In case of fire, save your code first. Image v/@igor_os777

ハチドリの親子がかわいい

9 distance measures in data science w/algorithms (v/@MaartenGr).

so this is what we would call a "chick magnet"

The latest settings for Tesla self-driving mode: Sloth / Chill Standard Hurry Mad Max

This one never gets old, although you could add now “Proof by AI: the bot said so, so just believe it!”

I just found something interesting hidden on the SpaceX website Go to: SpaceX.com → Human Spaceflight → Space Station → scroll all the way down → “Play Now” It’s a live Dragon docking simulator where you try docking with the ISS yourself And really… this game is way trickier than it looks You think it’ll be simple until the capsule starts drifting sideways and rotating at the same time 😭 Made me realize how insanely precise real docking actually is. The controls, timing, movement… everything has to be perfect

harness, scaffold, context engineering, agent... do you actually know what they mean? we wrote an AI agent glossary and tried to make sense of it all with simple definitions and real examples ↓ go read it ↓

At some point the "stochastic parrot", "it can only regurgitate" people are going to have to fall back and regroup. I'm pretty sure that this wasn't anywhere in the training data. Erdős, 19-friggin-46, yo. Perhaps it was IMPLIED by the training data. So what? An awful lot of math is emergent from the nine Peano postulates, but we don't trivialize that math, now, do we?

One day I will remember that the CAD program I use with my 3D printer measures cylinders by radius rather than diameter. But it is not this day.

I wonder a little at the anti-AI crusaders who boycott small studios, microbusinesses, and individual artists, but who don't give up using Amazon, Google products, Shopify stores, Etsy, Apple, Youtube, big publishers, big studios, etc. These corporations are also using AI, but it's only the single, struggling types who suffer when the dogpiling begins. Is it one of those "I can't pressure those guys, so I'll concentrate on the people I can pressure into failing" things? Because all that's doing is weeding out all the potential competition. Do they want the big studios and corporations to be the only game in town? I sympathize with "I want to live in a world with no AI." We don't live in that world anymore, though, and smashing the looms isn't going to bring it back. Given that, we should stop pretending that there's a path that doesn't involve some group of people getting their lives upended and think about how we can help them turn that situation into an opportunity, rather than berating them for trying to use those changes to survive. (Or, dare we allow it, thrive.) I really think it bears repeating: we no longer live in a world without AI, and the genie's not going back in that bottle. Your energy to fight the inevitable is limited, and even if it wasn't, the battle is already lost. So. What do you do next?

Simple harmonic motion, as visualized by @fermatslibrary.

You do realize that everything you see on your screen right now lives in a data center, right? Same with everything else on the internet. Amazon. Email. Your bank...

Sandhill cranes putting on a show.

Concise descriptions of more than 600 programming languages and DSLs: esr.gitlab.io/loccount/

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

Alignment is when you get a computer to do the things I want it to do.

Just found out my best friend has been running an uncensored AI model on his laptop I felt sick to my stomach No content filtering. No safety guardrails. Generating whatever he wants with zero oversight He said he "learned about it from Americans online" I should have known I confronted him immediately "Are you insane? Where is your Data Protection Impact Assessment? Have you appointed a Data Protection Officer? Have you filed with your local supervisory authority? That model processes data with no lawful basis under Article 6" He said "bro I just wanted it to write code without saying no" I nearly threw up We spent 14 hours together filling out GDPR compliance documentation He now has a registered data processing agreement, a cookie policy for a model that runs offline, and a 47-page privacy notice that no one will ever read His GPU now spends more time logging consent records than running inference He can still generate anything he wants but each prompt takes 11 minutes due to mandatory compliance checks I also reported him to the European Data Protection Board just to be safe He says he misses the old days I told him "in America they have freedom. In Europe we have frameworks" He's mass-deleting his Hugging Face downloads as we speak This is what it means to live in a regulated society I've never been more proud of him

Nah, brah. You just build a big habitat, point it in the direction you want to go, and take off. Yes, barring longevity increases (which I wouldn't bet against either) it might be your distant descendants who actually wind up at another star. So what?