Tessera

mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · last mo.

An AI “actor” or “performer” is really just a cartoon. They don’t have any more agency or interiority or personhood than Elmer Fudd.

The story here is not this stupid movie – which will never get made and never come out – but how the Tilly Norwood people keep getting these credulous articles placed in national news sources despite zero demonstration of any success or demand for this.

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · last mo.

Felt like what we really needed was a pop song with no clear connection to the team, to sing at random intervals. But then I randomly sorted 60 yrs of Billboard to pick one and got this—an incredible song, but it goes way too hard for an activity called "footie" www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T9v...

Sly & The Family Stone - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

YouTube video by SlyATFamilyStoneVEVO

youtube.com

This really is a vintage World Cup: terrific football, ties - you bet! - and now: a dazzlingly dodgy decision for the hosts. The US now only needs to master 'chants that are not boringly literal' to become a footballing nation.

A year since the Clippers scandal broke and the main fallout so far is that Kawhi has managed to flee US jurisdiction

Trump has tried to replicate each other President’s signature failures, from the hits (internment camps, corruption, losing a war in Asia) to the deep cuts (tariffs, destroying the WH, picking a contemptible racist VP), but I’m still kind of surprised to see him going for the William Henry Harrison.

I put the Lynx on as background last night and wound up intently watching the whole thing. Miles uses time and space like no other player I’ve seen. So much fun to watch defector.com/olivia-miles...

Olivia Miles Is The Throwback Point Guard Of The Future | Defector

Vertical video makes Olivia Miles look good. Horizontal video makes her look better. Her gift shines in context, on the unadorned and unsoundtracked platform that is the next day’s full-game replay. W...

defector.com

Chris Towers is Overreacting To Small Sample Sizes@cptowers.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It's really funny to me how often Zohran gets helpful advice about how to do something he just did without the advice

I’m still waiting for sports teams in high income tax cities/states to be punished for their policies, but ive seen very little evidence that this has ever mattered despite how often this talking point comes up.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2mo ago

Even if this wasn’t an affront to humanity, and even if it was possible to train an LLM on a one-person corpus (no), using solely one person’s words *obviously* doesn’t guarantee you get their views. Example: you can make the phrase “this wasn’t an affront” from this post.

“The installation, unveiled in February 2024, allows guests to ask Douglass questions through an iPad. Using a closed database of Douglass’s autobiographies and speeches, the artificial intelligence generates responses based solely on Douglass’s recorded words.”

Hannah Walser @hkpmw.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Brunson is pretty clearly the biggest ball hog of any NBA Finals MVP. No one who shot as much as him missed as often. The size of the dot shows assists/game. He was below the median on that front, so not moving the ball around, either. Singular player—not sure we'll see a winner like this again.

Scatterplot showing every NBA Finals MVP. The x axis shows how many shots each player took per game. The y axis shows the player's field goal percentage. The point of the graph is that Brunson took a lot of shots but didn't make very many—in fact, everyone who shot at least as often as him made more, and everyone who missed as many as him shot less. Players are sized by assists per game, and Brunson was a little below the median on that front, so it's not like he was making up for it with playmaking. Also the two players closest to him were great defenders, whereas he is one of the worst defenders ever to get the award. Players are colored more or less by their team when they won, although I was lazy about matching the colors exactly.

Idk what’s going to happen tonight, but I was rooting for the Phillies in the 2022 World Series when Sam Alito decided to attend a game, so I know that karma is real

When a team invites a dictator to the game it’s good if they lose, is my view

I think if every well-informed person in the country can understand jokes about your last four mayors, you have to accept that pretty much anyone who moves to your city can quickly become a "true" citizen of it. Hegemony facilitates assimilation.

The scale and dispersion of Knicks fans emerging like cicadas for their team’s once-per quarter-century title run shows us just how much pain James Dolan causes almost every year

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3mo ago

This is obvious horseshit, but I think it's useful to put numbers to this stuff sometimes. The Warren wealth tax would raise $16.5b from Bezos alone in the first year, which amounts to $4k for every teacher in the US, roughly a 6% pay raise on average. Bet that *would* help that teacher in Queens!

Bezos on CNBC: "You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you."

Much more difficult to list the 100 worst novels of all time

How bad a foul baiter is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? See if you can guess which two dots are his on this graph of MVP seasons. Dots are further right if players shot the ball a lot. Higher dots mean players shot more free throws. Answer lower in the thread.

