prime’s posts

Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die – Hmm Daily

In a chair, at a computer screen, 47 doesn’t feel that far from 37.

h/t @[email protected]

But the fact is that, starting with Plato’s Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper. I think Borges is quite correct, all prose is fiction. So when I came to write a utopia of course I wrote a novel.

• Ursula K. Le Guin (h/t A Working Library)

Why Does AI Wrie Like… That?

I love Sam Kriss’s newsletter. This article he wrote for NYT is so lucid and the issue needed to be called out.

Reddit, r/vinyl: All my advices

I bought a record player because we inherited a small collection of vintage records. I’m trying not to fall too deep into the rabbithole. I can tell I’ll be spending a ton of time on this hobby in the near future.

Money Doesn’t Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse.

The scale of this imbalance is hard to overstate: relative to the average citizen, a millionaire is 10 times more likely to serve in Congress. Lawyers, by comparison, are nearly 100 times more likely. This is largely because of the money primary. My research finds that lawyers running for the House raise twice as much money in the critical first 90 days of a campaign as candidates from other backgrounds. This cash doesn’t come from the public at large–about half comes directly from other lawyers. It is a closed loop of professional influence that filters out those who can’t tap into a similar network.

What I find helpful about this recentering–of considering both the risk of change and the risk of the status quo–is how it reorients us towards a more realistic view of risk. No path, no choice, is ever entirely free of risks; no road we could walk is always and forever perfectly safe and clear and certain. When deciding whether to take a fork in the road or continue on, the choice isn’t between taking a risk or playing it safe; it’s between these risks and those risks. It’s a choice of which risks not whether to risk anything at all.

Whose risks? Whose benefits? - everything changes

Bringing Sexy Back - Lux Magazine

…we need to kill the panopticon in our heads. That means first killing the panopticon we’ve built for others.

Systems design 3: LLMs and the semantic revolution - apenwarr

We expected LLMs to write poetry or give strategic advice or whatever. We didn’t expect them to call APIs and immediately turn around and use what it learned to call other APIs.

After 30 years of trying and failing to connect one system to another, we now have a literal universal translator. Plug it into any two things and it’ll just go, for better or worse, no matter how confused it becomes. And everyone is doing it, fast, often with a corporate mandate to do it even faster.

A view of LLMs I hadn’t seen before. They’re the latest tech in a long line of protocols and adapters that standardize them. The glue that made the web possible now has a new ingredient.

# 朝崎郁恵 ikue asazaki × ヨシダダイキチ yoshida daikiti - はまさき hamasaki

Japanese folk vocalist + instruments from all over Asia. Such a rich fusion. It’s blowing my mind.

(h/t @[email protected])

Paying attention to trees

That’s the thing about going outside. It’s so much… so much everything more than the computer. And the computer can do some pretty amazing things, but the thing about a simulation is that it is not not the real thing. The thing about a map is that it is not the territory. The model is useful because it has made a choice for what to model. And that is where the art comes in.

Impossible Burgers are so good. 🍔

Delicious ramen for dinner 🍜 yum yum yum

These guys built a real, working electric replica of a 70-year-old mechanical Chinese typewriter. It can type tens of thousands of characters. It’s a mind-boggling achievement. Demo starts at the 4 minute 40 second mark.

I finished season 1 of Twin Peaks and started season 2. I first watched season 1 when I was in college but I hated it. Upon rewatching, I realized that the cheesiness and campiness is tongue in cheek, so I like it a lot more now. I’m motivated to finish the series and the film. 📺 🍿

Tom Sachs - How to make coffee. This short video doesn’t seem like much but it has a satisfying rhythm to it.

America has stopped being interested in living and has gotten busy dying. Fascism isn’t destroying America, America is destroying itself.

The American century of progress has been an anomaly precipitated by a handful of exceptional people and a handful of exceptional events. It is an aberration, not the nature of America.

The average American is no more interested in science than he is interested in God. Which is to say, he only cares insofar as it can give him something in return.

Science is a church to worship God, which is life, and a method to study life, which is God. It no longer serves America’s purpose.

Apparently this little device feels like a cat purring on your chest: Sensate Pebble

I do miss my cat (RIP 🐈‍⬛) but it feels strange to buy a gizmo to replace her services.

youtu.be/DWqe3y0B7…

This video is titled “Smoking sand” and you have to see it to believe it. It keeps getting better and better up until your last second. Just when you think it can’t escalate, it does.

Solar: How to get started and why you should

I found this useful as a primer on installing solar panels & a battery system in your home. I didn’t know that some electric vehicles can act as a battery and give power back to your home HVAC and appliances when needed.

hell.ac is a webpage that spews infinite Makov-chain-generated text to make LLM web crawlers choke. According to the creator, one such crawler slurped up 500GB of nonsense text data.

Apples, Trees, and Quasimodes - System Stack

If you want your computer to be humane in the deeper sense—not an appliance, but an instrument for thought—you have to look to the margins. That’s where it has always been, and where it still is today. If it survives, that’s where it’ll still be.

h/t @[email protected]

WeldWerks Brewing Co. | Greeley, CO Craft Brewery weldwerks.com

Just had a Peach Cobbler sour ale from this brewery that literally tasted like a peach cobbler. Butter, vanilla, graham cracker notes. Really mind blowing stuff. Like something out of Willy Wonka.

A Take Away Show with LEÏ in the streets of Arles.

The duo exalts the oral traditions of the Mediterranean and the Middle East through their four hands and two voices, carrying the words of women across generations. Laurène Barnel and Carine Habauzit weave subtle polyphonies, blending lullabies, nursery rhymes, and original compositions that tell of the eternal feminine and its cycle tied to the imagination of water.

Mesmerizing. 🎶

That which has no intrinsic substance and no other sort of substance does not burn, and what does not burn is not extinguished; such lack of extinction is the meaning of “peace.” '

Vimalakirti Sutra

Poisoning Well: HeydonWorks

It reads kind of like Jeffrey Chaucer, if Jeffrey Chaucer was a tech bro with a serious head injury.

The examples remind me of the “where lies the strangling fruit” sentence from Jeff Vandermeer’s novel Annihilation.