Hubski: AshleyRhttps://hubski.com/images/discussion.pnghttps://hubski.com/pub/468871https://hubski.com/pub/468871https://hubski.com/pub/468836https://hubski.com/pub/468836https://hubski.com/pub/468854https://hubski.com/pub/468854https://hubski.com/pub/468848https://hubski.com/pub/468848https://hubski.com/pub/468852https://hubski.com/pub/468852https://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/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/468833https://hubski.com/pub/468833https://hubski.com/pub/468815https://hubski.com/pub/468815https://hubski.com/pub/468829https://hubski.com/pub/468829Kelly Moran - Butterfly Phasehttps://hubski.com/pub/468834https://hubski.com/pub/468834https://hubski.com/pub/468826https://hubski.com/pub/468826https://hubski.com/pub/468791https://hubski.com/pub/468791https://hubski.com/pub/468758https://hubski.com/pub/468758https://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/468613https://hubski.com/pub/468613https://hubski.com/pub/468790https://hubski.com/pub/468790https://hubski.com/pub/468728https://hubski.com/pub/468728https://hubski.com/pub/468770https://hubski.com/pub/468770Night Beats- Bluehttps://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/468676https://hubski.com/pub/468676https://hubski.com/pub/468503https://hubski.com/pub/468503https://hubski.com/pub/468816https://hubski.com/pub/468816lil steve fucked around and played some hockey. weird one. different process for mehttps://hubski.com/pub/468680https://hubski.com/pub/468680https://hubski.com/pub/468593https://hubski.com/pub/468593Little Barrie - Free Salutehttps://hubski.com/pub/468741https://hubski.com/pub/468741https://hubski.com/pub/468734https://hubski.com/pub/468734Knocked Loose - Blinding Faithhttps://hubski.com/pub/468498https://hubski.com/pub/468498https://hubski.com/pub/468704https://hubski.com/pub/468704https://hubski.com/pub/468703https://hubski.com/pub/468703https://hubski.com/pub/468480https://hubski.com/pub/468480https://hubski.com/pub/468686https://hubski.com/pub/468686https://hubski.com/pub/468332https://hubski.com/pub/468332https://hubski.com/pub/468388https://hubski.com/pub/468388https://hubski.com/pub/468754https://hubski.com/pub/468754the internet was a mistakehttps://hubski.com/pub/468576https://hubski.com/pub/468576https://hubski.com/pub/468337https://hubski.com/pub/468337https://hubski.com/pub/468286https://hubski.com/pub/468286https://hubski.com/pub/468160https://hubski.com/pub/468160https://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/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/468701https://hubski.com/pub/468701https://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/468685https://hubski.com/pub/468685https://hubski.com/pub/468277https://hubski.com/pub/468277Meant to post this Sunday. Life is long and distracting.https://hubski.com/pub/468059https://hubski.com/pub/468059https://hubski.com/pub/467646https://hubski.com/pub/467646Greetings from the International District of Seattle.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/468056https://hubski.com/pub/468056https://hubski.com/pub/468285https://hubski.com/pub/468285Probably should start using AI.https://hubski.com/pub/468178https://hubski.com/pub/468178https://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/468036https://hubski.com/pub/468036https://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/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/468150https://hubski.com/pub/468150Rival Consoles - RecoveryGoon - Bend Back + Ochrehttps://hubski.com/pub/468558https://hubski.com/pub/468558https://hubski.com/pub/468200https://hubski.com/pub/468200https://hubski.com/pub/468310https://hubski.com/pub/468310https://hubski.com/pub/468091https://hubski.com/pub/468091Fake Pubski because someone has to, I guesshttps://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/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/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/467950https://hubski.com/pub/467950https://hubski.com/pub/468148https://hubski.com/pub/468148https://hubski.com/pub/468412https://hubski.com/pub/468412Ronin Rhythm Clan - Modul 22https://hubski.com/pub/468406https://hubski.com/pub/468406https://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/468214https://hubski.com/pub/468214Butcher Brown - EspionageFabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel - PoeiraConchúr White - Righteoushttps://hubski.com/pub/467896https://hubski.com/pub/467896https://hubski.com/pub/468062https://hubski.com/pub/468062I've Been Riding With the Ghost - Songs: OhiaNoisecream - Entropyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467984https://hubski.com/pub/467984https://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/467741https://hubski.com/pub/467741https://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/468306https://hubski.com/pub/468306https://hubski.com/pub/467828https://hubski.com/pub/467828https://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/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/467734https://hubski.com/pub/467734https://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/467778https://hubski.com/pub/467778https://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/467872https://hubski.com/pub/467872https://hubski.com/pub/468262https://hubski.com/pub/468262The irony of Business Insider covering "spam" "ruining the internet" is rich indeedhttps://hubski.com/pub/467619https://hubski.com/pub/467619https://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/467939https://hubski.com/pub/467939https://hubski.com/pub/467730https://hubski.com/pub/467730https://hubski.com/pub/468239https://hubski.com/pub/468239Filing this under “mental models for understanding how to utilize LLMs”.https://hubski.com/pub/467691https://hubski.com/pub/467691https://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/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/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/467885https://hubski.com/pub/467885https://hubski.com/pub/467884https://hubski.com/pub/467884Ebi Soda - Something to Do in the Futurehttps://hubski.com/pub/467753https://hubski.com/pub/467753lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467651https://hubski.com/pub/467651https://hubski.com/pub/468176https://hubski.com/pub/468176This is like the Waiting for Godot of tech journalism.https://hubski.com/pub/467624https://hubski.com/pub/467624https://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/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/467515https://hubski.com/pub/467515https://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/467292https://hubski.com/pub/467292https://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/467332https://hubski.com/pub/467332https://hubski.com/pub/467936https://hubski.com/pub/467936https://hubski.com/pub/467449https://hubski.com/pub/467449https://hubski.com/pub/467533https://hubski.com/pub/467533https://hubski.com/pub/467518https://hubski.com/pub/467518https://hubski.com/pub/467609https://hubski.com/pub/467609https://hubski.com/pub/467724https://hubski.com/pub/467724https://hubski.com/pub/467490https://hubski.com/pub/467490https://hubski.com/pub/467578https://hubski.com/pub/467578https://hubski.com/pub/467387https://hubski.com/pub/467387https://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/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/467662https://hubski.com/pub/467662https://hubski.com/pub/467824https://hubski.com/pub/467824https://hubski.com/pub/467069https://hubski.com/pub/467069https://hubski.com/pub/467823https://hubski.com/pub/467823Heurta - Aerial InterludeAlbrecht La'Brooy - Daybreakhttps://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/467644https://hubski.com/pub/467644https://hubski.com/pub/467636https://hubski.com/pub/467636https://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/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/467241https://hubski.com/pub/467241https://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/467463https://hubski.com/pub/467463https://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/467148https://hubski.com/pub/467148https://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/466999https://hubski.com/pub/466999https://hubski.com/pub/468007https://hubski.com/pub/468007https://hubski.com/pub/466996https://hubski.com/pub/466996https://hubski.com/pub/467552https://hubski.com/pub/467552https://hubski.com/pub/467412https://hubski.com/pub/467412https://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/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/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/466724https://hubski.com/pub/466724https://hubski.com/pub/466872https://hubski.com/pub/466872https://hubski.com/pub/466329https://hubski.com/pub/466329https://hubski.com/pub/467168https://hubski.com/pub/467168https://hubski.com/pub/467512https://hubski.com/pub/467512https://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/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/467495https://hubski.com/pub/467495https://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/467324https://hubski.com/pub/467324https://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/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/466643https://hubski.com/pub/466643https://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/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/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/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/466991https://hubski.com/pub/466991https://hubski.com/pub/466558https://hubski.com/pub/466558https://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/467124https://hubski.com/pub/467124https://hubski.com/pub/466878https://hubski.com/pub/466878https://hubski.com/pub/467100https://hubski.com/pub/467100Citizen - Dive into My Sunhttps://hubski.com/pub/467095https://hubski.com/pub/467095https://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/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/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/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/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/466776https://hubski.com/pub/466776https://hubski.com/pub/467482https://hubski.com/pub/467482https://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/467478https://hubski.com/pub/467478https://hubski.com/pub/467230https://hubski.com/pub/467230https://hubski.com/pub/467758https://hubski.com/pub/467758https://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/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/468501https://hubski.com/pub/468501lil steve hockeyhttps://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/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/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/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/467736https://hubski.com/pub/467736Johnny Booth - Full Tilt Jan Jelinek - Tendencyhttps://hubski.com/pub/467173https://hubski.com/pub/467173https://hubski.com/pub/467436https://hubski.com/pub/467436https://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/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/465995https://hubski.com/pub/465995https://hubski.com/pub/465558https://hubski.com/pub/465558https://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/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/465892https://hubski.com/pub/465892https://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/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/468460https://hubski.com/pub/468460https://hubski.com/pub/466362https://hubski.com/pub/466362https://hubski.com/pub/465363https://hubski.com/pub/465363https://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/467663https://hubski.com/pub/467663Silent Planet - OffworlderKansas - Dust in the Windhttps://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/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/466685https://hubski.com/pub/466685AI is such a scamhttps://hubski.com/pub/466035https://hubski.com/pub/466035Mega lol. But still, I read it, so I guess they win.https://hubski.com/pub/466286https://hubski.com/pub/466286http://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org/downloads/Rural_Hospitals_at_Risk_of_Closing.pdfhttps://hubski.com/pub/465757https://hubski.com/pub/465757https://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/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/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/464847https://hubski.com/pub/464847https://hubski.com/pub/466927https://hubski.com/pub/466927https://hubski.com/pub/467288https://hubski.com/pub/467288Congi - Spoken Word {K-Lone Remix}Ashez - Sound {Chumra Remix}https://hubski.com/pub/466913https://hubski.com/pub/466913Quentin Dujardin - CondrozJohnny Booth - The LadderThe Breathing Effect & quickly, quickly - Guitarshttps://hubski.com/pub/465049https://hubski.com/pub/465049https://hubski.com/pub/465850https://hubski.com/pub/465850Original publication: Ptolemy’s treatise on the meteoroscope recovered.Tangentially related: https://hubski.com/pub/466461https://hubski.com/pub/466461https://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/463530https://hubski.com/pub/463530https://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/467592https://hubski.com/pub/467592https://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/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/465426https://hubski.com/pub/465426https://hubski.com/pub/464601https://hubski.com/pub/464601I maintain - we did this thing in March 2020 where we said "obviously you need money to stay alive; obviously we need you to stay home in order to stay alive, so here's money." And once we did that thing? We revealed to EVERYONE that underpaying and overworking is a choice, not an outcome of the system. And the minute you show someone you are choosing to fuck them over, they choose not to get fucked anymore.A group of first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. complained to bank leaders last year that they were working an average of 95 hours a week and that job stress had harmed their physical and mental health. “When I was an associate, if someone called me on vacation, I was just happy people were continuing to call me,” says Stephen Zubiago, chief executive and managing partner of Nixon Peabody. “I don’t know if that was the right mind-set.” Stephen graduated Brown in 1988, Marquette in 1991. A Motorola StarTac was probably his third or fourth cell phone.For time-sensitive work, like researching case law or reviewing documents by a deadline, that can create a “huge staffing problem,” he says. "According to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), only 63% of law graduates from the class of 2015 obtained full time, bar passage required employment."For much of her career, Mary Waisanen, a 43-year-old structural engineering technician in Virginia Beach, Va., would say yes when asked to work overtime to meet deadlines. The extra hours brought her a pay bump. But after watching TikToks about how to reach a healthy work-life balance, she says, she realized that she shouldn’t need to work extra hours to make ends meet.They got us to forget the social contractShe recently asked her manager to review her salary and see if she was due a raise, as well as for a performance review—which would be her first in three years. And when we woke up...