Unique in what sense?

Ten years ago we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash. Now we have no jobs, no hope, and no cash. (Please don't let Kevin Bacon die!)

Bottle It Up And Go YouTube video by Tommy McClennan - Topic

Also feels related to another blues trope, “the guitar sings the words”

youtu.be/JQI1rldm0p8

though i’m not as confident about that, since it feels independently justified just as a virtuosic performance practice

High Water Everywhere, Pt. 1 (2010 Remastered) YouTube video by Charley Patton - Topic

Charley Patton’s recordings are also full of this kind of thing: youtu.be/YKuq7p5MJ8E
I’ve never heard anyone explain it this way but it’s completely obvious when you think about it.

Brown Skin Girl YouTube video by Tommy McClennan - Topic

youtu.be/wXsF_L-9Jh8

He talks to himself (“how she got you then?”) because in a real live performance, the audience would be saying things like that to him. He hears that as an essential element of the performance that’s completely missing in the studio. So he has to provide it himself.

How much does it weigh?

How many of the necks can you actually play? In that video it looks like he can reach the top 3 at best. Is there a different stance one needs for proper 6necking?

According to the Egyptologist Wallis Budge, the Arabic word al-kīmiyaʾ actually means 'the Egyptian [science]', borrowing from the Coptic word for "Egypt", kēme (or its equivalent in the Medieval Bohairic dialect of Coptic, khēme). This Coptic word derives from Demotic kmỉ, itself from ancient Egyptian kmt. The ancient Egyptian word referred to both the country and the colour black (Egypt was the "Black Land", by contrast with the "Red Land", the surrounding desert); so this etymology could also explain the nickname "Egyptian black arts". However, according to Friedrich Mahn, this theory may be an example of folk etymology.[7] Assuming an Egyptian origin,

today I learned that the word “chemistry“ may have originally meant “that stuff they do in Egypt”

I think that people can cause things but only if they’re pure of heart and believe in themselves very much

cool!

wasn’t there a thing in medieval islamic philosophy that was the exact opposite — that god is constantly causing all events, which are otherwise causally independent from each other?

D254
Transformation:
man
to musical instrument.

orthogonal to the actual point, but seeing this made it viscerally click for me why ancient people defaced statues of sargon, akhenaten, etc.

can i be credited as a “script kiddie”

"a little python is a dangerous thing", i chuckle to myself as i download a database of 10,000 movie scripts so my girlfriend can ctrl+f for the word "boobs"

Norman Rockwell guy standing

I need to go to the bathroom

there's no such thing as an "untranslatable" word because the same faculties required for an L1 speaker to pick up use of the word are also possessed by you, an adult foreigner, and can be engaged in the same way.

there are words that are embedded in a remote cultural context.

new insane anthropic mechinterp paper just dropped. www.anthropic.com/research/emo...

I watched the Artemis launch and, no joke, I think that NASA hiring a couple professional youtubers would make a dent on addressing this.

I've said this many times before. The crucial point is actually to understand why 0.99999... refers at all. Before that conversation, an algebraic proof is actually obfuscatory. As a diagnostic, ask yourself: does ...99999 = x = -1? After all, x - 10x = 9.

- web devs worked on it
- as i understand it what it does is build custom feeds for users based on natural language prompts. that’s not something web devs would have done. it feels a bit more like a search engine.

I don't know because I don't work there, but I would guess that it was an idea that a dev had, that they'll try out to see if people like it, and probably shutter if people don't like it. Same as any other feature on any other social media platform.

Everyone complaining has gotten negatively polarized against a genre of computer algorithm.

This seems like an extremely uncontroversial use case for an LLM. The input is natural language and the measure of output quality is vague. It's not taking a human job but rather providing a previous nonexistent functionality. There's no way for it to hallucinate or misinform.

There’s some cool recent research on this phenomenon! It turns out vision language models excel at image benchmarks *even when the actual images aren’t provided,* because the answers are implicit in the questions!

arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687

Comments section straight out of 1965. He's washed-up, phony, a sellout. Why can't he go back to making protest music?

bonus: as a Westerner i’m acquainted if not close with Regular Buddha and Fat Buddha, but Veiny Emaciated Buddha is a new one for me!

I’ve played enough LA-MULANA to know that one of these things will definitely explode into a cloud of bats if I come near it.

"OK. Well, imagine that you want some computers in your body but there are also some computers that are very bad to have in your body,"

my allergist did the '"what is your job" as proxy for "how technically should i explain this concept to you"' thing to me and then i'm pretty sure i failed the technicality cut by saying "computer science research", which was pretty funny