big, that I'm wondering if it's a more structural problem. Any thoughts?https://hubski.com/pub/465593https://hubski.com/pub/465593Predictions are hard, especially about the future, as the man once said.https://hubski.com/pub/466291https://hubski.com/pub/466291https://hubski.com/pub/468754https://hubski.com/pub/468754the internet was a mistakehttps://hubski.com/pub/466165https://hubski.com/pub/466165https://hubski.com/pub/467023https://hubski.com/pub/467023Some workers have lost the muscle memory in their minds required to get jobs done in an open-office setting and, like flabby biceps, that muscle has to be exercised to strengthen, says S. Thomas Carmichaelhttps://hubski.com/pub/465306https://hubski.com/pub/465306https://hubski.com/pub/466094https://hubski.com/pub/466094Tornado outbreaks are moving from Texas and Oklahoma toward Tennessee and Kentucky, where people may not be preparedKinda related: Supercell tornadoes are much stronger and wider than damage-based ratings indicatehttps://hubski.com/pub/468730https://hubski.com/pub/468730Love the "mute Monday" constraint of only 200 words in the article (if you don't count captions).This telescope was worth every penny.https://hubski.com/pub/465260https://hubski.com/pub/465260https://hubski.com/pub/468701https://hubski.com/pub/468701https://hubski.com/pub/466037https://hubski.com/pub/466037https://hubski.com/pub/466927https://hubski.com/pub/466927https://hubski.com/pub/465983https://hubski.com/pub/465983no, not that StarshipTo get to the point where Starship can even start doing landing demos, there are 3 missions that still must be completed — the orbital flight test, a propellant-transfer test, and a long duration flight test. For the sake of illustration we will assume all launches go perfectly — akin to what SpaceX internally likes to call a “green light schedule.” (if all the traffic lights were green, how fast could you get there?)This puts us at 4 launches for the initial demos, and 54 launches for the three landings required. That means that at minimum, for Starship to complete its contractual obligations by Artemis IV, the rocket must fly fifty-eight times with zero failures by 2028. That’s not zero failures in the “nothing blew up” sense, but in the sense that every test must go flawlessly — redesigns and lessons learned must fit within the schedule. The clock is ticking, and one thing’s for sure, those lights sure aren’t all green.In summary, for SpaceX to meet its contractual obligations, we need 4 Apollo programs’ worth of super-heavy lift out the door by, well let’s be kind, the end of the decade.https://hubski.com/pub/466913https://hubski.com/pub/466913Quentin Dujardin - CondrozJohnny Booth - The LadderThe Breathing Effect & quickly, quickly - Guitarshttps://hubski.com/pub/465908https://hubski.com/pub/465908There must be a rule about how the more billion a company make , the more bad decision they take: google glass, metaverse, tesla screen, windows8...https://hubski.com/pub/467579https://hubski.com/pub/467579I’ve wanted to go here for years. Today my mate Ben made it a reality.https://hubski.com/pub/466794https://hubski.com/pub/466794You wanna talk about fuckin' weird?Country was goddamn paralyzed in the fall of 1982. People were afraid of eating anything. Everyone threw out their pills. Then Weekly Reader ran like three different articles about what all the awesome new "safety seals" on mutherfucking everything were for without saying "because some creep-ass mutherfucker slipped cyanide into the tylenol and we were powerless to do anything about it."AND YETIn 1978, he was charged in Kansas City, Missouri, with the dismemberment murder of Raymond West, 72, who had hired Lewis as an accountant. The charges were dismissed because West’s cause of death was not determined and some evidence had been illegally obtained.He was convicted of six counts of mail fraud in a 1981 credit card scheme in Kansas City, accused of using the name and background of a former tax client to obtain 13 credit cards.Lewis was charged in 2004 with rape, kidnapping and other offenses for an alleged attack on a woman in Cambridge. He was jailed for three years while awaiting trial, but prosecutors dismissed the charges on the day his trial was scheduled to begin after the victim refused to testify, the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office said at the time.Police in 1983 described Lewis as a “chameleon” who lived in several states, used at least 20 aliases and held many jobs, including computer specialist, tax accountant, importer of Indian tapestries and salesman of jewelry, pharmaceutical machinery and real estate.Nobody ever said shit about Jim Lewis getting arrested, probably because they knew there was no way they'd get a murder conviction. If you weren't old enough to consume news in 1982, the tylenol killer became nothing more than a bar trivia question (never made Trivial Pursuit because that was too creepy). It completely dropped out of everyone's memories because it was scary and oh by the way now there's seven seals between you and your advil don't you feel safe? If you wanted to know when wypepo started freaking balls about Halloween candy? It was really given wings by Jim Lewis, and then two years later when Ronald O'Brien was executed for poisoning his own kid, it was fuckin' over. In between, D.A.R.E. was founded and stranger danger became the theme song of American life.America is rolling on more than 40 years of PTSD from something we have complete amnesia about.https://hubski.com/pub/468558https://hubski.com/pub/468558https://hubski.com/pub/465843https://hubski.com/pub/465843https://hubski.com/pub/465825https://hubski.com/pub/465825Myna Cycles - Sun GlimmersBotch - To Our Friends in the Great White Northhttps://hubski.com/pub/466715https://hubski.com/pub/466715Personal faves: -Bulgari, for making a case out of rock- Jean-Claude Biver, for taking Moser's tourbillon-and-vantablack hands-free repeater trolling and bedazzling the shit out of it- Jacob and Co for vehemently defending "ugliest jewelry imaginable" as their home turf- Jacquet-Droz and Louis Vuitton for saying "hold my beer"-Peterman-Bedat for somehow still existing despite a lack of advertising, distribution or press since 2002- Louis Moinet for demonstrating that the idea I had four years ago and couldn't find a single example of isn't stupidhttps://hubski.com/pub/469685https://hubski.com/pub/469685https://hubski.com/pub/466667https://hubski.com/pub/466667I don't know exactly what is happening but the physicists are excitedhttps://hubski.com/pub/465717https://hubski.com/pub/465717Tor - LensGareth Donkin, quickly, quickly, The Breathing Effect - GEEK OUT!Steve Hauschildt - Reverse Culture Musichttps://hubski.com/pub/466648https://hubski.com/pub/466648https://hubski.com/pub/465712https://hubski.com/pub/465712Yesterday, President Joe Biden declared that “it remains to be seen” whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “dangerous.” I would beg to differ. I have been writing about the threat of AI to free speech. Then recently I learned that ChatGPT falsely reported on a claim of sexual harassment that was never made against me on a trip that never occurred while I was on a faculty where I never taught. ChapGPT relied on a cited Post article that was never written and quotes a statement that was never made by the newspaper. When the Washington Post investigated the false story, it learned that another AI program “Microsoft’s Bing, which is powered by GPT-4, repeated the false claim about Turley.” It appears that I have now been adjudicated by an AI jury on something that never occurred.steve this is the kind of thing to not ask ChatGPT to do for you.https://hubski.com/pub/468412https://hubski.com/pub/468412Ronin Rhythm Clan - Modul 22https://hubski.com/pub/468406https://hubski.com/pub/468406https://hubski.com/pub/465670https://hubski.com/pub/465670https://hubski.com/pub/467482https://hubski.com/pub/467482https://hubski.com/pub/467478https://hubski.com/pub/467478https://hubski.com/pub/465651https://hubski.com/pub/465651https://hubski.com/pub/465649https://hubski.com/pub/465649https://hubski.com/pub/467464https://hubski.com/pub/467464Cumulus Frisbee - Fall into ItSkinshape - Better ChancesBit late on this one, sorry. I had Tonsillitis followed by COVID and it slipped my mind.https://hubski.com/pub/465640https://hubski.com/pub/465640https://hubski.com/pub/467453https://hubski.com/pub/467453I will admit to being on a Nick Harkaway kick. The Gone Away World is easily the best book I've read in 30 years and Angelmaker is the only Steampunk work that isn't cringe-inducing fan fiction of Gibson & Sterling's Difference Engine.Also ChatGPT is a bullshit engine, AI is anything but intelligent and I haven't seen this much overhyped bullshit since all of Wall Street tried to justify AOL buying Time Warner.https://hubski.com/pub/466538https://hubski.com/pub/466538because of course they dohttps://hubski.com/pub/469668https://hubski.com/pub/469668lil steve I played hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467436https://hubski.com/pub/467436https://hubski.com/pub/465510https://hubski.com/pub/465510https://hubski.com/pub/466422https://hubski.com/pub/466422https://hubski.com/pub/468306https://hubski.com/pub/468306https://hubski.com/pub/465467https://hubski.com/pub/465467https://hubski.com/pub/465445https://hubski.com/pub/465445 Well, well, well Hubski, today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects: watchmaking. Now, I know what you're thinking, "Kleinbl00, aren't you supposed to be a tech guy? What's up with the old-school mechanical watches?" Well, let me tell you, there's a lot more to watches than just telling time.First of all, let's get one thing straight: watches are not just fashion accessories. Sure, you can buy a cheap quartz watch at the mall for ten bucks, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about finely crafted timepieces that are designed to last for generations.The thing that really gets me excited about watches is the engineering. I mean, have you ever taken a look inside a mechanical watch? It's a miniature Rube Goldberg machine in there! Every tiny gear, spring, and lever is precisely crafted to work together in perfect harmony. And when it's all put together, it's a thing of beauty.But it's not just the engineering that makes watches so great. There's also the design. From the elegant dials and hands, to the intricately carved cases and movements, watches are true works of art. And let's not forget about the history. Some of the most iconic watch designs have been around for over a century, and they still look just as stylish today as they did back then.Now, I know what you're thinking, "But Kleinbl00, what about smartwatches? Aren't they the future?" Well, sure, they have their place. But there's something special about a mechanical watch that a smartwatch just can't replicate. It's the sound of the ticking, the weight of the watch on your wrist, the feeling of knowing that you're wearing something that was crafted with care and attention to detail.So, if you've never given watches a chance, I urge you to do so. Take a trip to your local watch shop and try on a few different styles. See if you can spot the differences between a quartz and a mechanical watch. And who knows, you might just find yourself falling in love with the art of watchmaking, just like I did.Hmmm… I think it still has a way to go. kleinbl00 you’re safe.https://hubski.com/pub/466380https://hubski.com/pub/466380https://hubski.com/pub/468290https://hubski.com/pub/468290Meanwhile, disaffection with the war is continuing to gnaw away at the Russian leadership and the Russian people, beneath the thick surface of state propaganda and repression. That undercurrent of disaffection is creating a once-in-a-generation recruiting opportunity for the CIA. We’re not letting it go to waste.https://hubski.com/pub/468262https://hubski.com/pub/468262The irony of Business Insider covering "spam" "ruining the internet" is rich indeedhttps://hubski.com/pub/467382https://hubski.com/pub/467382Now we turn to phenylephrine. As you can see, that's a somewhat different structure - there's a phenol on the aryl