“Until then,” she says, “I will make more of an effort to ‘act my wage,’ ” referencing a phrase that’s gone viral on social media and encourages workers to do solely what they are compensated for. Ms. Waisanen says she has since received a letter stating she will receive a 12.5% raise in 2023.Negotiating like a real shark there, Mary. Cost-of-living is up 15% over the time you didn't get a raise, but by putting your foot down you managed to not quite close the gap.What could prompt a widespread return of professional ambition? A severe economic downturn that sends unemployment soaring might make workers feel they need to work harder to show their value. Now, so many people want to take time off in the summer and around the winter holidays that Ms. Dockendorf says she is considering shutting down the entire office for a week twice a year. That would require telling clients far in advance to expect dark weeks, she says.Just for the record, there is an eight week period during which I cannot buy motorcycle parts... because while the parent company is Chinese, the factory is Italian.These days, many workers are content doing the same job they’ve done, Mr. Diamantaras says. The pay is comfortable, the company is stable and many workers want to make time for friends and activities: “That’s OK, but you have to have people—we constantly look for people—who have drive, that we feel like we can promote to higher-paying jobs in the organization.” Can I put on my pointy-haired-boss hat for a minute? We basically see two types of workers - those who want to do more, and those who don't. Don't care what your professional skills are, don't care what your level of ambition is - your job is not your life and you may have grand ambitions outside of work but when I'm paying you? You wanna show up, sit down, and plow through the tedium I stack in front of you. And if I demand more than you're willing to give up, I'm the asshole. On the other hand, if you're someone who wants to do more, it behooves me to recognize that your time with me will be limited to that which fulfills your ambition and the best thing I can do is send you off into the world better than you came in because we'll meet again, guaranteed.This shit is fundamental, but American-style capitalism presupposes that if you aren't willing to be ground to dust you don't deserve a paycheck and it's fucking hilarious to me whenever the WSJ runs one of these "beatings will continue until morale improves" thinkpieces. In a recent job listing for a property-and-casualty insurance agent, TGS laid out those expectations: “If you’re just OK with getting by, or are a ‘quiet quitter,’ this will be too fast paced for you. We’re looking for people that want a new Mercedes.” lolU.S. labor productivity, as measured by how much the typical worker gets done in an hour, fell at a 5.9% annual rate in the first quarter of 2022—its steepest decline in more than a decade. It fell 4.1% in the second, before rising at a 0.8% pace in the third. Some economists believe worker disengagement is one factor in recent declines. Productivity can also be affected by hiring trends and the state of the economy.  It's a goddamn mysteryMany workers say they see little connection between working hard and being rewarded. About half of the 1,071 respondents to a May survey by The Wall Street Journal and NORC at the University of Chicago said they don’t have a good chance of improving their standard of living, compared with 27% who said they do. The 27% figure was a 20 percentage-point drop from a year earlier. About 60% said they were pessimistic about most people’s ability to achieve the American dream. We call that "burying the lede"Growing up, Austin Wiggins saw his father work long hours as a manager at a regional grocery chain, without ascending to the store-director level. Doing so, his father, Daniel Wiggins, says, would have meant possibly moving to a store location further from family, which he didn’t want. In May, just before he started a new accounting job, the younger Mr. Wiggins asked his dad to cosign a loan to buy a 2020 Toyota Camry. Mr. Wiggins says he was taken aback when he saw his dad’s salary, required for the loan. It was under six figures, and not far above what he was going to make as a 23-year-old recent graduate, he says. “I know how many hours he’s put in, how much he’s given to this company,” Mr. Wiggins says. “There’s not compelling enough correlation to make me become the person that’s going well above and beyond what I need to do.” https://hubski.com/pub/465684https://hubski.com/pub/465684https://hubski.com/pub/465660https://hubski.com/pub/465660https://hubski.com/pub/466291https://hubski.com/pub/466291https://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/464500https://hubski.com/pub/464500Yes I try to make this post each year. Yes every time I’m apt least two thirds inebriated. May this year be your year to grow!edit: I didn’t take a good fireworks pic, here’s a fitting 2022 image I made instead?https://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/465594https://hubski.com/pub/465594https://hubski.com/pub/464928https://hubski.com/pub/464928FACT: The Chinese have overflown the US with balloons before.FACT: Chinese spy balloons have been publicly documented as far back as 2020 over Japan.FACT: The United States used the shit out of balloons during the Cold War.FACT: The Soviets discovered that the best way to do anything about it was build custom planes.FACT: Weather balloons require reflectors to be visible to radar.FACT: The Soviets gave up on radar and relied principally on optical detection. (2 links up)A special electro-optical sight was made for the M-17, able to detect a balloon with a diameter of around 100 feet from a distance of 19-25 miles and then automatically track it. The laser rangefinder coupled with it had a range of 5 miles. FACT: The Soviets eventually gave up on projectile weapons and tested lasers.The first experimental A-60, known as the Izdeliye 1A, made its first flight on August 19, 1981, with Yevgeniy Lakhmostov at the controls. The aircraft’s laser gun was housed in the cargo hold. On the fuselage spine, there was a large fairing, covering a mirror system, by which the laser ray was directed onto the target. The gun had a range of 25 miles and was able to ‘shoot’ for a total of 50 seconds, at least according to the design specification; reportedly, the actual firing time was only 11 seconds. FACT: The US also tested aircraft-based laser weapons in the '80s.FACT: In 2018, the USAF commissioned a development project called "Irascible Pod" for testing on the U-2.SPECULATION: IRASCIble Pod = Illumination/Refraction for AeroStat CounterIntelligence. C'mon. Y'all know we've done worse.SPECULATION: We needed an excuse to deploy our 70,000ft ceiling, 400kt, 14-hour-flight-duration, LIDAR-equipped, CO2-laser-bearing balloon hunter-killer and we got it over the weekend.https://hubski.com/pub/468333https://hubski.com/pub/468333lil steve - Dig the ending guitar playing. Was fun. I need a band.https://hubski.com/pub/464894https://hubski.com/pub/464894I've dropped the movie ball in recent years and I'm slowly picking up the pieces. I can find 100 best-of listicles so what I'm really after are those that totally captivated you for whatever reason - or surprised you, or disturbed you or left you stunned in your seat and contemplating it for the next week. I'm not really into blockbusters, but something popular and quirky like Everything, Everywhere All At Once (already seen it though) is very welcome. If you're unapologetically gushing about Top Gun: Maverick... I will watch it. Give me your faves from the past 4-5 years but... you know I'm flexible.https://hubski.com/pub/466667https://hubski.com/pub/466667I don't know exactly what is happening but the physicists are excitedhttps://hubski.com/pub/466648https://hubski.com/pub/466648https://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/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/465180https://hubski.com/pub/465180https://hubski.com/pub/465487https://hubski.com/pub/465487https://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/465811https://hubski.com/pub/465811https://hubski.com/pub/466165https://hubski.com/pub/466165https://hubski.com/pub/464225https://hubski.com/pub/464225I’m on a long walk. It’s sunny and cold. I’m meeting my brother, yes thenewgreen, that brother. I have prepared a bunch of questions for him, including this one: Of all the screenplays you’ve written, from Meatballs to Private Parts to Beethoven Two and on, is there a character that you most identified with?I’ll report back later, but my main point is this: it’s good to get away from the flaming chariots of our minds and go outside. I once posted here a poetry challenge called Go Outside. Great submissions. I’ll check archives later.Found it: https://hubski.com/pub/463594https://hubski.com/pub/463594https://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/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/466538https://hubski.com/pub/466538because of course they dohttps://hubski.com/pub/465331https://hubski.com/pub/465331https://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/464916https://hubski.com/pub/464916https://hubski.com/pub/466037https://hubski.com/pub/466037https://hubski.com/pub/466422https://hubski.com/pub/466422https://hubski.com/pub/464843https://hubski.com/pub/464843https://hubski.com/pub/467452https://hubski.com/pub/467452https://hubski.com/pub/464260https://hubski.com/pub/464260It’s been a while since the last book thread. Anything nice you’ve read recently? Or even this year? I’ve been totally sucked in, perhaps way late, with “the poisonwood bible”. Not even my kind of book generally, would not have picked it off a shelf. But it was recommended in my favorite podcast “Heavyweight “ on the last episode and I picked it up from the library. I feel I haven’t been this engrossed in a book for a loooong time. It’s Congo’s decolonisation through the eyes of 5 women that came live in a rural village as wife and children of an American preacher. Any “coup de cœur “ for you lately?https://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/465593https://hubski.com/pub/465593Predictions are hard, especially about the future, as the man once said.https://hubski.com/pub/465221https://hubski.com/pub/465221https://hubski.com/pub/464533https://hubski.com/pub/464533Those of you who know me know I have a blog called Lil's Book of Questions that I kept during a dark time. For a while Hubski had a mirroring feature so that comments on hubski were magically mirrored on the blog. There were many comments. They disappeared from the blog, but might still be in the amazing hubski archives.In fact, here's a blog I wrote for Hubski after the infamous Detroit meet-up,I still love questions. New Year's Eve, I had a small gathering including an improv comedy trainer/doctor, a dub poet from Jamaica, and an activist rabbi. Here are the questions we discussed. I asked each person to pick a number from 1-12, then read their question.1. What are you curious about (for 2023)?2. What are you worried about (for 2023)?3. Are you open to being more known in 2023 (to your choice of human)?4. Do you have any resentments that you can let go of in 2023?5. Do you have a philosophy of [your occupation, whatever it is]? Are you considering re-evaluating any of it in 2023?6. Do you remember discovering that you were valuable and worthwhile?7. What success are you still proud of?8. What are you grateful for today?9. What idea or attitude did you once believe that you later discovered was false?10. When you realize that everything is made up – all religions, nations, ideas, philosophies - made up by people trying to understand how to live in the world – what then do you believe? What belief system do you follow, or do you make up your own?11. What questions do you have about yourself that you’d like answered in 2023?12. How would you like to be more effective in 2023?I'd love to see your answers to any of these.https://hubski.com/pub/464524https://hubski.com/pub/464524separation of YAM-5 at 1:30:31.https://www.loftorbital.com/whatwedog2g, flying a spacecrafthttps://hubski.com/pub/466380https://hubski.com/pub/466380https://hubski.com/pub/465190https://hubski.com/pub/465190https://hubski.com/pub/467438https://hubski.com/pub/467438lil steve 🏒https://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/464423https://hubski.com/pub/464423I'ma take my victory lap.After years and years of "ZOMFG THIS IS HOW HITLER HAPPENS" and "If Lebanon, then USA" and "If Hungary, then USA" and "If Italy, then USA" and "beer hall Putsch Putsch Putsch" and everyone inflicting exactly one Hannah Arendt quote on anyone who listened, EveryoneCan ShutThe FuckUp.The January 6th Report Takeaway: Trump Incited the Riot The Select Committee estimates that in the two months between the November election and the January 6th insurrection, President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, seeking to overturn State election results. This included at least:  68 meetings, attempted or connected phone calls, or text messages, each aimed at one or more State or local officials; 18 instances of prominent public remarks, with language targeting one or more such officials; and 125 social media posts by President Trump or senior aides targeting one or more such officials, either explicitly or implicitly, and mostly from his own account. Furthermore, these efforts by President Trump’s team also involved two other initiatives attempting to enlist support from large numbers of State legislators all at once: The Trump Campaign contacted or attempted to contact, nearly 200 State legislators from battleground States between November 30, 2020 and December 3, 2020, to solicit backing for possible Statehouse resolutions to overturn the election. At least some messages said they were “on behalf of the president.” Nearly 300 State legislators from battleground States reportedly participated in a private briefing with President Trump, Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, and others on January 2. The president reportedly urged them to exercise what he called “the real power” to choose electoral votes before January 6, because, as President Trump allegedly said on the call, “I don’t think the country is going to take it.” The Final Campaign: Inside Donald Trump’s sad, lonely, thirsty, broken, basically pretend run for reelection“It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing it’s gone. The magic is gone,” an adviser said. “When Seb Gorka and Raheem Kassam and Kash Patel and Devin Nunes are your stars, that’s the D-list. It was D-list MAGA. When Brick Man — that freak, Brick Man — is in the VIP seating, we’ve got a problem.” Brick Man is a man who wears a suit made of fabric with — you guessed it — a brick pattern. The bricks symbolize the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He wandered around the ballroom offering interviews to reporters. I have a high tolerance for this kind of shit, obviously, and I could