@LibraryThing founder. Lead @TalpaSearch developer. Father, hacker, bibliophile, ex-classicist, Mainer, Catholic.
Portland, Maine
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This is absurd. Floyd is known because he was killed by police. One might also say that Trump is an American man with a lengthy criminal record—indeed 34 convictions versus Floyd's mere eight—but it would be better to say Trumps was President, as that's why he's known.
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His organization runs this professorwatchlist.org/searc…
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I once put the ice cream on the car to buckle my toddler son in and did not forget and did NOT drive off with it on top, but my son still mentions it all the time as a cautionary tale of dad’s cruelty and stupidity.
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Shakespeare managed to do all that in the first 14 lines.
🎭Romeo and Juliet audiences have been given an entire page of warnings about suicide, fake blood and stage fighting for a new prodution at Shakespeare’s Globe telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08…
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This question is in no way woke. It's testing whether you can accurately process what's in a text as opposed to your own misreadings born of bringing things into it from your own head.
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I feel like people in New Zealand are much more used to NZ being a common thing, and don't think "Naziism?" the way we do.
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It’s a gross sentiment, but Olbermann’s just some pundit. He’s not president of the United States.
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Map of who controls what at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (via @DeaconSober; sharper image)
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Just imagine being Usha Vance's parents, who immigrated from India in the 1970s and spoke Telugu, and having your greasy racist son-in-law smearing your family for political points.
Vance says it is "totally reasonable and acceptable" for people to not want to live next door to people who speak a different language than they do
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I suggest you spend some time talking to ChatGPT about something you know very well—starting with super-easy stuff and working your way to things only an expert like you would know. You will get a better sense of when these systems can be trusted and when they can't.
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Leaving aside his sincerity, which you obviously doubt, Biden is a baptized Catholic. Catholic baptism creates an irreversible, ontological change. As a bishop you are obligated to understand that and not deny it. Don't you have a theology degree?
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We live in the bad timeline.
Missouri House Gives Initial Approval to $45.6 Billion State Budget That Defunds Libraries | @NPR kcur.org/politics-elections-…
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This is absolutely epic. If you have any interest in tech or education, you have to give it a look. I feel like I aged another decade relieving all this. hackeducation.com/2019/12/31…
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The idea that the question is "woke" is false, but it also betrays the sort of thinking that will fail such an exam—seeing not the text, but imagined motivations, shadowy arguments from your head, etc.
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🦞 Portland, Maine, several blocks from me. This is why my family is still basically recluses. Maine—why can't you be smart?
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Saturday, instead of taking your child to a bookstore, show them your Kindle library and say "When I die, you're not licensed to use this."
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Stravinsky – Orthodox
Rachmaninoff – Orthodox
Tchaikovsky – Orthodox
Shostakovich – Orthodox
Prokofiev – Orthodox
Scriabin – Orthodox
Mussorgsky – Orthodox
Arvo Pärt – Orthodox
These are some awesome lists :)
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The YA book Hatchet is about a kid who gets lost and struggles for his life in the wilderness. The sequel, The River, has the same kid decide to go back into the wilderness, get lost and struggle for his life in the wilderness. The third book decides the second book didn’t happen in order to subject him to an extended struggling for his life. In books four and five he returns to the wilderness and struggles for his life.
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In the past it was enough that public libraries provided free access to good books. I propose their budgets expand, so we can pay people to read them.
Fox viewers are less likely to believe lies after being paid to watch CNN for 30 days: study rawstory.com/fox-viewers-cha…
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In Acts 2:1–2 the early Christian community has people praising God in Parthian, Medean, Elamite, Aramaic, Cappadocian, Pontic, Phrygian, Sidetic, Coptic, Latin and Arabic.
Go get stuffed.
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Your beat is the limitations of LLMs, and I am with you there. But 2x faster and cheaper is significant, and will enable new things. If @cshirky says "more is different," so is faster and cheaper.
Some quick tests on a process we use on Talpa.ai. TLDR: GPT-4o is faster than all GPT-4 models and even GPT 3.5.
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Also, that the president doesn't get do things. For good or ill, their power comes from politics. A president who tried this would find themselves powerless.
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Let me guess. The entry on Trump reads "Donald J. Trump was an American man with a lengthy criminal record…" Right?
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It's so bad. It's a grand piano falling through a floor of bad. And then falling through every floor beneath. Bad.
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GDP Lithuania — $30,510 per capita
GDP Russia — $15,077 per capita
Enjoy your beet slop, Boris.
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Much of "banned books" boils down to "challenges"—a patron complains that Harry Potter teaches satanism and the library laughs and does nothing. Restrictions on prison reading are true government bans, and they are getting worse. nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/ba…
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Every photo you post from now on needs to be a ten second static GIF with exactly one weird frame.
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In grade school two friends and I wrote some Apple II games and formed a “company” (never actually incorporated). I’m not sure we ever sold anything, but I subscribed to MacWorld under the name. Thirty-five years later CapitalOne wants to give us a credit card.