ring, and there's no longer a chiral methyl group bretween the hydroxy and the N-methyl. It also has adrenergic effects, but different (and often weaker) ones than either ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. Its main effect seems to be raising blood pressure, and it has medical uses in that area as an addition to anaesthesia agents. But what it does not do well is act as a decongestant. There have been several controlled studies that show that it is indistinguishable from placebo in conditions like allergic rhinitis. Pseudoephedrine, however, is very clearly distinguished from placebo and in most people has very noticeable decongestant effects that last for several hours. https://hubski.com/pub/465265https://hubski.com/pub/465265I knock on wood. Probably once a day, at least. I have twice today. I know it makes no rational sense, but I’m too afraid not to. Why? No idea. I’m just superstitious.https://hubski.com/pub/468239https://hubski.com/pub/468239Filing this under “mental models for understanding how to utilize LLMs”.https://hubski.com/pub/465232https://hubski.com/pub/465232​Ticket for Coffee Shop Frustration: Ordering Black CoffeeNo One Wants a Printer, but Everyone Wants to PrintWhere there’s a problem, there’s a business opportunity. Tyler Eshleman was wandering through a dorm at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University his freshman year when he came across two intrepid roommates. They’d purchased a color printer and were charging students to print out term papers, reading assignments, even entire textbooks. They weren’t doing people’s homework. Just printing. “I wish I would have gotten in on something like that,” Mr. Eshleman says, noting the pair was turning a profit.Now 21 and living in Troy, Mich., Mr. Eshleman is mostly envisioning a printer-free life for himself, like many young people I talked to.“Some point, you buy an apartment, house, car, second house or a boat. Then maybe you think about buying a printer,” he reasons. https://hubski.com/pub/466243https://hubski.com/pub/466243https://hubski.com/pub/466211https://hubski.com/pub/466211There's an alternate timeline where1) Zelensky announced they were investigating Hunter Biden2) Biden lost just enough votes to lose3) Putin invaded Ukraine4) The US did nothing5) Britain kind-of-sort-of supported Ukraine but the only other involvement was some seriously off-the-books CIA shit6) Russia annexed Ukraine and Moldova, which have both become partisan terrorist states akin to Syriahttps://hubski.com/pub/466208https://hubski.com/pub/466208https://hubski.com/pub/466193https://hubski.com/pub/466193discusshttps://hubski.com/pub/466177https://hubski.com/pub/466177https://hubski.com/pub/466173https://hubski.com/pub/466173Chuck Senrick - Dreamin'Ichiko Aoba - Imperial Smoke TownOvermono - Arla Fearnhttps://hubski.com/pub/467288https://hubski.com/pub/467288Congi - Spoken Word {K-Lone Remix}Ashez - Sound {Chumra Remix}https://hubski.com/pub/466130https://hubski.com/pub/466130https://hubski.com/pub/468176https://hubski.com/pub/468176This is like the Waiting for Godot of tech journalism.https://hubski.com/pub/465078https://hubski.com/pub/465078https://hubski.com/pub/467215https://hubski.com/pub/467215Let's start with the "editorial board": The PRC totally hid COVID from the worldLiterally the next link they gave me: Richard Petty and Billy Lane have things to say about trade schoolAnd the next link: An Amherst grad thinks legacy admissions are great for diversityWell over half the applicants to highly selective colleges could shine equally as students. How, then, do admissions officers decide who gets the golden ring?Meanwhile in politics, nihilism takes the early leadPetri: You know, there’s one thing we know about this group of people: If they bind together, they certainly can stop a candidate that they dislike. Like, there’s one thing this group of people is really efficient at. It’s stopping upstarts with no political experience from taking the nomination. So that bodes really well, I think.In science and technology, enjoy this extremely pointed dunking on Russia via their space programBut 1966 was a long time ago. It’s the year Hewlett-Packard developed its first computer. It’s the year Fresca and Twister debuted. Frank Sinatra released “Strangers in the Night,” dooby, dooby, doo. Today’s Russia is trying to replicate an achievement from 1966 — and failing. It speaks volumes about the reckless waste of a once-great nation’s capabilities.discuss.https://hubski.com/pub/466059https://hubski.com/pub/466059Parsons cost per credit hour: $1873Parsons dorm per year: $15,000Parsons meal plan: $6400Getting college credit for something Youtube can teach you in 3 minutes: Pricelesshttps://hubski.com/pub/465809https://hubski.com/pub/465809https://hubski.com/pub/465763https://hubski.com/pub/465763"Starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party," the researchers write, "the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time."While 12 agents heard about the party through others, only five agents (including Klaus and Maria) attended. Three said they were too busy, and four agents just didn't go. The experience was a fun example of unexpected situations that can emerge from complex social interactions in the virtual world.It's like uber-botting Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley.https://hubski.com/pub/468007https://hubski.com/pub/468007https://hubski.com/pub/465603https://hubski.com/pub/465603Javier Santiago - Ancestors' BluesVarra - Birdo IIhttps://hubski.com/pub/465502https://hubski.com/pub/465502no one saw this cominghttps://hubski.com/pub/465476https://hubski.com/pub/465476So... FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE saying "October Surprise" has been a cue for All Reasonable People to dismiss you as a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist. Mr. Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.https://hubski.com/pub/466795https://hubski.com/pub/466795Goon - Emily SaysWardown - Ferrichttps://hubski.com/pub/466787https://hubski.com/pub/466787As they mature, they’re realizing, like Jill seems to, that the exploitation they experienced was essentially a labor rights issue.I have four younger brothers. My mother dreamed of all five of us playing violins in churches hard enough that I got to do it a few time before I was ten years old. My parents had neither the money nor the backbone to raise me and my brothers in the picture perfect fundamentalist frame, so that plan petered out. This article discusses the phenomenon more thoroughly.https://hubski.com/pub/465432https://hubski.com/pub/465432https://hubski.com/pub/465382https://hubski.com/pub/465382European astronomers of the sixteenth century encountered two competing systems of mathematical astronomy. On the one hand, in the ancient system of Ptolemy, the earth was the immobile center of the universe. Constrained by Aristotelian physical principles to move in uniform circular motion, the moon, sun, and seven known planets orbited the earth. “Absolutely all phenomena, are in contradiction,” Ptolemy writes, “to any of the alternate notions that have been propounded.” On the other hand, the new theory of Nicolaus Copernicus which, while still committed to uniform circular motion, argued that by placing the sun at the center instead, the apparent retrograde motion of the planets could be accounted for with greater mathematical simplicity and elegance.Copernican theory encountered resistance on theological and philosophical grounds. Other opponents pointed to the evidence of the senses: the earth was perceptibly not in motion. But what about the predictive power of Copernican theory? Whatever its philosophical or physical flaws, was it at least superior to the Ptolemaic system in calculating the motions of celestial objects?https://hubski.com/pub/466729https://hubski.com/pub/466729The accepted fundamental forces governing our universe comprise gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. While life is not typically categorized as a fundamental force, our understanding and definition of life might benefit from its thermodynamic and quantum mechanic properties.The Second Law of thermodynamics posits that in an isolated system, entropy – a measure of disorder – invariably increases over time. Life, characterized as a complex, self-sustaining, and self-replicating system, initially appears counter-intuitive to the Second Law, as it generates order from chaos, thereby reducing local entropy. However, life's work in reducing local entropy is counterbalanced by an increase in entropy elsewhere in the universe.Life, via its metabolic processes and environmental interactions, performs work to maintain and propagate itself. In doing so, it releases energy, primarily in the form of heat, contributing to an overall increase in universal entropy.The principle of conservation of energy (dU = δQ - δW) encapsulates life's metabolic and environmental interactive processes. It performs work (W), transforming heat (Q) into different forms of energy. This work contributes to the persisting life system, and as the principle of natural selection postulates, such work is likely to be selected for, thereby propagating life. This transformational process, driven by life's inherent capacity for work, effectively accelerates the total entropy of the universe.This understanding aligns life within the framework of the second law of thermodynamics, where life does not contravene the law but works in accordance with it. Life can be postulated as an entropic accelerator (dS_life/dt > 0), enhancing the universe's overall entropy. This paradigm provides a thermodynamic perspective to our definition of life, underscoring life's efficiency in contributing to universal entropy.Secondly, the role of life within quantum mechanics, specifically regarding the observer effect, may also contribute to our definition of life. The observer effect posits that the mere act of observation alters the observed phenomenon, as notably demonstrated in the double-slit experiment, where the observation of a particle determines whether it behaves as a wave or a particle.Life forms (and the devices they create) act as quantum observers. They are capable of collapsing quantum wave functions into definite states through observation, influencing quantum states. This interaction suggests that the definition of life could be expanded to include its unique role within quantum mechanics.Considering life from both thermodynamic and quantum mechanical perspectives, life fundamentally contributes to the workings of the universe. These unique interactions provide the basis for refining and improving our physical definition of life, possibly positioning life as an integral component in the universe, rather than an anomalous agent within it.https://hubski.com/pub/467897https://hubski.com/pub/467897More than £50m-worth of watches were reported stolen in London in 2022, according to a Metropolitan Police FOI, shared exclusively with the BBC by international database The Watch Register.In the first six months of 2023 in the capital, 3,190 watches were reported stolen according to the Met. Although we don't know exactly how many of these were stolen on the street, a fifth involved violence against the victim.Crypto fixes this. Fight me.https://hubski.com/pub/466705https://hubski.com/pub/466705https://hubski.com/pub/466700https://hubski.com/pub/466700Jonny Nash - DittoRalph Heidel - AVIhttps://hubski.com/pub/466680https://hubski.com/pub/466680Something I've been working on as of late. it's mostly newer tracks, but I did dig through the vault and pull up an ambient track from six years back (no clue of that is hinted in the track title of course), and a few other bits that had been floating around since who knows when.https://hubski.com/pub/467875https://hubski.com/pub/467875GPT-3.5, the base model behind the free version of ChatGPT, has been conditioned by OpenAI specifically not to present itself as a human, which may partially account for its poor performance. In a post on X, Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan wrote, "Important context about the 'ChatGPT doesn't pass the Turing