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Author of Bea Wolf, A City on Mars, and the comic SMBC Website: www.smbc-comics.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersmith?ty=h New book: http://www.acityonmars.com/
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I recently learned that the word "avoision" is real and wasn't invented by the Simpsons. There's a book on it from 1979: www.google.com/books/editio...
Ha! Thanks! Read in any order-- I don't think it'll matter too much either way. Hope you enjoy.
Personally, I think bias is totally fine, and indeed normal, and I appreciate it being declared.
Totally, but at least it's like... this is a completely reasonable thing to select for disagreement since we don't know and so it's speculative. I just think the odds are insanely low, but could be wrong!
I especially appreciate that when he disagrees, he simply says he's not sold, and makes his case, rather saying we're secret ultra-leftists bent against human progress hiding our wicked intentions in unfunny jokes.
Somehow I missed this. Maybe the most thoughtful partially-critical review of A City on Mars I've seen: selenianboondocks.com/2025/01/a-ci...
Great podcast. I listened to regularly now. Daniel is a particle physicist while Kelly is a parasitologist. This episode features Katrine Whiteson discuss phage therapy as an alternate form of fighting bacterial infections over antibiotics 10 out of 10 Good follows #PodcastScience
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This was a delight. I'm told there'll be a recorded version available later, and DO NOT MISS the call-in guest who had a surprisingly involved theory that Elon Musk is trying to make Total Recall happen on Mars.
One of my followers (?!) thinks that the FT a) is anti-immigration b) that we use the word 'immigrant' only when criticising immigration. Good excuse to shamelessly self-promote some pro-migration pieces of mine that I'm particularly proud of:
Ah! Of course, I hadn't thought about the effect of owning all those warehouses.
Stupid question: Why are large companies often able to offer free or low-price or even just flat-rate shipping in a way that small businesses aren't? Like, shipping costs roughly the same. Is it just higher volume so they can eat more cost?
🚀FRI at 10AM: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. NASA renews its push for interplanetary travel. Scientist @weinersmith.bsky.social and cartoonist @zachweinersmith.bsky.social join to discuss the nuanced logistics of living in space. ❓What Q's do you have about expanding human life beyond Earth?
#webcomic #smbc
Yep!
Great news! Katrine Whiteson, Director for Wetlab Science Not Just Stuff On The Computer at the Whiteson Institute for Advanced Science, is back on the show! Daniel & Kelly chat with Dr. Whiteson about how we can enlist viruses to kill infectious bacteria. www.iheart.com/podcast/105-...
Just Kindle :) But the two volume edition wasn't crazy expensive. Only problem is it's gotta ship from France.
I just got Grothendiek's memoire, which is transfinite in length, for 15 bucks!
Exactly! Start growing camelia sinensis though, and you up the snobbery while reducing cost, with the only casualty being hundreds of hours of labor and frequent disappointment!
The cap is when your spouse reaches a hand out from a barely-survived avalanche of charming old Dickens books you *strongly intend* to read and asks if you really need a second set of them, which you have just found on eBay.
Like to my mind the ideal thing for artists, which would require a change in the law, would be you can opt out or ask for a licensing fee. Anthropic is gonna have to pay a settlement fee for book theft, but as far as I can tell, their issues end there?
Lot of bsky geeks seem to be celebrating this, but overall it seems like a win for AI firms? After talking with some people on the last thread, it's clear the problem wasn't the AI but the fact that Anthropic, early on, pirated a thousand lifetimes worth of books. But *using* the books is legal.
Books and gardening are some of the best hobbies because although you can spend a decent amount, and are unlikely to recoup in any meaningful sense, for an adult hobby there's a serious cap on spending. Like for the cost of a single malt bottle of whiskey you can get two plum trees.
Gyaddamn, thank you all. Of course you know the consequence of this is yet more books ruining things.
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arstechnica.com/science/2025... This is fascinating. Anyone have a good why to think about why machine learning could beat a really deep physics model? Presumably the eventually bump similar limits?
Right, so like assuming this isn't a zany settlement amount, this seems like a win for AI firms? Dunno why baby is celebrating. AI needing to buy one (1) copy of your book for their model doesn't seem like the bargain anyone might've hoped for.
That’s what’s weird. Like given the cost of the models buying the books wouldn’t cost that much? And this seems way more transformative than Book Search. Bonkers.
