Wow that’s wild. The thing that bothers me most about shit like this is that a good teacher would put aside their pride and take it as an opportunity to learn something themselves and show the class how to find out an answer to a question like this. Instead, you’ll always remember her as the dumbass who didn’t know what fossils are.

Goood question. I hadn’t thought about her in ages, but it’s funny how random memories of her class are coming back now. She was a shitty teacher, she clearly didn’t want to be there.

Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.

Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.

A middle school teacher asked for an analogy about something, I don’t remember what specifically, but I raised my hand and excitedly said “Oh! Like how math can help you understand music and music can help you understand math?”

The teacher looked at me like I was a total fool and said “music has absolutely nothing to do with math, how could you possibly think that?”

Since I was a snarky little punk, and I knew I was right, I said “have you heard about the circle of fifths? Let me tell you about it” and I proceeded to explain the mathematical beauty of music to the entire class. I even had sheet music in my bag from my piano lessons, so I pulled it out and showed it to everyone to explain the bars, tempo, and time signature, all of which are based on mathematical principles.

She was not happy to be proven wrong in front of a class of fifth graders.

It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…

Human and AGI collaboration might be interesting, if ever real AI actually develops. But I wouldn’t call augmenting or probing of existing works of fiction with rehashed LLM sludge collaboration, I’d call it glorified and advanced plagiarism at worst, and low quality cliff notes at best.

I would much rather read a work of creative fiction from a human being than to encounter autocorrect word predictions written into paragraphs. The idea that the text itself can be queried to gain additional meaning divorced from the author’s intention strikes me as unrealistic and not faithful to the person who originally crafted the words.

Though I’m obviously biased against LLMs being used for this kind of thing, from lots of experience seeing how crappy they are.

Ugh.

Totally agree with this. The second season wasn’t great as a whole (though I still enjoyed it and don’t think it deserved all the hate), but I still thought Mackie was excellent in it. He’s a really versatile and talented actor.

Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

In essence, DeepSeek — and I’ll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI’s reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of “unsafe thoughts” that might “manipulate the customer,” then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a “competitive advantage.” -Zitron

100%

I’ve had dreams where my long locks were dramatically blowing in the wind, only to wake up and run my hands through my…well shit, that’s just my scalp.

I started losing my hair when I was a teenager, so I’ve been bald for most of my life. I’ve been shaving my head for decades because it’s the only way my head and face don’t look absurd. I’m totally used to it, and long ago accepted that I’d never have hair on my head again.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my hair back.

If this turns out to be legit and works on most people, there could be a worldwide explosion of self-esteem in adults.

The umbrella is such an underrated skill. My manager is the best buffer between me and the C-suite, and I appreciate it immensely. She doesn’t involve me in any of the company’s internal political crap unless it directly impacts me. She filters out all the bullshit and protects me from our bosses getting in the way of the work.

Some of her other excellent managerial qualities: she doesn’t cold call me (we’re remote), she doesn’t schedule unnecessary meetings, she has zero contact after COB, and she trusts me to get my shit done during the day, on my own, with absolutely no micro-managing. Some weeks I don’t need to interact with her at all, even though she’s a fun person I never mind chatting with. She’s the best manager.

It all boils down to mutual respect. Respect leads to trust, trust leads to teamwork and a healthy work environment.

I wish this was all true, I really do. But there is a time and a place to be calm. This is not that time, and this is not that place.

These systems are supposed to have COOP plans (Continuity of Operations), but not all of them do. Systems are supposed to have some degree of backups, but I can tell you from experience that this is almost never the case in any meaningful way.

I’ve spoken to a number of feds who said their work disappeared overnight. They didn’t choose to comply, and didn’t have sufficient backups in place because of a lack of resources. Their manager or an administrative assistant somewhere most likely went on a deletion spree, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Sometimes when this stuff is gone, it’s really gone. And we have every right to be furious about it.

100% agree about the media incentives, but sometimes outrage is not only warranted, but essential.

To clarify, this is because the arbitrary deadline for feds to accept the “offer” is Thursday, and there are a lot of frightened people out there who think this might be their best option. I’ve spoken to a number of federal employees about this, and none of them are convinced there’s any reason OPM will actually honor the severance pay promised in the email, so they’re just going to wait to be fired and potentially lose out on a ton of severance pay. I think that’s the right call though, at least for those who can afford it.

There was no legal foundation for this “fork,” but agencies can’t reject it since it came from their HR overlords. All the communications about this “offer” have been extremely vague with no specific instructions, guidance, or guarantees. I’m willing to bet they’ll renege on the deal (why wouldn’t they?) and everyone will have to wait and see what the Supreme Court ultimately says about it months after the damage has already been done and careers and livelihoods have been ruined.

I was responding to the comment above (and lots of other chatter like this), which said “people voted for Musk” which is just not true. And like you said, the people don’t vote for the cabinet, they vote for the person who nominates cabinet members. It’s useful to point out because these distinctions have real-world consequences. Musk is a what’s called a “Special Government Employee,” which is an unelected position.

I don’t want to be pedantic, but okay I will. Musk wasn’t on any ballot. Not a single person voted for an individual named Elon Musk. It wasn’t an option. Enough people voted for Trump and Vance for them to win, but they were the only two on the ballot. It may seem like a distinction without a difference, because Musk functionally has an insane amount of power and influence, but that power was delegated to him by the person that people actually voted for, which is how our government works. People might have voted for Trump hoping he would use Musk in this way, but they still only voted for Trump.

I feel silly writing all that out, but these kinds of distinctions matter imo.

8, inside and out. A terrified, angry, and exhausted ninja turtle.

My entire team and I work remotely (since before Covid), and it has never been an issue. Nobody puts any extra effort into their appearance, everybody wears sweats and loungewear and women don’t wear makeup. Most of us blur our backgrounds so nobody can see our spaces, but this does not imply anything about our homes other than the fact that we all like our privacy. I can even hear my manager’s breast pump going during meetings (it’s out of frame, obviously), and nobody cares, she’s got a baby to feed after all.

We’re all people with different lives, different homes, and different bodies. As long as we all get our work done, nobody cares what we look like, sound like, or how our homes are decorated. If you’re feeling undue pressure from your employer about what your personal appearance or spaces are like, I don’t think that company is a good fit. If there are genuine mental health issues at play, then a good company will make a reasonable accommodation to ensure your work doesn’t cause any undue harm.

This is a pretty big disappointment imo, and shows that the party didn’t really listen to its voters or learn from the election in any meaningful way. He was the least interesting and compelling candidate. I wish they had gone for someone with an actual ideology and values that they’ve lived and acted on for years—like Faiz Shakir. This role is very important, and it would have been a great way to show us that Dems actually care about us, and not just the money. But nope, they’ve taken yet another opportunity to give power to a bland vanilla fundraiser who almost nobody has heard of.

The race hinged more on the candidates’ organizing and fundraising resumes than on their postures regarding the ideological soul of the party, as it did in 2017, after President Donald Trump’s previous election win.