God: When the humans are alone, they should be able to hear music in their heads sometimes.
Angel: That's a lovely idea.
God: And it should be a 8 second loop of a song they don't really like and can't exactly remember the lyrics to.
Angel: ...
God: There's no way to make it stop.
Look, I was there, he corrected himself quickly and fluidly. He does have a speech impediment: the issue at hand is his mental acuity, and if anything this showed me that he recognized a mistake and fixed it
I feel like we need to teach Americans the term "monstering".
That's what it's called when the UK tabloids do this to someone. Only, it's not just the tabloids here.
We learned "gaslighting" in the Trump admin. We can do this!
there's a toddler in a cape running around pointing at people and saying "you're a frog now" and when he did it to me I ribbited at him and he ran away giggling and then his dad came up and whispered that I was only the second person who played along?? come on people, you gotta play along!!
I joke a lot about my capacity for despair, but there's enough Catholic discipline in my youth to remember that it is in fact a sin, one that absorbs all the best in you more comprehensively than a tar pit. I left the church ages ago, but I held onto that cable: despair is not a long-term good.
I can't find it now, of course, sigh. But a *lot* of the "civility" stuff that people objected to was really, really interesting to me, both as someone who has studied patterns of deradicalization *and* as someone raised Catholic. Because it hit *a lot* of my Catholic signifiers.
I don't *think* Thomas or Alito would take the retirement, but one of them might. I think Sotomayor is gambling that she'll be able to stay in office for the next four years and that she can move Barrett the way RBG moved Souter.
/8 At any rate, congratulations to the Federalist Society for an achievement beyond the reach of the British, outside the grasp of bloody civil war, impossible to Nazis and Soviets and terrorists: defeating the American idea.
Someone's probably written a 2-hour long YouTube video about this, but I'm just sitting here thinking about how when Lucas and the team made Star Wars, it was them remixing little bits of everything he was a fan of. But now, when making Star Wars, it's just people remixing Star Wars itself forever.
A few years ago, Jon Lovett floated a theory that media treats Democrats like protagonists - to be challenged, accounted, and forced to be behave in growth-oriented ways - while the GOP are treated like antagonists - immutable, expected to disrupt, thematic obstacles.
Thinking about that a lot.
I don’t recall the NYT calling for Trump to step down after being convicted of 34 counts of fraud and being called by a judge at his civil trial a rapist in the common person sense
After asking the government (or private foundations) to pay for the costs of doing research, we conduct the research and write papers about it that our peers review for free, then we donate those papers to for-profit companies that sell them back to us at high prices. This is considered normal.
ok i have another quote tweet prompt. what's something, big or small, related to your job or hobby, that most people don't know that you would like to have them know? it can be a concept, a piece of history, some vocabulary, or something else.
the four year old wanted to play teacher tonight
so he turned off the light and closed the door and told me to “shhhh” because it was a lockdown and I had to be quiet
this is a drill we do for preschoolers now
anyway I’m going to go cry
Worth pointing out that Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles away and the tech it's using was launched into space a week before the Atari 2600 came out.
A private corporation would have written this thing off years ago. FUND NASA.
The thing a lot of people -- somehow engineers, especially -- don't understand about brains is that a lot of things seem simple to us only because *titanically complicated system that have evolved over millions of years* are constantly working on them without our awareness.
It's the kind of problem you can instinctively sense is both too simple and too hard for a computer to do better than a brain. The steps you'd need to take to enable the computer to get it right use way more time and mental energy than just keeping an eye on it yourself.
Bsky threading is broken and I can't be fucked working out why it's broken so click on my profile and hit the replies tab. While Vic Gundotra was the immediate cause of Google switching to suck, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt enabled him to do this.
This is, incidentally, why I hate that we're calling LLMs "AI".
They don't know anything. They can't judge anything. They can't remember anything. There's nothing intelligent about what they're doing.
Predictive text models do not ever "answer your question"
They predict what an answer to your question would probably look like.
Which is very, very, very different
the private equity acquisition process where they take out huge loans to buy a company, put those loans on the company’s balance sheet and liquidate the company to pay them off (while looting the assets) should be made illegal
it is a purely destructive process and it’s absurd that we allow it
I didn't think the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money would wrap itself around MY face
All research on politics and/or demographic differences in political opinion must have someone on the team who understands how to do an analysis around power and inequality. Otherwise the inferred conclusions keep blaming oppressed groups and their demands for the backlash of those w/ social power.
haven't read the whole thing but I'm wary of researchers who focus on "gaps" and "polarization" because they tend to encourage power-neutral analysis that misses vital context.