test' paper. As always, testing behavior doesn't tell us about capability." In a reply, he continued, "ChatGPT is fine-tuned to have a formal tone, not express opinions, etc, which makes it less humanlike. The authors tried to change this with the prompt, but it has limits. The best way to pretend to be a human chatting is to fine-tune on human chat logs."https://hubski.com/pub/465298https://hubski.com/pub/465298 The federation was mandated to “cease and desist from all unfair discriminatory practices” related to sexual orientation and gender identity and reverse its former policy of barring transgender athletes within two weeks, according to the ruling, obtained by Fox News.Fair? Not fair? It’s tricky? Is there more to this than I am thinking? If you’re genetically male you would have a pretty massive advantage with regard to lifting heavy weight, no?https://hubski.com/pub/466676https://hubski.com/pub/466676Journalist James Fallows pointed out that there are between 3,500 and 5,500 colleges in the U.S. and all but 100 of them admit more than 50% of the students who apply. Only about 70 admit fewer than a third of all applicants. That is, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, “the great majority of schools, where most Americans get their postsecondary education, admit most of the people who apply to them.” The changing demographics of the country are also changing student populations. As an example, in 2022, more than 33% of the students at the University of Texas at Austin, which automatically admits any Texas high school student in the top 6% of their class, were from historically underrepresented populations. And universities that value diversity may continue to try to create a diverse student body.But in the past, when schools have eliminated affirmative action, Black student numbers have dropped off, both because of changes in admission policies and because Black students have felt unwelcome in those schools. This matters to the larger pattern of American society. As Black and Brown students are cut off from elite universities, they are also cut off from the pipeline to elite graduate schools and jobs. ________________________________________________________________Al Franken made a good argument for affirmative action in Lying Liars. He hypothesized two children running a foot race, one of which the beneficiary of intensive training since he could crawl, the other without decent shoes. If they tie, is it really a tie? Or does the one without the benefit of wealth and privilege demonstrate more latent ability? Therefore, perhaps the finish line shouldn't be parallel to the road.But that's the sort of nuance conservatives defy by definition and "fair means fair" despite the fact that elite colleges have always existed to keep out the riff-raff. Jeff Selingo has an anonymous quote from a Harvard administrator in "Who Gets In" along the lines of "Harvard admissions aren't designed to ensure the Harvard student body is elite; they are designed to ensure that only the elite make up the Harvard student body." Standardized testing was originally created to keep the Jews out of the Ivy League. The Stanford-Binet intelligence test was named after a eugenicist by a eugenicist.https://hubski.com/pub/467868https://hubski.com/pub/467868A debate broke out between the engineers and the journalists: Why was a person in the middle of an otherwise automated process? Why not let AI extract the headlines? Our knee-jerk answer was “Because journalism!” But when we retreated to our desks, we had to admit there wasn’t a whole lot of journalism involved. We were defending stenography.Bloomberg shifted to automated earnings headlines in 2013 and has used AI to create its earnings summaries since 2018. It also employs more journalists and analysts now than it did back then — some 2,700, all of whom get to do more interesting work than writing earnings headlines and summaries.https://hubski.com/pub/465212https://hubski.com/pub/465212https://hubski.com/pub/466567https://hubski.com/pub/466567https://hubski.com/pub/467806https://hubski.com/pub/467806https://hubski.com/pub/467804https://hubski.com/pub/467804A project by the Israeli NGO B'tselemB’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories strives for a future in which human rights, liberty and equality are guaranteed to all people, Palestinian and Jewish alike, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Such a future will only be possible when the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime end. That is the future we are working towards. B’Tselem (in Hebrew literally: in the image of), the name chosen for the organization by the late Member of Knesset Yossi Sarid, is an allusion to Genesis 1:27: “And God created humankind in His image. In the image of God did He create them.” The name expresses the universal and Jewish moral edict to respect and uphold the human rights of all peoplehttps://hubski.com/pub/466519https://hubski.com/pub/466519https://hubski.com/pub/466507https://hubski.com/pub/466507https://hubski.com/pub/465068https://hubski.com/pub/465068If only the democrats held the executive and legislative branches for two years to undo the Trump administration's railway braking regulatory repeals.If only Mayor Pete used to work for the infamous McKenzie consulting firm and could offer up an inside look at cost-cutting corporate profiteering at the expense of us plebs.If only Mike DeWine had the authority to officially declare a disaster and receive more funding without making Northern Suffolk look negligent.If only JD Vance felt empowered enough to lie about already working with FEMANope, things are fuckin' great!https://hubski.com/pub/465067https://hubski.com/pub/465067Paywalled, which is really a shame, I'm sure there's a need to offer a solid rebuttal to each very reasonable argument in the article.#humorhttps://hubski.com/pub/467758https://hubski.com/pub/467758https://hubski.com/pub/467740https://hubski.com/pub/467740 The Sphere is a distillation of an evolving relationship among art, artist, and technology—somewhere between a warm embrace of and a final surrender to screens. It is an acknowledgment and maybe even a tribute to the ways in which our screens have become extensions of ourselves and the way that documentation via these screens has become its own form of consumption and participation. Seeing is believing, but what the Sphere suggests is that documenting has become inextricable from living.https://hubski.com/pub/469531https://hubski.com/pub/469531https://hubski.com/pub/467736https://hubski.com/pub/467736Johnny Booth - Full Tilt Jan Jelinek - Tendencyhttps://hubski.com/pub/466354https://hubski.com/pub/466354Website looks like it was designed in about 2002. An entertaining read nonetheless.https://hubski.com/pub/466333https://hubski.com/pub/466333I was beginning to conclude that ChatGPT was an idiot. Which, granted, doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of jobs it can do better than flesh and blood, and without the paycheque.I'll be frank: apart from a couple impressive-ish results, the only way to make me even less interested in the current AI thing would be for it to include the phrase "Phillips curve." But this post at least got an honest chuckle out of me.https://hubski.com/pub/466272https://hubski.com/pub/466272Only 67 defectors made it to South Korea last year, compared with 1,047 in 2019, official data show. The figure had been declining even before the pandemic due in part to tighter restrictions in China, the preferred route for defectors.I've read Aquariums of Pyongyang, Without You There Is No Us, Escape from Camp 14, and I think a couple others. Blood Brothers is now 20 years old and contains some gonzo shit but one of the allegations supported by everything else I've read is that North Korea's porous border with China facilitates North Korea's black market activity, which forms the fundamental basis of its economy. Both Aquariums and... some other book I can't remember the title of (Girl with Seven Names?) reference the human trafficking between North Korea and China, with many Chinese laborers in the 3rd world actually being North Korean. Up to 80 percent of North Koreans depend on informal markets known as jangmadang for daily necessities, according to a report released in March by Elizabeth Salmon, the United Nations independent investigator for human rights in North Korea. But these markets have had their activities sharply curtailed, she wrote, noting that the border closures have forced a vulnerable population “to the brink”.Food shortages in North Korea have worsened in recent months, due in part to the border closures, according to international experts. Kim Jong Un in February called for a transformation in agriculture and stressed the need to hit grain production targets.If the North Koreans are walling off their northern border, that means that the threat from interacting with the world is greater than the benefit of a semi-porous border. Cybercrime might explain the difference. Dunno. Most of these fences are around river crossings. Escapee accounts of North Korean river crossings aren't dissimilar from Rio Grande river crossings between Mexico and Texas. But as time goes by and the pandemic subsides, the government may find it harder to justify the restrictions, he added.LOL like the North Korean government justifies anythinghttps://hubski.com/pub/467663https://hubski.com/pub/467663Silent Planet - OffworlderKansas - Dust in the Windhttps://hubski.com/pub/466138https://hubski.com/pub/466138This is straight from Goldman Sachs, courtesy The Daily Shot:Let’s take another look at the banking turmoil that caught the markets off guard this year. The post-COVID quantitative easing period marked a significant shift in the banking landscape, as financial institutions experienced a surge in deposits. This influx of liquidity was difficult for banks to manage, as they struggled to lend at a pace that matched the growth of deposits. Consequently, they sought alternative methods to deploy excess liquidity, turning to the purchase of Treasuries, agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and other liquid fixed-income products. However, these assets were acquired at yields approximately 3.5% below current levels, making them vulnerable to an increase in interest rates. As the Federal Reserve proceeded to hike rates, the value of these securities dropped precipitously, leading to losses amounting to 34% of Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) capital. This situation was further exacerbated by accelerated deposit withdrawals from smaller banks, a phenomenon facilitated by the convenience of modern banking applications. In a bid to maintain liquidity, some institutions were compelled to sell their securities, incurring substantial mark-to-market losses and leaving them severely undercapitalized.https://hubski.com/pub/445278https://hubski.com/pub/445278At the end of 2018, Inc. Magazine ran a piece on Forever Labs. It was an exciting time for us. We had a lot of press online, from publications like CNBC, Well + Good Bloomberg, etc. But the one that was the most exciting to us was Inc. Magazine. Why? Because it was not just online, it was on the shelves, in real life! I remember seeing the shelves in the airports with them on it and feeling a huge sense of pride. I even rearranged them to be in front of competing magazines. Yes... I'm that ridiculous. We had investors find us through this magazine, many new clients and I still use it as a link to share with prospective clients and business partners. It was written by a guy named Jeff Bercovici. By the time Jeff wrote the piece mk and I had done a lot of press. We were used to how it works. They are introduced to you by your PR company and much of the narrative is predetermined. They talk with you to get some quotes and then write the same piece they would have written even if they'd never met you. Most of the time it's flat, riddled with inaccuracies and bombastic. Click bait. Titles like, "Tech CEO's are paying a small fortune to buy eternal life." Or some such nonsense. Jeff didn't do this. Jeff actually took the time to come and witness a