not. “If you’re looking for an indication of how bad things are going,” the adviser added, “it’s Brick Man not just being there but being in the VIP section. Don Jr.’s not there!”Bannon’s speech is complicated, for all that it sounds like it was written with a testosterone shot as a pen. He is screaming for war. He is invoking the revolution. He is calling for the imprisonment of everyone in the intelligence community who prevented Trump from seizing power in 2020. Bannon claims not just one stolen election but two: that Russiagate deprived Trump of the ability to do all the Trumpy things he wanted to do. This is an aggressively pro-Trump speech.Except Bannon’s speech too uses the past tense for the former president._______________________________________________We now have an 800-page congressional report that says, in plain English, that Donald Trump AND ALL HIS FOLLOWERS did EVERYTHING THEY COULD TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT. For MONTHS. Speaking as someone with a perverse attraction to political instability, the United States withstood more internal political pressure than ANY OTHER GOVERNMENT I KNOW OF without breaking. If you include the fucking Russians? External pressure, too. One of two political parties tried to flush democracy down the goddamn toilet and FAILED because enough normies in the halls of bureaucracy just want a fucking reliable paycheck.Although the committee is right to laud the Republicans who testified, it must be said that most of them only spoke up long after the fact. And mostly when their own personal prospects were threatened. And some refused to speak at all. The report pointedly notes that Mike Pence refused to speak with the committee. Yet Cheney describes him as someone who “worked to defeat many of the worst parts of Trump’s plan to overturn the election.”It’s an ugly quirk of this period of American history that people like Pence can be recognized for stepping away from the shattered-glass, ketchup-dripping, feces-smeared mess they helped Trump create, without lifting a finger to do any meaningful clean-up.This was not a republic saved by a few good people doing good things. This is a republic saved by inertia, saved by apathy, saved by bureaucracy, saved by the selfish self-interests of a million men in gray. But save it they did? He had wanted to be in the movie business. It’s important to never forget this about him. He watches Sunset Boulevard, “one of the greatest of all time,” again and again and again. A silent-picture star sidelined by the talkies, driven to madness, in denial over her faded celebrity. When he was a businessman, he showed it to guests aboard his 727. When he was president, he held screenings of it for White House staff at Camp David.He once showed it to his press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who later described how “the president, who could never sit still for anything without talking on the phone, sending a tweet, or flipping through TV channels, sat enthralled.” And he once showed it to Tim O’Brien, the biographer, who wrote that when Norma Desmond cried, “Those idiot producers. Those imbeciles! Haven’t they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them. I’ll be up there again, so help me!,” Trump leaned over O’Brien’s shoulder and whispered, “Is this an incredible scene or what? Just incredible.”A washed-up star locked away in a mansion from the 1920s, afraid of the world outside, afraid it will remind him that time has passed … Well, he does not like the way it sounds for Trump. He still talks that way, in the third person. “This was the same thing in 2016. They said first, ‘Oh, Trump is just doing it for fun,’ and then they learned that wasn’t true,” he told me. “And then they said, ‘Well, he won’t win.’ And they learned that wasn’t true.”There's a world of fucking difference between writing Mein Kampf while serving five years for failing to overthrow the government the first time and playing golf while awaiting prosecution for "at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, seeking to overturn State election results."I've been bringing up Oswald Mosley a lot. Go ahead and search. 'cuz I'm done. From here on out I'm gonna bring up this. The United States is the most inertia-filled democratic republic the world has ever seen, for better or worse. If nothing else, it makes it really fucking hard to knock over.In the interview with Maron, the President, confronting frustrations with the fact that he wasn’t able to alter the world with the wave of a rhetorical wand, offered an alternative view of how big democratic societies work. They are, he said, like ocean liners: you turn the wheel slowly, and the big ship pivots. “Sometimes your job is just to make stuff work,” Obama said. “Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were. At the moment, people may feel like we need a fifty-degree turn; we don’t need a two-degree turn. And you say, ‘Well, if I turn fifty degrees, the whole ship turns’ ” over. Note that the President wasn’t saying that big ships aren’t worth turning, just that it takes time. Their very bigness is what makes them turn slowly, but their bigness is also what makes them worth turning.Liberal In Chiefhttps://hubski.com/pub/464720https://hubski.com/pub/464720https://hubski.com/pub/465061https://hubski.com/pub/465061https://hubski.com/pub/462321https://hubski.com/pub/462321You guys are like the cool distant cousins I once grew up with, haven't seen in ages since I was a kid, and have always wanted to emulate. I've always been around but haven't found it in me to check in, so if you have the time-- shoot me an update in the comments on how you've been and what sort of butt you've been kicking. For me, I've come a really, really long way in the last few years. In the last 6 months especially. I'm sure you've come a long way too. I'm actually proud of myself for the first time in a long time, not for any specific achievement, but for a general feeling of upward trajectory-- a sense of confidence in the deficiencies I've identified in myself, and in the ways I'd like to heal and develop them. I walked away from a long, content, and unfulfilling relationship. I learned a lot, and I'm grateful for it. I left after finally learning my lesson about the importance of upholding my values and the lines you draw that define your self-respect, self-esteem, and integrity. I was able to do that because I built a beautiful, tough, and authentic group of friends up in Fairbanks, Alaska the last year and a half. They have supported me and supported each other through a consistent round-robin of ups and downs. Having friends like these as a resource is something I've never known, and it might just be the most valuable thing in my world right now. I've done well so far in my career, I have the trust and respect of my subordinates and the confidence of my superiors. Most importantly I'm able to show up to work, make shit happen, un-fuck my peers so they can make shit happen too, and give my people a sense of purpose as part of a team along with ambitions to motivate them into their future. Turns out you don't need role models if you have counterparts that make you want to be and do the best you can. Alaska is a wild place. I mean that in every sense of the word. It has no care for human preference, opinion, or comfort. It's simply not our land. It's the land of the grizzly bear, the mama moose and endless wilderness that you are invited to see, but not touch. In the winter, at -40F degrees, I've been out in the mountains and seen the northern lights dancing with the force and the grace that'll make you question everything you ever thought was possible in the universe. I want to make sure my kids are able to experience all of this as a general vaccine for cynicism. I'm deploying to Kuwait on Friday, where I'll generally be working until this time next year, and then I'll return to Alaska. Nothing beats an all-expenses paid trip from the coldest place on earth to the hottest. Thanks for reading the highlights of my last few. Your turn!https://hubski.com/pub/464358https://hubski.com/pub/464358https://hubski.com/pub/463679https://hubski.com/pub/463679Let's start with the recipe: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/extra-tangy-sourdough-bread-recipeChanges: No overnight refrigeration (yes overnight rise); added rosemary (eyeballed)That's the dough before the overnight riseAnd that's after the overnight rise! Ignore the paddle attachment for the kitchenaid, the dough hook was used to make this after the extra flour, salt, and rosemary added. All shaped up and ready for the second rise. And yes, I've failed y'all by not getting a post-rise picture there :( So next is the actual final product. It's done a lot of growth in the oven. According to King Arthur Baking, it's a sign of underproofing. It looks a bit ludicrous, but it's damn delicious so judge away you don't get to eat it. That last one makes it look more bowed than it is, it's really flat on bottom, just a little bulbous at the ends thanks to my inexperienced and shitty shaping skills. Look at that beauty dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegarFoveauxhttps://hubski.com/pub/465843https://hubski.com/pub/465843https://hubski.com/pub/467418https://hubski.com/pub/467418Matthew Halsall - An Ever Changing Viewhttps://hubski.com/pub/465825https://hubski.com/pub/465825Myna Cycles - Sun GlimmersBotch - To Our Friends in the Great White Northhttps://hubski.com/pub/464973https://hubski.com/pub/464973For fun and pulp I'm deep in Warhammer 40k novels until the final novel of the Horus Heresy series comes out sometime this year. Specifically, the novel Titandeath by Guy Haley has been really enjoyable because of its great mix of giant robot on giant robot action and a series of more personal sections showing the conflict and cooperation of woman and machine, man and machine. I think that it gives a lot of flavor and depth to something that started out as a way to sell plastic toys and has become a series of more than 500 books, shorts, audio dramas and more by a ton of different very talented authors. I'm gonna continue to talk about 40k because there's never been a better time to get into it.For something more substantial I was listening to an interview with a history professor who said his favorite two books that he assigns every level of student he teaches are War and Peace and a book I hadn't heard of called Buddenbrooks by Thomas MannBuddenbrooks is subtitled: The Decline of a Family. I'm looking forward to getting into it.Anyway.What are you reading?https://hubski.com/pub/464934https://hubski.com/pub/464934Kjjjjjjjjj - NaomesqueSophia - Gunshttps://hubski.com/pub/468258https://hubski.com/pub/468258My favorite Southern cooking: Chicken curryhttps://hubski.com/pub/466243https://hubski.com/pub/466243https://hubski.com/pub/462431https://hubski.com/pub/462431steve thenewgreen mk and so many more friends. It’s called My Brain Tumour: A ComedySettle in.https://hubski.com/pub/464586https://hubski.com/pub/464586I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: if you believed – really, truly believed – that the opposing party was a satanic cult of pedophiles and puppet-masters who are actively working to destroy America by renouncing God and castrating your children for sick sexual pleasure – wouldn’t you do everything you could to win?Would you consider, even for an instant, compromising with something that demonic?The Freedom Caucus has no interest in governing. No interest in politics or compromise: not with McCarthy, not with the party, certainly not with the Democrats. They want to restore their twisted version of an imaginary America. They want to crush evil. They want war.I don't entirely agree with Jedeed on this. The jihadis can be as hate-hearted as they want, ultimately they have to earn re-election every two years. MTG was re-elected in a walk but Boebert was down to the wire; unless the Republicans have managed to gerrymander the country not just in conservative favor but also vitriolic, reactionary favor they will eventually outrun their supply lines. But I do think that the Democrats have slipped from being the near enemy to the far enemy to the cosmic enemy. The Republicans are too busy fighting themselves to really have the focus for national politics for at least a cycle.https://hubski.com/pub/464202https://hubski.com/pub/464202I am so damn grateful for Hubski archives. I have left many parts of myself in the hubski archives -- and they're still there (for now). I take nothing for granted.4140 days ago, I was searching for the Higgs Boson, but found Hubski instead -- and was busy there for another 1,800 or so days. Anyway, I was just needing to find a poem that I posted 1750 approx days ago.I miss you all, and I miss my hubski self as well -- but I have far less restless longing now.More to say -- another time.https://hubski.com/pub/465306https://hubski.com/pub/465306https://hubski.com/pub/466795https://hubski.com/pub/466795Goon - Emily SaysWardown - Ferrichttps://hubski.com/pub/464541https://hubski.com/pub/464541https://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/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/463772https://hubski.com/pub/463772I don't use the internet the same anymore. I can't contribute the same way. I might be here againhttps://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/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/465260https://hubski.com/pub/465260https://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/464461https://hubski.com/pub/464461https://hubski.com/pub/465670https://hubski.com/pub/465670https://hubski.com/pub/466130https://hubski.com/pub/466130https://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/465651https://hubski.com/pub/465651https://hubski.com/pub/465649https://hubski.com/pub/465649https://hubski.com/pub/467372https://hubski.com/pub/467372The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza - The Alpha the OmegaCesco - Move Too Slowhttps://hubski.com/pub/466705https://hubski.com/pub/466705https://hubski.com/pub/465640https://hubski.com/pub/465640https://hubski.com/pub/466700https://hubski.com/pub/466700Jonny Nash - DittoRalph Heidel - AVIhttps://hubski.com/pub/468244https://hubski.com/pub/468244it me fr frhttps://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/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/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/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/464628https://hubski.com/pub/464628https://hubski.com/pub/465510https://hubski.com/pub/465510https://hubski.com/pub/464935https://hubski.com/pub/464935https://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/466567https://hubski.com/pub/466567https://hubski.com/pub/463653https://hubski.com/pub/463653https://hubski.com/pub/464048https://hubski.com/pub/464048https://hubski.com/pub/463109https://hubski.com/pub/463109https://hubski.com/pub/464477https://hubski.com/pub/464477elmo, Nico Harris & Slowya.roll - Sounds of FloresIglooghost - Rust GenomeYoni Schlesinger - Shine On You Crazy Diamond Live at Givatayim Theatrehttps://hubski.com/pub/463006https://hubski.com/pub/463006https://hubski.com/pub/466519https://hubski.com/pub/466519https://hubski.com/pub/466507https://hubski.com/pub/466507https://hubski.com/pub/464806https://hubski.com/pub/464806https://hubski.com/pub/463838https://hubski.com/pub/463838There's so much shit to link. I will freely admit to being laser-focused on this, in no small part because I spend about an hour a day in deep investigation about whether or not to sell anything. Did I watch the liquidation on Friday night in real time? Goddamn right I did.This isn't a crypto thing, this is a banking thing, and it's gonna be in your face for a long time. When Michael Lewis is hanging out with you for six months and he doesn't see the twist ending? When the tinfoil hatters have already linked in Epstein and Davos?