Category: Post
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Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment. This is what time-locked language models…
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Oddly, today’s sweet plum pudding hails from a meatier dish. As Maggie Black writes in History Today, the dish that eventually evolved into plum pudding originally contained preserved, sweetened meat “pyes” and boiled “pottage” (that is, vegetables) and was enjoyed in Britain as early as Roman times. — Read on www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-figgy-pudding-180957600/
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This morning, I woke up in a supremely comfortable bed, knowing there would be no deadly predators or pests to eat or infect me. With cheap soaps and pristine, hot water, I became cleaner in five minutes than was possible for any human—no matter how wealthy—in the past. With a flick of a switch, I…
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It was the opinion of the Symbolists, and Bocklin in particular that the purpose of art was to reveal through the use of a language no longer logical, but from “other” reality that hides behind that immediately perceptible with careful use of “symbols.” From Arnold Bocklin, 60 Paintings
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“My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement.” — Read on www.rogerebert.com/features/bright-walldark-room-august-2014-well-jump-and-well-see-by-chad-perman
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On the Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t. But this is supposed to be okay, because they…
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10. The data center buildout reaches 3.5% of US GDP in 2026. The scale of investment mirrors the historical expansion of the railroads. The only factor that slows overall building is perceived risk within the credit market, particularly in the private credit market. The massive growth in that asset class suddenly shows strains of increasing…
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Despite Neal’s reputation as a frenetic hipster, “I just realized that there weren’t that many trips,” Carolyn said. “It sounds as though they were doing this all the time. Half of them were coming home again — people don’t realize that Jack was going home and Neal was coming home. There weren’t that many anyhow…Jack…
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One-bedroom units in the building average $3,500— except two of them, subject to the city’s rent-stabilization laws, which hold rents below $900 per month. As a result, both units have been allowed to fall into disrepair, because the cost of restoring them to habitability is greater than what they’d generate in rent. Read more
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Pliny the Elder, who in his Natural History, completed in 77 AD, commented that the Empire’s legionaries had not yet extended knowledge of the island of Britain beyond the neighbourhood of the Caledonian Forest — Read on www.linkedin.com/pulse/mythical-great-wood-caledon-part-1-origins-richard-oram-khkge
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In my (extremely biased) opinion, the most stylish people on earth work at Fluevog.1 Unlike, say, Aritzia, you can walk into a store and never predict how the employees are going to be dressed. It’s a brand that celebrates individuality to the point where you’re allowed to wear whatever you want, as long as the…
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One of Diablo 4’s most significant technical changes is its fully connected overworld. Instead of isolated zones, players move through environments that update continuously. Enemy density, weather changes, public events and world boss timers are all managed through cloud coordination. As clients request updates, servers adjust local states to reflect global conditions. The setup reduces…
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While you can always twist reality to soothe your ego, iron, with its uncompromising physical reality, won’t support your self-deception. It doesn’t give a shit how you feel. As Rollins wrote, two hundred pounds “is always two hundred pounds,” regardless of whether you slept well, had a breakup, want to lift, or want the weight…
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when I was much more active on Twitter than I am now, I’d find myself, e.g., washing dishes and, without wanting to, thinking about various mundane things in the form of tweets. Some nascent half-kernel of an idea would come to me and, like a hack comedian for whom every banal thing is material, I…
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Reading Wikipedia articles from other countries is a good way to escape local bias, because other countries lack the incentives to prop up narratives. French Wikipedia paints the American Revolution as a violent and treasonous riot that started when Britain required the colonies to pay for their own defense: The American Revolution is a period of political changes after…
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The comic book writer Grant Morrison understood that if you get to tell a Superman story, you’ve been entrusted with global symbols of justice and kindness and goodness which are important to people. He understood this power, and when he had the opportunity to write Superman, he bucked every existing trend (and his own ouevre),…
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As Scott Adams says, our brains were not built to understand reality, our brains evolved for reproduction. Human brains don’t innately understand statistics and are designed for storytelling. People with widely different views (a Catholic and a Buddhist, say) can hang out together with no problem. In short, we don’t have a strong model on…
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I’ve come to accept that we all live in information bubbles, that it’s hard to pierce those bubbles, and that it’s helpful when we get a chance to see outside our realities. But unfortunately, piercing through what we know is often a very painful experience. One obstacle is that people get judgmental about people not…
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Balaji Srinivasan outlines his ten predictions on the future and current state of AI in this article. Among his predictions, he states that AI isn’t taking jobs as much as allowing people to take on any job. I’ve seen this directly in my experiments at Heartwizard Games, where I’m leveraging AI to create engaging stories…
Basement Whatever 