Exactly. Also, just because the experts turn out to be wrong about something doesn’t mean that anybody who makes up some bullshit is right. experts thought Covid wasn’t airborne, and they were wrong. You know who proved that? Other experts.
"There's no secret to living...Just keep on walking” Mark Draughn from the Windy City. Talking classical liberalism, criminal justice, the drug war, free speech, free markets, sex work, technology, photography, immigration, and cats. windypundit.com
279 followers 138 following 1,197 posts
view profile on Bluesky
Exactly. Also, just because the experts turn out to be wrong about something doesn’t mean that anybody who makes up some bullshit is right. experts thought Covid wasn’t airborne, and they were wrong. You know who proved that? Other experts.
Perfection.
What bullshit! The protests were combined to a couple of small areas. Trump sent a few thousand troops. LAPD has 8800 police officers, and with another 9900 in LA county, and 7600 state cops. That’s why Trumps troops didn’t have much to do.
Somebody should give Vance a Gold Star for being a "Very Good Vice President." He obviously needs it...
White House Downplays Trump Hand Bruise As Least Concerning Part Of Body https://theonion.com/white-house-downplays-trump-hand-bruise-as-least-concerning-part-of-body/
Lots of rumours that Trump is critically unwell. All I can say is I hope he's following any and all medical advice RFK jr is giving him.
What does the law say about encouraging suicide? If it had been a human having this conversation with him, could they be sued? Could they be charged? Does it matter that he’s a minor? Because this kind of sounds like speech…
I miss the old brand #CDC
I’ve been vibe coding on small projects and my experience is kind of the opposite. The LLM agent will chase a bug into a dead end and keep on pushing, unable to realize it’s looking in the wrong place. I have to explore the code and tell it to try something else.
Vance is smarter, and makes better arguments, and more disciplined. All bad. But I don’t think he could rally the base, so he’d have trouble controlling the Republicans in congress. He couldn’t threaten to primary them. I think that would allow for some sanity that we don’t have now.
The subject of Obama's praise here is none other than our own Radley Balko, who has been following police militarization issues for a long time. He's freelance, and you can support his independent reporting by subscribing here: radleybalko.substack.com?r=atkyr
Here's a black-and-white photo taken from Surveyor 3 during the April 24, 1967 lunar eclipse, showing the faint ring of light from Earth's atmosphere.
Basically, the moon reaches a position where the considerably-larger Earth blocks all direct sunlight. However, light skimming around the Earth's edge is passing through the atmosphere at a low angle, as it does at sunset. The moon is therefore being lit by twilight. Very red, very dim twilight.
I've been seeing this Blood Moon hype a lot. But unless you travel to a dark area and let your eyes adapt -- or take pictures with a long exposure -- all you're going to see is a dim, discolored moon.
That is…not a good look.
Dear Recruiter on LinkedIn, I'm glad you like my background and want to interview me for a job at a trading firm where I'd work directly with "Traders & Quants" on a real-time trading program. I regret I must decline, however, as I don't do nearly enough crystal meth for a job like that.
Brought to you by the same people who claim vindication whenever some study suggests masking mandates didn't work...after doing everything they could to undermine masking mandates.
How is Curtis Yarvin still a thing?
Reminder that the military sticking to activities they are legally allowed to do is a good thing.
Nobody has good numbers on the death toll from Musk’s USAID cuts — because the funding to gather the data was also cut — but the best available estimates are horrific: www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?vi...
I'm hoping for the best: That Gates is going to counter the influence of RFK Jr. I know it's a long shot, but these days Gates is miles better than most of the people Trump hangs out with.
Yeah, but also make one of the dots red to see if you can get someone to accuse you of being a Trump sycophant.
Sadly, I fear you are wrong. Some people are dumb enough to to think a dictator is the answer to everything. Even if he is this sick, lying fuck.
Honestly, downsizing government is something I could get behind, if it was done intelligently. But there's no chance of that. No way was this the result of careful thought about the role of government and the staffing needed to implement it. This was an act of vandalism.
Yeah, no more of that killing-us-two-or-three-at-a-time through drowning and plane crashes BS.