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/465809https://hubski.com/pub/465809https://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/463722https://hubski.com/pub/463722https://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/466354https://hubski.com/pub/466354Website looks like it was designed in about 2002. An entertaining read nonetheless.https://hubski.com/pub/464193https://hubski.com/pub/464193https://hubski.com/pub/462709https://hubski.com/pub/462709https://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/464141https://hubski.com/pub/464141https://hubski.com/pub/468162https://hubski.com/pub/468162steve lil hockey. Anyone want to add vocals? Be my guest :)https://hubski.com/pub/462580https://hubski.com/pub/462580https://hubski.com/pub/465078https://hubski.com/pub/465078https://hubski.com/pub/465062https://hubski.com/pub/465062Quentin Dujardin - CaliforniaFairpoint Convention - Who Knows Where The Time Goes?Monty & Visages - TEKhttps://hubski.com/pub/463499https://hubski.com/pub/463499https://hubski.com/pub/462966https://hubski.com/pub/462966https://hubski.com/pub/464540https://hubski.com/pub/464540https://hubski.com/pub/468151https://hubski.com/pub/468151https://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/465603https://hubski.com/pub/465603Javier Santiago - Ancestors' BluesVarra - Birdo IIhttps://hubski.com/pub/463253https://hubski.com/pub/463253https://hubski.com/pub/462659https://hubski.com/pub/462659https://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/465502https://hubski.com/pub/465502no one saw this cominghttps://hubski.com/pub/468147https://hubski.com/pub/468147https://hubski.com/pub/463143https://hubski.com/pub/463143https://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/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/464330https://hubski.com/pub/464330https://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/464320https://hubski.com/pub/464320If I could teleport into any one person’s living room right now and have a conversation, I would choose Mitch McConnell. I would set up a poster stand with an enormous picture of Trump’s MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT, point to it with a yardstick, and say, “You sold your party out for this. Remember? In January 2021 you decided you’d rather win the midterms than cut this cancer out of your party. And look at you now. A historic 2022 loss and the man you sacrificed yourself for is selling NFTs six months after NFTs stopped fooling anyone. How do you feel? THIS IS NOT PARODYhttps://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/464276https://hubski.com/pub/464276https://hubski.com/pub/462571https://hubski.com/pub/462571https://hubski.com/pub/464210https://hubski.com/pub/464210https://hubski.com/pub/465432https://hubski.com/pub/465432https://hubski.com/pub/464783https://hubski.com/pub/464783Genghis Tron - Dream WeaponMaruja - ThunderPhotek - T'Raenonhttps://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/464776https://hubski.com/pub/464776user-inactivated is visiting CDMX and I remembered a draft trip report that never got published.February 2012A three-day weekend with snow in the local forecast is ample excuse for a trip South. Plans for Miami were scrubbed when one in our party had a change of heart, so we two decided Thursday night to take the kid to Mexico City. We packed for 75° but would have to wear our coats to the 6 p.m. flight Friday.We got the last three seats to Atlanta, where we had about thirty minutes to get from Terminal B to Terminal E while booking a hotel. The negotiator found us a room at the Hilton in Reforma for US$80 a night which worked out quite nicely.The nighttime arrival into the airport nestled in the middle of a metropolis of 20 million (one of the world's four biggest agglomerations, I had read) was almost as spectacular as a nighttime arrival into LAX. We followed the guidebook advice and bought a $240 (US$20) taxi voucher in the airport.Saturday was spent, or largely misspent, going from one recommended neighborhood to another: Condesa, San Ángel, Coyoacan. We were frustrated by the usual tourist troubles — not knowing which streets to explore, high walls that forced us to walk around rather than through a lovely park, and friendly directions that always seemed to get us only halfway there. An occasional unprotected wifi network provided an oasis of vital data, but didn't improve our scheduling. We arrived at a recommended coffeehouse in late afternoon when it was overcrowded, then a restaurant recommended for its mole too early, when it was still deserted. We were also frustrated by an oft-cited law that we could not sit outside to eat with our minor if anyone around was smoking.By Saturday evening we abandoned our reservations about safety and cost and boarded random street taxis and roamed freely looking for food. We enjoyed tostadas con mango at a casual place in the posh Polanco district, then grabbed coffee and walked halfway back to Reforma before hailing another cab.Sunday, after protracted and difficult negotiations with hotel staff, we arranged a driver to take us to las pyramidas in Teotihuacan for US$90 efectivo. We got about half off the going rate by declining the tour guide service and pretending not to be concerned by hints that a return taxi would leave us penniless and naked at the side of the road, or worse.The drive north was interesting for the seemingly endless kilometers of poor-looking neighborhoods covering every available space. They are mostly gray concrete blocks, about one in ten painted a festive solid color, like M&Ms spilled in gravel. The driver, in lieu of providing tour-guide service, coughed and wheezed and cursed a motorcycle procession that closed the main highway. These mild oaths, in English, were very nearly the only curses I heard all weekend. I've spent years learning and practicing maldiciones, and was disappointed that reality did not live up to the promises of Mexican cinema. Like the colorful, plasticky, undervalued toy currency, the foreign curses seem fake and are easy to dispense.Opportunities to spend came hard and fast once we passed the entrance gates at Teotihuacan. The grand Pyramida del Sol loomed in the distance behind a gauntlet of trinket stands. I picked up a swell straw hat, which even my halfhearted bargaining brought into the negligible range of petty cash. It was hard to refuse the sun-wizened meztizos, approaching with baubles and a sales pitch of "casi gratis" — indeed the starting price was often a dollar.Bartering still makes me a little tense, and the added pressure of protecting pockets, keeping an eye on junior (who was clambering over every available stone construction, built by Aztecs [actually by an unknown people predating the Aztecs] with no concern for safety), and the thin air took a toll as I tried to trickle some tourist cash down. A graybeard held up a jailer's ring full of carved stone keychains and told me they cost "quince." I knew that meant fifteen or fifty, but blanked on which. I couldn't figure it out, so I asked him in Spanish how you write quince. No tengo letras, came the reply, making me feel the bigger fool. I finally got out of it by asking how much for two, then reflexively talking him down to 20 pesos for a pair. A lazy German tourist then took advantage of the same deal without sweating.Already two thousand feet higher than Denver, the additional 216-foot climb to the top of the pyramid was occasion for more sweating and panting. My heart rate was never lower than 80 all weekend, and the stone steps, sometimes seemingly vertical, must be responsible for more human sacrifice in modern times than the ancients could arrange. It was worth the effort for the views, breeze, and to see a cluster of pilgrims at the top praying and grinning and crowding on hands and knees to touch a tiny silver button stuck in the center of the peak.Back in the city, the kid had some kind of pants malfunction and I went out in search of a safety pin. I didn't know what they were called so I sketched a diagram and carried it from shop to shop. Someone told me it is called a "seguro" but that caused more confusion as it also means "insurance." While wandering around, I received one of those traveller-beware life lessons you read about in the guide books.From travel notes: "dude spit on my shoes and got 15 off me"He spotted his mark, an aimless tourist, and took advantage of the fact that shoes become dust-coated upon first contact with the Mexican street. He had a filthy rag and started rubbing my feet with it, inviting a firm kick. Instead I stood rooted and unable to interrupt the unrequested service-in-progress, all the more shocked when he applied a mild enzymatic solution to my shoe leather and began rubbing it in. I marched off indignantly, hopefully intoning "No hay derecho" like the waiter in "The Butterfly and the Tank" PDF. But he followed and started badgering me about his shoeshine fee. I advertised the location of my wallet pocket by clamping a hand over it and tried to shake him off with random turns, looking for a market or cafe with witnesses. Finally I stopped at a snack stand with the excuse of making change and paid the guy to leave me alone. With the exchange rate at 12-to-1 it was a fair price for a story.Arriving at the airport departures entrance, my wife asked "Did you get the passports?" My one-word response was not "no" but left no doubt about the passports; they were still in the hotel room safe. My brain switched into emergency mode — fight or miss-your-flight — and I turned off all the roaming safeties on my cell phone to call the front desk directly, no messing with calling cards. After agreeing to some number of stipulations including an additional round-trip taxi charge, I was assurred that the safe contents were en route to the airport. A tense quarter-hour later, the bellhop (botones for "buttons") arrived. He handed over the documents and I gave him a tip, and insisted that he keep the other item from the safe, a "Rolex" I had picked up in Bodrum.Back story, September 2011: there was a whole street of fake watch sellers near our rental apartment by Gümbet Beach. I was not in a rush and planned to be deliberate in shopping for a silly souvenier. I would get the best price I could from the first shop, then see if the second shop could beat it, then continue on down the line.The price at the first shop was so low I didn't bother moving on, and the vendor resized the band before I left. The quartz movement was still keeping time months later in Mexico, and may be running yet.https://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/466989https://hubski.com/pub/466989Tom VR - Blue Sky UnravelMatteo Mancuso - Falcon Flighti:lo - Biomehttps://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/464760https://hubski.com/pub/464760https://hubski.com/pub/468095https://hubski.com/pub/468095https://hubski.com/pub/468090https://hubski.com/pub/468090https://hubski.com/pub/464708https://hubski.com/pub/464708 The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history. As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note in their book “The Gig Academy,” about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to a 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers. Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives now barely enable them to keep their heads above water.props to whomever came up with the term “The Gig Academy”https://hubski.com/pub/464099https://hubski.com/pub/464099mk challenged me to write a song using the lyric, "If I shot a heat sinking missile at you would it miss because you are cold as ice?" - This may be the single worst lyric ever written. Then, mk fed this lyric to ChatGPT and got more lyrics. I used these to record this awful song. lil steve I played some bad hockey. But blame mk. Or blame AI. Truth is, I'm still to blame :) Was fun to make.https://hubski.com/pub/463474https://hubski.com/pub/463474Cleopatrick - Scaring MeNick Drake - Place To BeArkist - Out of the Sunhttps://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/468080https://hubski.com/pub/468080https://hubski.com/pub/466928https://hubski.com/pub/466928https://hubski.com/pub/463967https://hubski.com/pub/463967https://hubski.com/pub/462666https://hubski.com/pub/462666"Israel in the Jared Kushner's $2b VC fund with the Saudi Arabia"https://hubski.com/pub/465212https://hubski.com/pub/465212https://hubski.com/pub/462610https://hubski.com/pub/462610The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom.Milton Friedmanhttps://hubski.com/pub/463863https://hubski.com/pub/463863https://hubski.com/pub/461936https://hubski.com/pub/461936https://hubski.com/pub/465895https://hubski.com/pub/465895https://hubski.com/pub/464497https://hubski.com/pub/464497FictionA Clockwork Orange, Anthony BurgessCombat videos reminded me of Nadsat and the ultra-violence enjoyed by Alex and his droogs.Fight Club, Chuck PalahniukDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. DickBoth books very good, and both very different from the movies, which are classics.King Rat, China MiévilleThe author has an admirable convention of mentioning in the acknowledgements music used during the creation of the story, so you can set the mood for Kraken by putting on some Burial. This story, his debut effort, is set to Jungle drum & bass, citing “Glok” by A Guy Called Gerald as “still the most terrifying slab of guerrilla bass ever committed to vinyl.”There is no Antimemetics Division, qntmThe author optimized according to Thoughts on self-publishing resulting in a very attractive and readable paperback. Non-fictionKilling Pablo, Mark BowdenBowden proved his ability to tell a story in Black Hawk Down, and this magazine-style biography is a good balance of history, analysis, and Miami Vice. Escobar atoned for a multitude of sins with public works in Medellín, but the reader is hard-pressed to spare a tear when he is finally shot dead running barefoot over rooftops.Rust, Jonathan WaldmanThe title was used unconventionally to describe corrosion in general, but ferrous oxide is the supervillain in the struggle against infrastructure entropy. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca SklootHeLa is the oldest and most often used sample of human cells used in laboratory testing. Before 1951, there were no human cells that could be kept alive indefinitely outside a living body. Henrietta Lacks died at age 31 of a very aggressive cervical cancer, and a biopsy grew into a successfully commercialized cell line. Raises thorny questions of informed consent, especially at a time when patients were not very well informed.American Sketches, Walter IsaacsonA purchase from the remainders section at the now-closed World Bank InfoShop; short versions of the author’s successful biographies.Intellectuals, Paul JohnsonThis gossipy ad-hominem survey of (mostly left-leaning) authors and thinkers makes a persuasive argument that they were awful people, but the fair reader wonders if the heroes of the right were any better. Entertainingly sensational and salacious.Open, Andre AgassiAgassi is not a likable narrator, but like many sports stars his childhood was consumed by athletics, which earns him some sympathy. Again and again he tells journalists he hates tennis, “But you don’t really hate tennis,” they say; he assures them he does. Two sisters and older brother Phil failed to satisfy their father’s monomaniacal retirement plan, for Andre tennis takes the place of high school, friendship and family, and finally he makes good. With only one anchor in life, he is constantly surprised to find himself telling reporters how much he loves the sport. He is infuriated at the way sportswriters associate him with the “Image is Everything” tagline he pronounced for a Canon camera ad, yet he obsesses over his hairpiece, earrings, and the denim shorts look. Recommended by Tyler Cowen as an example of reading the best book in any subject to expand one’s horizons. An easy and compelling read, if not always enjoyable.Pushing the Limits, Henry PetroskiAt the end it is revealed that this is a collection of columns from American Scientist magazine, explaining the lack of cohesion in a book of great disasters and achievements and some more prosaic stories.The Elephant in the Brain, Kevin Simler and Robin HansonHaving heard so much about this book, I wasn’t too surprised by the contents. After Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated the unreliability of our thought processes, then many of their studies succumbed to the replication crisis, we learned not to be too sure of anything. This book argues that, not only do we deceive ourselves, it is often to our advantage to do so. Rough times for epistemology, but there is still plenty for the curious to learn.Cycles of Life, Vaclav SmilHow the World Really Works, Vaclav SmilThe 1997 title reads like a textbook, full of sterile descriptions of flowchart diagrams depicting biological material flows: carbon through phytoplankton and animal respiration, the nitrogen cycle, the “terrestrial nitrogen cycle centered on plants,” the “modern biogeochemical sulfur cycle.” In many cases, a critical reaction keeping the living world in balance is performed by some random bacterium you never heard of. It’s a good reminder of how complex the biosphere is. Scientists can carefully measure the amount of nitrogen in the atmosphere, but soil measurements depend on sampling and extrapolating. Even more difficult is measuring flow between reservoirs. Atmospheric nitrogen must be “fixed” into compounds like ammonia to be useful for plants, and lightning is part of this process, but calculations of the flow depend on estimates of the frequency of lightning strikes, the length of their path and power, and the number of nitric oxide molecules produced. How the World Really Works is an ambitious survey of the processes that make modern human life possible, with a focus on energy and materials, especially the “four pillars” of civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. Claiming to be neither an optimist or a pessimist, Smil describes the fascinating processes that make these substances widely available, with sober assessments of the challenges surrounding decarbonization goals. HistoryEndurance, Alfred LansingThe ultimate story in the misery literature canon. The will to live enables an amazing level of heroic struggle, but the real lesson is how often the men record joy and gratitude in their diaries despite circumstances that would seem absolutely inimical to any hint of cheerfulness. The power of positive thinking has limits, though, and at some point while on the boats they were reduced to “cursing everything cursable.” Two men stopped me in public to comment on the paperback I carried around. A month after I finished rereading this classic, the discovery of the wreck was announced.The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard RhodesAtom Bombs, John Coster-MullenRhodes’ book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. I found only one other title to win these three prizes, and want to see if it is half as good as Rhodes.I deliberated over paying $50 for Atomic John’s self-published history, but was delighted when the author replied to my e-mailed thank-you note for a signed copy, forwarding a collection of additional documents and later providing tourist advice before my visit to the Navy Yard museum. In 2017 he declared my trip report on the total solar eclipse and Oak Ridge National Laboratory “Fascinating!!” and expressed a desire to see a total solar eclipse. Last year, in Tennessee again, I sent John a photo of the Norden bombsight at the new K-25 history center, and his daughter replied to say he passed away in April.His book is not as polished as the Pulitzer Prize winner, but equally fascinating, about three-quarters photos, primary documents and footnotes. He even corrected the record in some cases, and discovered that the Little Boy bomb was a “girl.” EconomicsThe Essential Hayek, The Essential Milton Friedman, The Essential Ronald CoaseMore free summaries in the Essential Scholars series. The Armchair Economist, Steven E. Landsburg“Economic theory predicts that you are not enjoying this book as much as you thought you would.” The “economic way of thinking” is very useful in seeing how the world works, so I like entertaining Freakonomics-style presentations of theory in everyday life, but glib generalizations sometimes seem too tidy to be useful. ClassicsBeowulfI don’t have much of an ear for poetry, and the story was less than compelling, mostly of interest as source material for John Gardner’s Grendel, crafted for the modern reader. But classics endure because they are worth keeping, and Beowulf is better than most books. I would have appreciated an inspiring speech or two from Hrothgar, something in the Anabasis style.The Classics, Caroline TaggartA cheesy dictionary of Greek and Roman trivia bought at the World Bank InfoShop.The Grapes of WrathAs described earlier, the book seemed to advance a dishonest case for socialism. There’s a story about the film version of the novel being criticized as un-American and socialist, so that Stalin took notice and allowed the foreign film to be shown in the USSR as anti-capitalist propaganda. The plan backfired when it became clear viewers were amazed that poor Americans could ever live in a relatively nice farmhouse and afford rifles and shotguns. When things got desperate, the Joads were still able to buy a car and drive across the country in search of a better life, a dream for Stalin’s subjects. He pulled the film.Strange to see the word robot in a book published in 1939. Aesthetically, the work is captivating and powerful, building slowly to a conclusion that gave me frisson.The Wrecker, Robert Louis Stevenson (with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne)Starts with a fantastic coming-of-age, poor-in-Paris, seafaring adventure, goes a bit off track which I blame on the collaboration. Stevenson is one of the great writers and storytellers. British LitThank You, Jeeves, P. G. WodehouseReliably diverting, but with less Jeeves than usual, and a ridiculous racial plot device that now seems awkward.A Handful of Dust, Evelyn WaughAnother satirical look at a British aristocrat, but with a bizarre plot turn that ends up in the South American jungle.Pride and Prejudice, Jane AustinAssigned to the kid, read in sympathy. I found it very boring and was relieved to see two 2-star ratings by GoodReads friends when I finished.Neil Gaiman: American Gods: Shadows, American Gods: My Ainsley, American Gods: The Moment of the StormThe graphic novel was a good rendering of the novel, like a movie easy to consume while leaving a lot out.The Ocean at the End of the LaneA forgettable eBay paperback. Thomas Hardy Summer SeriesThe Mayor of CasterbridgeHardy lights one slow-burning fuse after another: a 21-year vow to abstain from strong liquors after a scandal, a packet of compromising correspondence, insults given unawares, a bombshell “do not open until” letter, and of course a complicated geometry of affections requited and not. Victorian English throughout: “Some folk want their luck buttered.”Tess of the d’Urbervilles“The Woman Pays” is a chapter heading in the table of contents and also a spoiler for the whole book. Poor Tess grew up without books, and fell for a man who took advantage of her innocence. “Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk?” she cries to her mother. “Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’ learning in that way, and you did not help me!” More Victorian vocabulary: dolorifuge, temerarious, purlieus.Far From the Madding CrowdHardy’s first literary success, establishing the formula of a strong yet flawed woman navigating a harsh and male-dominated agrarian world. The hero, shepherd Gabriel Oak, is a bit too ideal a rival for the dashing but despicable Sergeant Troy. Both are drawn to the heroine’s good looks, which at the time included “something in the exact arch of her upper unbroken row of teeth”. Unfinished BusinessThe Journals of Lewis and Clark Captain Clark doesn't spell a word the same way twice; now a bedside table decoration.The Story of My Life, Helen Keller The story was amazing and inspiring, but much of the book is composed of her letters, which seemed like the typical correspondence of a young woman, only very interesting because they were written by hand, without assistance, with very good handwriting! 10,522 total pages read in 2022 (10,031 in 2021), 37 books (up from 32), 21% of total pages in digital form (down from 38%). $139 spent on reading material (down from $192).https://hubski.com/pub/465870https://hubski.com/pub/465870https://hubski.com/pub/463783https://hubski.com/pub/463783https://hubski.com/pub/466853https://hubski.com/pub/466853https://hubski.com/pub/462452https://hubski.com/pub/462452https://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/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/462989https://hubski.com/pub/462989https://hubski.com/pub/464360https://hubski.com/pub/464360Tommaso Cappellato & Astral Travel - My Body Needs to Breathe, I Doesn'tPortico Quartet - ImpressionsThe Physics House Band- Melting Through Midtownhttps://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/463668https://hubski.com/pub/463668https://hubski.com/pub/463665https://hubski.com/pub/463665ain't no hatorade like WSJ hatoradehttps://hubski.com/pub/463657https://hubski.com/pub/463657 is this the new pirate radio?https://superbluesurf.bandcamp.com/track/la-honda-wayLa Honda Way - superbluesurfhttps://cuzcoband.bandcamp.com/track/new-tricksNew Tricks - Cuzcohttps://tidal.com/browse/track/23324716La cabane du pêcheur - Francis Cabrelhttps://hubski.com/pub/462928https://hubski.com/pub/462928https://hubski.com/pub/464919https://hubski.com/pub/464919https://hubski.com/pub/462798https://hubski.com/pub/462798https://hubski.com/pub/462759https://hubski.com/pub/462759Madison Cunningham - All I’ve Ever KnownZeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange - Languages of PaoCFCF - Liquid ColoursDorian Concept - Let It All GoStray From The Path - IIIhttps://hubski.com/pub/462008https://hubski.com/pub/462008https://hubski.com/pub/464838https://hubski.com/pub/464838Belle and Sebastian - Stay LooseOmari Jazz - Dream ChildEels - I like Birdshttps://hubski.com/pub/463397https://hubski.com/pub/463397https://hubski.com/pub/464112https://hubski.com/pub/464112 > write a brief argument about why people should care about ChatGPT, especially its broader implications on the work force There are several reasons why people should care about ChatGPT and its broader implications on the work force.First, ChatGPT is a powerful and versatile language model that has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology. By allowing people to communicate with computers in a more natural and intuitive way, ChatGPT has the potential to make a wide range of tasks easier and more efficient.Second, ChatGPT has the potential to impact the work force in a number of ways. For example, it could be used to automate certain tasks that are currently performed by humans, such as customer service and data entry. This could lead to increased productivity and efficiency, as well as freeing up workers to focus on more creative and rewarding tasks.Third, the development of ChatGPT and other similar technologies also has broader implications for the economy and society as a whole. As artificial intelligence continues to advance, it will be important for workers to adapt and develop new skills to stay competitive in the job market. This will require investments in education and training, as well as a willingness to embrace new technologies and ways of working.Overall, ChatGPT and its broader implications on the work force are important to consider because they have the potential to greatly impact the way we live and work.