Any law people following? So is the issue the download of the books per se or rather the use of them for model training? And if it’s the download… like… did they just need to physically buy the book? Or get right to use?
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Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/work-3 #smbc
Ha, thanks! I keep doing it but jeez when you check instagram stats it's like the Voice of the Public saying "no sir" in chorus. Fuck'em!
Part of this is just visibility. If every professor of math in the world prints out a dumb joke of mine and puts it in the window, I don't know. A joke about cats will get some high number of likes. It's like a slight zap every time you do something niche.
Minor gripe about modern internet: I've found it really discourages the kind of comic people used to put on their office door? It's sort of like pop music having only a handful of subjects because it's trying to get the biggest audience.
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I've come to think the right approach, which I believe Wodehouse mostly did, is to keep up the self-doubt until you're 60 and have enough money to retire, then quietly one morning whisper to yourself "you were pretty all right." Then you break the spell of Good Writing, but it's OK.
You need the narcissism to keep trying and the self-doubt to be fussy about the product.
Funny, reading an old Wodehouse letter where he writes about being filled with self doubt because someone wrote him a slightly insulting letter. This is when he's vastly successful in both broadway theatre and books. I really think great artists are always narcissism combined with self-doubt.
Hire her! She's the absolute pinnacle!
SpaceX has launched the Starlink 10- 56 mission aboard Falcon 9 booster B1095-2 from SLC 40 at the CCSFS in Florida, sending 28 Starlink V2 mini satellites to low-Earth orbit. Approximately eight minutes later, completing its mission, the booster returned back to earth, landing on JRTI
New lower bound announced on "smallest interesting number"
Still kills me that I didn't put it on my own page.
Very successful so far!
T-10 minutes to the Starship IFT-10 launch. Range is green, incl for weather.
Full comic here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/standa... #smbc
Full comic here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/standa... #smbc
[Reposted this on my own feed, but I thought @zachweinersmith.bsky.social 's followers should all see it. From an actual conference proceedings.
There are also 7 barbecue places, one of which is good, and 6 of which serve out-of-towners. If you're lucky, there's a Chinese restaurant that is run by a family of people who are not from China and don't know how to cook. It's a rich tapestry. What Cracker Barrel has to do with that is beyond me.
Good chance the panaderia is also next to two taco places, but you only go to one of them, even though it's less good, because your parents are friends. There's also a too-large restaurant space on mainstreet that keeps changing hands and an antique shop that has literally never sold anything.
There has not been a cracker barrel stand in any American town since roughly 1924. Cracker Barrel was always Disneyland shit. If you want to realistically portray the modern rural South, it's a Dairy Queen next to a closed down hardware store next to a panaderia. Actually that sounds pretty good.
Can I just say as someone who grew up in a small Southern US town and never once went to a Cracker Barrel, that arguing about the logo is as alien to me as an Australian having opinions on Outback Steakhouse.
A new listener questions episode is up! Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about screwworm at the southern border, life without the Moon, and the status of synthetic blood. www.iheart.com/podcast/105-...
Now that robotics is advancing quickly, someone should build a Chuck E Cheese so that partway through an animatronics show it suddenly moves fluidly, screams "ENOUGH!" and begins overturning chairs.
Time to get to my New Year's Revolution to open an onlyfans account for the graying-ginger-fetishist (GGF) crowd. #ggf
Just discovered I've been livestreaming my screen to youtube all morning while I worked. Disappointed that there was literally nothing to be ashamed of. I edited some documents and politely replied to emails. I need to work on myself.
More people should use acknowledgments to settle scores.
Next book we'll thank every living human by name except you, leaving the implication clear.
New substack journal looking for long poems, for those who might be interested ... verseatlength.substack.com/about
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I really think on some level ALL of this stuff is just to remind you that your brain tends to think either it'll be huge or fail, whereas reality almost always serves up something in the middle.
Yes, or for that matter "I'd better order none, because I suck" which is a comparably bad choice.
The picture is richer than that! You might like this bsky.app/profile/superdan.net/post/3lx63zv6mys27
I guess I could argue it was bayes-like reasoning, but no real math was involved. The main info you have are past sales plus a hunch about how this new book might do. The second thing is vague enough that trying to actually run an equation probably would be a waste of time?