And now he's got a chance to beat his old record and really run up the numbers...
Damn, that song is an earworm...
So you don’t think the rhythm of the rails is all he feels?
I loved the movie OPPENHEIMER about the race to build that world-changing negotiation.
Yes. I think for some of them this is just an excuse, a license, to indulge their desire to make people suffer.
I don’t think Vance would be able to control other Republicans by threatening to campaign against them because he’s nothing without Trump.
Not now 2025! We’re busy with all this other shit… www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...
To be honest, regardless of political beliefs, at least half those words and phrases should never be used by anyone who wants to communicate clearly anyway.
I don’t know who John Ganz is, but he makes an interesting argument that Trump is still stuck in the late 1980s. www.unpopularfront.news/p/when-trump...
I'm not saying there haven't been other years...
So far the 2025 has been one long experimental proof that I do *not* have the psychic power to kill people with my mind.
In my case, just place the money in a pizza box and everything will be fine.
"I swear state AGs are the absolute worst." The plural is the worst. Whenever I see "attorneys general" in a news story, I know there's about a 95% chance they will have done something I hate. (Slightly improved from 98% lately because they might be opposing something even worse by Trump.)
Caution: This rule may not apply to you if you’re not white. Probably.
The recurring theme of my adult life is the most powerful people in any system having not even the slightest idea how it works and no particular interest in acquiring it. Their confidence is completely unphased by this.
youtu.be/OjGHf7OvglM?...
You know, I for one am shocked that the least principled man in the world would align himself with what Putin wants after just one conversation
True. Back in the heyday of blogging, I used to recreationally try to crack the identity of anonymous bloggers, and it was easier than I expected, and I didn’t have warrants or fancy government databases. (I *never* outed anyone. I did occasionally warn them they were exposed.)
This seems like possible fodder for a @kenwhite.bsky.social podcast. True threats, I think.
Pee tape. Definitely the pee tape.
Can anyone help? I need to find news items about deaths due to ICE operations in 2025, either directly by ICE action or as a response, e.g. running into traffic. (I don't need in-custody deaths.) I've never done this kind of research before, and I'm not sure how to start. Can anyone give me a clue?
You are our only hope for sanity it this world. (No pressure.)
I wish I had a great answer. I try to do what I can, which is talking about it online, contacting my representatives, and donating money to others who are more directly active. It’s going to take a lot of work by a lot of people.
If I squint at “airborne molds” hard enough, it looks a bit like “miasmas.”
Agree...for now. But it's consolidating control bit by bit. So now, while it's still not very strong... now is the time to stop it.
Nobody's died in ICE custody lately either. (www.ice.gov/detain/detai...) (They have 30 days to report a death, it's not quite as miraculous as it seems.)
Not sure what to make of it that the CDC hasn't put out a measles update today. (www.cdc.gov/measles/data...) It's supposed to be updated every Wednesday. Could just be delayed for some reason... could be a number the Trump administration doesn't like...
"There's always questions and we're always encouraged to have them. Science is always evolving." Not if you cancel the research that answers the questions you dumb fuck!
Fortunately, all three of us have avoided that pitfall…
That’s fine for the hard core deniers who should know better, but I’m more concerned about how to convince legitimate skeptics, I.e. normal people who don’t know the science, aren’t super invested in the issue, but still have an opinion because because it’s an issue that keeps coming up.
LLM's tokenize text into words or parts of words, encoded as numbers. For ChatGPT 4o, for example, "Illinois" is a single token: 192741. The LLM has no idea there are letters involved. "r" and "R" are 81 and 49. Asking if 192741 has 81 or 49 in it has no obvious answer.
This is an incredibly well-told story of a bad 3-week-long encounter with a chat bot. Fortunately, the victim was intelligent enough to figure his way out of it. The reporters contacted experts to help explain what was going on. Amazing story.
This is a really good thread about the value of social media.
(There are ways around this problem, which is why some AI/LLMs can figure it out.)