procedure in Orinda, CA. We knew from the first sentence that this would be a different article. It started, "In a clinic in leafy Orinda, California, Anthony, a 45-year-old medical sales rep, lies facedown on an examination table, a sterile sheet draped over his bare bottom."I've been to this clinic many times. "Leafy," is literally the most perfect description you could muster. The scene he sets with the patient is also perfect. He actually wrote this piece. The first paragraph ends, "Attaching a syringe, he slowly draws out 60 milliliters of marrow.It's a rich, dark red. Like beet juice."This is also PEFECT. Not only by description but in the accuracy of the amounts being drawn, etc. SO MANY journalists don't give a damn about the accuracy of things. It's actually scary, because it makes you think, "if they're this off the mark on what they wrote about us..... how off the mark are they about everything else? What can I trust?" Well... I trust Jeff Bercovici. Several months after this piece ran Forever Labs had the opportunity to put together a panel for SXSW. mk was on the panel, and two other friends of ours that run biotech company in the longevity space. But... we needed a moderator. The PR company suggested Jeff. "Great!" was our reply. The panel was awesome. We had a pretty full room and some amazing questions. Jeff was a great moderator. After, we all hung out and Jeff and I got to talking. Where are you from, etc... I always ask everyone if they're a musician. It's one of my first questions. My wife is always embarrassed, not by the question but by how quickly within meeting someone I ask it. Jeff mentioned that one of his longtime friends lived in Michigan and was also a musician. He told me that this person had an amazing family and threw the best party ever. Fortress Party. He told me that his friend converted his 10k square foot home in to a giant fort. The kind you made when you were a kid. The walls were all covered in sheets and pillows, etc. There were many rooms throughout the house all with different themes. This sounded compelling. Compelling enough that I pinged him when I got home for the introduction. That's when I cold emailed hardtaco to hangout. Not only was he completely cool with the cold intro. He suggested he and his entire family meet me and my entire family. We essentially set up a family blind date. We had them over. They were/are awesome. They LOVE to game. In fact, if he's up to it I would highly recommend sharing your blog on the games you are playing and reviewing during quarantine. It's something like a game every day... it's insane. He's insane. His whole family is, but in the best possible way. In the, this is how American's got to the moon kind of way. Anyways, this is all a very long post to say that Forever Labs has had some awesome press over the years that has brought us clients and awesome strategic investment and business partners, but hardtaco is the coolest thing to come out of me hiring a PR company. Welcome to Hubski!Oh, check out his song/project. He posts one song a month and has for like 30 years... (yeah, that's right.. just one a month. Slacker.) Let's hope that hardtaco contributes beyond his once a month song posting. But even if he doesn't, please welcome him. He's become a good friend. lil steve kleinbl00, ButterflyEffect, flac, rezzeJ, ghostoffuffle, ecib, coffeesp00ns ... ya'll would dig his hardtaco project.Onward!-TNGhttps://hubski.com/pub/467592https://hubski.com/pub/467592https://hubski.com/pub/465895https://hubski.com/pub/465895https://hubski.com/pub/465870https://hubski.com/pub/465870https://hubski.com/pub/465824https://hubski.com/pub/465824Shout-out to my cousin who refused to get vaccinated and got COVID while pregnant with her sonhttps://hubski.com/pub/467452https://hubski.com/pub/467452https://hubski.com/pub/467438https://hubski.com/pub/467438lil steve 🏒https://hubski.com/pub/467418https://hubski.com/pub/467418Matthew Halsall - An Ever Changing Viewhttps://hubski.com/pub/465548https://hubski.com/pub/465548kleinbl00https://hubski.com/pub/465508https://hubski.com/pub/465508he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layerHis mysterious death make it pretty clear he was killed by time traveler to avoid dooming us even morehttps://hubski.com/pub/465484https://hubski.com/pub/465484Fievel Is Glauque - Save the PhenomenonBobbing - Ah Uh OhJohnson - Return Recoilhttps://hubski.com/pub/467372https://hubski.com/pub/467372The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza - The Alpha the OmegaCesco - Move Too Slowhttps://hubski.com/pub/465380https://hubski.com/pub/465380My wife shot down my Allison V1710 coffee table idea (even though they offered me 15% off!!!) so I did what any red-blooded nerd would do: started surfing around for 3d models of Allison V1710s. I haven't found a good one but I was made aware of the uniquely British nightmare that is the Napier Sabre.Problems arose as soon as mass production began. Prototype engines had been hand-assembled by Napier craftsmen and it proved to be difficult to adapt it to assembly-line production techniques. The sleeves often failed due to the way they were manufactured from chrome-molybdenum steel, leading to seized cylinders, which caused the loss of the sole prototype Martin-Baker MB 3.[9][10] The Ministry of Aircraft Production was responsible for the development of the engine and arranged for sleeves to be machined by the Bristol Aeroplane Company from their Taurus engine forgings. These nitrided austenitic steel sleeves were the result of many years of intensive sleeve development, experience that Napier did not have. Air filters had to be fitted when a new sleeve problem appeared in 1944 when aircraft were operating from Normandy soil with its abrasive, gritty dust.pip pip cheerio old chap let's hand-build H-24s for the war effort and slap chrome-moly sleeve valves on 'emQuality control proved to be inadequate, engines were often delivered with improperly cleaned castings, broken piston rings and machine cuttings left inside the engine.[12] Mechanics were overworked trying to keep the Sabres running and during cold weather they had to run them every two hours during the night so that the engine oil would not congeal and prevent the engine from starting the next day.[nb 3] These problems took too long to remedy and the engine gained a bad reputation. To make matters worse, mechanics and pilots unfamiliar with the different nature of the engine, tended to blame the Sabre for problems that were caused by not following correct procedures. This was exacerbated by the representatives of the competing Rolls-Royce company, which had its own agenda. In 1944, Rolls-Royce produced a similar design prototype called the Eagle. Yes, yes, when your wartime mechanics pushing back the Nazis can't keep your engine running it's the mechanics' fault. Truly.Napier seemed complacent and tinkered with the design for better performance. In 1942, it started a series of projects to improve its high-altitude performance, with the addition of a three-speed, two-stage supercharger, when the basic engine was still not running reliably.Rule Fucking Britanniahttps://hubski.com/pub/467358https://hubski.com/pub/467358A lot to unpack here. - Forest City is a "One Belt, One Road" project, meaning the CCP pushed it heavily when it was started in 2006. - The guy they were pushing was Najib Razak, who siphoned billions through Jho Low, whose nefarious bullshit not only gave us The Wolf of Wall Street but also ripped a giant hole in Goldman Sachs. - The property is 60% owned by Country Garden and is a great example of a tofu dreg ghost city outside of China. - That was pushed entirely at the Chinese who were investing their money outside of China and then once Razak was down there was enough civil unrest towards Chinese that they all bailed. - And then Xi implemented currency controls to keep any Chinese from buying this Chinese project for the Chinese.It's pretty fuckin' cool how all these massive Chinese developers somehow make their mortgage payments at the last minute without anyone really knowing where the money comes from. I personally love that the Chinese people are underwriting luxury apartments they aren't allowed to live in opposite an enclave full of people who hate them surrounded by jungles nobody lives in with crocodiles cruising the beach. Especially since the Straits Times wants you to know that actually, "ghost city" is a matter of perspective.https://hubski.com/pub/465328https://hubski.com/pub/465328Maruja - Live from Low Four Studiohttps://hubski.com/pub/465257https://hubski.com/pub/465257https://hubski.com/pub/465197https://hubski.com/pub/465197https://hubski.com/pub/469409https://hubski.com/pub/469409The whole series is good, if you're familiar with some linear algebra, but I found this one interesting in particular because of the last chapter (17:00 mark onwards) discussing superposition.I had always conceptualized the 50K neurons of GPT as the 50K parameters/dimensions it could assess tokens on, not realizing that superpositions exponentially increase the possibilities and what we consider nuance. Which also makes it impossible to truly know what it is 'thinking', as there are just too many superpositions to take into account. And, as I read somewhere else but can't find now, it also means the complete inability of any LLM output to be resistant to adverse agents. It's also fasincating that GPTs scale so well essentially through what feels like a hack, with higher dimension matrices allowing for much more vectors when the assumption is let go that vectors have to be perpendicular. The much more nuanced language modeling of LLMs comes from its size and this quirk of linear algebra, is how I understand that part.https://hubski.com/pub/466989https://hubski.com/pub/466989Tom VR - Blue Sky UnravelMatteo Mancuso - Falcon Flighti:lo - Biomehttps://hubski.com/pub/469372https://hubski.com/pub/469372https://hubski.com/pub/466928https://hubski.com/pub/466928https://hubski.com/pub/466853https://hubski.com/pub/466853https://hubski.com/pub/469366https://hubski.com/pub/469366Uyama Hiroto - Color of Love feat. Substantial & J SoulK.O.G - Don't Take My Soulhttps://hubski.com/pub/469363https://hubski.com/pub/469363a quirky fun assortment - playlisthttps://hubski.com/pub/466584https://hubski.com/pub/466584Knocked Loose - Deep in the Willow / Everything is Quiet NowAdam Pits - Brain BreachJohnny Booth - Storytellerhttps://hubski.com/pub/466494https://hubski.com/pub/466494https://hubski.com/pub/466420https://hubski.com/pub/466420I saw this float towards the top of Reddit not too long ago. Someone maybe kinda sorta credible is “whistleblowing”?https://hubski.com/pub/466417https://hubski.com/pub/466417Jonny Nash - All I Ever NeededBlack Milk - Will Remainhttps://hubski.com/pub/466377https://hubski.com/pub/466377May urine perpetually soak your eternal rest you piece of shithttps://hubski.com/pub/466325https://hubski.com/pub/466325This documentary talks about the Duggars. It also effectively demonstrates how the Institute for Basic Life Principles created the environment that primes victims for abuse, and goes to truly inhumane lengths to protect abusers. To quote the documentary"The Institute raises little predators."This material is still available for purchase freely.https://hubski.com/pub/466290https://hubski.com/pub/466290Drift-lab - Moonlighthttps://hubski.com/pub/469315https://hubski.com/pub/469315https://hubski.com/pub/466274https://hubski.com/pub/466274How it startedHow it's goingThe Texas Real Estate Advocacy and Defense Coalition, a landowner group, is pushing a measure to require state permits for renewables that would call for environmental assessments, notification of county officials within 25 miles and public meetings. The bill stalled, but a version was amended onto another measure being debated in the session’s waning days. “Some of these projects are five to ten thousand acres and they have zero permitting,” said Jessica Karlsruher, the group’s executive director.https://hubski.com/pub/466242https://hubski.com/pub/466242Come for the shady journalism around Swiss CoCo bonds, stay for the links to