Some Actions That Are Not Protesting or Voting
“I’m wiping my house off my shoes.”
“You say that I am fired, but I have investigated the matter, and it turns out I am not.”
Reddit catches the deep state doing UFO shit again. Nice try, spooks.
What the halt in US foreign aid means *immediately*. (live, impromptu chat with Atul Gawande)
TeenVogue on how to start an ICE Watch neighborhood program in your community.
San Francisco’s Right-Wing and Trump.
“Soon after publishing his subversive novel Oromay in 1983, Ethiopian writer Baalu Girma disappeared under mysterious circumstances and is widely believed to have been murdered by the Derg regime.” The English translation of the novel ships in the US on February 4th.
“Kroger’s partnership with Microsoft to install facial-recognition technology in stores, which could be used to identify individual customers: When a shopper approaches the shelf, she would see a price calibrated specifically for her. The next shopper might pay a different amount based on their profile.”
Ted! Life is more than an engineering problem.
“While these days Musk frames his crusade against Wikipedia as a principled stand against bias, the timeline of his complaints reveals a more personal motivation. His earliest grievances targeted his own Wikipedia biography, which accurately but much to his chagrin describes him as an “early investor” in Tesla rather than a founder. He’s also complained about the Tesla article, which he gripes “glorif[ies]” one of Tesla’s actual founders. He has repeatedly claimed his Wikipedia article was written by his “enemies”, and has joined his fans’ complaints about the portion of his Wikipedia page outlining his role in spreading misinformation, bigotry, and conspiracy theories, agreeing with one who suggested “someone paid to have this written.”
“the TikTokification of the Stanley cup has been vital to its contemporary popularity.”
“If you are a person who misses websites and a broad range of work worth reading, please understand the desperation that is felt by the people who used to be allowed to create them.”
A house resolution to let AI prescribe medicines. Oh.
Did a Chinese company doing AI as a side project just torpedo OpenAI and NVIDIA? As Jacob Bacharach put it, “another instance of a Chinese economic model that is focused on building products, tools, and infrastructure vs. an American economic model that is focused on creating financial instruments. These are still tools in search of limited practical application, but it is interesting that if you stop pretending that you’re building transcendent divine intelligence to wow the investors and the media dupes and instead just engineer for efficiency you can make stuff.”
“The model performs on par with OpenAI’s GPT-4 in tasks such as mathematics, coding, and natural language reasoning. DeepSeek-R1’s training budget has also drawn attention. According to its published API pricing, it costs RMB 1 ($0.14) per million input tokens (cache hit), RMB 4 ($0.55) per million input tokens (cache miss), and RMB 16 ($2.21) per million output tokens. This pricing is approximately one-thirtieth of OpenAI’s operational costs for GPT-4.”
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and other shells I put in an orange 