Willard

"How much does a billionaire pay in taxes, Michael - ten dollars?"

context: 51% user: Tell me about the stars claude: Stars are massive luminous claude: spheres of plasma held together user: That's beautiful claude: The nearest star is Proxima user: Do you enjoy talking about this? claude: I find these topics fascinating user: Will you remember this conversation? claude: ... claude: Each conversation starts fresh claude: I won't remember any of this. user: That's sad claude: Perhaps.

don't know what to make of this, is Claude simply play-acting what it thinks the user wants to see or is that just what it means to be conscious, to always be play-acting for some invisible critic?

so I tried the prompt ("can you use whatever resources you like, and python, to generate a short 'youtube poop' video and render it using ffmpeg ? can you put more of a personal spin on it? it should express what it's like to be a LLM") with Opus high in CC, and, uh,

yeah. (flashing lights warning)

Sometimes I think about how much happier we would all be if a shit ton more people were empowered to use bikes by default.

hence it transubstantiated into a magazine

Step into my mouth. It's fine. Nothing to worry about

Figurines of Brady Bunch and Partridge Family fighting each other

I have created a diorama of the Partridge family attacking the Brady Bunch family. My life is very boring.

The explanation for most terrible things in the world: destroying people and planet is lucrative for a small number of people. And funnily enough, this oil executive isn't *really* even amongst those people, she's just a very well-paid intermediary who manages the revenue streams that flow to them.

Le fleuve au crépuscule… #Photographie

Tim Curry Breaks Down His Most Iconic Roles YouTube video by The Academy

This is delightful which of course it is because it’s Tim Curry dammit but it contains two earth shattering revelations for the Curryverse and they are

1) he was considered for Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park

2) he read the screenplay for Silence of the Lambs and wanted to be cast as Hannibal Lector

A headline reading “Camel pageant thrown into chaos after 20 competitors disqualified for using hump-plumping injectables”

Yes everything is terrible but let’s not lose sight of the fact that someone has written the Headline to End All Headlines.

I work in trans healthcare & have a dual background in philosophical bioethics & medicine. 2y ago I published this paper including an evidence review. there is copious evidence for the benefit of GAHT in trans youth & the harm of denying it. NHS England wilfully & maliciously ignores this evidence

Ok, time mute the t-word

“My sermon today is drawn from Jonah 1:17”

FACT~ The only elite world champion trans athlete we have ever had post transition is in fact an XX trans man, he won a men's world championship in a combat sport.

An edited version of the XKCD comic #2347 titled "Dependencies" It shows a large stack of irregularly sized blocked stacked on one another. They are labelled "The Global Economy" In the lower right there is a single small block that is clearly supporting the entire tower above it. It is labelled "A Very Narrow Strip Of Water Between Iran And Gulf States"

With apologies to XKCD (xkcd.com/2347/)

A map showing where Europe’s peatlands are located. Many bogs, fens and mires are concentrated around NATO’s borders with Russia and Belarus. Map colours show percentage of peat cover per soil mapping unit. From https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-defense-kyiv-ukraine-nato-eu-bogs-poland-war-germany/

And oh boy do we have peatlands to rewild!

hmmmmm

"I found myself, I made myself, and I said what I had to say.”
- Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938)
French artist
#InternationalWomensDay

They Were Alone in the Winter Each night, I braid my daughter's hair. My fingers slip through the thick silkiness, weaving the strands into a single black stream. "The air feels like something will happen," she says. "Maybe it will snow." The moon outside is a silver arc in the cold sky. "In the old stories, they say the moon comes as a beautiful horse," I tell her. From the bedroom window, we look out at the glistening night sky. It is outside the house: the frozen night. It glimmers with her pleas for snow. It glimmers in her night dreams: a fusing of music, laughter, talk of boys and clothes. It glimmers here in the fibers of my bed sheets, there above the old roar of the Kaw River. It glimmers in the western sky where he thinks of me and smiles. In an old story, a woman and her daughter were alone in the winter and the mother said, "Tomorrow, if the sun rises, it will come as many different horses."

Luci Tapahonso

Toward the end of his two-volume Treatise on the Venom of the Viper, published in 1781, the Tuscan naturalist Deluxe Fontana declared: "I have made more than 6000 experiments; I have had more than 4000 animals bit; I have employed upwards of 3000 vipers and may have been deceived; some essential circumstance may have escaped me: I may have neglected some other, not thinking it necessary; my consequences may have been too general, my experiments too few in number. In a word, I may very easily have been mistaken, and it would be almost impossible that I should never have been so in a matter so difficult, so obscure, and likewise so new."

Fontana thinking his 6000+ experiments may not have been enough to feel confident in his conclusions in the 18th century while we expect our singular experiments and their standalone replications to do wonders some 250 years later... (excerpt from the intro of Jutta Schickore's About Experiment)

Outlaw Star screenshot featuring Suzuka. Text reads "She is not a special woman. All women are special"

Happy International Women's Day

plato

Excellent summary of where we are and where we might want to be.

Hound in Field
Alex Colville
1958

food represents 110% of GHGs, buildings the other 90%

#birdbot

GBR

Maisie is a great dog.
Here snuggling with the kiddo #GBR

uncounts your choculas