deathmtn

I had this weird pain on and off all day in the chest area. I still can’t say whether it was a digestion thing or a muscle thing. It felt better when I was horizontal and worse when I was upright, so it doesn’t seem like it would be acid reflux. Nor did I have any range of motion issues, so it also seems like it would be a muscle thing.

Whatever it was, it’s gone today. Bodies are a mystery.

FIRST-DETECTED BLACK HOLE IS MORE MASSIVE THAN WE THOUGHT

She thinks it might mean that black hole formation could be independent of the heavy-element content of the environment in which it formed. If that’s true, then maybe massive stellar-mass black holes didn’t only form in the early universe; they might also be able to form nearby.

There’s hope for us all!

38-minute run, 12 pull-ups. First run in maybe two weeks? It was good!

I found out that in the UK, there's an alternate set of Calvin and Hobbes collection:

- Thereby Hangs a Tale
- One Day the Wind Will Change
- In the Shadow of the Night

These are very dry and…British. They sound like Agatha Christie novels.

I saw a blog post about an AI judging drawing contests, then saw it was via MetaFilter. I used to be active there about a decade ago, then gradually got tired of it, for a few different reasons, which boil down to "I dislike reading most of the comments."

I looked at the site, and some of it looks the same. I came across this State of the Site post, and holy shit, what a multi-dimensional nightmare! I have no idea what to make of it, other than that it's just like the rest of the internet now.

I missed this interview with Timnit Gebru, who Google fired for helping to write a paper about how large language models can be biased.

It’s very dangerous if you have these kinds of researchers doing what my co-lead was calling “fig leaf”—cover-up—work. Like, we’re not changing anything, we’re just putting a fig leaf on the art. If you’re in an environment where the people who have power are not invested in changing anything for real, because they have no incentive whatsoever, obviously having these kinds of researchers embedded there is not going to help at all.

Every company of this size has some kind of “ethics team” and some internal forum to discuss them in. And this is how a company can have it both ways. You have the ethics experts and the internal discussion to show you care about not harming people. But the key is: You (the executives) politely ignore those people. You say, hey, great job talking about the ethics! Then, you keep on doing whatever helps you capture the market.

I went through this weird set of feelings in this order:

- Doing so much D&D stuff made me want to stop it and work on my boring task management app, which I haven't touch in two weeks.

- I reacclimated myself with this design and thought, but why? It's mostly for an automatic reactivity that I'm not sure I need. So, I thought, Svelte isn't right for this.

- Then, I spent a while going back in the commit history to find the point at which it was using Rollup, but not Svelte. I started ripping it out, but then thought, I like the convenient templating, though.

- Then, I decided to leave it, and just drop all the code that's there just to make sure that when you edit a card, it will be change anywhere else it might be. (I'm not sure it will appear in two places at once that often.)

Who knows what I'll think tomorrow!

Playing D&D with a kid is a nice change of pace from normal kid stuff, but it is still playing with a kid, which can get taxing.

This thing maps your GitHub commits into some kinda 3D bar chart.

Me: I don't know what these bars mean.
Katt: Well, the bigger ones are the bigger ones.

Hey Mady’s architectural-style drawings

I’m into really busy Richard Scarry/Where’s Waldo-type drawings. Also, it sucks when artists only have an Instagram page and nothing else. I guess I’ll see their work someday if it ever gets on something you don’t have to sign up to Facebook for.

Re: That Bon Appetit episode of Reply All I talked about a while ago: Hosts of Popular ‘Reply All’ Podcast Exit Amid Controversy

He noted the power of “Reply All” within Gimlet, as it’s the company’s biggest show, but given the hosts’ close ties to management, they found out about the union effort and were not happy about it. So the “Reply All” hosts allegedly proceeded to use their influence “as a cudgel against our efforts at voluntary recognition,” Eddings said, holding anti-union meetings and sending purportedly “harassing messages” to those on the union’s organizing committee.

Eddings said he attempted to speak with Vogt directly about diversity issues at Gimlet and his own experiences as an employee of color, including an instance when someone in senior leadership told him he seemed “too angry” for the company to work with him on diversity issues. Eddings said Vogt “didn’t comment on the diversity part, but made sure to tell me I had in fact seemed angry.”

Sruthi was involved with the anti-union and anti-diversity stuff, too. Amazing she thought she’d commit harm, then get credit for reporting on very similar harm.

John Naughton once spoke to Robert Maxwell at a meeting. It was quite a meeting.

After a while, the great man reappeared and invited us to join him for “luncheon”. This old-fashioned locution, by the way, seemed to be typical of his speech, at least when he was trying to be polite. On my way in I had passed him in a corridor, deep in conversation with two besuited lackeys. I caught a phrase as we went by: “We should issue proceedings forthwith,” he said. His English sounded oddly quaint, as if he had learned it out of that mythical phrasebook in which the postillion has been struck by lightning.

(Robert Maxwell was a powerful businessman whose fraud was discovered after his death. He's the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the woman who delivered young girls to the pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.)

Brad East, who I read because he had something interesting to say about social media a while ago, wrote about some NYT article in his post NYT, guilt by association, and libraries:

The entire hit piece is structured this way. "Alexander might be an okay dude, but it's possible that his blog might have led some readers to Wrong Thoughts." What I cannot for the life of me understand is what it means for a fellow writer to think this, to have written this way. Does he really suppose the way authors and their works ought to be judged is by the sheer possibility that some readers might draw undesirable conclusions?

Wow! Sounds like a pretty bad hit piece, eh?

His reaction was so strong that I decided to read the original NYT article. It was about the Slate Star Codex, a "Rationalist" blog. I looked for the "guilt by association" stuff. Here's what I found:

As he explored science, philosophy and A.I., he also argued that the media ignored that men were often harassed by women. He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books. He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”

In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”

That's not guilt by association, dude. That is stuff Star Codex said himself, with little room for charitable interpretation. That's just guilt. (Yes, yes, it's only guilt if you take the "woke" stance that misogyny and racism are bad.) And that's a misleading post from Brad East.

This is the second theologian blog I've read that sounds intellectually honest, but turns out not to be. (The first is this guy.) I have faith that this isn't always the case, though. If you know of a counterexample, drop them my way!

GifCities

The Internet Archive collected gifs from GeoCities and made them searchable. It's incredible.

For example (and I'm going to "hotlink" here):

Adam Buxton talks here about how the British thought America was super cool in the '70s. He also mentioned how young people today would find that laughable.

Which is true, and I have to admit it did make me a little sad.