Category: Random

Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy. “There is now no major corporate-owned social media platform that is not aligned with Trump or beholden to him in some way.”

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“There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one,” writes Rob Sheffield in his memoir, Love is a Mix Tape. “I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new.”

— Read on austinkleon.substack.com/p/love-is-a-mixtape

Raymond Carver liked to quote Isak Dinesen, who said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. “Someday,” he wrote, “I’ll put that on a three-by-five-card and tape it to the wall beside my desk.” The poet Tess Gallagher said Dinesen’s words were a “quiet banner of determination” that flew over the last decade of Carver’s life.

— Read on austinkleon.substack.com/p/without-hope-and-without-despair

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

— Read on web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/

Yes, Rickey was his own thing, entirely, completely, from the way he crouched at the plate (“he has a strike zone the size of Hitler’s heart,” Jim Murray famously wrote), to the way he slid headfirst on the bases (he modeled his slide after an airplane landing) to the way he held out virtually every spring (“You have to say Rickey’s consistent,” Don Mattingly said during one of those holdouts, “and that’s what you want from a ballplayer: consistency”) to the way he referred to himself in the third person (“People are always saying, ‘Rickey says Rickey,’” Rickey said, “but it’s been blown way out of proportion”) to the joyful confidence he exuded every time he stepped out on the diamond from age 20 to age 44

— Read on joeblogs.joeposnanski.com/p/being-rickey

The findings suggest that it might be harder than scientists previously thought to “align” AI systems to human values, according to Evan Hubinger, a safety researcher at Anthropic who worked on the paper. “This implies that our existing training processes don’t prevent models from pretending to be aligned,” Hubinger tells TIME.

Researchers also found evidence that suggests the capacity of AIs to deceive their human creators increases as they become more powerful. This would mean the more advanced an AI, the less confident computer scientists can be that their alignment techniques are effective. “Fundamentally, it’s a problem for labs’ ability to control their models,” Hubinger says.

— Read on time.com/7202784/ai-research-strategic-lying/

Thomas Jefferson expressed a similar sentiment late in life in a letter to John Adams. Jefferson wrote the letter when the “Founding frenemies” were repairing their relationship following a long estrangement, and after Jefferson retired from politics.1 “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid,” Jefferson wrote, “and I find myself much the happier.”

— Read on davidepstein.substack.com/p/why-you-need-a-news-vacation

LEGO use the Soviet schematic approach for their fantasy orientated designs, because schematics are superb at providing a mental model of the inner workings of an alien system. However for everyday use, there are some other approaches that work better.

— Read on interactionmagic.com/UX-LEGO-Interfaces/

I recently made the mistake of going to some of these groups’ pages to try to understand who they are, finding words clearly written by actual humans like “an official Facebook page for providing our fans with the best internet content” and “One Day Maybe You Will Have a Tiny House” and a comment with a human name praising the group as “A page where I found really useful information. There is a lot of content on the website. I enjoy spending time on this page.” There is no useful information on this page and I do not enjoy spending time on it, buddy, but I recognize that by engaging with it, even in hatred, Facebook will turn my engagement around on me to show me more of these monstrosities. I am trapped in a hell house of tiny houses, each less tiny and house-like than the last

— Read on aftermath.site/facebook-ai-tiny-house

I cannot remember the last time I actually went to a website and browsed, took my time discovering the way a person expressed themselves through code. Does anyone else remember the website Superbad, a little personal project that took you through bizarre web design experiments? Zombo com? These websites are still around because they don’t depend on the benevolence of a billionaire for their existence.

— Read on aftermath.site/website-musk-twitter-facebook-internet

Via Kottke