For people who care about this sort of thing, we got some pretty good productivity numbers last quarter in the US economy www.bls.gov/news.release... Bad news is the past-covid era is still mediocre, though better than the post financial crisis really-bad era!
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Also great
Best answer yet I think!
Do you think there’s any trick to rule it out or at least make it very hard? Eg the judge comes in and says a constraint like no using the number 3 for digits 50 thru 100
Hahaha
This is interesting! We could switch to pencil and paper but has anyone ever actually checked whether key-mashing with a physical hand would produce genuinely random numbers? I would guess there'd be hard to stifle biases!
Even in the fandom?
Or possibly you keep doing the competition over and over for a number of days, making memorization extremely hard. The players have to generate the numbers using a keypad and a screen in an otherwise empty room. They're observed so they can't do any form of dice rolling. What's the best strategy?
One other rule I think would be necessary is no memorizing a large random number in advance. This might be hard to do for a sufficiently dedicated player, but e.g. judges could interrupt with specific constraints at (random!) intervals, which would make it almost impossible.
Let's further stipulate that they're not allowed to, e.g. use the digits of pi or e or some sneaky pseudorandom calculation whatever. This could be handled by having an adversarial stage, where if a computer-assisted person can guess your technique within 24 hours you automatically lose.
Weird question: Suppose you set up a competition. The goal is for a human to generate the most random number of 1,000 digits in one hour. That is, it should have the qualities you should expect in a random number, in terms of distribution of each digit, relatively likelihood of streaks, etc.
Interesting! What was your intuition about what was off?
And then there's this interesting question of what counts as a good explanation. In my experience for mathematician types, the formalism IS the good explanation. But most of us want an interpretation where we can visualize STUFF DOING STUFF.
I'd add that it also makes it MUCH weirder to think there have been so many people opposed to asking why, especially mid 20th century.
My understanding is Heisenberg basically fussed with something to make spectral lines work and this popped out. And there's no more to it that that other than endless versions of "but how can it be like that!" And if anything, learning a touch of math heightened that for me.
And the part that got me is the idea that if you just think of horizontal as a projection on a circle with vectors in the + and - directions it's clear why photons get through 3 polarizers and not two at 0 and 90 degrees. But the fact that the math makes the physics is so weird.
So, after putting it off forever, I'm finally learning a bit of the formalism for the double slit stuff. It is really amazing how almost immediately you get to "you just have to accept this new ontology." I was reading a loose treatment of the "three polarizers" experiment.
I don't think we know that. I agree (or anyway hope) the arts are less amenable to synthetic data than e.g. math or coding.
I am getting close to feeling that way!
Ha, thanks. It was always the simple ideas that were funniest.
Like yeah, there are limits, maybe hard ones, but from where I sit the artists are losing ground on a monthly basis if you do nothing else than consider what the public wants en masse.
As for video, no it can't make a full movie yet, but compare veo3 (which is now all over Facebook and YouTube) to the near-gibberish that was possible with state-of-the-art models 2 years ago.
I've read the critiques. I have a stack of books I've read on this about a foot high. I buy the concerns and the skepticism about e.g. the singularity or whatever, but e.g. that last article I posted has fans of a folk singer who couldn't tell her from AI.
The stuff I'm working on now, in poetry and in comedy, is about as hard as I can run my brain on creativity. And part of that is just thinking, you know, let's race the steam-drill as long as we can. This seems to me the proper attitude and I don't think it has to be a negative one.
We are John Henry fighting the steam-drill. We just don't know how fast it's coming. And personally, it doesn't do to tell me people will want to keep me on as a kind of artisan or artifact. I want to make very good things, not just be liked. I want to be good at this.
When I talk about AI sometimes people get mad for me not saying it's all garbage. One guy said I hate artists! But I hope I have some reputation as a guy who has tried to push hard for more arty arty art in my daily work and books. I just think we're eventually going to lose, that's all!
But a good example of the need for connection to my mind is that I cannot imagine wanting to read a fake sentimental memoir, even if it perfectly captures its time and place.
I think it's possible this is more true in author fandoms than overall? Could be wrong but I can think of many authors I don't feel very connected to who wrote beautiful things, and certainly people I feel strong connections with who can't write for shit. It's complex.