welp, I got laid off.

if anyone you know is looking for a slightly-used computational linguist -- remote or in #Syracuse, NY -- get in touch. I'm also open to "data science" positions if they're "languagey" #GetFediHired #NLProc #NLP

@mcc you can OD on Vitamin D too! D regulates calcium uptake, and can cause calcium crystals to precipitate in your body. At extremely high doses, Vitamin D is used as rat poison.

That said, taking a 2000 IU dose daily is safe. Your body won’t overproduce Vitamin D if you have enough from other sources.

@arstechnica what are they supposed to do? Shoot the computers?

A society built on solidarity isn’t just for other people. It’s for *you.*

The alternative—a society built on competition, on domination, and on hierarchy—is one where you are treated as disposable. When the pressure of that competition comes to finally break you—as it will most people—you go into the dustbin.

In a society of solidarity, we lift each other up. If you are broken, we do what we can to heal you. This brings out the best in all of us.

@inthehands @mmasnick “Here’s what the “just let tech bros run everything” crowd fundamentally misunderstands about how innovation actually works: It requires exactly the kind of chaotic, unpredictable, open ecosystem that authoritarianism systematically destroys.”

Rudolf Rocker’s “Nationalism and Culture” is a fantastic deep dive into this very topic. It definitely was a perspective changing book.

It’s cool that Trump brought back all these spam texts. This is exactly what I wanted—some random number texting me “hello” five times a day

@inthehands it’s stupid if you want social security to function. If your goal is to break it so severely that privatizing it looks appealing—which has been the prerogative of these shitheads for 40 years—then this idea is exactly in line with their goals

You don’t need AI;
you need a spreadsheet.

@pluralistic i used to watch a lot of SerpentZA—a South African Brit who had emigrated to China—and one of the things he pointed out was that basically everything was illegal, but it was rarely enforced. Only if you were “annoying” would they throw the book at you.

But if everyone is always breaking the law, they have the legal pretense to arrest anyone they want at any time—that kind of arbitrary violence is the crux of authoritarianism.

The authoritarianism has already infected the GOP, deeply. Removing Trump alone will not solve the problem. The GOP was leaning towards more moderate positions in 2016—their policies are widely unpopular, and bending looked like the way forward.

What Trump showed them was they didn’t have to bend; they could double down by any means necessary—including usurping the rule of law if needed. This will not go away.

@inthehands sometimes, you just gotta tap the sign for them

@inthehands

There are a lot of very weird units, when you stare to hard at them. For example, the Hubble Constant is (70 km/s)/Mpc -- that is, a speed per Megaparsec, which checks out. but the distances technically cancel out, so the result is a *frequency.*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkfIXUjkYqE

@inthehands

I'd make the case that it's not really the same "distance" being cancelled out. even though they're both the same kind of unit, one is a distance related to the galaxy's motion and the other is a distance *to* the galaxy.

I think the same reasoning would apply for the lengths composing fuel volume and the distance of a car traveled.

@h2onolan it’s a good question

@panos @atomicpoet by restricting the size of posts, it leaves room for more voices generally. This was something I realized when I first used Twitter:

https://blog.thedansimonson.com/twitter-takes-characters-gives-access-in-return/

Also, when the infrastructure isn’t in place for longer posts—e.g. Read More buttons—it can be really irritating when an entire blog post is pushed into my feed.

@inthehands fwiw, they largely developed GPS to get nuclear weapons on target.

really great video on Polaris and the technical challenges needed to make it happen back in the late 50s: https://youtu.be/dSih6Ch0Hzs

@fgcallari @inthehands yes. from a cost perspective, a lot of applications of older techniques are simply ignored. the problem space wasn't exhausted, but few were willing to invest in fully exploring it from a commercial perspective.

@inthehands one of the big assumptions behind AI hype -- the unspoken presupposition -- is that the 99.9% reliability of traditional software will be complemented by the apparent capacities of generative systems and all the exponential possibilities entailed therein

in practice, because the generative systems are making stuff up, they're going to pollute traditional software into uselessness with absolute garbage inputs.

they're fundamentally two different things, and they cannot interface

Has anyone been brave enough to say “the Alabama Supreme Court sucks??” I’m gonna say it. I’ll do it. I’ll be brave enough.

You think you’re the greatest species to ever live and can do anything, yet you cannot and will never even take a nap inside a flower