---On the one hand: everything I've thrown at ChatGPT has been a thousand times more impressive than the parroting models of yore. Right now, automated news / wikipedia article creation is already a thing - it's not hard to see that expanded to everything from birthday cards to opinion pieces to consultancy reports to copywriters. It's also not hard to see the malevolent uses on the rise: imagine a social media that's 80% propaganda bots powered by AI language models? This whole AI boom has been going on for only a few months. It's going to get better. On the other hand, unless you're a level 99 prompt warlock the results are (and will always be?) quite generic, the common denominator. Its confidence will always be brazen even when saying things that are plain untrue. Neither of those drawbacks are easy to train for or solved with moar data.https://hubski.com/pub/463359https://hubski.com/pub/463359Objekt - CLK RecoverySnarky Puppy - BetGianni Brezzo - Centrichttps://hubski.com/pub/464800https://hubski.com/pub/464800https://www.ft.com/content/8d995a24-d77c-4208-a3a6-603d8788ebcdhttps://hubski.com/pub/464053https://hubski.com/pub/464053https://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/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/464713https://hubski.com/pub/464713Biggest context missing from the article involves this paragraph:After one of his children was allegedly stalked by a fan in South Pasadena, Musk blamed a Twitter account that tracked ­public data about the whereabouts of his ­private jet — his “assassination coordinates,” Musk said. He then had Irwin suspend the @ElonJet account, the account of its owner, and dozens of others that tracked celebrities’ planes. Several journalists from CNN, the New York Times, and elsewhere were suspended for tweeting the news.So I'm just wasting my life away another night, maybe five weeks ago, and I see a Twitter "Spaces" (voice chatroom) start gaining momentum. It was initiated and moderated by a handful of quasi-mainstream/establishment reporters like Taylor Lorenz, Ben Collins, Brian Steltzer (ok, that's mainmainstream) and a few others, discussing the recent suspension of the kid who built the automated Elon jet tracker. They manage to successfully summon this guy in about 15 minutes to discuss how all of the info is already very public domain. The voice chat eventually hits a critical mass of around 12,000 or so people, at which point, tippytop Elonstans show up to begin defending Elon's narrative, that his child's safety was threatened because of the jet tracker. Twitter's (yes, this handle) @jason begins screaming at Judd Legum, "DO YOU HAVE CHILDREN?? DO YOU?! HOW MANY, AND HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF THEY WERE THREATENED LIKE THIS?!?", and literally every single journalist was like "Jason, I think it would be wise to wait until more facts come out surrounding this incident". @Jason also berated the guy who built the Elon jet tracking account, who wisely said that he was declining to answer any questions, for legal reasons.Then, Elon shows up, not long after. He's clearly phoning in from a car or airplane, and feels the need to attempt talking to the voicechat listeners and also type on his keyboard simultaneously (probably because Elon is Very Busy and Hard Working Allthetime). Judd Legum is really going to town now, "Can you give us more details? Did this incident occur near the airport? What was the nature of the threat??", etc., until about 8 minutes of Elon's nonsensical stuttering goes by, and Elon ragequits.Of course, then it came out shortly afterwards that police are instead treating the member of Elon's security detail responsible for protecting his child as a suspect in the investigation.And you'll probably never hear another update about the incident.All in all, the perfect encapsulation of Elon's Twitter, as far as I'm concerned. He bought the world's most powerful messaging device, and he's almost done unintentionally ruining it.https://hubski.com/pub/464703https://hubski.com/pub/464703Benjy Wertheimer & John de Kadt - LilaBotany - Tele-VangelisTriosk - Lazyboathttps://hubski.com/pub/465548https://hubski.com/pub/465548kleinbl00https://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/464658https://hubski.com/pub/464658https://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/462177https://hubski.com/pub/462177https://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/465484https://hubski.com/pub/465484Fievel Is Glauque - Save the PhenomenonBobbing - Ah Uh OhJohnson - Return Recoilhttps://hubski.com/pub/463764https://hubski.com/pub/463764I may be back here https://hubski.com/pub/464591https://hubski.com/pub/464591Tigran Hamasyan - To NegateSteely Dan - AjaBill Withers - Lovely Dayhttps://hubski.com/pub/461958https://hubski.com/pub/461958Pick a July date in the past... say 25 July 2000, then pick today.. and sliiiiide.https://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/462729https://hubski.com/pub/462729Last year's report: This year I took 45 seconds off my swim, 27 minutes off my bike, but lost six minutes on the run.The swim was perfect conditions with dead calm water. I was able to get in behind a few people a few times to draft. Drafting is illegal on the bike but totally allowed in the water. It makes a real difference, too. Out of the water, the transition area is in a parking garage, three floors up. So we have to run up the looped ramp (they call the helix) before getting to our bikes. Then down the opposite end helix and onto the road.Taking 27 minutes off my bike time, dropping from 3:30 to 3:03, was partly the course being easier, partly my fitness being better, and partly my new race bike. I'm not great at hills, especially descending. Downhill can be faster than I'm comfortable with. This year's course had a couple hills, but fewer than last year and not as steep. And then on my new bike I was able to get aero and really cruise on any flatter areas.This year when I took hydration at the bike aid stations, I didn't stop like I did last year. I slowed a bunch, but then when they handed me a bottle I was able to pour it in the top of my mounted water bottle. It saved me from having to carry multiple bottles and still having to shuffle them around anyway. It worked well, and I even got one of the bottles in a garbage can. Then back up the helix to transition.The run was tough. I started out doing ok but faded fast after a mile or two. Early in the run there was a breeze off the lake, and I thought it might rain. Then the sun came out and baked us. Starting the run I thought I might have had a chance at breaking six hours, but by halfway I knew that wasn't possible anymore. I think I need a lot more run fitness to get a good 70.3 run. Maybe not more miles, but definitely smarter miles.My finishing time was 6:08. The full Ironman is today, and rain moved in. It's going to be a very long day for them.I really like the mix of activities with triathlon. I'm most improved in my bike from last year, but I placed higher in the swim and run than I did in the bike. Even with my run/walk finish, I was gaining time on people that had beat me on the bike. Then race day stuff is just awesome. Other competitors, spectators, a couple friends came out to cheer. It's what makes it worth it and why racing is distinctly different from doing the distance but solo.https://hubski.com/pub/466494https://hubski.com/pub/466494https://hubski.com/pub/462639https://hubski.com/pub/462639https://hubski.com/pub/465328https://hubski.com/pub/465328Maruja - Live from Low Four Studiohttps://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/463488https://hubski.com/pub/463488Hubski has failed: its userbase rivals that of a payphone, its creators keep it running as a formality, and the rate of burnout exceeds the rate of newcomers. On an average day, you see as many spam posts as real ones.When I log into Hubski, I feel like I'm watching a sick dog get sicker. The thing is is that there's no natural shelf-life to a website, so it could theoretically continue on for as long as somebody is willing to keep the lights on. I'd like to say that it shouldn't.The relationships Hubski has fostered can and will persist after it is gone. There are lots of other ways for people to get in touch with each other. A couple days of sharing numbers and handles should be enough.I'm one of the youngest people active here, if not the youngest (at 22-going-on-23), and I first came to Hubski 7 years ago in a different life. My cohort of compadres come back here like they come back to an old school building - hi, just checking in, it's been a few years - but it's not a place that people live anymore.There's nothing saying it ever has to end, but maybe it's time to start thinking about it.https://hubski.com/pub/466377https://hubski.com/pub/466377May urine perpetually soak your eternal rest you piece of shithttps://hubski.com/pub/465257https://hubski.com/pub/465257https://hubski.com/pub/462516https://hubski.com/pub/462516Brambles — Such Owls As YouBlack Star - Thieves In The NightSpite - Proper Onehttps://hubski.com/pub/464226https://hubski.com/pub/464226there's this particular style of writing that really annoys me - it's like the buzzfeed reddit kind of writing that's very quippy and clunky and i feel like it's taken over political messaging as the liberal version of trumpspeech. words mean stuff. the law matters, actually. this. so much this! i associate this kind of writing with the 35-50 demographicage is such a distinguishing factor with the way people write online. I'm trying to think of the younger demo version of this: maybe like normalize being X, Y is valid, if you do Z DNI /srs. I- asgsjfkdkshsgsthe older version is just trumptalk which is well documentedhttps://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/463231https://hubski.com/pub/463231Probably should be more careful with what i post, but you'll see a lot of posts like this from me! so ask me anything that could be burning your nogginhttps://hubski.com/pub/465197https://hubski.com/pub/465197https://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/466290https://hubski.com/pub/466290Drift-lab - Moonlighthttps://hubski.com/pub/462211https://hubski.com/pub/462211edit 12/08 FBI agents found dozens of classified documents in Mar-a-Lago search: sourceshttps://hubski.com/pub/462118https://hubski.com/pub/462118brahhttps://hubski.com/pub/464090https://hubski.com/pub/464090Volor Flex - 24 HoursRalph Towner - NimbusCleopold - Clevelandhttps://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/463002https://hubski.com/pub/463002Burger & Ink - Twelve Miles HighPizza Hotline - Level Selecthttps://hubski.com/pub/464035https://hubski.com/pub/464035https://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/464002https://hubski.com/pub/464002https://hubski.com/pub/467949https://hubski.com/pub/467949Kanaan - Bourdonhttps://hubski.com/pub/464901https://hubski.com/pub/464901https://hubski.com/pub/462830https://hubski.com/pub/462830https://hubski.com/pub/466174https://hubski.com/pub/466174https://hubski.com/pub/463884https://hubski.com/pub/463884Aleksi Perälä - FI3AC2279080Omari Jazz - GodBodyChargeYīn Yīn - Alpaca Mountainhttps://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/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/462649https://hubski.com/pub/462649https://hubski.com/pub/462634https://hubski.com/pub/462634Linkwood - Love LostCounterparts - Unwavering VowIntense - Only Youhttps://hubski.com/pub/464814https://hubski.com/pub/464814I run without following running, so this entire thing was news to me. Seems pretty thorough to an outsider, though.https://hubski.com/pub/462582https://hubski.com/pub/462582https://hubski.com/pub/466080https://hubski.com/pub/466080lil steve hockey!https://hubski.com/pub/463677https://hubski.com/pub/463677Matthew Halsall - Fletcher Moss ParkGas-Lab - Drifthttps://hubski.com/pub/463651https://hubski.com/pub/463651gohttps://hubski.com/pub/464769https://hubski.com/pub/464769https://hubski.com/pub/464706https://hubski.com/pub/464706 Under the extreme, high-density conditions inside a neutron star, the competition between nuclear attraction and Coulomb repulsion yields exotic structures called nuclear pasta. Ravenhall, Pethick, and Wilson were the first to investigate these unusual configurations of nuclear matter. Nuclear pasta is characterised by complex, non-spherical patterns such as tubes, sheets and bubbles; these configurations minimize their energy (see Figure 2). The name “nuclear pasta” arose due to a resemblance to different varieties of pasta — such as lasagna, gnocchi and spaghetti!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/462342https://hubski.com/pub/462342https://hubski.com/pub/462331https://hubski.com/pub/462331https://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/462257https://hubski.com/pub/462257https://hubski.com/pub/465956https://hubski.com/pub/465956Primal Code - White RiverAlfa Mist - 4th Febhttps://hubski.com/pub/462147https://hubski.com/pub/462147Jally Kebba Susso - JusticeJoaquín Cornejo - Esohttps://hubski.com/pub/467821https://hubski.com/pub/467821https://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/462038https://hubski.com/pub/462038https://hubski.com/pub/463210https://hubski.com/pub/463210https://hubski.com/pub/461972https://hubski.com/pub/461972veenhttps://hubski.com/pub/463172https://hubski.com/pub/463172Heatmiser - Christian BrothersMarley Carroll - ShiverMatthew Halsall - Cherry Blossomhttps://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/464490https://hubski.com/pub/464490https://hubski.com/pub/463090https://hubski.com/pub/463090I knew about the poster for this but just today found out there’s this digitally navigable version! Having struggled to grok the ATP loops in biology class this is well beyond my understanding. Yet I love staring at this Rube Goldbergian diagram hoping to better understand our life. (The same fors for those almost as complex Japanese train network diagrams, so maybe it’s just me.)https://hubski.com/pub/464421https://hubski.com/pub/464421I did not listen to every one of the 57 people who spoke at Americafest — I had to do things like go to the bathroom and collect free swag from merch tables like a demented Pokemon trainer. But I did catch most of the speeches, and I heard very little mention of Trump from anyone I have not already named here. Passing references, at most.Donald Trump is done, but the MAGA movement isn’t. The hat might be gone but the millions of die-hards remain. The future is uncertain, but there will be a future. And, if the past is any indication, the future is going to be very, very weird.https://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/462951https://hubski.com/pub/462951You are now aware that Amazon's merchandise is a loss-leader for their hosting business. Also that capitalism can be really stupid. But you knew that.