Happy Confederate Surrender Day!

Throwback to the 2024 Illinois flag contest, where this masterpiece was proposed. I wish it had won!

💯

I'm pretty sure I'd cringe at the regurgitated artifacts of my anxiety and self criticism from my pre-ptsd-treatment era. But it would be authentically me. The data volume wouldn't be insane. And the ethical issues would be massively mitigated. It could be educational.

Thought experiment: what if I took the open source options for LLMs and trained them on my own data. Which would be... All those blog posts from the twenty aughts and teens. All my texts and emails I could get my hands on. Most of the code I authored belongs to companies and I can't access.

I just called Pillion "Fifty Shades of Gay" before doing a Google search. A book by that name was published 13 years ago. I'm so timely.

Trump’s Iran Con Put Us in the Covid Before Times Again Trump started an unwinnable war. We know what comes next. We just haven’t felt it yet—the same way we hadn’t truly felt COVID in early March 2020.

Sounds about right: www.thefarce.org/trumps-iran-...

Sort of Skills-as-a-service, with lockin. Because Claude is so great as a coding assistant/substitute for junior devs (or so I hear), what happens if prices go up faster than your ability to pay? You become skilled at using the tool, and your skill is now very dependent on someone else's tooling.

A recent AI thought, which belongs somewhere in my manifesto outline. (Forthcoming sooner or later).

I take it as a given that the whole thing is billionaires trying to get capital advantage over skilled labor. And generate a certain level of user lockin. So they can charge you for a subscription.

She got that bandage off before midnight, so back to the cone of shame. Vet visit again on Monday.

Chemistry (and even more so, biology) are so messy. She'd love it. Unfortunately, with in vivo experiments and her love of animals, I would not anticipate a happy future as a bench scientist in biology.

And she's really not that far of from the pop culture understanding of science. That's totally how it's represented in cartoons. And titration is a popular representation of what happens in labs for a reason. But if she thinks it's more explosions than Excel, she's going to be disappointed.

And honestly, the last part tracks with the attitude I get from a lot of scientists. Go for it kiddo. Also I did point out I have a master's degree in science and technology policy, and said if she ever wants to understand the difference she can ask.

My 9 yo just said she wants to be a scientist so she can make things explode. Specifically pouring things Into other things to make them explode. I tried to explain that this isn't really science then she said she's not listening to me anymore because I'm an engineer and I don't know what science is

Excuse me *gentle* piano ballads. Somehow I think this makes my point even stronger.

If you do get duct taped to your seat, can you ask your neighbors for photos? =)

Youtube music put Pink Pony Club in a list called "soulful piano ballads". 🤔I love the song, but not sure I would have filed it there. =)

I'm not sure we need that as a blanket policy, but for this particular case, I'm on board.

I admit that monster train is more my jam because I got deep on the math and came out the other side wanting it to calculate it for me anyway =)

It is perhaps my favorite and most rewatched scene from the series. Also, when she threatens to take the ship apart with her bare hands.

Lloyd Alexander 🍲
CS Lewis 🦁
Mercedes Lackey 🐎
Dave Duncan ✨
Octavia Butler 👽
Lois McMaster Bujold 🚀
Ann Leckie 🐦‍⬛
Oops was that more than 5? Were they all speculative fiction? =)

Apparently that has much worse healing time. share.google/UyIesSMnRKPO...

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To be clear, a small septum piercing (because I think it looks good on others). And probably something geometric, or maybe a turtle, or a tree. Or a tree on a turtle. Or this one, because it's pretty. Euclidean solids are also interesting. www.threads.com/@tattootrend...

I've lately found myself thinking about some piercings and tattoos. I'm nearly 50. And I still have the "what would my employer think? (I have yet to see someone at my employer at my level or above with a visible piercing or tattoo), what would my parents think? What would family court think?"

You might be surprised.

Kinda weird that the party that controls the House, the Senate, and the White House claims there's rampant voter fraud.

Absolutely. Also how could I forgot that all the vehicles get the battle bots treatment, practically be damned? (And speaking of practicality, cascading waterfalls from hundreds of feet up is totally the right way to distribute scarce water in a desert. Almost definitely)

Progress pics =)

Though, for reasons, I was looking up the fortune 500 the other day and the Petro industry does have the highest revenue to employee ratio. So maybe a handful of people really can burn humanity to extinction if we don't do anything about it.

I think one has to appreciate the genre to view this as a masterpiece. And I just don't. I would probably be more impressed by the cinematography, writing, directing, and whatever else, if I enjoyed car chase shoot em ups, or if it had more wizards and/or space ships.

In the end, a solid action film (with a little too much action for me) in exactly the post apocalyptic setting you know to expect and a lot of setting that never gets explained and doesn't really make sense if you think about it, but you're not supposed to. Just enjoy the vibe.