Notices by Zach Weinersmith (zachweinersmith@mastodon.social)

This year, between seeds, cuttings, rootstocks, and grafted trees, I put in over 100 fruit trees. And then Virginia had the worst drought in years. So, I have to run around like an idiot once a week with a hose and bucket, and now I understand the idea that farming is stressful.

Why do we even want high-speed rail? The faster the train goes, the sooner you have to get off the train.

If you go to Europe, you can get across all of France in hours. Imagine taking an Amtrak across France. You wouldn't miss a thing! You'd probably have to spend a weekend at Versailles waiting for an engine change. I don't know how the Euros endure their system.

Bonus panel here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/huh-2 #smbc #comics

When describing what a fruit tastes like, do you have a set of fruit primitives? Like a sort of fruit primary colors that are used to explain other fruit..

Bonus panel here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/safe #smbc #comics #ai

For those interested, my new book got a super positive review from Kirkus, one of the major book reviewers, and notoriously stingy with good reviews. Hope kids agree!

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/zach-weinersmith/sawyer-lee-and-the-quest-to-just-stay-home/

Which is closest to your view?

Full comic here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/peace-4 #smbc #comics

One other thought: possibly it was not a human culture shift but an Internet composition shift? Like, early Internet overrepresented dorky young men, and that likely affected what was considered appropriate or problematic.

Like, one of my earliest weird experiences with LLMs was when bing chat came out. I asked it "what is the most popular content searched for on bing." It started writing about porno for a bit, then abruptly everything disappeared and it said it couldn't answer the question. Which is strange in multiple ways, but most odd that Bing AI can't tell you the most searched for thing on Bing. The same servers will deliver, like, racist vore cartoons or whatever, but the Ai has to be squeaky clean.

Do you think of LLMs came out in, say 2003, the major players would've allowed nsfw mode? Like to my knowledge there was never serious pushback on search engines indexing basically anything legal, even if it was deeply offensive. Is that a culture shift or is it more about how an LLM feels like a human being, rather than a mindless indexer.

Nerd confession: I've read hardly any Pratchett.

But yesterday, my 12 year old got loaned a copy of Wee Free Men and read it front to back in, like, an afternoon. And then was quoting it to me for hours.

Help me, what does she need next?

Available now!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weiner/parenting-an-smbc-comic-collection

Thanks for your support, everyone!

Bonus panel here: #smbc #comics #math

Another wild result using LLMs to solve math problems. https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1smehbo/stunning_ai_breakthrough_gpt_54_solves_erdos/

I continue to be amazed how little people care about this compared to automatic PowerPoint presentation generators and Ai girlfriends.

Hey cybersecurity geeks-- so it seems like anthropic now has really good exploit detection ability. Do you think this makes offense or defense harder? Like, seems like everyone might have to go through a battery of automated checks before deploying stuff into the world.

I think there's an extent to which activism and artistry are opposed, in that the former is trying to achieve some end now and the latter is trying to make things that are permanent and not about the present.

But there are rare exceptions, such as Orwell, or Arthur Koestler or especially Hunter S Thompson. I fine Thompson particularly compelling as someone who can take an article on a thing that happened last week and somehow let the whole universe peek around its edges.

I don't see this is a bad thing the editors did. I can see why they wanted to do it, and probably would've done the same. But I suppose it's a casualty of such an era that the Great Conversation, about free will, language, mathematics, etc. gets hard to hear over all the shouting.

So, there used to be an NYT column called The Stone, which did essays about philosophy. They ended in 2020, but had 3 compilation books.

One of the interesting things reading these books is how, post-Trump, I would say the essays become much less interesting, because you can (I think?) feel the editors and writers suddenly wanting to grapple with current events. The focus necessarily gets narrow and reactive.