Putinhttps://darioitem.com/https://hubski.com/pub/466234https://hubski.com/pub/466234The problem is that R cannot in practice actually be used as a way to predict financial disasters. So unless we’re missing something it’s of questionable practical use, beyond as a new conceptual take on an ancient realisation: rate shocks often reveal financial faultlines.As the paper points out, the modelled R readings looked comfortably high in the late 1990s — until LTCM suddenly blew up. It was similarly sanguine in the noughties — right up until the global financial crisis erupted. https://hubski.com/pub/469312https://hubski.com/pub/469312https://hubski.com/pub/466174https://hubski.com/pub/466174https://hubski.com/pub/466139https://hubski.com/pub/466139https://hubski.com/pub/466137https://hubski.com/pub/466137“These increases in delinquencies are occurring while student-loan payments are still paused,” said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “When student-loan payments resume, one can expect delinquencies could well rise, not just in student loans but in other types of debt.”https://hubski.com/pub/466118https://hubski.com/pub/466118lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/466112https://hubski.com/pub/466112https://hubski.com/pub/466080https://hubski.com/pub/466080lil steve hockey!https://hubski.com/pub/465992https://hubski.com/pub/465992Before the Chudnovsky brothers built m zero, Gregory had to derive pi over the telephone network while lying in bed. It was inconvenient. Tapping at a small keyboard, which he sets on the blankets of his bed, he stares at a computer display screen on one of the bookshelves beside his bed. The keyboard and the screen are connected to Internet, a network that leads Gregory through cyberspace into the heart of a Cray somewhere else in the United States. He calls up a Cray through Internet and programs the machine to make an approximation of pi. The job begins to run, the Cray trying to estimate the number of times that the diameter of a circle goes around the periphery, and Gregory sits back on his pillows and waits, watching messages from the Cray flow across his display screen.https://hubski.com/pub/465980https://hubski.com/pub/465980https://hubski.com/pub/465976https://hubski.com/pub/465976I had an adventure from the year 2000 to the end of 2010 that assisted tens of millions of people watch pirated TV – and almost nobody in my daily life knows anything about it.https://hubski.com/pub/469281https://hubski.com/pub/469281https://hubski.com/pub/465956https://hubski.com/pub/465956Primal Code - White RiverAlfa Mist - 4th Febhttps://hubski.com/pub/469277https://hubski.com/pub/469277@llil@ steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465819https://hubski.com/pub/465819https://hubski.com/pub/465816https://hubski.com/pub/465816Even in our carefully ordered world, there remain avenues for chaos to thrive in its purest form: the wild pig. Groups of them, called sounders, cavort across golf courses at night like drunken teenagers. Security cameras catch them careering through suburban neighborhoods, where they dig up gardens and lawns. They create shambolic crop circles in fields—Texas’s agriculture industry alone suffers $118.8 million in damages annually. The most recent estimates suggest that tens of thousands of them are involved in car accidents each year. They affront us even in death, vandalizing graves as they barrel through cemeteries.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_Warhttps://hubski.com/pub/465792https://hubski.com/pub/465792Paradise Cove is nuts. You'd see the listings on Redfin and then you'd be all "but also there's $4k/mo rent" and you start to realize that you're looking at a tarted up thing on wheels and that was before things went completely batshit and now?A Marmol Radziner-designed mobile home is currently on the market for $3.995 million.https://hubski.com/pub/465758https://hubski.com/pub/465758I never saw this video before today.... I don't know what rock I was hiding under.https://hubski.com/pub/465652https://hubski.com/pub/465652Silly little tune I made today while playing hockey steve lilhttps://hubski.com/pub/469271https://hubski.com/pub/469271https://hubski.com/pub/465634https://hubski.com/pub/465634https://hubski.com/pub/465617https://hubski.com/pub/465617This is like the kerning of US architecture: once you see it you can’t un-see it.@holz_bau is interesting to follow if you are the kind of regularly enjoy well designed floor plans in your timelinehttps://hubski.com/pub/465609https://hubski.com/pub/465609lil steve I wrote some hockey prior to recording it for the first time in a long while. Meaning, I didn't make up something just to record. I wrote this on an acoustic early this morning and then recorded it tonight. I dig it. EnjoY!https://hubski.com/pub/465582https://hubski.com/pub/465582https://hubski.com/pub/465122https://hubski.com/pub/465122“I can say, ‘you’re a piece of s—!’ But if I say it with an upward fluctuation at the end of the sentence, the AI likes it."I have a 3CX phone system. I am certified to design them. It's perfect for what I need to do, also grossly outsized. I can handle 16 simultaneous calls but the system can be built out to thousands. It was designed for call centers, can also be used for hotels. I can put up a big-screen leaderboard of which of my top 50 agents for converting calls and I can arrange wake-up calls and room service. I don't do any of that but that's okay, the system is extensible and deeply customizable. It has API fingers into Salesforce, it has fingers into Zoho, it has fingers into Hubspot. It speaks to Google very easily - the fanciest thing I have it do is take calls that are routed to "page", have the system phone-pool all of my midwives, have it record their message, have it send that message to Google, have Google convert it from speech to text and then have the phone system simultaneously email a monitored inbox and text everyone in the pool so that my midwives get not one, not two, but three independent notifications that someone called and get a written summary of what they called about so they can look up their notes before they call the patient back. I can also "barge, listen and whisper": we have used this in limited quantities when we want one of our students to learn how to communicate with patients while having a midwife supervise and advise without the patient knowing our student has training wheels.So I could build this. me. It'd be easy. I'd route any phone call to the google speech-to-text as a "whisper" on every conversation. I'd take the output of that speech-to-text and feed it into chatGPT. I'd need the training data? but it sure as shit sounds like HomeServe USA just fuckin' rolled on it and is training as they go. Ultimately? It sucks working in a call center. It's the sort of job that you'd like to automate out of existence. But as with most automation, it's gonna be shitty for a while and the people who experience the worst of it are gonna be the people it's replacing. “I don’t think anything is off limits because we have to enable our customers to transact in whatever means they’re most comfortable,” said Mr. Rusin, the CEO. “So my philosophy is—automate everything. The choice will ultimately reside with the consumer.”Call centers are high-turnover shitholes. They've never not been. But there are also a half million people in the USA - 15 million worldwide - who rely on them to earn a living. And their jobs are going to get worse before they disappear - Comcast's AI is hilarious because the more you shout at it the faster you get a human. You can literally cut your wait time in half if you shout "NO FUCK YOU LEMME TALK TO A GODDAMN HUMAN" and then the human gets scored on how chipper they are while eating your shit. The ultimate goal of any call center operation has been to reduce headcount to zero. AI is not yet capable of doing that? But that won't stop companies from trying. If AI makes your job easier now, AI will make your job extinct later... and it will do it in an excruciating fashion.https://hubski.com/pub/465088https://hubski.com/pub/465088lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465087https://hubski.com/pub/465087Last Skinny Puppy show EVER at the Paramount. Fuck yeah I paid the scalper. It was supposed to be at the Neptune, which is the crappiest venue in Seattle, but it sold out in 15 minutes because apparently this here town really likes its howly abstract industrial.Gonna be playing a lot more Skinny Puppy on the show I tell you what.How influential is the band? Oscar winner Trent Reznor once described his first Nine Inch Nails single, “Down In It” as a “total rip-off” of Skinny Puppy’s “Dig It”. (One of the earliest versions of NIN toured with the group as the opening act in the late ’80s). And Vancouver-raised Grimes has called Skinny Puppy one of most important bands of her life.I bought this on VHS. It took six weeks to arrive. A bully that used to terrorize me stopped as soon as I painted a Skinny Puppy logo on the back of my leather jacket. Two weeks later he got Ogre's haircut. My daughter tried to make a Skinny Puppy logo balloon animal. It was epic. She's about due for her first concert... but i'm thinking it'll be Ladytron.https://hubski.com/pub/469098https://hubski.com/pub/469098I will make this into a song in July. On the road until then. Outside Your Home Town——You seem broken so soft spoken she saysAnd pushes the ashtray roundNothing is forbidden if you’re outside of your home town-Brandishing a smile she saysI’m too young to know her nameKissed me at the corner Like a thousand parades-I had only the trees to see meBreaking some ground uneven beneath me-Oh, how droll can a singer beWhen she’s knee deep in weedsAt the moments release yeahOh, you can’t run when your legs get stuckIn that deep southern mudWhere the critics all judge -Carrying a knapsack she saysIs the only way to flyBottles lined up on a fence That she never passes by-Landing see the summer sky Pinkishly turning redFoment while that moment keeps Dancing through my head -I had only the trees to see meBreaking some ground uneven beneath me-Oh, how droll can a singer beWhen she’s knee deep in weedsAt the moments release yeahOh, you can’t run when your legs get stuckIn the deep southern mudWhere the critics all judge -You seem broken So soft spoken she saysAnd pushes the ashtray roundNothing is forbidden If you’re outside of your home town-Outside of your homeTown..https://hubski.com/pub/469083https://hubski.com/pub/469083lil steve hockey. PS. I love you both.Lyrics were stream of consciousness:Today a thousand dollars will be spent onSomething you really don’t needThere’s someone knocking in every directionSometimes you really can’t feedI know I can sleep outside whereEveryone’s the sameI know I can sleep in sleep inDon’t remember your name I got up and saw over your shoulderSomething I really can’t missBetting too much on people I don’t knowCan make you feel quite Remiss I know I can sleep on the lawn whenSeeing soldiers come for my homeI’m not forgetting songs that I’ve sungJust carry themhttps://hubski.com/pub/469022https://hubski.com/pub/469022https://hubski.com/pub/468951https://hubski.com/pub/468951https://hubski.com/pub/468946https://hubski.com/pub/468946lil stevehttps://hubski.com/pub/468942https://hubski.com/pub/468942lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/468913https://hubski.com/pub/468913hockey was played. lil stevehttps://hubski.com/pub/468900https://hubski.com/pub/468900song I made. I really hate it. Like, a lot. lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/468886https://hubski.com/pub/468886steve lil I had such a blast making this. So So So much fun making hockey. For the record, I've never owned $1k shoes :)I was on a plane recently and was bored and penned this as a rap song. I think it is best listened to in the state it was recorded. So, get high. Also, headphones please. So much fun to make this one. @ecibhttps://hubski.com/pub/468865https://hubski.com/pub/468865My pal Kevin made this song and asked me to play on it. I play guitar (e-bow) and high vocals. Maybe some percussion too... I don't remember. I like this song though. It's particularly pretty