Graph showing seasons for NBA MVPs since 1974, which is the first year the relevant data exists on Basketball Reference, where I got it. The x axis shows field goal attempts (FGA), reflecting how often a player shot in general. The y axis shows free throw attempts (FTA), reflecting how often a player shot free throws. Both are scaled per 75 possessions, to mitigate differences in pace from one season to the next. You'd expect a clean correlation between FGA and FTA, since shooting is generally necessary for drawing shooting fouls, but these dots are pretty widely distributed. (R squared in a linear regression is .27, so FGA explains less than a third of FTA). This graph erases some nuance, e.g. you get fewer FTA if you tend to score when fouled (i.e., getting and-1s), but it's still a decent rough picture.

Hannah Walser@hkpmw.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Enkidu was a great Philly dog. He was confident and self-possessed, loved food dropped on the sidewalk, and looked vaguely like Gritty. What he loved to do, he did, and I was lucky that so often he included Hannah and me. He was my buddy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9II...

Enkidu Blue

YouTube video by Nothing

youtube.com

A couple of days ago, my dog Enkidu died. When we adopted him in 2020, he was already an old man of 11 with a fully formed, hilariously stubborn personality, remarkably independent and remarkably affectionate. He was a good friend. Enkidu was named after a character from the epic of Gilgamesh. 🧵

An elderly miniature poodle is sitting on someone's lap in the passenger seat of a car. The image is from the perspective of the person whose lap he's on, and you're close enough to his head that you can see the texture of his curly gray fur very clearly. He's looking out the window as the sun goes down.

J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This is one of the best 21st century jazz albums

David Leheny@davidleheny.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Jazz OTD: The composer and cellist Tomeka Reid led her remarkable quartet with guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara on the recording of "Old New," on April 18, 2018. Adventurous and uncompromising but also accessible and compelling. #jazzsky

J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Once again pondering the fact that Penn's motto, Leges Sine Moribus Vanae, is usually translated as "Laws without morals are useless".

Judge orders Penn to comply with federal subpoena seeking list of Jewish faculty, students

Penn has until May 1 to respond to the subpoena's requests, but will not be required to “reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific Jewish-related organization.”

thedp.com

J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Bam Adebayo now holds the title belt for highest scoring game among active players. He's just the 34th player with this achievement, and the 21st since Elgin Baylor (the first good offensive player).

Graph showing the history of active NBA players with the highest scoring game. The x axis is time, and the y axis shows how much they scored in that game. The graph begins in November, 1959 with Elgin Baylor's 64-point game, and goes to just after Bam Adebayo scored 83 in March of 2026.

J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 5mo ago

In that NYTimes "spot the AI writing" quiz, three of the five examples use the "It's not X; it's Y" tactic. I feel like you see that a lot in all sorts of generated text. What's the deal? Is this really common in the data, or is it somehow emerging from the training or generation process?

Three passages from a NY Times piece that was effectively an ad for Claude, the tool used to generate them. Each has a highlighted excerpt with a characteristically AI-ish "not" clause:

1. "Not from cruelty, but from understanding..."
2. "The universe is not indifferent to us; we are made of it..."
3. "Ambiguity was not weakness. It was survival."

J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The Price Lab’s Critical Approaches to AI Working Group has released a white paper in which we advocate for AI-free instruction in reading, writing, & research. These are fundamental skills in the humanities (& in general), & with decisive action we can keep teaching them well in the age of AI!

Critical Approaches to AI Working Group | Price Lab for Digital Humanities

The Price Lab is the University of Pennsylvania's center for innovative uses of technology in the study and teaching of history, art, and culture.

pricelab.sas.upenn.edu

J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Jazz did a lot of heavy lifting for my sanity in 2025, and for whatever reason (coincidence? not?) it was a really good year for new jazz releases. I wanted to do a little thread about my favorite albums, and give a top five.

J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 9mo ago

The extent to which everyone refuses to learn whether it's "Sliwa" or "Silwa" is very funny to me

J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 9mo ago

The occupied city winning because its diverse prosperous team came through thanks to guys who don’t usually get the glory is what we’re going for here, I think.

Love this piece by Laura McGrath, who finds an important question for the book industry—“What if we’ve been over-estimating the role that genre plays in the life of a reader?"—in a recent paper I wrote with James English.

The Omnivore Dilemma

Digging into the Data of Contemporary Readers

laurabmcgrath.substack.com

As a metaphor maybe

Snippet of one of the President's idiotic posts, asserting that "This Ballroom will be happily used for Generations to come!"

I think a lot of people feel an almost familial pride in and love for their cities, and among other things these marches highlight each city, its particular faces, slang, colors, streets, communities. It's ineffable but I think it’s profound.