istewart

And the photos from a previous event are an ocean of whiteness. Hard to argue that they're not, uh, cultivating a certain demographic...

I propose we pool funds, buy an old motel on the other side of the city limits in Oakland, and rename it Farthaven

Notwithstanding the subject matter, I feel like I've always gotten limited value from these Oxford-style university debates. KQED used to run a series called Intelligence Squared US that crammed it into an hour, and I shudder to think what that's become in the era of Trump and AI. It seems like a format that was developed to be the intellectual equivalent of intramural sports, complete with a form of scoring. But that contrivance renders it devoid of nuance, and also means it can be used to platform and launder ugly bullshit, since each side has to be strictly pro- or anti-whatever.

Really, it strikes me as a forerunner of the false certainty and point-scoring inherent in Twitter-style short-form discourse. In some ways, the format was unconsciously pared down and plopped online, without any sort of inquiry into its weaknesses. I'd be interested to know if anyone feels any different.

Time magazine is, of course, now a property of Salesforce bobblehead Marc Benioff. So one wonders if there are editorial decisions being made at a high level, much like the Washington Post.

so an alternative, somewhat weaker fireball spell

Butt

( Y )

There aren't really many other options besides Springer and self-publishing for a book like that, right? I've gotten some field-specific article compilations from CRC Press, but I guess that's just an imprint of Routledge.

Considering Tesla's well-documented issues with functional door handles, this may be more accurate than you think

Marginally related, but I was just served a YouTube ad for chewing gum (yes, I'm too lazy to setup ad block).

"Respawn, by Razer. They didn't have gaming gum at Pompeii, just saying."

I think I felt part of my frontal lobe die to that incomprehensible sales pitch, so you all must be exposed to it as well.

Yeah, Phoronix is somehow a tier below even below HN. The Gamergate freaks of Linux enthusiasts. At least on Slashdot or HN, you might occasionally get someone with actual technical expertise posting. Phoronix just seems like a playground to push whatever the latest "I got this software for free and I hate it" grievance is, which is a profoundly pathetic thing indeed.

The "system prompt" phenomenon is one of the most flatly dopey things to come out of this whole mess. To put it politely, this seems like, uh, a very loosely causal way to set boundaries in high-dimensional latent spaces, if that's really what you're trying to do.

I put this prompt into my local Ollama instance, and suddenly Amazon is constantly delivering off-brand MOLLE vests and random stuff meant to attach to Picatinny rails, plus I also have nineteen separate subscriptions to the Black Rifle Coffee Company brew-of-the-month club. Help?