According to the biography Lucky Loser, those weren’t his medals, he borrowed them from someone so he’d look better in photos
13.03.2026 14:58
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According to the biography Lucky Loser, those weren’t his medals, he borrowed them from someone so he’d look better in photos
The “our blessed homeland” meme where that the same things people often argue against on “bitter lesson” grounds are contrasted with the positive framing we give those same actions for methods that *work*. Our Essential Structure vs. Their Bitter Lesson Our visionary equivariance vs. their constricting inductive bias Our cunning generality vs. Their infeasibly vast solution space Our clever synthetic data vs. Their Desperate Data Augmentation Our exponential speedup vs. Their losing battle with Moore’s Law
“The Bitter Lesson” is a fine little essay. Anyone in software/ML/AI should read it. But I see a lot of people run with a maximalist overstatement of it, essentially: “structure and domain knowledge are always a mistake”. This is historically dubious and theoretically ungrounded. A thread:
I sat at a coffee shop in Champaign and used a packet sniffer to dump AOL Instant Messenger traffic on their unencrypted WiFi and witnessed an entire breakup.
Threads thread: thriller_instinct 3d Is it okay to bully 40 and 50 year olds who are on social media just for being on it, cuz like why are you here - 254 Q 3.1K G 28 746 corporateash 18h ••• My ICQ UIN is 7231680. That number is burned into my consciousness. I inadvertently learned that you could see private conversations in public chat rooms when using Telnet instead of a browser on GeoCities. I can tell you the difference in audible dial-up handshakes between 1200, 2400, 14.4 kbps modems. I needed a edu email address to join Facebook after my university was admitted. We were here at the beginning. We made social media. You wouldn't be in my Top 8. I have usernames older than you. 852 Q62 G6 72
“I have usernames older than you.”.
Holy shit
When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.
Guys it’s a toaster.
Grab your Dramamine because you’ll want to sleep through this!
We are fighting against three giants, my dear Sancho - injustice, fear and ignorance.
Miguel de Cervantes.
Big Basin is one of the most magical places in NorCal, I camped there only a few weeks before it burned, and I have been dining on those memories ever since. I long to go back there and camp again someday.
Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Cry Havoc! And let wag the dogs of war!
Surprising take in this paper: LLM-generated AGENTS md files hurt performance in most settings while increasing cost by 20%. arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11988
Great to see you on Bluesky! I am so sad about what this country has done to climate science. I spent 10 years of my life working on climate technology, and they flushed it all down the drain.
Oh my god, he has been accidentally shot by Claudine Longet!
A Mandaic curse bowl in the Royal Ontario Museum. It has a spiraling Mandaic text that leads to an encircled x at the center.
This Super Bowl Sunday, I’d like to introduce you all to the magical curse bowls used in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria in late antiquity. Written in Mandaic (as here) or Syriac Aramaic, they trap demons who trespass on a household by sucking them in with spiraling spells to the center of the bowl.
I once read a paper in Science where the author (a Stanford professor) had butchered the data so badly and buried it so effectively in the supplemental material that they made a 1% increase in enzyme activity appear like a 50% increase, and nobody noticed bc nobody read it closely enough.
the sign in Costco for THE $1.50 HOT DOG
If nobody got me, I know there’s one American institution that’s got me
Top of the photo in white text reads: "BREAKING OVER 680 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES MEMBERS, INCLUDING 10 NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATES, ENDORSE IMPEACHING RFK JR." Below that in black text is a statement reading: "We, the undersigned Members of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering, writing in our private capacities, endorse the Articles of Impeachment introduced in the House of Representatives on Dec 10, 2025 by Representative Haley Stevens." Below that is the red "STAND UP FOR SCIENCE " logo. Below that is a link in white text reading: "standupforscience.net/impeach-rfkjr".
BREAKING: Over 680 members of the National Academy of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering have endorsed articles of impeachment against RFK Jr.
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Dr Kareem Carr man: i wish to publish @kareem_carr Jan 21 reviewer 2: your paper is no good man: i'll do anything to improve reviewer 2: it's simple. you must read the work of the great scientist Pagliarini man: *bursts into tears* but i am Pagliarini Andre Pagliarini @apagliar Jan 21 a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini Jan 21, 2026 • 3:47 PM UTC
I just thought everyone should see this
Americans still have more confidence in scientists than many other groups in society
Full survey results show American public have high levels of confidence in scientists while revealing some partisan differences (including on how to fund science), but statements asserting lost trust should be read instead as intentional efforts to degrade trust.
www.pewresearch.org/science/2026...
The theater scene in SF sucks. Want to pay $600 to see Kevin Spacey in the Broadway touring company of Avengers the Musical? No? Too bad, that’s all there is.
Chicago has been a hotbed of incredible theater for decades because you can stand up a black box and put on a weird little show for cheap.
This is one of the saddest thing about AI: it has totally borked the hiring pipeline. It’s impossible for small businesses to hire now from the general public, the only practical way is by word of mouth, which further entrenches the existing systemic biases.
epilogue: Reader, I signed the contract, and the hugs were GREAT.
Kid1: Hello, sir, I am founder and CEO of Free Hugs for Everyone.
Kid2: It will be a multimillion dollar company. Would you like to sign our contract?
Me: If the hugs are free how does it make money?
Kid2: Uh…Investment!
Me: Lots of companies in Silicon Valley work that way.
People get mad that they’re not the people being advertised to anymore.
Changing World UNCHANGING MAN A CENTURY HENCE It is fascinating to conjecture what life will be like a hundred years from now, but I feel pretty sure that the most extravagant guesses would, in one respect, fall short of the reality. Material progress will have reached a stage which no one can even imagine. While man himself will remain very much as he is today. --Mullumbimby Star, 18 November 1926
People will be basically the same as today
This is funny mostly because you can’t really do anything useful with a Flipper Zero.
blog.adafruit.com/2025/12/30/n...
How I long for leaders who make things with their hands. I think a qualification for running for president should be making a piece of furniture and we all get to see it at the debates.