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/467855https://hubski.com/pub/467855https://hubski.com/pub/464321https://hubski.com/pub/464321The musician helped create the Moog synthesizer and composed groundbreaking albums and film scores, but lived in seclusion for almost 10 years to hide her gender reassignmentWendy Carlos in her New York studio, October 1979.https://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/464220https://hubski.com/pub/464220KB and I are fighting in the Pubski from last week, and I'm not getting notified that there are new replies to read... my hubwheel stays blue and doesn't show me new comments. But if I go to the Comments menu, then I see he has replied to me.The hubwheel next to my name turned Orange to indicate new replies for the first, and maybe second response. But it isn't lighting up to show me I have new responses anymore.Is it possible that when you turned off email it somehow turned off notifications of replies?https://hubski.com/pub/467832https://hubski.com/pub/467832https://hubski.com/pub/464203https://hubski.com/pub/464203Sylvette - Blanket of DustGigi Masin - La Giara Di Gesturi Randomer - Freak Dubhttps://hubski.com/pub/464139https://hubski.com/pub/464139https://hubski.com/pub/465652https://hubski.com/pub/465652Silly little tune I made today while playing hockey steve lilhttps://hubski.com/pub/465634https://hubski.com/pub/465634https://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/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/464036https://hubski.com/pub/464036I will leave the rest of Brainard’s speech for you to read. I disagree with her on key parts, underscoring how far monetary policy is from a reckoning. It is mindboggling that the Fed continues to obsess over inflation expectations when there is no evidence that they are de-anchoring. Surveys show that Americans remain 'Team Transitory.' Yes, the unelected, unaccountable people at the Fed calling the shots and elite macroeconomists have de-anchored. But they’re not representative of Americans.Listen to the people.Fiscal policy as a solution is completely missing. We must bring fiscal into the discussion, and it’s not here or in the elite macroeconomic discourse. The current crises are a wake-up call that resilience against inflationary pressures requires fiscal policy too. The Fed is not enough. Only Congress can take key steps, such as green energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act and the onshoring programs in the CHIPS Act, to protect against spikes in future inflation. Claudia Sahm chooses to be an Area Substacker rather than working for a big dumb right wing think tank.https://hubski.com/pub/465582https://hubski.com/pub/465582https://hubski.com/pub/462523https://hubski.com/pub/462523Seems like a really rookie mistake, to assign all your deep cover agents with passport numbers within a specific range..........This one was under cover in Naples as a jeweler and befriended NATO leadership... and her passport was only one number higher than the two Novichok poisoners in Britain.To do all the work necessary to set up a deep cover agent and support them for a decade, only to surface them (and several others) because they use a known GRU set of passport numbers... sheeeeeesh.https://hubski.com/pub/462458https://hubski.com/pub/462458https://hubski.com/pub/462457https://hubski.com/pub/462457Wonder if they can bring back the Lada badge to sell some of these cars under.https://hubski.com/pub/463880https://hubski.com/pub/463880kleinbl00https://hubski.com/pub/467765https://hubski.com/pub/467765https://hubski.com/pub/463723https://hubski.com/pub/463723Cumulus Frisbee - Inner InterferenceOzric Tentacles - SunhairTower of Power - Only So Much Oil In The Groundhttps://hubski.com/pub/462047https://hubski.com/pub/462047lolhttps://hubski.com/pub/462006https://hubski.com/pub/462006Jally Kebba Susso - Nina TollaDistinguisher - Without Endhttps://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/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/465059https://hubski.com/pub/465059https://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/465017https://hubski.com/pub/465017FYI - Colin Meloy is The Decemberists.thenewgreen you doing this next?https://hubski.com/pub/462952https://hubski.com/pub/462952https://hubski.com/pub/462925https://hubski.com/pub/462925Julian Lage - Word For WordL'eclair - DallasCovet - glimmerhttps://hubski.com/pub/462914https://hubski.com/pub/462914Archive.ph link because pay/subsciber-wallhttps://hubski.com/pub/464884https://hubski.com/pub/464884lil steve Hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/464791https://hubski.com/pub/464791https://hubski.com/pub/464790https://hubski.com/pub/464790https://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/462562https://hubski.com/pub/462562The unavoidable ten inches in the study is more than twice as much sea level rise as scientists had previously expected from the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. The study in the journal Nature Climate Change said it could reach as much as 30 inches (78 centimeters). By contrast, last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected a range of 2 to 5 inches (6 to 13 centimeters) for likely sea level rise from Greenland ice melt by the year 2100.I'm going to win, @wasoxygen!https://hubski.com/pub/464692https://hubski.com/pub/464692Elephant and manatee are the only other species with chinhttps://hubski.com/pub/462416https://hubski.com/pub/462416TL;DR: private school dweebs leverage connections to get finance jobs, leave finance jobs and leverage connections to get started in forex, scam every trader until they can't trade forex anymore, buy the dip in Bitcoin and proceed to convince the entire crypto world they're geniuses. Complications ensue.https://hubski.com/pub/462327https://hubski.com/pub/462327Open Mike Eagle - I'll Fight YouTedeschi Trucks Band - Somehowhttps://hubski.com/pub/462222https://hubski.com/pub/462222https://hubski.com/pub/467620https://hubski.com/pub/467620This song is dumb. lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/464526https://hubski.com/pub/464526Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right,Because their words had forked no lightning theyDo not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height,Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.https://hubski.com/pub/464514https://hubski.com/pub/464514lil steve I played hockey Took a trip to Spain. Came back and made this. Has zero to do with Spain but somehow it’s in there.https://hubski.com/pub/467608https://hubski.com/pub/467608Black Josh - HabitatThrown - on the vergeTigran Hamasyan - To Negatehttps://hubski.com/pub/461970https://hubski.com/pub/461970About as LA a story as you can write. I remember watching The Helicopter Channel at work the morning the land was sold; there were four news agencies with birds circling it because the rumor was someone was finally going to buy one of the last developable plots up in the Hills. Money is not taste.https://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/461922https://hubski.com/pub/461922goobster, I almost forgot to tell you, Devac and I hired PBS to do a quantum entanglement thing.https://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/464108https://hubski.com/pub/464108what if 'Bavarian Illuminati' but with ALL THE MONEYhttps://hubski.com/pub/467551https://hubski.com/pub/467551Vildhjarta - ylvaAlabaster Deplume - If You're Sure You Want Tohttps://hubski.com/pub/464025https://hubski.com/pub/464025There's a LOT of ground covered in this article on how to put humans into hibernation for long-term spaceflight, but this part - the reduced damage from cosmic rays - really caught my attention and surprised me: "...One of the great unknowns about the mission to Mars, for example, is whether humans can endure the ravages of galactic cosmic rays, the remnants of the Milky Way's celestial violence. Once a spacecraft travels beyond Earth's protective magnetosphere—which orbiting craft like the International Space Station stay well within—there's no real way to dodge these cancer-causing particles, and scientists have yet to find a malleable, lightweight material that can shield against them. But if human cells can be made less active, they may develop significant resistance to radiation. In a 1972 experiment, for example, scientists found that ground squirrels that were irradiated while hibernating had a much higher survival rate than their fully conscious peers..." https://hubski.com/pub/464022https://hubski.com/pub/464022Caitlin Fisher has a blog, uses Google, and hates her parents. She also hates this book, but not nearly as much as she should.That's all I got, except to say that Ryan Holiday's recommendation of this book is enough for me to ignore him now forever, which is liberating AF.https://hubski.com/pub/463941https://hubski.com/pub/463941The problem is not specifically that Galactica doesn't work. The problem is that Meta has been touting Galactica as a model that does work. In reality, Galactica has the same profound flaws as other large language models, fundamental shortcomings that researchers have been warning about for years. Tech companies that definitely know better keep releasing AI with overblown claims, and then the most casual experimentation shows them to be full of it. In this case, some Meta researchers have pushed back at the users, saying it wasn't Meta's job to figure out the shortcomings of Galactica. It's like drawing a face on a cardboard box, claiming it's a sophisticated robot, and then when people point out that all it can do is roll down a flight of stairs, getting angry at them for expecting too much out of cardboard.https://hubski.com/pub/467514https://hubski.com/pub/467514https://hubski.com/pub/463913https://hubski.com/pub/463913lololololhttps://hubski.com/pub/467503https://hubski.com/pub/467503lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/463840https://hubski.com/pub/463840Mr. Ryan had a tendency to leap headlong into whatever interested him, including drugs, his family said. He played football and hockey and read everything from “Crime and Punishment” to Carl Sandburg’s poetry.He was deeply affected in junior high by the shooting death of two classmates, his mother said. A succession of substances followed: She said he started drinking alcohol in junior high, tried prescription pills by 8th grade and began using meth in 10th grade.“Meth is what turned our life into a nightmare,” Mrs. Vigil-Ryan said.When he used meth, she said, he was wound up and talked a mile a minute. It gave him confidence and energy, but he was also ornery and agitated when he was coming down.He began using heroin within months of starting meth. He ran away, repeatedly, at one point briefly living in a homeless encampment in downtown Salt Lake City. He escaped from two rehabilitation centers and broke into cars looking for money. His parents sometimes went searching for him.“For the last six years of his life I thought his life was at risk every day,” his father, Dan Ryan, said. “There were a lot of times we didn’t know if he was going to come home or not.”https://hubski.com/pub/463826https://hubski.com/pub/463826https://hubski.com/pub/463797https://hubski.com/pub/463797https://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/463417https://hubski.com/pub/463417Not sure there’s a more cut and dry everyday example of a consumer-abusing monopoly than Live Nation/Ticketmaster. I remember when I was a kid Ticketmaster’s fees were usually flat and maybe like $2.50 per. I don’t go to too many events these days, but when I do it appears seem like 30% is the typical fee, and that’s on tickets that run over $100 apiece to begin with. DoJ keeps talking about reviving antitrust. Can’t think of a better place to start.https://hubski.com/pub/463255https://hubski.com/pub/463255Oh boy! another one! I really like making these, lets me share stuff about myself that I wouldn't say in a casual conversation. Ask anything! (mainly on topic but it doesn't have to be) :)https://hubski.com/pub/462991https://hubski.com/pub/462991https://hubski.com/pub/462959https://hubski.com/pub/462959https://hubski.com/pub/462805https://hubski.com/pub/462805https://hubski.com/pub/467380https://hubski.com/pub/467380https://hubski.com/pub/467365https://hubski.com/pub/467365Worth another listen.thenewgreenhttps://hubski.com/pub/462630https://hubski.com/pub/462630https://hubski.com/pub/462553https://hubski.com/pub/462553talk to me about how stupid NFTs are againhttps://hubski.com/pub/467343https://hubski.com/pub/467343https://hubski.com/pub/462387https://hubski.com/pub/462387https://hubski.com/pub/462333https://hubski.com/pub/462333https://hubski.com/pub/462270https://hubski.com/pub/462270I know what you're thinking.... another "old guard" geezer posting about how bad things are with nothing but anecdotal evidence that this is actually the case. Before you judge me, please watch the video. I don't believe unhappiness is unreasonable when one is forced to accept concepts such as "throw-away society" and "poor value / high overall ownership costs" and "bad ownership experience" in the name of "progress."The back-story to this video is as follows. A couple years ago a local gentleman brought his 1947 GE fridge to me for rewiring and re-gasketing. That job went well and he has been using that fridge ever since as a beverage fridge. https://hubski.com/pub/467180https://hubski.com/pub/467180https://hubski.com/pub/461991https://hubski.com/pub/461991https://hubski.com/pub/461986https://hubski.com/pub/461986Great sketch. And the channel, "Moms Against Greg Abbott", is trynna take back "MAGA"!Subscribed. Not a mom, but subscribed.https://hubski.com/pub/461940https://hubski.com/pub/461940https://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/465478https://hubski.com/pub/465478https://hubski.com/pub/465592https://hubski.com/pub/465592https://hubski.com/pub/465545https://hubski.com/pub/465545https://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/465065https://hubski.com/pub/465065lil steve - I liked making this. Made me feel sad. Was good to feel.https://hubski.com/pub/464890https://hubski.com/pub/464890Bitfinex, Steve Bannon, Brock Pierce... good times.https://hubski.com/pub/464889https://hubski.com/pub/464889Content for children tops the YouTube earnings charts in North America, most of South America, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and much of Central and Eastern Europe, Jordan, Israel, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Mongolia, Australia, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. Only in much of Africa do kids’ shows not figure as the most lucrative channels on YouTube. Globally, children’s channels are more popular than gaming channels or those devoted to How-To videos, general entertainment, comedy, or animals, some of the other most popular types of content.https://hubski.com/pub/464886https://hubski.com/pub/464886lil steve Played some hockey that sounds like Weezer :)https://hubski.com/pub/464885https://hubski.com/pub/464885lil steve more hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/464844https://hubski.com/pub/464844Weird. Iron Maiden is not in the HoF? But Missy Elliott could be? For Rock and Roll? I'm no Maiden fan, but they definitely had a larger contribution to rock and roll than many on the list. A very unique band with an enormous and passionate fan base. They still sell out enormous stadiums across South America etc.https://hubski.com/pub/464834https://hubski.com/pub/4648341) Be a short-selling fund2) FUD that you're about to fuck some shit up3) Go short AF4) fuck some shit up5) https://hubski.com/pub/464820https://hubski.com/pub/464820https://hubski.com/pub/464779https://hubski.com/pub/464779lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/464775https://hubski.com/pub/464775https://hubski.com/pub/464752https://hubski.com/pub/464752Debbie Harry was mucho hot. I love this song. Love her voice. Love the synth hook. Love the bass and drums. Love the rhythm guitar riff. Love the intro click track. Everything about this song is perfect imo.https://hubski.com/pub/464664https://hubski.com/pub/464664Added percussion and lots of vocals to the intrumental I recorded the other day. Plus lots of synth etc. lil steve Some good hockey here. Can't Find HomeCan't find homeShe never ever ever went homeShe never ever found someoneThat feels like homeShe searched the worldFor the man that could feel like she feelsShe looked high, but mostly lowThere came a time when sheWould tie her chain to any old postYeah she looked high but mostly lowCan't find homeShe never ever ever went homeShe never ever found someoneThat feels like homehttps://hubski.com/pub/464614https://hubski.com/pub/464614"make sunsets" lolpreviously...https://hubski.com/pub/464620https://hubski.com/pub/464620steve lil - I enjoyed making this a lot. It was fun to play with horns and strings. I think with drums and vocals, it could be a cool one. Happy new year to you both. Anyone, feel free to add to this.https://hubski.com/pub/464610https://hubski.com/pub/464610Everyone has a theory about why American politics today is so awful.I blame MTV.More specifically, I blame the music channel’s “Rock the Vote” campaign in the early 1990s. That’s the moment when the tastemakers of popular culture decided the widespread perception that politics isn’t cool was a problem to be solved. Politics had to be made cool. And