Boom! Wonderful takedown of a Trump apologist billionaire by a member of The Lincoln Project.
Down the Memory Hole – Tom Tomorrow, Daily Kos.
Wealth distribution in the United States I don’t think it is a perfect illustration, but I do think it is a pretty good illustration of why the folks who are mad at the world have been told to be mad at the wrong people, mostly by the people they really should be mad at.
Giant mushroom in roadside cemetery, NC.
Prof. James Mickens' 2018 USENIX keynote takes some wild and occasionally nerdy/cringey turns, but ultimately speaks clearly to a question I’ve had often lately: Do we really know what questions we ask, assumptions we adopt, and consequences we ignore when we write software?
A week or so ago there was a spate of discussion about “likes” on the micro.blog platform. Today I ran into someone who appears to have drafted the Simplest Thing That Might Work with the Open Heart Protocol on the back end and a web component for the front end.
🐶Fresh from the salon.
This horrifies me: The creeator of the web editor Hypertext Plus, has lost his home: I’m Selling My Name by Russell Beattie.
The last Funky Winkerbean actually happened on Sunday, Dec 25, 2022 so that Tom Batiuk could go out the way Sparky Schulz did with Peanuts. This last week of John Byrne guest strips is just contractual obligation. 💬
I’ve noticed that many authentication providers & libraries fail to mention Ed Tech software like Clever, Canvas, or other LTI SSO providers. Given the variety in OAuth2 implementations, you do need a specific integration. This is one area where we could do better in open source.
A good, nerdy deep-dive into the details: Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000
I’ve waited for years for a cross-platform whiteboard/diagramming/mindmap tool that worked anywhere near as well as Scapple on the Mac. Today, Obsidian Canvas launched and so far, it appears to meet the brief.
What part of the Gartner Hype Cycle are we in now for ML? Is it the Burning of Megatons of Cash or the Accidental Destruction of Innocent Bystanders? Let me know when we get to the Plateau of Standing Around in the Ashes Saying “Who Could Have Predicted This?”
I generally don’t pay attention to Bird Site shenanigans these days, but I just learned they’ve banned links to a specific set of other social media. Ok, whatever. But one of those is Nostr, and as far as I know, you can’t even link to Nostr. They added that for hipster cred.
The daily 🐶s
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I believe Talking About Large Language Models by Murray Shanahan should be required reading for anyone working with LLMs. You really must understand what you’re actually asking of a system vs. what it looks like you’re asking of a system.
The Model Does Not Think; The Model Predicts
In my day job, we work with transformer models a lot, so I’m always interested in how they advance. I played around with the OpenAI Chatbot and found the results compelling. Asking it to generate a coding tutorial (“How would you create an event sourcing application in PHP 8?") was …
This makes me happy: Charles Schulz’s 100th Birthday Comic Strip Tributes 🗨
For #FeedReaderFriday, a helpful hint: Every Mastodon profile comes with its own RSS feed, for easy following. Just append .rss to the profile URL. For example, https://mastodon.social/@Tonybreed.rss.
How wonderful, a new Octopus Pie story! 🗨
An unfortunate week for influential writers: RIP Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month, The Design of Design), and Greg Bear (Blood Music, Eon).
Funky Winkerbean is ending after 50 years. That strip, oddly enough, has been a touchstone for most of my life. 🗨
📷 Credit: Hackaday: Ugliest Airplane Ever Built Predicted the Future
I’m not saying this is just a Big Trak for (mostly wealthy, I suppose) Gen-Xers, but it sure pushed those buttons for me: Yarbo Yard Robot