ChatGPT breaks text into tokens—small words or parts of words—which it codes as numbers. So “blueberry” gets broken into “blue” and “berry” which are coded as 18789 and 19772. ChatGPT literally has no idea there are letters involved.
Or show up, get a badge and gun, then personally harass every MAGA politician and supporter you can find until you get canned. You know how they think it’s so unfair when the cops come after them.
This just seems like blaming the victim. Trump threatens to do millions of dollars of damage unless people pay him in money, gifts, and praise. It’s like a protection racket, and we don’t usually punish the people who were forced to pay.
It’s like RFK Jr is a Russian asset sent to kill as many Americans as possible without firing a single bullet.
Americans love technology and absolutely hate science and that’ll always be fucking confusing to me
This is practically an act of murder. RFK Jr already has a serial-killer-level body count, but he apparently wants to try for genocide-level.
It’s an old joke: www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/joke...
Sure. And, as I kept reminding myself back when I blogged regularly, you can’t limit yourself to only writing things that nutcases and scumbags won’t abuse. That’s no way to live.
[I understood that reference.gif]
Fair point. On first reading it just struck me as kind of anti-expert/anti-science, and I know that’s not you, but it felt like something the nutbags could use to bolster their arguments. Then again, I’m sure they already do.
“Vaccines keep you from getting sick” “Medical transitioning is good for kids”… I get your point, but I think this one has the potential for a lot of collateral damage.
The amazing thing is that this plan worked (at least according to the Netflix documentary). The last few dives were accompanied by a much higher rate of hull creaking. But they just kept diving. The Titan disaster is about hubris, but it's also about eroding safety standards.
Three quarters of the problems in our society could be solved by not letting the supremely confident grifter drive.
I love it every time I see you post that.
I registered Republican once here in Illinois just to fuck with their primary. So… right?
Bordertarians nod approvingly: "this doesn't count as militarism somehow!"
Oh great. So from now on we’ll never really be sure if the government‘s economic statistics are honest. Just what we need: more uncertainty. That should do wonders for the economy…
Here’s the thing: Have any important people on the left retweeted any of those people? Because Trump retweets crazy MAGA people all the time.
That feels like punching down. It’s “someone on the Internet is wrong” territory.
The craziest thing about him is that other people take him seriously.
Yes! That is the correct answer for you!
Here’s hoping everything works out for the best
Yeah, I think he would think Lucy is great and Charlie Brown is a low-IQ individual. He wouldn't gain any insight into is relationship with Putin.
Trump needs to watch more Charlie Brown and Lucy.
My thought: Economists already don’t measure the economy by the state of the stock market.
Heh, I don’t use any of them regularly. I think I used kerfuffle a few times several years ago.
Every time I hear about something like this, the description is so vague that it makes me suspicious. Do they really believe it’s a person? How long does it last? Is there harmful behavior? Is it better or worse than, say, having a bit of a thing for a sexy starlet?
I mean, you know, not that there’s anything wrong with that.. but… yeah
What? No way! I’m sure there’s nothing homoerotic going on here:
So, suddenly disparate impact and systemic racism matters to conservatives?
Trump every day of his entire life.
This Time We Got Him™️ #7952
Probably. But he will spell it wrong.
Hell yeah!
Just to throw another theory on the pile: Covering up easy bruising from blood thinners?
I want to ask, Was there math? Because I’m pretty sure that doing real quantum physics takes math.
I think the key moment will come when Trump is gone. Will his successor be able to exercise power the way he has? Or will it all fall apart because the leader of the cult is gone? I have no idea, but I know what I'm hoping for.
This is what I call a blowjobs-for-cancer argument. “Giving blowjobs cures cancer, so any woman who won’t give me a blowjob must want people to die of cancer!”
If you wanted to know some minor fact like the year a film came out, the melting point of zinc, or what gauge of wire you need to hook up a 15 amp outlet, you had to visit a library, unless you invested in the appropriate reference books yourself.
OR, the whole alpha/beta/etc concept turned out to be an oversimplification of primate relationships, and there is no evidence that it applies to humans at all, so self-declared “alpha males” are just narcissists, sociopaths, and other types of jerks.