Solomon cookin’ again

the rarer reverse Sobchak

I cannot believe that you think my claim about the end of history and the impending obsolescence of the human race is controversial. Is your head that deep in the sand?

Photo: Deadloch season 1, Phil McGangus (Shaun Martindale) is in the pub for the wake, eyes closed in irritation, and the subtitle reads “Vanessa, enough with ‘Lightning Crashes’ for fuck’s sake!”

Reprise!

Photo of a young blonde woman dressed in black (she’s a widow) standing in a cemetery with the subtitle reading 🎶 Her placenta falls to the floor 🎶

rewatching Deadloch season 1 for the Cath lore & was re-delighted by this scene where newly widowed Vanessa Latham (Katie Robertson) sings Live’s “Lightning Crashes”graveside

iPhone photo: 16x9 so you know it’s serious landscape time, foreground is pine tree silhouettes but at some distance, could be ferns at a glance, to the left just beyond is a strip of dark blue water and above that, left to right, a fading strip of orange sunset, then purple wisps of thin clouds, a tiny crescent moon in the sheltering expanse of night

island magic

“self-starter”

Picture of an article by Adrian Chiles titled "I adore dogs, so why does their unconditional love make me nervous?" A header under the title says "Those recovering from heart attacks and strokes apparently do better if they have a dog in the house. And dogs help depression, too. It’s a shame I can’t bear them looking at me."

Thank you for introducing me to Adrian Chiles

oh that’s good, annoying in that I didn’t get there myself but good 👏🏻

Like most of you I’m sure, I’m rephrasing Alcuin’s “Quid enim Hinieldus cum Christo?” as “Quid enim Saussure cum Claude?”

what a marvelous intro to this article

look, a whole book on the topic!

H/t @lopatto.bsky.social whose article I’m still reading

we've all heard of the promotional "strength of weak ties" theory but we need to update its negative version where, thanks to social media, you have very limited acquaintance with a vast universe of people because they were a dick that (one) time

*not a subskeet, random thought

iPhone photo: a house finch perched on a thin branch in a blossoming cherry tree, holding a blossom in its beak so that its face is almost completely hidden

I don’t know what the instigating factor was but this finch has declared war on cherry blossoms, one blossom at a time

or maybe it’s camouflage?

"6 ... it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." - Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society

American conservatives have long criticized Lionel Trilling for saying this, and yet every day they keep saying and doing things that confirm his point.

I find all this interesting in that all the criticism of TTSS informs you the film’s subject is not “who is the mole” but the corrosion of trust that sets everyone against each other

If Mythos can be told to red-team codebases, then it will be put to that use by bad actors, but Anthropic also reports alignment issues in which Mythos is itself the bad actor-bot

(my untutored guess is that the “mole” behaviors are affordances created by weights in training data)

Like everyone is amusing themselves by getting free compute from Rufus but presumably someone else is also probing how sandboxed Rufus is, can Rufus do lost-item fulfillment? Can Rufus file 1,000 complaints against a competitor?

I watched the Oldman “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” 👏🏻 yesterday & it’s got me thinking about coding LLMs as potential moles (cf. Mythos bad-bot mystique per Anthropic), plus customer-facing chatbots have man-in-the-middle agency

Like the balancing here of a cascade of plausibly significant impacts with the notion that a new paradigm is called for, even if it’s not clear what that is yet

there’s a fantastic button to the #2 entry here, I say, purposefully opening up a curiosity gap so that your brain will itch all day if you don’t click

Bluesky waking up this morning and deciding to focus on the we-bomb-children-company having put out some bad copy, you can just stick with the war crimes?

No one has messaging discipline any more

“…ceterum autem censeo Palantir esse delendam”

of them is a stick, which they both regard with great interest (eyebrows raised, mouth open, tails wagging). One is saying “The applications are limitless.”

Alt text: this is a New Yorker cartoon by Ellis Rosen. Two scientist dogs (they have lab coats, ID badges, a clipboard under an “arm”) are standing at a bench in a lab (flasks, toy models on the wall shelves behind, drawn grayed out so focus is on foreground action). On the bench in front…

timeline synchronicity

yes, and I’ve been to Glasgow, they say you’re never more than 6 feet away from a hippo there

shit I’m stuck…line?

“What if I disagree though?”

“Comments aren’t really a good mode for expressing disagreement as such because it’s very difficult to tell if you do truly disagree or have simply been misled by brevity or out-of-context glimpses of longer threads.”

I was literally just musing about whether it’d be preferable for social media comments to adopt improv rules, specifically “yes, and”

Thousands of Vancouver perverts delight in taking pictures of tree genitalia VANCOUVER - Thousands of perverts, creeps, and peeping toms have taken countless photos from different angles of tree genitalia and shared them on social media.

Thousands of Vancouver perverts delight in taking pictures of tree genitalia