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 make possible. Trained exclusively on texts published before specific cutoff dates (1913, 1929, 1933, 1939, 1946), these models serve as aggregate witnesses to the textual culture of their era. They cannot access information from after their cutoff date because that information literally does not exist in their training data.
Basement Whatever
Escape the algorithm
aging ai algorithm aliens Art builder Chicago cities community consciousness curation design enshittification finance focus future games good tech governance happiness history information Internet learning magic management media music organization perspective philosophy predictions privacy project reading reality social social media symbols technology travel ttrpg USA wealth work
about
-
-
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/ -
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 conjured hot coffee into existence with a taste and quality that could not have been summoned by any empire or fleet previously. In a safe car that could rapidly whisk me to another country in a few hours—by driving onto a train that literally travels under the ocean—I typed a few keystrokes on a magic device that allowed me to listen to virtually any music recorded, anywhere on the planet, in the last century or so.
-
The Isle of the Dead, Arnold Bocklin 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
-
“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 -
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 are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.
— Read on slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/ -
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 default rates, creating a potential bottleneck for the most capital-intensive infrastructure projects.
— Read on tomtunguz.com/2026-predictions/ -
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 took a trip once a year and Neal would take quickies here and there. But we had a very settled home-life for ten years.”
— Read on www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/carolyn-cassady-interview -
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.
-
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 -
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 look is totally your own. One day, I came across a video interview with an employee at their New York City store, Madeline Kevelson. After a brief scroll of her Instagram, @spiltmlk, I was smitten by her complicated, historical outfits that seem to exist outside of time.
— Read on freakpalace.substack.com/p/i-found-the-best-dressed-person-in
-
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 the traditional boundaries seen in older ARPGs. It requires fast, consistent communication between server clusters and player devices. When too many events occur simultaneously or the server load spikes, players notice it immediately through latency or ‘rubber-banding’. Diablo 4’s smoothness during crowded encounters is largely a result of intelligent distribution of compute processes in multiple data centres.
— Read on www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/how-cloud-infrastructure-shapes-the-modern-diablo-experience/ -
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 to exist.
What is iron in your life? What qualities, what people, what ideas can you rely on to bring you back to reality?
— Read on kupajo.com/iron-never-lies/ -
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 would immediately start working it over for any and all tweet-like potential.
Maybe there was a tiny bit of dish soap left at the bottom of the bottle, and I considered diluting it with water to get it out more easily, and make the bottle last longer. I wouldn’t simply think that. Thanks to Twitter, I’d think something exponentially more inane and annoying, such as, “The masculine urge to water down the dish soap…” or “The two genders [picture of brand-new dish soap vs. picture of old diluted dish soap]…” or “Choose your fighter [same two pictures again]…” or “Wake up babe, new diluted dish soap just dropped,” or “Men will dilute the last millimeter of dish soap rather than go to therapy…” or “No but the way I just diluted the dish soap…”
And so on. Just cycling through a procession of dumb, Twitter-borne phraseologies as they ran through my head
— Read on www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing -
How to get control of YouTube. Shut off the algorithm and get a better landing page.
How to get control of Spotify. Escape the algorithm, expand your listening.
How to get control of Twitter. “Onboarding to Twitter is challenging. It’s not a rewarding experience for most people; your posts barely get any engagement at all until you have a few hundred followers at least, and the process to get there is punishing. It takes a lot of time to curate a good Twitter feed; the median content on there is trash.”
-
-
These songs that make me think of Europe as “the other” – a remote place difficult for Americans to understand. The flip side of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism. This is not to be confused with songs that deliberately make Europe seem exotic or remote.
“This is the Day,” The The
“Moderation” and “French Boys”, Cate le Bon
“West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys
(movies where Europe is the other: “Say Anything,” “Beyond Sunrise”, “Wings of Desire”)
-
“The Serendipity Machine: Notes on Using Twitter.”
Some guidelines for using Twitter as a superpower – meeting people, getting questions answered, learning. It covers how difficult it is getting traction at first.How to Be Found by Your People Online (YouTube)
“Transform your Instagram Feed Into a Community Bulletin Board.” Make the Instagram algorithm biased to local community. “…curating in this fashion is an excellent way for turning the platform’s shortcomings into a positive.”
-
“Will Emerson talks about the impending financial turmoil”: “the only reason they get to continue living like kings is we have our fingers on the scale in their favor”
“The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Refuses to Fix Anything” – “The “number go up” rule is not a story of greed or economics, it’s a story of how we make decisions as a society.”
“Democracy?” – “Will you gentlemen excuse us for a moment please?”
Basement Whatever 