People with power who are also protected from criticism can become corrupt. they can use power to ignore or imprison critics.
ideology, politics, religion, social structures, etc. without oversight creates conditions for corruption.
and yes, corruption reduces social participation.
i remember the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, magnitude 9.3, lasted 4 min 38 sec, the second most powerful earthquake ever recorded, the strongest ever in North America. the fault moved 60 ft (18 m) to release 500 years of stress buildup.
wait, did you think interviews with celebrities and prominent people were actually natural conversations and the transcript wasn't edited? really?
i often think of this as a poem for Silicon Valley.
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray
the "madding / maddening crowd" is apt for social media and the boom/bust of SV.
over and over, a digital device is only a few years old and a function stops or a part breaks and it's been discontinued. can't repair it.
maybe I'll only buy things made of heavy duty brass, good for a hundred years.
I wonder about the impact of sycophantic AI on the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem. has it created a feedback loop?
BTW, to those who say "I told you so!", have they added "no syncophanty" lines to their AI?
is that why they're so certain about their anti-AI attitude? ("Yes, master! You're right!")
Sean, but isn't this the essence of science? trying stuff to see what happens? or how it works?
and yes, I also crisscrossed Europe many times, just to see what there was, and often, there was so much.
“Sperm whales live in close-knit, female-led societies, &the new observations show how those dynamics persist in the animals’ most significant & vulnerable moments.
‘It’s amazing to think abt how, when faced w/this imposs challenge, these animals come together to succeed’” @projectceti.bsky.social 🧪
USA friends: March 28 is No Kings Day. Find your local peaceful protest at nokings.org. Share and be there! 🚫👑
An incoming Iranian missile.
The incandescent glow at the tip of an incoming missile is adiabatic compression, not friction. At hypersonic speeds (Mach 5 to Mach 14), air molecules ahead of it are comptessed, which creates a high temperature plasma seen as visible light.
Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, is 4.24 light years (40 trillion km) away.
Current rocket technology would take 8,000 years for a one-way trip.
it will take Voyager One about 80,000 years to get there.
Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, the Upanishads, Guatama Buddha, Zhuangzi, the Taoist...
Mark Andreesen has zero knowledge of history. what he says simply isn't true.
Jurgen Habermas
lots of calla lilies
it's the same problem as counterfeits: whatever has value becomes a target for duplicates. eventually the original loses its value.
shocked. shocked!
A section of the OpenAI Symphony readme that says “tell your coding agent to build symphony in a programming language of your choice” with a link to a detailed spec
We have reached a moment where instead of releasing software you simply release the detailed spec for software and tell people to prompt their agent to build it themselves
From the README of OpenAI’s new Symphony orchestrator: github.com/openai/symph...
so much fake AI propaganda from all three sides in the Iran war.
anyone know of an authoritative, verified source of news?
does the fox have a name?
I got five identical sales pitches in LinkedIn messages, sent by five different people.
is LinkedIn generating sales messages for people? or are these five fake profiles?
most marketing is going to change from "human to human persuasion" into A2A, where search, evaluation, and transaction is entirely by agentic.
"marketing" will be done by data management teams.
Great article about a very active life
Apple blossoms
Important reminder of the devastation wrought by the Musk/DOGE dismantling of USAID. Hundreds of thousands dead, many more to come. The greatest crime of the 21st century (so far).
1. open xisohongshu (red note)
2. go to Settings \ Language and Translation
3. select your language
it will auto translate all postings to your language.
that's how millions are using it in their language
yes, the US social sites should do this.
As I said yesterday, America, your usual tourist demographic from friendly countries don't hate you. We're not holidaying in America anymore because your police keep doing this and so you are considered an unsafe state to travel to.
King Charles I was arrested by Parliamentary forces on January 1647 (379 years ago) during the English Civil War. He was tried for treason and executed January 1649.
the AI posts aren't for you.
if it's technically accurate and high quality, then it's data for an AI. additional articles establish a body of data.
whether humans read it or not is irrelevant.
you read only a tiny fraction of your field. an AI reads and evaluates all of it.
i projected my laser (532nm green, 5mW) through a double-slit to a whiteboard 6.7m away (22 feet). nice interference pattern (the horizontal series of dots). yep, light (photons) is a wave, not particles.
yes, the idea of "now" depends on relative motion. my now may not yet happened for Paige, but may be in the past for Marcus.
the future has already happened.
the past hasn't yet happened.
(again, depending on relativistic motion.)