when just played on the guitar and super simplified. But this version is fun too. Kevin's a good dude. Enjoy.https://hubski.com/pub/468863https://hubski.com/pub/468863lil steve this was fun. The second part is very different from the first. Enjoy. Love it’s aboutAll those things that can’t be bought It feels good till it goes out Without love you just stumble aroundGloves are off Now you have to understandBeen 20 Years and you still don’t understandA dozen houses and you still don’t understandWhat you have to do to treat me like a manGirl problems well it’s all our problem nowIt’s all I hear about when you are coming homeI know you do a lot but I do my part tooYou still don’t understand what you’re supposed to doConversation well it’s something I enjoyDiverse opinions that’s something I enjoy But you’re spoon fed what everyone is eatingYou shoot off bullet points from the pulpit they keep Feeding I supposed to care for what you care about I knowI’m supposed to want the things your wanting, this I knowBut half the things we have we have them for the showThe grass ain’t greener if you’re standing in the mudThe sky is falling your complaints hit like a thudWhen you have everything fine fault in all that’s goodSometimes some silent contemplation can be foodWake up early find you sleeping in the nude All the common questions heard them all beforeWhat’s the weather like, nothing I hate moreLet’s move to Europe no more problems to reportTurns out our problems have found their own passporthttps://hubski.com/pub/468849https://hubski.com/pub/468849lil steve this is a favorite song of mine, so I decided to destroy it. Was fun to record.https://hubski.com/pub/468830https://hubski.com/pub/468830lil steve hockey. Not a good one. But always fun to make something. mk this is the steaming pile of shit.https://hubski.com/pub/468825https://hubski.com/pub/468825steve lil I played some hockey. I really like parts of this. I wanted to record a full song and then take away everything but the vocals and then add in new instrumentation that is totally different than the original. This is the product of that process. It was cool. Fun. I'm getting more confident in recording my voice. I hope you two are well. I miss you guys.https://hubski.com/pub/468602https://hubski.com/pub/468602lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/468597https://hubski.com/pub/468597lil steveedited an earlier song. Still was some good hockey. Lyrics below:--Lily was burned aliveWhat kind of father am I?Her ashes reached into that Philly skyCarried your smell homeNow it hides in my roomTime to bury all the dark ones liesLick your lips for Happy, happier timesThe sun this trip is hard to findSit in my lapTell me you'll be there 'tilI fall asleep and can't taste wineErased the book I signedIt got dark outsideI started to feel something new, aliveComing out this raceFeel the coming daysArriving hooded with a single scythe We had a life I knowSeemed beautifulThere's an ocean out thereBeyond the bowlBeyond the bowl I knowIt's beautifulhttps://hubski.com/pub/468501https://hubski.com/pub/468501lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/468460https://hubski.com/pub/468460https://hubski.com/pub/468333https://hubski.com/pub/468333lil steve - Dig the ending guitar playing. Was fun. I need a band.https://hubski.com/pub/468322https://hubski.com/pub/468322lil steve hockeyI've got a lot of loversBut not a lot of friendsFlown a lot of placesBut never seem to landSee a lot of facesWalking through the crowdsThey never seem that kind at allI never seem to belongI want to stand aloneFeel your light on meI want to erase the book I signedAnd start again Scott freeYou never know the moments that pull you downA gravity of lust and soulEternity is a long time to barter with Better skip a mealhttps://hubski.com/pub/468258https://hubski.com/pub/468258My favorite Southern cooking: Chicken curryhttps://hubski.com/pub/468244https://hubski.com/pub/468244it me fr frhttps://hubski.com/pub/468230https://hubski.com/pub/468230Thank you Spotify for the random recommendation.and now you are all introduced to my favorite new weird audio obsession.I can't look awayhttps://hubski.com/pub/468162https://hubski.com/pub/468162steve lil hockey. Anyone want to add vocals? Be my guest :)https://hubski.com/pub/468151https://hubski.com/pub/468151https://hubski.com/pub/468142https://hubski.com/pub/468142crypto fixes this FIGHT MEbe Nikesee $2b in secondary market revenueput shoes on Polygonmake $200mSecondhand luxury products worth 45 billion euros, or $49.3 billion at current exchange rates, were sold worldwide in 2023, based on Bain & Company estimates. The resale market has roughly doubled in size in four years and is now equivalent to 12% of the value of the market for new personal luxury goods. Go ahead and tell me about your fucking databases again. Show me how the database, which has been around for 200 years, should obviously just be adopted to a problem that the luxury industry has just... not applied until now. You know. That industry where individual families can run a business across four hundred fucking uninterrupted years. Then tell me why they wouldn't just do what Nike did, considering it could make them an extraFiveBILLIONdollars a year.Come at me. fucking do it.https://hubski.com/pub/468147https://hubski.com/pub/468147https://hubski.com/pub/468141https://hubski.com/pub/468141So, imagine this scenario: You want to add a new light switch to a room. In the past, you would likely hire an electrician to put holes in your wall, run new wiring to a switch box and install the switch itself. In the future, a solar-powered switch compatible with the new wireless communication standards coming to connected devices could go anywhere you like, in any room of your house, and attach to the wall with little more than some removable adhesive.Multiply that scenario by every possible combination of sensors and switches that could be used in every industrial and commercial setting you can imagine, and you start to get an idea of just how much potential a humble indoor solar cell could unlock.https://hubski.com/pub/468130https://hubski.com/pub/468130don't care how boring this is for you I'ma need to refer to it a lot I reckonhttps://hubski.com/pub/468110https://hubski.com/pub/468110Note that No Man's Sky did the exact same fucking thing: the method is "fine you have to release when Sony says because they're fucking idiots who don't understand how anything works" followed by "and the proof of that is the conventional wisdom that 85% of your sales is in the first week." I have yet to play Phantom Liberty but I'm a little maudlin over the fact that CDPR had to abandon their game engine after Cyberpunk. It's a masterpiece for a certain type of person, and I'm that person.https://hubski.com/pub/468122https://hubski.com/pub/468122lil steve hockey I met a woman that was once in the US as an exchange student. She said her host brother was named, "Paco." She told me that Paco was, "mad rich," and he loved to gamble. He had a baby. That's all I knew. Then I asked what the exchange program was and she said, "I was in a mental breakdown program." And then the topic shifted. But I wrote this song based on the exchange. It was fun to make.https://hubski.com/pub/468095https://hubski.com/pub/468095https://hubski.com/pub/468090https://hubski.com/pub/468090https://hubski.com/pub/468080https://hubski.com/pub/468080https://hubski.com/pub/468074https://hubski.com/pub/468074This time of year is always a boon for me. I always come out of the previous year with increased hope and vigor. I was recently back in my home town for a funeral of a family member that lived to 96. It was a great life that ran its natural course. While back home I met up with some friends that are musicians. They are phenomenal players/writers but they rarely finish a song or release new material. After jamming with them, I sent them this Ben Franklin quote: Hide not your talents. They were made for us. What's a sundial in the shade?"Do any of you have any inspiring quotes that embody how you feel about heading into 2024?Onward!-TNGhttps://hubski.com/pub/468045https://hubski.com/pub/468045Got a banjo for Christmas. Never touched one in my life until 5 days ago, so this is kinda shitty. Learning. Happy New Year, all!https://hubski.com/pub/468042https://hubski.com/pub/468042https://imgur.com/a/5au6nN6Image ^In my family we draw names for Christmas. My father drew my name. He handmade my gift. It's a Tongue Drum. He made it from several woods, one of which is from his deceased friend, Dave. It was a very special gift. Incredibly thoughtful. It may be the best gift I've ever received for Christmas. I used it to record today. This is not a good song, but I just wanted to play around with capturing the sound and using various effects on it. Everything but the guitar/drums/vocals is the Tongue Drum. Probably 5 tracks of it. You can really hear it at the beginning and the middle breakdown section. I'm grateful. lil steve hockey!https://hubski.com/pub/467973https://hubski.com/pub/467973The gist is that 1) actually admin is the stupid kind of woke, not the faculty and 2) when the game is utilitarian, playing is a losing move.He doesn't ask whether not playing the utilitarian game results in losing any slower though.It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter.Outside observers mock job ads looking for scholars working on “anti-racist Shakespeare,” and these listings are frequently tortured and ridiculous. However, such ads do not always reflect the scholarly priorities of the professors on the hiring committees. Rather, they’re often a product of the plotting of superiors who care more about their university’s public-facing diversity data than they do the intellectual needs of the English department, the interests of its students, or the health of the discipline more broadly.https://hubski.com/pub/467949https://hubski.com/pub/467949Kanaan - Bourdonhttps://hubski.com/pub/467944https://hubski.com/pub/467944there are some bits that are easier to criticize than others but on the whole i thought this was pretty goodhttps://hubski.com/pub/467898https://hubski.com/pub/467898You wanna talk about burying the lede. This is boring but important so bear with me.(but don't take my word for it, play around)That humpy line there is how much money your money makes you. What you can earn just by giving your cash to something virtually risk-free like a bank or loaning your money out to a city to build roads or whatever. There's a historical perspective. now - before you get your panties in a twist, I want you to think about every document you have saved somewhere. I guarantee you 90% of them are receipts and contracts. People who don't pay attention get butt-hurt over the idea that we don't know how to make a Roman hamburger but we know how much it cost Pliny the Elder to get a car loan and the reason for that is people save their contracts. You may notice that for the last, oh, fifteen years or so, money hasn't been making much money. This is important because if your money isn't making much money, you need some other way to make money. Because in a capitalist, free-market society, money costs money.The money you earn minus the money you pay is your profit, and if you are a capitalist rentier, you don't do any work, you let your money do it. So far so good?NOWIf you can't make any money by sitting on your money, you have to do riskier shit with your money. Like loan it out to stupid companies that aren't making any money now, but if they take over the market they will jack up prices because they have a monopoly. Like, Amazon. Like, WeWork. Like, Spotify. It has been argued by smarter people than me that interest rates reflect the price of monopoly - the more money your money can make, the less likely you are to lend it to giant fucking companies looking to get giant-er. “Investors are increasingly impatient in 2023 for tech firms to start making money” Nvidia is at 25 right now.https://hubski.com/pub/467891https://hubski.com/pub/467891From the Economist's Leader (their editorials) this week, which points to the linked article:Few ideas are more unshakable than the notion that the rich keep getting richer while ordinary folks fall ever further behind. The belief that capitalism is rigged to benefit the wealthy and punish the workers has shaped how millions view the world, whom they vote for and whom they shake their fists at. It has been a spur to political projects on both left and right, from the interventionism of Joe Biden to the populism of Donald Trump. But is it true?Even as the suspicion of free markets has hardened, evidence for the argument that inequality is rising in the rich world has become flimsier. Wage gaps are shrinking. Since 2016 real weekly earnings for those at the bottom of America’s pay distribution have grown faster than those at the top. Since the covid-19 pandemic this wage compression has gone into overdrive; according to one estimate, it has been enough to reverse an extraordinary 40% of the pre-tax wage inequality that emerged during the previous 40 years. A blue-collar bonanza is under way.Across the Atlantic, such trends are more nascent, but still apparent. In Britain wage growth has been healthier at the bottom of the jobs market; in continental Europe wage agreements are building in higher increases for the lower paid. Long-running trends in inequality are being questioned, too. A decade ago Thomas Piketty, a French economist, became a household name by arguing that it had surged. Now increasing weight is being given to research which finds that, after taxes and government transfers, American income inequality has barely increased since the 1960s.All this can be discombobulating, not least when the prices you pay for food and energy have risen at an unusually fast pace. So ingrained is the idea that workers are suffering in today’s world that claiming otherwise is almost heretical; the dissenting inequality research has sparked an ill-tempered debate among economists.To understand what is going on, it helps to consider that the blue-collar bonanza is not just an artefact of the statistics: it makes intuitive sense, too. As we explain this week, three forces that shape labour markets—demand, demography and digitisation—have each shifted in ways that benefit workers.https://hubski.com/pub/467882https://hubski.com/pub/467882lil steve played hockey. Started recording this song about a guy that is invited to see some modern country band and although he hates modern country the girl that invited him is super hot. I was going to end the song with the guy ending up liking the music but my pal Ian told me that he actually had an experience like this and the music was so bad that he no longer found her attractive. It was so bad it repelled him. Said it was a Kenny Chesney concert. FWIW, I have heard some pretty great modern country songs. Pop rock with a twang. Anyways, was fun to make. Here are the lyrics:Seems like a waste of my timeStanding in this lineWhat do you want me to sayIt's not a band I'd see on any other dayBut you look so good and you feel so rightSo maybe just for one night I'll see someModern CountryYou got a fiddleOh, I want to diddle itShe got a banjoWearing a tight white tank topShe says, "Oh you gotta see this"Playing a jug like an asshole"You gotta hear this"Sings a song that mentions my home state (your home town)(Don't like modern country)I hear the first song that they playCan't look at you in the same wayhttps://hubski.com/pub/467855https://hubski.com/pub/467855https://hubski.com/pub/467833https://hubski.com/pub/467833lil steve hockeyDIdn't have time to finish this one. Would have edited more and put a guitar solo in the middle, added some organ, strings. Who knows...https://hubski.com/pub/467832https://hubski.com/pub/467832https://hubski.com/pub/467821https://hubski.com/pub/467821https://hubski.com/pub/467820https://hubski.com/pub/467820This is tobacco-settlement bad. Spitballing? To settle this the Attorneys General will want Zuck to voluntarily cede control at a minimum. They've got a dozen cited instances of Facebook going all this shit is bad for kids tho and Zuck going but it's good for profits steady on.https://hubski.com/pub/467765https://hubski.com/pub/467765https://hubski.com/pub/467754https://hubski.com/pub/467754lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467732https://hubski.com/pub/467732The lost ISS toolkit is now visible from Earth using only binoculars.https://hubski.com/pub/467639https://hubski.com/pub/467639steve lil I played hockey. Liked this one while making it but it sure is busy. Lyrics:When you're cutting yourself just to feel againEverything is going to be alrightWhen you're burning everything you've writtenEverything is going to be alrightWhen the last thing you want is right in front of youEverything is going to be alrightWhen you're counting your steps but they're meaninglessEverything is going to be alrightWhen your choices seem dirty, wrong and shiftlessEverything is going to be alrightMy grandad said he had two wolves fighting inside of himThe black world was full of hateThe white wolf was full of kindnessWhich will win, which will leave?The one that stays is the one you feedWhen you wake up sad and emptyEverything is going to be alrightWhen the black wolf is showing his teeth againEverything is going to be alrightFeed the white wolf and give it your attentionEverything is going to be alrightThe black wolf is coming...https://hubski.com/pub/467620https://hubski.com/pub/467620This song is dumb. lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467608https://hubski.com/pub/467608Black Josh - HabitatThrown - on the vergeTigran Hamasyan - To Negatehttps://hubski.com/pub/467605https://hubski.com/pub/467605SHRDLU is contemporary to the HAL-9000.[...] the famous dialogue with SHRDLU where you could pick up a block, and so on, I very carefully worked through, line by line. If you sat down in front of it, and asked it a question that wasn't in the dialogue, there was some probability it would answer it. I mean, if it was reasonably close to one of the questions that was there in form and in content, it would probably get it. But there was no attempt to get it to the point where you could actually hand it to somebody and they could use it to move blocks around. And there was no pressure for that whatsoever. Pressure was for something you could demo. Take a recent example, Negroponte's Media Lab, where instead of "perish or publish" it's "demo or die." I think that's a problem. I think AI suffered from that a lot, because it led to "Potemkin villages", things which - for the things they actually did in the demo looked good, but when you looked behind that there wasn't enough structure to make it really work more generally.-Terry Winograd, 1991https://hubski.com/pub/467601https://hubski.com/pub/467601https://hubski.com/pub/467572https://hubski.com/pub/467572lil steve played hockey. I enjoyed making the music and I dig the lyrics, vocals are bit wonky. Enjoy!So desperate for loveHe clung to a leafFloating on the breezeIt crumbled in his handsHe cried whileHe dancedTragedy struckAt the schoolWhere he workedEach shot it struckOut of luckOut of luck..So desperate for lovehttps://hubski.com/pub/467551https://hubski.com/pub/467551Vildhjarta - ylvaAlabaster Deplume - If You're Sure You Want Tohttps://hubski.com/pub/467514https://hubski.com/pub/467514https://hubski.com/pub/467503https://hubski.com/pub/467503lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467475https://hubski.com/pub/467475lil steve hockeyNow with lyrics for lil. Dont you come around here when you’ve got nothing sayWell, the bear came and ate the whole damn stateSpending all your time on these meaningless thingsYou used to think all of your efforts would bring so much change Well, somebody else can save itIt’s not my place to make changesLet the new generation maintain itWe gave you the tools to rearrange ithttps://hubski.com/pub/467470https://hubski.com/pub/467470lil steve HockeyI had a quick moment and recorded this. Background vocals are pretty awful. But it was fun to make.https://hubski.com/pub/467380https://hubski.com/pub/467380https://hubski.com/pub/467365https://hubski.com/pub/467365Worth another listen.thenewgreenhttps://hubski.com/pub/467343https://hubski.com/pub/467343https://hubski.com/pub/467180https://hubski.com/pub/467180https://hubski.com/pub/467159https://hubski.com/pub/467159Cumulus Frisbee - Fogrollerhttps://hubski.com/pub/467132https://hubski.com/pub/467132lil steve played hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467080https://hubski.com/pub/467080https://hubski.com/pub/467028https://hubski.com/pub/467028To track performance, the researchers fed ChatGPT 1,000 different numbers. In March, the premium GPT-4, correctly identified whether 84% of the numbers were prime or not. (Pretty mediocre performance for a computer, frankly.) By June its success rate had dropped to 51%.There was a time? When Intel ate shit for fucking up the 5th decimal place of long division in hardware.The growing dissatisfaction with Intel's response led to the company offering to replace all flawed Pentium processors on request on December 20. On January 17, 1995, Intel announced "a pre-tax charge of $475 million against earnings, ostensibly the total cost associated with replacement of the flawed processors." This is equivalent to $783 million in 2021.Know how you know a math coprocessor is fux0red? You run math on it. The SRT algorithm can generate two bits of the division result per clock cycle, whereas the 486's algorithm could only generate one. It is implemented using a programmable logic array with 2,048 cells, of which 1,066 cells should have been populated with one of five values: −2, −1, 0, 1, 2. When the original array for the Pentium was compiled, five values were not correctly downloaded into the equipment that etches the arrays into the chips – thus five of the array cells contained zero when they should have contained 2.Know how you know ChatGPT is fux0red? You turn it on.In response to questions about the new research, OpenAI said in a written statement: “When we release new model versions, our top priority is to make newer models smarter across the board. We are working hard to ensure that new versions result in improvements across a comprehensive range of tasks. That said, our evaluation methodology isn’t perfect, and we’re constantly improving it.”The whole of the world's stock markets this year are focused on how shiny the Magic 8-ball is, not whether it can predict the future. Which, fundamentally? means the markets don't care.Could the erosion of the ability to solve math problems be an unintended consequence of trying to prevent people from tricking the AI into giving outrageous responses?https://hubski.com/pub/466976https://hubski.com/pub/466976https://hubski.com/pub/466954https://hubski.com/pub/466954not a big enough fan to own much, but we've lost a solid voice.https://hubski.com/pub/466809https://hubski.com/pub/466809https://hubski.com/pub/466805https://hubski.com/pub/466805https://hubski.com/pub/466786https://hubski.com/pub/466786I wanted to record a country song. I made this. Not sure I succeeded. lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/466765https://hubski.com/pub/466765https://hubski.com/pub/466714https://hubski.com/pub/466714https://hubski.com/pub/466675https://hubski.com/pub/466675https://hubski.com/pub/466629https://hubski.com/pub/466629lil steve hip hop hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/466628https://hubski.com/pub/466628lil steve - hip hop hockey I’m trying to work on rapping more. It’s dumb. But fun.https://hubski.com/pub/466591https://hubski.com/pub/466591https://www.cnn.com/americas/live-news/titanic-missing-sub-oceangate-06-22-23#h_fb2ac2f64193e7f88e0e6f55247626f5https://hubski.com/pub/466549https://hubski.com/pub/466549lil steve Hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/466543https://hubski.com/pub/466543https://hubski.com/pub/466521https://hubski.com/pub/466521See title. What is the best place to ask this kind of question? Basically like https://www.reddit.com/r/findawebsite/https://hubski.com/pub/466512https://hubski.com/pub/466512I'm not affiliated with this group. I just thought it was super