Finished reading: The Killing Hills by Chris Offutt 📚
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 …
Currently reading (when I need a break from Viriconium): The Killing Hills by Chris Offutt. Been a fan of his since his first story collection, Kentucky Straight, in the 1990s.📚
Currently reading: Viriconium by M. John Harrison 📚
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. 🗨
Test Post from Obsidian
This is a test post from Obsidian using the Micro.Publish plugin.
In the next chapter of the never-ending search for a note-taking system that I don’t end up hating, I’m trying out Obsidian. It has a micro.blog plugin, so that already puts it ahead of most things I’ve tried.
📷 Credit: Hackaday: Ugliest Airplane Ever Built Predicted the Future
Independent book bloggers I’ve found while I’m reading Empty Space and the preceding two Kefahuchi Tract novels by M. John Harrison: A Sky of Books and Movies, Speculiction, Former People, and Weighing a Pig Doesn’t Fatten It. 📚
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
Currently reading: Nova Swing by M. John Harrison 📚
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Data science at its most relevant: Compound Pejoratives on Reddit (NSFW: language)
Well, this is just sad. I used to go to the Parkette when I lived in Lexington. I have photos of the sign I took for a project back in the early 90s. Lexington’s Iconic Parkette Drive-In Closes
From /dev/lawyer: Legal Sources for Not-a-Lawyers “It’s your law, people. Don’t let lawyers scare you off of reading it!”
Currently reading: The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past Book 1) by Cixin Liu 📚
I either missed or forgot that Ben Bova died last fall. They just released the last novel he conpleted. I read dozens of his books as a kid, one of which was the first book I ever finished and thought, “Wow, an author can make mistakes like that?” (Cyberbooks was that novel.)
This is the kind of content I think the web needs to get back to in a big way: 8-Track Heaven
For anyone you know who might need it: Vaccines Work. Here Are the Facts. | The Nib
Pure evil. Terms and Conditions Apply
Fellow children of the 80s, read this and say it with me: “No shit, Sherlock.” 1980s pop culture was all about impending, inevitable nuclear doom. Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: I Want My Mutually Assured Destruction I have a vivid memory – cir. 1983, so I’d’ve been 14 …