Chill Links

โ€˜Stop the slopโ€™ efforts gain traction as platforms draw lines around AI content.

Falling long-term unemployment isnโ€™t good news, economists say โ€” what it means for jobseekers.

Amid cost of living stress, many parents are supporting children well into adulthood.

Foreigners are buying fewer U.S. properties, but luxury homebuilders still draw them in.

How Colorado became the unlikely epicenter of American yak ranching.

Mount Toba eruption doesnโ€™t seem like it could nearly kill our species.

The World's Vegetables Are Vanishing, And It's Quietly Wrecking Our Diets.

In a First, Astronomers May Have Spotted a Supermassive Black Hole That Wandered to the Edge of Its Galaxy.

Meet the army of amateur archivists racing to save US history in national parks.

A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue.

'It's apocalyptic.' A look at the aftermath of catastrophic fires in Spokane.

The Westโ€™s Demographic Math No Longer Adds Up.

Germany battling โ€œdailyโ€ hybrid warfare attacks, minister warns.

Somn

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

I don’t care about how much I sleep, when I sleep, tracking my sleep, doing anything else about sleep than I already do, having a sleep schedule or even really giving much of a crap about sleep.

I just do not care. It’s mostly irrelevant to how I live my life. Why are people so obsessed with this? Sleep when you need to, don’t when you don’t. Simple.

Taste This

Chill Annoying, Music

I don’t think I have good taste in music, but just like what the fuck I like and don’t give a flying fuck who knows it.

That radio station that’s showing the tracks in the sidebar? That’s the music I actually listen to. It’s not curated (for the station). It’s just whatever semi-randomly1 pulls from the 11,000+ tracks I have in my main music directory. I don’t edit or block or even pick anything.

Simple as that. Woo-Hah!

  1. There is an AI DJ.

Chill Links

Americaโ€™s small businesses are giving up on health insurance.

Data Centers Didnโ€™t Jack Up Your Billโ€”Utility Greed Did.

A rising number of S&P 500 companies are spelling out exactly how artificial intelligence tools are boosting their margins โ€” and the improvements are getting larger.

DeepMindโ€™s hurricane breakthrough has surprised weather scientists.

Indiaโ€™s Climate Stress and the Solar Power Paradox.

The fundamental problem academia has today is that since the mid 2010s, much of it–at the administrative and departmental levels–reconfigured itself away from being a somewhat autonomous body with its own autonomous intellectual goals and standards, to being a subservient epistemic support layer for a vertically integrated emergent politics whose primary goal has been reversing political developments like Trumpism, Brexit, and nationalist populism in general.

Incentives are for losers.

Illinois Just Told Every Operating System to Start Reporting Your Kid's Age.

ChatGPT starts blocking direct requests to copy an authorโ€™s style. Moronic.

Lake Mead hits historic low water level as Colorado River struggles.

Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

Reboot Insult

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Anyone else dealing with users who think rebooting is a personal insult?

There are tons of users like this.

I understand that you want your problem examined in minute detail by a team of experts and fixed. But computers are extremely complicated devices. Often, they get into a state that is not and never will be capable of being solved in any reasonable timeframe. Many DLLs and EXEs (etc.) do unpredictable, undocumented things that no one except the vendor can solve when they go wrong. And often, not even then.

Fucking reboot. Just reboot. Shut the fuck up and reboot. Fuck.

A few weeks ago, I had a user complain to my manager — all without putting in a ticket or contacting anyone on my team — that their machine was extremely slow and not working correctly. Why do people do that, contact a manager when they’ve made no effort to follow any process1? It just means I put them at the very bottom of every queue forevermore.

Looked at the logs. They had not rebooted in 184 days. Windows 11 needs a reboot about once a week to be functional.

I do not understand users.

  1. I actually know the answer to this. It’s because they are not getting their work done and want to use IT problems as an excuse. Seen it hundreds of times.

Actual Prizes

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Bobby (@Bobbythirdway) / X

Many women: I am the prize!

Men: But you offer nothing. You can’t cook. You can’t do anything adult. You’re dumb as a rock because you spend 16 hours a day scrolling on your phone. You don’t even like sex. What are you even here for?

Many women: The prize! The prize! The prize!

Men: *Goes off and does something away from the crazy*

We have really failed women.

Bottles and Necks

Chill Annoying, Gutter Philosophy

Wolf Tivy (@wolftivy) / X

I like Wolf, but this is old wine in a new bottle.

This is just Nietzschean “Overcome historical moralistic baggage that holds us back” from the Genealogy of Morals 1 combined with Foucaldian antihumanism. It’s just accelerationism, in other words, in somewhat different garb. I mean, Nick Land has been writing the same shit since the 1990s. The whole CCRU project was Deleuze-Guattari plus Nietzsche plus cybernetics, with the human seen as a bottleneck to progress.

Regardless, there is no way to credit “what we really are” without an implicit normative story about which capacities count as the real ones and which are historical baggage. There is no way around this; part of any useful philosophy is making value judgments. What Wolf is doing is reinventing the wheel while not even knowing what a wheel is or why there are wheels.

  1. Read that when I was 11, probably not the best idea.

Chill Links

JWST study suggests a handful of 'leaky' galaxies reionized the early universe.

Neanderthal growth hormone receptor increases muscle mass in people today, study shows.

AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon.

#
Taste Is All That's Left.

Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities.

Federal Communications Commission scraps limit on broadcast TV ownership.

Americans Are Richer Than Everyone Else.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Two Theories for Explaining 15 Universal Sex Differences in Cognition and Behavior.

Explosive drone found hovering near Ukrainian cargo aircraft at German airport.

Modernaโ€™s mRNA flu shot earns FDA approval after rollercoaster review.

Employers unexpectedly cut 23,000 jobs in a sign of a wilting labor market.

The Argentine ranch where tech CEOs plan to ride out the apocalypse.

Americans got their biggest raises in 40 years. Inflation took most of it.

A house, a car, a little breathing room: Why middle-class life feels increasingly out of reach.

Spokane wildfires are a warning to the rest of the world.

Wildfires now the dominant contributor of unhealthy levels of air pollution for pregnant women in the US.