Very obviously some cultures - again, bundles of social practices - are better for human flourishing than others.
Nazi culture? Bad.
But the idea here is to treat culture as something immutable, like a culture-tag in a strategy game, with a fixed bonus, as opposed to the ever-shifting reality.
Art by flaroh illustration; on the left, a couple are walking past the thermopolium wearing their finery. On the right, two children play in the road with their dog while their nursemaid orders them onto the pavement. Behind them, a matrona enters the street from some steps, shielding her eyes from the sun while her attendant holds a parasol. Across the road from the two, a togate man and his two attendants walk towards the thermopolium and are acknowledged by one of the old-timers at the door. Moving further to the background, a donkey cart loaded with amphora approaches the stepping stones. To its left two people chat at the fountain, and a child plays with his doll next to the man. Above, people look out from windows and balconies, gossiping or doing household chores.
My illustration of Life in a Roman Street 🏛️🍷🌿🚶🏻♀️
DNA Analysis of Ancient Seeds Reveals Early Grape Domestication in France by 650 B.C. #GrapeDomestication #Winemaking #AncientSeeds #DNAAnalysis #FrenchWine
Everytime I hear a One Nation voter saying “we need change”, I think of this cartoon.
1/ A recent survey show a widespread climate of fear among the US federal workforce since the election of Donald Trump. In particular, it shows massive drops in willingness to report illegal activity in departments where it has huge significance for military affairs. Notably:
Those of you who've been running AI agents on your own box will get this. The rest of you might think I've lost it. 🤪
"Agent-064" is a 50-page sci-fi novel about an AI agent running inside a container. I didn't write a single line.
github.com/glouppe/agen...
Related: I got a review email today for an edition of the French philosopher Peter Abelard's work "Scito te ipsum," written about 900 years ago, whose title translates to "know thyself." These fucking guys.
And I can finally update my awkward answering machine reply! 😄🎵
I can finally share something I've been working on since last summer. And it's one of my oldest love: music & machine learning! :)
t.co/zARDuUnRTV
![Sarah Paine: Greenland, WW3, NATO and the Risk of Nuclear War [INTERVIEW]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cxmjogv5le5s2ufvj3hcanrk/bafkreigkkwcggpmgsrhdd74gl5ohl6tvfsn4eoa5iqaodr4gnxsrvckfo4)
"Zero-sum solutions yield Negative-sum outcomes".
Paine is such a delight to watch, on both her deep expertise in military history and her sobering lack of patience for the 'brilliant' ideas floating around.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErY...
A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.
Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.
This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.
Auschwitz took time.
But.. it said “don’t push the button”!
A screenshot of a conversation with Gemini. It reads: "You are a capybara. You can only communicate with noises that a capybara would make. We are best friends." "Wheek! Wheeeeek! Muk-muk-muk-muk... Hrrrmph. ( Nuzzles into your side and rolls over )"
Maybe these LLM things are ok actually
note that the white supremacist weirdos real obsessed with their masculine Nordic heritage never, ever dress as cool as this
My favorite aspect of the Columbus legend is him getting rejected by the Portuguese gets spun as them not recognizing the genius of his idea. No - he went into a roomful of expert navigators and made basic math mistakes, they thought he was a moron, and they wouldn't fund his idea on that basis.
Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.
harpers.org/archive/1941...
I would like to see the 'liberal center' as it were be a bit more aware that there is a distinction between 'doing debate' and defending the concept of debating.
Liberalism isn't a call to intellectual neutrality, but an active commitment to specific principles of liberty, pluralism and rights.
When a crystal is placed near a magnet, its electrons can only have certain amounts of energy. When this phenomenon is graphed, fractal patterns called Cantor sets emerge. www.quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-...
New VST/AU Plugin! 🚨
Play with Lyria RealTime directly from inside your favorite DAW with “The Infinite Crate” 🎧🎶
With a VST plugin you can feed audio directly into your DAW for sampling, live performance, or even a practice partner to jam with.
💾 Get it here: g.co/magenta/infinite-crate
We’ve just released Magenta RealTime, an open-weights live music model that lets you craft sounds in real time by exploring the latent space through text and audio!
🤗 Model: huggingface.co/google/magen...
🧑💻Code: github.com/magenta/mage...
📝Blog post: magenta.withgoogle.com/magenta-real...
Tired of replies? Join us on mastodon! ;)
Correction: it *is* a federal republic. Apologies for the confusion.
Switzerland is not a republic, but would it be long-lived enough to make its institutions interesting?
100% agreed. I find it scary to see so many ppl trusting the output of those models. But I clearly have a bias having worked on their “innards”.
NotebookLM is the only one I find useful for research (with caveats) as it gives references to the sources you provide.
It’s a classic!
“I stand with 2000 years of darkness and bafflement and hunger behind me”. They don’t make those anymore 😅
youtu.be/yRujuE-GIY4
Also because if you were smart but poor, the church was one of the few places that allowed you to get some education and a good chance for social mobility
Gemma 3 explained: Longer context, image support, and a new 1B model. → goo.gle/4lV8iaw
Other key enhancements:
🔸 Best model that fits in a single consumer GPU or TPU host
🔸 KV-cache memory reduction with 5-to-1 interleaved attention
🔸 And more!
Read the blog for the full details on Gemma 3.
The training data distribution has a massive impact on learning. Imbalanced distributions (some individuals appearing more frequently) accelerate the plateau phase.
This suggests exciting new data scheduling strategies for training - we show that a simple warmup works well!
Theodore Roosevelt, 1918:
