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If you ask chatGPT to give you the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, it gets it exactly right. This and other such examples are sometimes taken as evidence that it has kept a copy of that book in memory, a potential copyright violation. The makers of these Large Language Models say they don’t, or at least […]

Reading Since last time, I read a few books: Sea of Tranquility, a book club book, Doppelganger, the new Naomi Klein, and Manywhere, a collection of short stories. Sea of Tranquility was very digestible sci-fi. I haven’t read that much sci-fi overall, so it’s probably inaccurate to say that it’s spiritually similar to Ted Chiang, but that’s the closest reference I know of. In the end, I think it’s a …

Beborn Beton's North American tour begins on October 3. The post Interview: Beborn Beton discuss their return to the U.S. appeared first on Synthpop Fanatic.

It’s one of the strangest pieces of vintage animation you’ll ever stumble across–the cheeky, puppet-starring infomercial-of-sorts Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939). Played many decades ago in the auditorium of a long-gone building created solely for the 1939 World’s Fair, … Continue reading →

The Full Pint monthly link pour.

I can't stop thinking about this quote from Ted Chiang (originally snipped by Simon Willison). Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When …

Simon Mullings – “Spike” – died at the weekend while on holiday in Scotland. Most people reading this would have known him, I guess, as the bass player for 80s indie band The Snapdragons whose songs included Dole Boys on Futons We were closest between 2020 and 2022. By then, we’d both been working for […]

From the Garbage Day newsletter, some reflections on the connection between virality and popularity (highlights mine): The conclusion I’ve come to this summer — one I’m still not totally sure I fully believe yet — is that what’s really happening here is that virality is decoupling from popularity. And I think you could even argue that the very idea that mass appeal had to be accurately reflected back at us …

A Trainmaster is a person in charge of the movement of trains in a division or subdivision of a railroad. A Train Master is a diesel locomotive, designated H24-66, built by the Fairbanks-Morse company. Two Words. Train Master.This story began decades ago, long before The Shifter. Facing the big Five-Oh soon I decided to revisit some old projects. This quickly rose to the top of the list. Look for more …

Mars Express was launched by the European Space Agency in 2003, and is ESA’s first Mars mission. In one shot, you can see Mars as a half-lit disk, with Phobos, its tiny moon, hovering above. Right below Phobos is Olympus Mons, the solar system's largest volcano, towering 22 km high and 600 km across—or as the Bad Astronomer says, “about the size of Colorado”.Posted by Andrea Luck, by way of …

I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does, instead of sleeping), and one particular slide jumped out at me: It’s a little graphic advertising the different kinds of modeling software that are part of something called the SIERRA framework, as part of a pretty standard “overview” presentation on computer modeling …

I normally try to avoid arousing the trolls on our local Nextdoor site, but occasionally I get interested in a particular item. Such was the case the other day when one of our local curmudgeons posted an announcement for a newly formed group that is opposing the city’s plans to build a new water treatment plant. The current plant is about 80 years old, nearing the end of its useful …

This traditional Neapolitan spaghetti frittata recipe is a fabulous was to use up leftover spaghetti. You can eat this frittata hot or cold and serve it as part of a buffet. potluck or with an aperitif. This classic version includes eggs, two kinds of cheese (parmigiano and scamorza) and pancetta. History Spaghetti frittata, also known... The post Spaghetti frittata appeared first on The Pasta Project.

Acknowledgements The code in this post is indebted (and in some cases wholly ripped off from) work by the glorious Finn Lindgren, who emailed me some code to do this probably a decade ago. Yes I am behind on my emails. Finn’s code can be found here as part of the glorious INLAbru project. Code availability The code from this post can be found in my github repo. The time …