Am I right that the available mono catalogue isn't remastered?

I try to have a rule for myself. The rule is just "don't post snark about current US politics," because those posts get so dull. But I'm a weak man and sometimes I fail.

Incredible that the most basic History Channel Dads would make better policy than this.

I wonder if flu has ever affected a war

The image is excellent.

I am extremely proud to tell you that one of my excellent students, @kylefoster.bsky.social, has a review of Fred Beiser's EARLY GERMAN POSITIVISM in the current issue of @hoposjournal.bsky.social!

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Can't comment on the translation as such, but "Seething Chaos" is fire.

Sorry, I'm still stuck on this. You know what other languages have syntax and rules? All of them! That's what a language is!

If your theory of creativity entails that it can't involve language, it's a bad theory!

"Writing a haiku isn't creative, because haiku have a defined structure and rules."

Yes. For me, at least part of it is Ossoff us doing Cool Obama, which is just a lot less pretentious than Shapiro doing Highest Rhetorical Heights Obama. (I find the latter unbearably embarrassing.)

<Norman Rockwell freedom of speech guy>

In some ways, Hermann Cohen is a better writer than Ernst Cassirer.

It's a maze. A labrynth.

If we're talking %s, it's six of one and half dozen of the other!

A thing Maritimers seem not to know is, this region has a much higher share of its population living rurally than the rest of Canada outside of the North. A question Maritimers have to think about is, why would it be so terrible to have, say, BC- or SK-levels of rural population?

I guess the ice rink and football fields are easy enough to find, so that's something!

Ha. I'm actually thinking of SMU, where, eg, the art gallery is basically impossible to find if you enter campus from any of the most common points of entry. The main performance space isn't quite that bad, but still pretty bad.

Conversely, a university that's a stone's throw from downtown Halifax has kneecapped itself over and over again for decades by building architecture that's relentlessly hostile to the public. That's a terrible own goal!

One of Vancouver's great disadvantages as a city is that its two main universities are far from downtown. That's a problem! Because universities are natural cultural hubs -- museums, concerts halls, and sports facilities. That stuff should be where people can get to it!

It's the sort of thing that could work just fine as travel for any member of the cabinet who needed it, *provided there were very clear and transparent norms about its use*.

And it's, uh, not clear that condition was going to be satisfied.

'Twas my lucky bun day

Her stuff post-IMMACULATE COLLECTION hasn't stayed in heavy rotation. But her late-90s collaborations with William Orbit produced some great pop songs.

My defense of Madonna is that she was the first pop artist to get a #1 on the charts with a song that displaces the backbeat by a full eighth note.

I mean, she was the first get such a song in the *top 10*, let alone #1.

This is, if not in so many words, the argument offered for some of the biggest names in music presently.

Only 17 more turns to practice, and you'll be up to date!

That's exactly my thought. So when people talk about the need to learn promt engineering, my deep suspicion is there's (almost?) nothing to teach that's separable from some specific SME.

Every example I've ever been given of high-level prompt engineering has boiled down to "I used my subject-matter expertise to push the LLM to generate what I needed from it."

My very strong suspicion is that whatever skill there is there that's independent of subject-matter expertise can be picked up in an afternoon by someone just messing around on their own.

There is no such thing as "prompt engineering". There is only subject-matter expertise.

I'm starting to suspect people pushing "prompt engineering" have no subject-matter expertise themselves. And worse, they don't even understand that it's what the rest of us do have.

Reciting to myself Macbeth's "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech to get motivated to exercise.