ndru

It wasn’t for us, though. I speak EU Spanish and I didn’t gets lot of it, nor understand all the symbolism, but the celebration of the language and culture seems self evident.

I didn’t get all the symbolism in the Chinese Olympic opening performance, or countless other cultural performances, but I don’t see it as necessary to understand 100% to be able to appreciate the expression.

I don’t particularly care for Bad Bunny’s music, but the show felt to me like a powerful expression of cultural validity on a huge stage in a country where people are facing state violence for looking like they belong to that culture.

From what I’ve seen shared online from members of that latino/a community, they feel like it was incredibly powerful for them to see genuine representation at that level. To me that is more important than whether or not I personally understood all the language or symbolism.

“I used to do drugs. I still do drugs but I used to too” - Mitch Hedberg

The potato plant is a nightshade, closely related to the tomato. All nightshades contain poisonous alkaloids, including small amounts in tomato fruits and green potato skins.

The potato is still a vegetable though... Vegetable is a culinary term and can apply to any part of a plant, including roots and tubers.

I think it helps to understand that when some people say “chemicals” in the context of highly processed foods, they mean “industrial additives”.

But nobody means selective breeding when they say GMO. That term emerged specifically to describe the products of genetic engineering. There a plenty of legitimate concerns.

But it didn’t though. Old apps work just fine. There are plenty of reasons to complain about Apple - but the way they changed architecture twice and did so with impressive backwards compatibility both times is not one of them.

I’ve previously argued that current gen “AI” built on transformers are just fancy predictive type, but as I’ve watched the models continue to grow in complexity it does seem like something emergent that could be described as a type of intelligence is happening.

These current transformer models don’t possess any concept of truth and, as far as I understand it, that is fundamental to their nature. That makes their application severely more limited than the hype train suggests, but that shouldn’t undermine quite how incredible they are at what they can do. A big enough statistical graph holds an unimaginably complex conceptual space.

They feel like a dream state intelligence - a freewheeling conceptual synthesis, where locally the concepts are consistent, while globally rules and logic are as flexible as they need to be to make everything make sense.

Some of the latest image and video transformers, in particular, are just mind blowing in a way that I think either deserves to be credited with a level of intelligence, or should make us question more deeply what we means by intelligence.

I find dreams to be a fascinating place. It often excites people to thing that animals also dream, and I find it as exciting that code running on silicon might be starting to share some of that nature of free association conceptual generation.

Are we near AGI? Maybe. I don’t think that a transformer model is about to spring into awareness, but maybe we’re only a few breakthroughs away from a technology which will pull all these pieces off specific domain AI together into a working general intelligence.

Squeezing a metal cylinder out my chute sounds a lot less pleasant than just pooping poop.

A long list of refurb and land work, but my main focus the past couple weeks has been getting a kitchen garden growing in my new place. It’s been a few years since I’ve had my hands in the soil and it feels great to be growing again. Just a few beds for salad and greens right now, with a few new fruit trees, canes and bushes. I’d love to get my hands on a rotovator/cultivator to get some bigger bits of land in cultivation, but there’s limited cash and a long list of expenses.

The warning is specifically for trans folk.

The government's website issued guidance for transgender travelers, saying that U.S. ESTA and visa application forms require travelers to declare their sex, which should reflect their biological sex at birth. Travelers with an "X" marker on their passport or whose gender differs from the one assigned at birth are advised to contact the U.S. Embassy in Dublin for further information on specific entry requirements.

Ah yes, one of my favourite quotes by Orreleeise: “Overcomine challenges and oeeence ine teisge and rivively renence verover re rescience”

So unrealistic