Hypothesis: The "it's not X, it's Y" pattern that LLMs are so fond of outputting can be traced back to a single, very prevalent phrase in the training data:

Me looking at the air quality numbers on AQINow.

Chernobyl: Not Great, Not Terrible Quote

Alt: Clip from Chernobyl of Dyatlov saying "Not great, not terrible."

static.klipy.com

My wife is out of town so the cat is settling for scratches from me tonight.

This is going to turn out to be a single vibecoded Java class definition

If I were FTC Commissioner, I would mandate that all popups with a "Maybe later" button must also have a prominent "Never ask me again" button.

Wish I could bottle up these 67°F July days in NYC to save for when it's 90°F in August.

Stay cool! Find a cooling center near you: nchh.org/information-...

Incredible.

Very curious to hear the detailed postmortem on Anthropic model failures this morning will be. Personally, I saw effects on the public Anthropic endpoints, but _also_ on Azure, AWS, and GCP, which is not typical outage behavior for model endpoints. Suggestive of a big configuration change, imo.

Become ungovernable!

Hot take: .gitignore should be for things _specific to that repository_. General files that should always be ignored go in your user-level .gitignore.

In a very welcome move, it looks like @Anthropic is rolling back the `claude -p`/API SDK changes.

Controversial take: making your coding agent a coauthor on your commits is harmful in the long run. It invites too much abdication of responsibility.

Idea: The Doomsday Clock (thebulletin.org/doomsday-clo...) but for the Butlerian Jihad.

Doomsday Clock - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

It is 85 seconds to midnight.

thebulletin.org

✈️ Off to NYC. This week's trip and work is sponsored by the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. (I've always wanted to say that!)

If you love spending 6 hours in the RPG character creation screen instead of playing the game, Starship is for you (and me): starship.rs

Starship: Cross-Shell Prompt

Starship is the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell! Shows the information you need, while staying sleek and minimal. Quick installation available for Bash, Fish, ZS...

starship.rs

Google's most advanced Gemini model: "I'm sorry, but I can't generate images of copyrighted characters." Also Google's most advanced Gemini model:

Big coup for Dario.

This lil guy was supposed to be at 40 μF, but was down to 11 μF and that's why my upstairs had no AC today. Fortunately, we keep spares around for just this reason. 😄

Smaug quarantined the cursed gold of Erebor for 170 years, blocked Sauron from claiming the North, triggered the chain of events that found the One Ring, and gutted the goblin armies right before the War of the Ring. In effect, the dragon is the savior of the Third Age. In this essay, I will

The first "amazing weather weekend" of each year in NYC is among the best serotonin-inducing events of all time.

My finance students got me what is among the greatest possible gifts for a teacher to get: eight boxes of The Good Chalk. Thank you Amanda, Amir, Anjith, Delilah, Dimitri, Freyr, Irma, James, Jeremy, Juliet, Kavan, Kevin, Laxmi, Stavros, Steve, and Thor, and good luck on your future careers!

Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma

madeline odent@oldenoughtosay.com · 3mo ago

what are the Six Genders? wrong answers only

Had to go to NYC to get the good Virginian ramps because I missed all the local ones. It may be, perhaps, the perfect vegetable. I could eat these by the barrel.

Ready for the consequences of pushing all my weekly/biweekly meetings into as few days as possible. Hoping it stays dry outside so I can go for a stroll for at least a few of these.

Remember when people said the grid "couldn't handle" EVs? I guess bolting a data center on the side of every house is fine, though.

A is for apple, B is for Banach-Tarski, C is for Cantor's diagonalization, ..., I is for (truncated) icosahedron, ...,

"Despite various theories, the exact cause of the Kentucky meat shower remains a subject of speculation and mystery." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentuck... cc @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social

"Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?"