Stuff I found on the Internet
"It's one thing for Bari Weiss, when she was just running the Free Press or whatever, to report this. It's another thing for The New York Times to report this. I think they put a stamp of legitimacy on medical falsehoods. They also legitimized anti-trans hate, really." once more for the people in the back: fuuuck the new york times
"[W]e need to acknowledge that young people making speculative bets aren't stupid or weak. They're responding rationally to the world they inherited. The failure isn't theirs. It's ours, for giving them mental models designed for an economy that no longer exists."
"The mistake that every investor, commentator, analyst and member of the media makes about NVIDIA is believing that its sales are an expression of demand for AI compute, when it’s really more of a statement about the availability of debt from banks and private credit."
"The problem with all of us being so much more a hive mind than we realize is that knowledge problems that ripple across our a information ecosystems can become not just threats to individuals with weak character or bad habits, but the equivalent of colony collapse.... Real belief in collective knowledge may also suggest that caring for our own knowledge formation in social systems is a way of caring for the system as a whole."
"Since this is a Master System 2 chipset, it should lack the collision detection bug that impacts ALF when played with the Power Base Converter. I know you were worried."
tired: "What would Jesus do?" wired: "How did Woz do this?"
"Maybe what makes this zine so special is... but that it models so clearly the movement between [the personal and the activist]—the way you might get from personal frustration to organizational commitment. Gendertrash distilled hundreds of personal viewpoints into a hard-won political ethos that made itself known through coherent and moving writing. It is a model we sorely need now."
"By foregrounding per-query impact, substack writers and companies are erasing the real problem with generative systems: they are oversold and overused, in an anxious bid to make impossibly high hopes come true.... [I]n terms of diversion away from real action, it is the weird flipped cousin of the way fossil fuel companies exploited and popularised 'carbon footprint' messaging to divert responsibility for action away from themselves."
good and very simple tutorial for writing gdbstub interfaces with example code
"After High Sierra there was Sierra, and then Apple had decided to rename macOS into OS X. This was the culmination of the multi-year project of decoupling the mobile iOS from the desktop OS, which made perfect sense to most users. Apple continued to prove their dedication to open platforms, because in a later version of their desktop OS (Snow Leopard) they had discontinued App Store altogether."
"You probably think 64 kilobytes doesn't sound much when a small game now takes 8 gigabytes, but that's 'cos modern games are sloppy, inefficient, fat and lazy - like the basement dwelling losers who wrote them!!!"
very cool idea: "BumpySkies uses current weather and flight data to forecast periods of turbulence along the path of major-carrier flights within or departing the continental United States. It operates under the notion that expecting these bumpy patches will make encountering them less surprising and scary for nervous fliers."
lively and easy-to-follow notes, even though I don't know Racket or x86 assembly
full of useful and juicy nuggets, e.g. on GPU failures due to thermal stress: "So let’s aggregate up. Imagine you had a 10,000 or even a 20,000 GPU data center. You should expect on the statistics a chip to fail about every 3 or 4 hours. So long before I get to the point where I’m rapidly turning these over because there’s a new generation of chips, I’m turning over a vast chunk of my chips just because they’re failing under thermal stress."; "TSMC now is something like 15% of Taiwan’s GDP" (!!); "the U.S. has been very good at speculative bubbles. This is one of our main core competencies here. They tend to be about real estate, or... technology, or... loose credit, and sometimes they even have a government role with respect to some kind of perverse incentive that was created. This is the first bubble to have all four.... The sum of all bubbles"; "[Like shale wells], it’s an extractive resource economy in surprising ways. So not just in terms of the... declining return from the GPUs themselves, but also the declining return... of these giant training sets that allowed us to scale up the so-called scaling laws for large language models...." also it's adorable that Paul Krugman thought that GPU stands for "general processing unit"
conservation is such a cool job
variations on a simulation of "Physarum polycephalum"
I wish I cared about anything as much as this guy cares about EMI
very generous resource with activities, readings and an example syllabus "designed to help you develop a creative practice rooted in inquiry, context and change"
need this for later
"We have created a system where the only way to survive is to be destitute enough to qualify for aid, or rich enough to ignore the cost. Everyone in the middle is being cannibalized. The rich know this… and they are increasingly opting out of the shared spaces"