Given the pacific tilt of the world, the CNMI might again be on the frontlines of a regional war. I've always thought that John le Carré would have written a good novel about it -- it's where East and West overlap in 21stC. But above all it is a place of astonishing beauty and wonderful people. 🇲🇵
Winds measured 175mph--at one point, the typoon was only moving at 5mph and so it lingered of Saipan and Rota causing huge damage to the island. Saipan is a tourist destination for Korean, Japanese and Chinese travellers; Sinlaku will make the island's fragile post-pandemic recovery more difficult.
One of the most beautiful places in America, The Northern Mariana Islands in the the Northwest Pacific, was hit by super typhoon Sinlaku. The damage is enormous and recovery will take months. The NYT covered it but events on America's pacific fringes are often ignored www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/w...
Does anyone have insight into how “Proquest Biographies” of authors/historical figures are created? I’ve copied a (paywalled) link to one example below
This is the resource one of my grad students believes used/stole his dissertation research—they’re encyclopedia-style but include zero citations
A list of slurm jobs on a high performance computing system
Maximising access to high performance computing clusters this morning to test LLM performance. Very lucky to be able to do this and be able to leverage powerful computing tools to do so.
I’ve wondered this. My theory is that it comes from long marketing messaging in which comparisons are important and of which there’s more than we can imagine.
This is amazing’
This is an amazing opportunity to leverage UVa’s compute power in pursuit of humanities questions. Happy to share my experience applying just year if anyone would like to talk.
Working on this right now!
I find data such a useful way into textual analysis and I think that it brings real insight. But the problem is that it takes me so long that I read less. How do you balance data-orientated research with more traditional library work?
We’re doing perfectly, thank you! All three of us are sending positive vibes your way.
Good luck!!!
I once wrote to the actor Geoffrey Palmer about writing a memoir (I was working as an agent at the time). He took the time to call me up and tell me, in about 15 seconds or so, that he didn’t want to do it and then hung up. I was so shocked I’m not sure I spoke at all.
Oh sure. They’re very different business. My point was more that it’s easy to take an absolute position against ads (as Netflix did) when capital is cheap and available. It’s a harder position to hold when growth slows and capital is harder to raise.
I wonder if this is sustainable. Netflix found their position wasn’t and Anthropic needs cash and a lot of it. Maybe they can generate that by servicing high value markets (like they seem to be doing) but not sure that underlying problem that all these companies face is commercially resolvable.
Also query whether books pages about sales at all and more about prestige.
It’s always sad to lose books pages. It makes me wonder though if generalist book coverage has/had much impact on the market. I always assumed — based on my v limited experience— that focused papers like LRB / TLS/LARB are more effective because of their audience.
Advanced level parenting is eating while baby wearing and then not spilling food on worn baby. It is beyond my skills right now.
V DC moment -- overhearing a neighbour complain that their next door neighbour is a congressman who is away and hasn't shovelled the snowcrete in front of their house.
Also, I'd love to see how SWE use these tools. The new codex app can run multiple agents simultaneously and I'd like to know if that's useful for me or not.
I agree: agentic coding tools make it harder to learn basics and I wonder what errors creep when used blindly. On the other hand, I feel like we're might reach a point where python/r/ruby etc will become artefacts of the past as agents develop their own code that we can't understand
I am very lucky in that I get to use UVA's high performance computing services for my work but it means I've become an obsessive refresher of Active Jobs. It's quite a shift from playing with jupyter notebooks and the anticipation is something else.
I use codex and it’s marvellous but how much code do you need to know to keep on top of it. Codex has enabled me to do things I didn’t know were possible
But now I think about I feel Darlings would be better
Discards. But it’s never really that
Why does American etiquette not specify when to use Yours sincerely or Yours faithfully? I had this hammered into me as a child and was met by disbelief when I mentioned it to my American wife.
I hope someone takes you up on this offer. I want to read that piece
Have you listened to this podcast about a family in the north of England, their belief in reincarnation and a UVA prof’s interest in them
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
I haven’t been back to LA for more than 15 years but Cole’s was a great place to eat when I lived there. We used to spend plenty of boozy nights downtown too and I always imagined that it vibrancy had persisted. A shame that it’s been lost.
airmail.news/sh/V5hPrr
Yes. And knowing how to brief the agent properly and then assesses its overall output. I haven’t tried simply asking it to topic model this corpus of novels yet but we can’t be that far off an instruction like that being enough.