therefore not boring.I'd run the Abe Simpson shouting at clouds meme but this mutherfucker is younger than I am.In a vivid example of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, one “Rock the Vote” public service announcement in 1990 featured Madonna rapping, “If you don’t vote, you’re gonna get a spanking.” Never mind that some segment of the target audience might have paid good money to get spanked by Madonna. If your ad campaign requires pop culture’s preeminent sex symbol to make saucy allusions to S&M to persuade people to take their civic duty seriously, you’re not taking your civic duty seriously.NO NOTEShttps://hubski.com/pub/464603https://hubski.com/pub/464603https://hubski.com/pub/464564https://hubski.com/pub/464564https://hubski.com/pub/464556https://hubski.com/pub/464556lil steve - Hockey. This one was very very fun to make. Probably too much going on in this, but it was a joy to record.https://hubski.com/pub/464531https://hubski.com/pub/464531lil steve played hockeyThere's an awful electric piano track. just awful. But fun to play the drums.https://hubski.com/pub/464525https://hubski.com/pub/464525Surely my musical highlight for 2022 was this Tiny Desk concert from The Smile. Just how Radiohead's Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner were going to perform songs from their sonically adventurous album A Light for Attracting Attention was a puzzle not only to me but to the band. They arrived early, along with saxophonist Robert Stillman, to test out several tunes and figure out just what made sense behind my desk — minus the volume and effects that shape the album's sonic landscape. For roughly 90 minutes, the Tiny Desk crew was treated to a casual rehearsal, witnessing the band's creative companionship work itself out, settling on four songs.https://hubski.com/pub/464489https://hubski.com/pub/464489https://hubski.com/pub/464187https://hubski.com/pub/464187When asked what the happiest song length, chord progression and BPM were, ChatGPT said approx 3 minutes, C, F, G and approx 130BPM. It also gave me these lyrics after I asked for the happiest lyrics ever: skipping through the meadowButterflies, birds in flightThe sun is shining brightlyand everything feels just rightHolding hands and singingFeeling free, wild and youngNo worries on our mindsWe having fun, having funLife is like a partyLets dance and celebratespread some love and joy aroundand make the world a better placeThere’s beauty in the simple thingsIn the smiles and laughterIn the moments we cherishin the friends that matterLife is like a partyLets dance and celebratespread some love and joy aroundand make the world a better placelil steve mk - hockey. Here is the happiest song according to artificial intelligence.https://hubski.com/pub/464125https://hubski.com/pub/464125https://hubski.com/pub/464045https://hubski.com/pub/464045https://hubski.com/pub/464019https://hubski.com/pub/464019lil steve hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/464010https://hubski.com/pub/464010Hi Hubskinites! Today I released a collaborative project titled Contempoétnico, a fusion of contemporary electronic sounds with Mayan instruments and language.These songs were made in collaboration with my friend Daniel Lima in Mexico City. Dani and I met last year and we immediately hit it off over a mutual fascination with the ancient cultures of Central and Southern Mexico. Dani plays various instruments, including the hompax, a didgeridoo-like instrument created by the Maya. These songs were built around recordings Dani sent me, to which I added live and midi instruments. Most of these songs are through composed in order to match Dani's song structure (changes in intensity, tempo, etc.) and because of this were created off the grid.Tracks 3 and 6 feature poetry spoken in the Yucatec dialect of Mayan. Track 6 features a poem about the Mayan god Kulkulcan. Track 3 features a poem written by my father, who grew up speaking the language, written for his brother who passed away from COVID last year. It's a great honor to be able to preserve the culture and the language in this type of modern container, I really hope you enjoy these tunes.https://hubski.com/pub/463979https://hubski.com/pub/463979Oblivion - LushSungazer - EtherCulpeper's Orchard - Hey You Peoplehttps://hubski.com/pub/463956https://hubski.com/pub/463956https://hubski.com/pub/463911https://hubski.com/pub/463911https://hubski.com/pub/463879https://hubski.com/pub/463879https://hubski.com/pub/463817https://hubski.com/pub/463817The Krayon is like 4 years old, they just changed the color.The VC&A automaton is batshit and I love it. I will never not love VC&A automatons. Their snapdragon tulip watch is also batshit and answers the question "if displaying the time were truly irrelevant how terribly could you do it?" Note that I love this unironically. Watches are jewelry that happen to tell time; when you put your thumb on the "jewelry" side of the scale, this happens.The bitcoin bulgari is like a year old and was dumb then and is terribly dumb now. Horological awards shows like this are mostly so that rich assholes can smell their own farts.https://hubski.com/pub/463832https://hubski.com/pub/463832While many mainstream reports on FTX’s collapse have focused on the failed deals between the billionaire owner-founders of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Binance, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the story also includes the involvement of at least one dark figure in online poker history, Daniel S. Friedberg, who serves as FTX’s Chief Regulatory Officer. Friedberg is positioned in a central role in assuring that FTX remains in compliance with financial exchanges and licensing regimes around the globe.Friedberg played a prominent and infamous role in the coverup of the insider-cheating scandal at UltimateBet in the mid-2000s, and he helped orchestrate some of the questionable legal moves that allowed the Portland, Oregon-based site evade U.S. law enforcement efforts throughout its existence. Those business and legal moves included the creation of a false-front office in Canada which in turn allowed for an IPO on the London Stock Exchange, a faked sale of the company to Tokwiro Enterprises (an entity created by the former chief of the Kahnawake nation, Joseph Tokwiro Norton), licensing in various offshore “rubber stamp” jurisdictions, and ultimately, a shadowy merger with another online-poker company, Absolute Poker, which was also riddled with insider fraud and crippled by its own cheating scandal.Friedberg, who served as FTX’s general counsel before taking on the company’s regulatory role, was recently described by Coingeek’s Steven Stradbrooke as being “almost comically inappropriate” for the job. The description appears apt, given Friedberg’s long history of not complying with various jurisdictions’ regulations, but rather, evading them.https://hubski.com/pub/463703https://hubski.com/pub/463703https://hubski.com/pub/463689https://hubski.com/pub/463689https://hubski.com/pub/463607https://hubski.com/pub/463607https://hubski.com/pub/463544https://hubski.com/pub/463544ArsTechnica article on the next generation of security for our devices/lives, that finally does away with passwords.Pro: Much easier for companies to secure products/data when you don't have to mess with passwords. Customers are finally released from needing dozens of different passwords everywhere.Con: It's early. There's an oddity that it's not cross-OS, but that's a temporary glitch. And psychologically, humans have been trained to think of passwords as their lock/key, and may not feel so comfortable using their face/fingerprint everywhere for everything.Bonus: This article is on ArsTechnica, so the comments section is very good. Serious discussion by serious people who know what they are talking about.https://hubski.com/pub/463476https://hubski.com/pub/463476Broader background.https://hubski.com/pub/463414https://hubski.com/pub/463414https://hubski.com/pub/463415https://hubski.com/pub/463415https://hubski.com/pub/463403https://hubski.com/pub/463403And GPT-3 can apparently already solve the Traveling Salesman problem which is wild to me. There's an increasing amount of reasoning that these new language models seem to produce - things like explaining a joke which has to be miles beyond Markov chain shenanigan territory. I keep finding these developments fascinating and a bit scary. Can't help but think that we're in the honeymoon phase, as early signs are showing of things that are morally...grey. What happens when, I dunno, Facebook decides those billions of Whatsapp messages and voice memos might make an excellent training dataset?https://hubski.com/pub/463294https://hubski.com/pub/463294https://hubski.com/pub/463281https://hubski.com/pub/463281I dont even know what app I should use for SMS nowhttps://hubski.com/pub/463195https://hubski.com/pub/463195Up to that point, the labels wouldn’t cooperate – not even CBS Records, Sony’s longtime partner for years before the electronics company bought it outright in 1987. “If there would have been rotten eggs available, they would have thrown them at me,” recalls Jan Timmer, then head of Philips Worldwide, of an Athens, Greece, music-industry conference where he attempted to introduce the new format to a roomful of defensive record executives. One was Jerry Moss, head of A&M Records, who pounded his fist on a table. Back then, skeptical label salespeople called the CD “Jerry Shulman‘s Frisbee,” a reference to CBS’ market-research director, the label’s top CD evangelist.https://hubski.com/pub/463171https://hubski.com/pub/463171Hey, I'm Dany, I'm a young commission artist, ask me anything!https://hubski.com/pub/463096https://hubski.com/pub/463096https://hubski.com/pub/463094https://hubski.com/pub/463094Add some more. Vox etc. Have fun with this. I'll never finish it. Hope someone can use it. steve lil I played hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/462893https://hubski.com/pub/462893Hey folks, I'm at IAC Paris. If you're in the area and considering attending the public day, shoot me a message!https://hubski.com/pub/462823https://hubski.com/pub/462823lil steve I played hockeyhttps://hubski.com/pub/462803https://hubski.com/pub/462803https://hubski.com/pub/462743https://hubski.com/pub/462743kleinbl00https://hubski.com/pub/462727https://hubski.com/pub/462727lil stevehttps://hubski.com/pub/462716https://hubski.com/pub/462716https://hubski.com/pub/462715https://hubski.com/pub/462715couldn't help myselfhttps://hubski.com/pub/462581https://hubski.com/pub/462581https://hubski.com/pub/462559https://hubski.com/pub/462559Bitcoin may just be the beginning of the problem. If reported trading volumes for bitcoin, the most regulated and closely-watched crypto asset around the world, are untrustworthy, then metrics for even smaller assets should be taken with even greater grains of salt. At its best, trading volume is one of the most measurable signs of investor interest, but it can be easily manipulated to convince novice investors that it has much more demand than it actually does. https://hubski.com/pub/462521https://hubski.com/pub/462521https://hubski.com/pub/462492https://hubski.com/pub/462492I was invited to take my son to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers with another dad/son. I think I will go because the Strokes are the opener.https://hubski.com/pub/462448https://hubski.com/pub/462448https://hubski.com/pub/462441https://hubski.com/pub/462441https://hubski.com/pub/462380https://hubski.com/pub/462380There were warning signs about Mr. Price, but Ms. Margis did not see them. When she did a Google search, many of the top results for “Dan Price” were his own social media accounts, along with flattering stories. Buried was the reason he had, for a time several years ago, nearly vanished from public attention: An article I wrote in 2015 for Bloomberg Businessweek revealed that his story about the pay raise had notable holes, and that his former wife had accused him of domestic violence.Overnight, the attention largely dried up.But Mr. Price found an antidote to obscurity: Social media. Tweet by tweet, his online persona grew back. The bad news faded into the background. It was the opposite of being canceled. Just as social media can ruin someone, so too can it — through time, persistence and audacity — bury a troubled past.Mr. Price’s internet fame has enabled a pattern of abuse in his personal life and hostile behavior at his company, interviews with more than 50 people, documents and police reports show. He has used his celebrity to pursue women online who say he hurt them, both physically and emotionally. Ms. Margis is one of more than a dozen women who spoke to The New York Times about predatory encounters with Mr. Price.https://hubski.com/pub/462166https://hubski.com/pub/462166https://hubski.com/pub/462048https://hubski.com/pub/462048if the title is accurate, mk and I were there.https://hubski.com/pub/462044https://hubski.com/pub/462044Electricite de France SA said it’s likely to extend cuts to nuclear generation as scorching weather pushes up river temperatures, bringing the energy crisis in the European Union’s second-largest economy into sharp focus.Europe’s biggest producer of atomic energy, usually a net exporter of power for most of the year, is importing now. The nuclear issues are not just a problem for France but for countries such as neighboring Germany, which may have to burn more gas to keep the lights instead of preserving the fuel in storage for winter.The French utility said late Tuesday that power stations on the Rhone and Garonne rivers will likely produce less electricity in the coming days, but there will be a minimum level of output to keep the grid stable. A heat wave is pushing up river temperatures, restricting the utility’s ability to cool the plants.https://hubski.com/pub/462046https://hubski.com/pub/462046https://hubski.com/pub/462042https://hubski.com/pub/462042Ian’s ploy worked for a while. By his count, Saber and Sunny comprised $7.5 billion of Solana’s $10.5 billion TVL at their peak. (Billions of those dollars were double-counted between his two protocols.)“I believe it contributed to the dramatic rise of SOL,” Ian wrote of a time when Solana’s native currency traded at $188.Solana network’s TVL continued to swell even after the Saber ecosystem began losing steam in mid-September 2021, topping at $15 billion around Nov. 9, according to data provider DeFiLlama, while Saber’s TVL had by then dropped 64%.Ian wrote he disdained this “vanity metric”; nonetheless, “it bothered me that Ethereum TVL was so much higher” than Solana’s, because in his view, DeFi projects on Ethereum – the largest blockchain for DeFi – are “stacked” to double-count deposits.“I wanted to create a system very similar to this,” he wrote. One problem: “If the same team built each protocol, TVL would be more silly as a metric. Thus I created more anonymous profiles,” he wrote.Ian wore 11 masks.https://hubski.com/pub/462039https://hubski.com/pub/462039who else likes big starhttps://hubski.com/pub/462021https://hubski.com/pub/462021https://hubski.com/pub/461967https://hubski.com/pub/461967which might have come in handyhttps://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