Somewhere a therapist is trying to get people to "live in the moment" while this girl is already three levels deep into a made up game that only exists in her head and involves real trains. The world needs more pointless whimsy.

Interpolation looks like extrapolation when AI can mix two or more of its specialties.

Windowsの効果音を口だけで表現するアカペラグループが凄すぎる

The Most Incredible Stupid Human Trick Ever

We can guess where this goes. When a robot is walking around in the house and tells the dog hey it's time for dinner, we'll decide the robot is conscious.

Before we claim that LLMs generate bad frontend code, we should establish the frame of reference. Bad compared to what? Many of these discussions compare LLMs against some idealized standard of “perfect” frontend code, forgetting the realities of most human-authored code that came before them. In my experience, LLMs produce *far* better code than the average frontend developer, just not better than the superstar top 1% dev.

Definitely doable. We had competitions in 1st and 2nd grade. Read multiple children's books per week. We gradually ramped up to reading more adult books by age 10.

One of cinema’s great flukes: Sigourney Weaver draining that impossible basketball shot in Alien: Resurrection. Nobody expected it, so the editors had to cut fast when Ron Perlman instantly broke character and yelled, “Holy shit, it went in!”

I'm suspicious of people who get likes. x.com/ick_real/status/200877…

Something I think about now and again happened about 20 years ago. Someone came up to me in a multi-storey car park and said is this the top level? I looked up at the sky and said ‘Yes’ They said ‘If you’re going to be like that I’ll ask someone else’

Since there's a lot of screaming about the legality of black-bagging Nicolas Maduro going on, let's talk about the game theory of international law. Before I do that, though, I'm going to acknowledge that the Trump administration's legal posture doesn't even implicate international law significantly. Their theory is that Maduro stole an election, is not the legitimate head of state of Venezuela, and is a criminal drug-cartel leader; universal jurisdiction applies. This is why a photograph of Maduro restrained by a soldier wearing a DEA patch was released. I'm not here to state a position on whether that legal posture is valid; I want to instead outline a game theory of the "rules-based international order", which people are complaining has been violated because the US black-bagged a head of state. There are two different ways to establish a framework of governing law. Most people only understand one of them, which is the imposition of law by a ruler or coalition with force dominance. I'll call this "unitary law". The other mechanism is mostly only understood by a handful of libertarians; it is law as a violence-minimizing equilibrium among a number of roughly equal agents playing an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game. In such settings, cooperation evolves naturally and doesn't have to be handed down by a single ruler or coalition. I'll call this "IPD law". "International law" is enforced by an uneasy combination of both mechanisms. This is more difficult to see than it should be because there's also a lot of air and bullshit around "international law", bullshit consisting mostly of wordcels trying to cast magic spells on people with guns. The air and bullshit is why it's common to say that international law is a mirage, or a fraud that only serves the interests of the strongest powers. This isn't true: what is true is that if an international norm is not sustained by being a stable strategy in an IPD game, only force majeure by a dominant power or coalition can uphold it. Here's an example of a moral good that was established by unitary law of nations: the general abolition of chattel slavery, which happened because a dominant coalition of Western nations said "Fuck your sovereignty, we're no longer tolerating this anywhere our militaries can reach." Here's an example of a moral good that was accomplished by IPD law of nations: generally humane treatment of prisoners of war in armed conflicts. This didn't develop because great powers unilaterally said "stop doing that", it happened because even a great power at war with a minor one is exposed to effective tit-for-tat retaliation if it abuses POWs. If you want to understand "international law", you need to be able to disentangle three different things that claim to be international law: unitary law imposed by great powers, IPD law enforced by the threat of pain-inducing defections in an international tit-for-tat game, and wordcel bullshit. The thing to bear in mind is just because there's a lot of wordcel bullshit going around in "international law" doesn't mean there isn't a reality underneath.

Not 100% relevant, but reminded me of this, which is a favorite of mine:

When the dog usually goes for a walk with the husband and stops at the pub for a beer, then one day the missus takes him for a walk 😭

Some guy asked if this was for seances, and now I believe Vision Pro is only for ghoulish PK Dickian nightmares.

Which photo is more iconic? Like for Trump, Repost for Nixon-Elvis

Heavy petting... Bear, by Marian Engel. Bantam Books, 1976.

one of my favourite posts of all time

Never forget where we came from

Christopher Walken says Bugs Bunny is one of his favorite actors. He told Ben Stiller that "A lot of times I’ve played roles as if I was Bugs Bunny... but nobody knew"