awesome.https://hubski.com/pub/466517https://hubski.com/pub/466517https://hubski.com/pub/466499https://hubski.com/pub/466499lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/466482https://hubski.com/pub/466482lil steve Hockey.https://hubski.com/pub/466368https://hubski.com/pub/466368They're only victims if they can hurt youhttps://hubski.com/pub/466340https://hubski.com/pub/466340So I believe we have some clarity.The Republicans have a new bill. It's not stupid. It basically argues that any financial actions should be treated as financial actions whenever money enters the system. More than that, it really leans into decentralization - that holy-of-holies that the crypto community holds as more important than air and yet tends to resist at all costs.The bill creates a definition of a decentralized network, in which a token could transition from being treated as a security to a commodity, an investment category with lower disclosure requirements.Under the current language of the bill, which is subject to further negotiation and change, a decentralized network would be one in which no person had control for at least a year prior, no issuer or decentralized organization owned more than 20 percent of the tokens affiliated with the network, and no marketing or issuance for the project was done in the three months prior to certification as a decentralized network.Any token issuances made within 12 months would also have to be to end users.Private sales of tokens for capital raises would still be allowed to help raise funds for projects well before the point at which they could be reclassified as decentralized. Those private sales, which already happen, would be allowed under the same framework as private securities offerings.The SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as federal markets regulators, would determine which projects qualify as decentralized. If a project became concentrated again, the SEC could take away the decentralized classification.It sets a framework for onboarding exchanges:If the bill as written were to become law, trading platforms for most tokens would also have a streamlined path to becoming registered as alternative trading systems with the SEC.And it carves out stablecoins:Payment stablecoins are exempted from securities designation, and McHenry and Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., have drafted legislation to create a comprehensive framework for that class of digital assets.If you look at the SEC's actions against Binance, and then run it through the FT's handy-dandy comparison chart, one thing becomes painfully clear:BIG FUNDING ROUND = SECURITYhttps://hubski.com/pub/466321https://hubski.com/pub/466321Surprise surprise it hugely benefits the wealthyhttps://hubski.com/pub/466284https://hubski.com/pub/466284lil steve - Hockey. Some nice moments in here, imo.https://hubski.com/pub/466280https://hubski.com/pub/466280Fun times.https://hubski.com/pub/466273https://hubski.com/pub/466273Against this backdrop, the relative calm that pervades markets seems puzzling to us. Volatility in equity, rates and credit markets appears relatively contained and well below March levels. Looking back to 2011, markets were also fairly calm before the X-date but subsequently registered sharp moves. In the three weeks after the resolution, the S&P 500 fell by over 12%, 10-year Treasury yields declined by 70bp and high yield bond index spreads widened by more than 160bp. In our view, these changes resulted in part from the fiscal contraction embedded in the agreement that resolved the 2011 debt ceiling impasse. We don’t know yet what the current resolution will entail and would caution against expecting a similar market reaction this time, especially in Treasury yields.https://hubski.com/pub/466269https://hubski.com/pub/466269lil steve made this hockey as a mea culpa for my kids. Do as I say, not as I dohttps://hubski.com/pub/466246https://hubski.com/pub/466246lil steve played hockey. b_b, This is what happens when I don't "write," the song. But had an hour and wanted to make something.https://hubski.com/pub/466227https://hubski.com/pub/466227https://hubski.com/pub/466184https://hubski.com/pub/466184https://hubski.com/pub/466149https://hubski.com/pub/466149lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/466116https://hubski.com/pub/466116https://hubski.com/pub/465981https://hubski.com/pub/465981I got four out of fucking tenThe cover image brings me so much joyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465977https://hubski.com/pub/465977We Need to Make Government Bigger - It’s Not What You Thinkhttps://hubski.com/pub/465972https://hubski.com/pub/465972So China's economic data has famously been... aspirational, shall we say. It says what the CCP wants it to say but you could scry information from it by looking at the story the CCP wanted to tell. Call it second-order economic data.Now the CCP is straight up saying "we're not telling." Which, in in combination with saying "and we can lock you up for whatever we want, whenever we want" is a great way to eliminate all foreign investment.https://hubski.com/pub/465889https://hubski.com/pub/465889The measure will expand the scope of the law -- now limited to state secrets -- to cover all documents, data, materials or items related to national security and interests. It does not provide further details on what constitutes national security and interests.https://hubski.com/pub/465820https://hubski.com/pub/465820lil steve I think I like this bit of hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465812https://hubski.com/pub/465812lil steve Hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465668https://hubski.com/pub/465668YO! stupid little thing I made. Pretty much one track takes all around. Feels live. No click.https://hubski.com/pub/465647https://hubski.com/pub/465647https://hubski.com/pub/465595https://hubski.com/pub/465595Fraud is of course the giant pixelated elephant in this particular paper. Barbon and Ranaldo don’t venture into causation, making only passing references to the likelihood that the sophisticated cohort disguise their intentions by running multiple wallets and avoid crashes by causing them. https://hubski.com/pub/465592https://hubski.com/pub/465592https://hubski.com/pub/465545https://hubski.com/pub/465545https://hubski.com/pub/465478https://hubski.com/pub/465478https://hubski.com/pub/465465https://hubski.com/pub/465465https://hubski.com/pub/465401https://hubski.com/pub/465401thenewgreen you gotta listen to this.I'm a little obsessed with this song. The fuzziness of the recording quality, throw on headphones and it feels like you're in the space with these guys. My understanding is these are demo tracks from a few guys sitting in a room around one microphone after they moved from Ohio to California.Almost 50 years after having these songs recorded people are able to listen to them. Shit.https://hubski.com/pub/465379https://hubski.com/pub/465379Bing chat is not a search engine; it's only playing the role of one. It's trained to predict internet text, and is filling in a search engine's lines in a hypothetical transcript between a user and a chatbot. It's drawing on all sorts of dialog examples from the internet, which is why it so frequently slips into internet argument mode. In its internet argument examples, the person being called out for an incorrect fact will usually double down and back up their position with more data.So when it mentioned a nonexistent AI Weirdness post on Battlestar Galactica and I challenged it, it invented a nonexistent separate AI Weirdness newsletter and finally a completely fabricated excerpt from it.https://hubski.com/pub/465364https://hubski.com/pub/465364Bought a new bass today. Game changer for recording. So much nicer. It's fun. Have a great weekend, all. Strange days ahead, me thinks. Onward!lil steve some rocking' hockey happened.https://hubski.com/pub/465321https://hubski.com/pub/465321I wrote this today. lil steveWhen you’re in the wrong situation All the worlds a big complicationThey’re all moving but you stay stationSee them passing byToo perfect to even try itWhen you feel like lifes just happeningWithout your say it just keeps happeningLook around see the same sad saps againSee them passing by too perfect to even try Lifes slipping away sonMaybe if you had some a kind of compassYou could right all the ships sonIf you had the right motivationYou could be a better person for themhttps://hubski.com/pub/465319https://hubski.com/pub/465319Faithfully steve lil hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465296https://hubski.com/pub/465296Fuck you you wash-trading sacks of shithttps://hubski.com/pub/465290https://hubski.com/pub/465290Who does it want us to root against?“Cocaine Bear”: I guess we are supposed to be rooting for the people? The bear bites a guy’s leg off! But it is hard not to root for Cocaine Bear, a bear who has done cocaine.“The Courage to Be Free”: Ron DeSantis has two enemies: anyone who disagrees with him (this includes the Elite, the media, Disney, the federal government and countless others) and the word “was.” He hunts down all instances of the verb “to be” and replaces them, mercilessly, with the verb “represent.” https://hubski.com/pub/465287https://hubski.com/pub/465287https://hubski.com/pub/465285https://hubski.com/pub/465285https://hubski.com/pub/465279https://hubski.com/pub/465279I had 30 minutes. Made this. Stream of consciousness vocals in real time. Recorded on guitar, one bass and drum track. Fun 30 minutes. lil stevehttps://hubski.com/pub/465256https://hubski.com/pub/465256My sister said she was singing this song today and tried to find it online. She only later remembered it was a song I wrote back in the 90's. I decided to record it for her. lil steve some nostalgic hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465233https://hubski.com/pub/465233lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465210https://hubski.com/pub/465210Nik Bärtsch Ronin - Modul 36Aleksandir & Leyla - String Gamehttps://hubski.com/pub/465198https://hubski.com/pub/465198This thread is exactly 1 year old:https://hubski.com/pub/465193https://hubski.com/pub/465193lil steve hope you two are well.https://hubski.com/pub/465184https://hubski.com/pub/465184https://hubski.com/pub/465170https://hubski.com/pub/465170lil steve Hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/465147https://hubski.com/pub/465147https://hubski.com/pub/465066https://hubski.com/pub/465066lil steve I enjoyed making this one too. This one made me feel happy. It's good to feel. Really like the part that says, "Gotta be love." Been enjoying writing horn/string parts. Miss you both. -Shttps://hubski.com/pub/446022https://hubski.com/pub/446022Speak to anyone that does programming...99 percent of the time in the conversation debugging will come up. It is hard. It's like telling a kid to do something and then trying to figure out why they are doing exactly what you told them to. But it's not what you want them to do. Ha!Or the late nights we as computer language interpreters spend to build a piece of code. So that the computer can do what we want it to do.Our internet history is full error searches, and why we getting specific errors. Deadlines creeping up, and your code is just not there yet (side note: I have a funny feeling that perfect code is a myth)Pushing to production praying that everything still works. and in the process of fixing one thing, you hopefully didn't break anything else. Which usually is the case.So why do I code, why put my self through so much pressure. Because for me it takes me somewhere else when I code time does not exist, I lose myself, the best feeling in the world. For those hours spend coding me and the computer are in sync, reality is just gone. I don't do it to escape reality but its a damn good feeling. And the best part is after everything, all the frustration and all the googling your code works. And there is no way for me to describe the feeling. But FUCK is it a good feeling. I have not found anything on planet earth as good as coding. Its the most frustrating but the best feeling in the world. Please I would like to ask all coders to give me your reason why you code? I would love to take this conversation further. Lekker