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An actual real-world friend just asked me if I knew what an ISBN was. I've been waiting for this moment my whole life.
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The Catholic Church does not believe that, some Catholics believe that. Catholic faith does not require belief in any post-scriptural miracle, apparition or other divine message or action. See Catechism §67.
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This is insane and also 10% chance of being back-assedly great? It will destroy the "For You" tab. But people stick round, we'd all be better off with the "Following" tab. Get rid of algorithmic junk and stick to listening to people you follow. Like it used to be.
Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.
The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.
Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.
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Also, given the training data, it's going to be a very online dude. Probably Redditor. He's got opinions.
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I’m kinda enjoying being the villain today.
Vote Harris. Whatever Trump is going to do to commas is way worse.
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After Trump and Vance's shameful display, the actual leaders of the Free World are lining up behind Zelensky en masse. France, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Netherlands, Sweden, Czechia, Norway, Croatia. Portugal… on and on
After Vance accused Zelensky of not saying thank you, Zelensky is now tweeting individual thanks to every single world leader expressing solidarity with Ukraine.
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To me the most amazing thing here is that a nice old colonial near Boston was only supposed to be worth $500k.
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Rapacious capitalism is not the reason Americans can't find time to read 100 pages a day. People of course differ, but overall we aren't working more, we're working less.
I do have a counter suggestion: the average American now spends 4.5 hours on their phone every day.
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Brazilian Catholic Bishops come together to condemn the attack on their democracy. US bishops did nothing like this.
A Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil (CNBB), perplexa com as graves e violentas ocorrências em Brasília, pede serenidade, paz e o imediato cessar dos ataques criminosos ao Estado Democrático de Direito.
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Exactly. They're legal! They're employed and hard working! They're not terrifying Muslims! They're from the west! Weren't those the things? Is there some secret other factor at play?
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Floyd? Yes. He's a nobody. What matters about him is how he died and the reaction it caused, which is why an entry focus on THAT.
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I'm all for diverse literature, but please don't put Homer in the "nondiverse" category. A 2700 year-old oral poem from an illiterate, non-Christian, pre-philosophy, shame-based culture is more deeply alien to a high school student's experience than anything else they will read.
These high school "classics" have been taught for generations — could they be on their way out? ift.tt/1Uo3CnB
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If I were president there would be no stories about me playing golf all the time. But I would have to make sure nobody squealed about the Dungeons and Dragons and Minecraft.
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You can beat it by reading with attention to what's said and what's not. (It's useful to read the question first, so you know the kind of thing that's going to be asked. I would not read the question AND the answers first.) But that won't always work, so the backup plan is to
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The Millinocket wedding's death count is up to 5. In another state, things would get confused quickly, but Maine's counts are so low that everything can be traced exactly over weeks. It shows how a few "mild" infections ends up killing others.
Wedding officiated by anti-mask pastor in Maine kills 5, sickens at least 175. apnews.com/263d072466b2152f1…
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I don't know the source, but can I speculate that this is hard because the training data for humans is 99.99% them NOT doing this, so there just isn't enough data for an AI to begin to understand the movements here?
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I recall a senator or congressman who retired and stayed in DC. He and his wife figured that's where all their friends were. A year later they left because, actually, he didn't really have friends once he wasn't powerful.
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Someone needs to write a book “What Changed?” surveying how the Internet changed, markets, culture, and society—chapters on music, dating, politics, etc. It would be fun for people like me who lived through it, and informative for those who don’t remember things were different.
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I asked my 800k Instagram followers what their biggest concern was, and it was black people, followed by how to get french fry stains out of white fabric.
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I just wrote a letter to an member frustrated that no library would take his large, high-quality personal library. Librarians, at least here, can be harsh about such people. I understand why libraries can't do it—I explained it to him. But his sadness and frustration… ugh.
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Many English teachers and many librarians have warned about this, and they are heroes indeed. But many English teachers have cooperated in the decline, moving from assigning books to assigning chapters. And the deemphasis of books in libraries—the oft-heard cry of “libraries are SO much more than books”—bears some of the blame here too. To speak out against the latter has been professionally risky for some time now. It’s time to switch gears, admit error and re-emphasize libraries’ role in reading and literacy above all.
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The trads are calling him “Prevost,” a “modernist,” a pagan, a heretic, for this and for condemning the death penalty—Catholic teaching for decades now. They had a window to convince a sympathetic Pope they just wanted the Latin Mass back, but they’ve proved once again it isn’t about any of that. It’s a wholesale rejection of the Church as it actually exists and believes. It’s high time to lay down the law—stay and accept that the Medieval church isn’t coming back, or go, elect your own anti-Pope, and believe whatever you want.
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Massachusetts also has Bunker Hill Day and Evacuation Day. The latter, commemorating the British departure from Boston, is on March 17, and is considered something of secular, Yankee-inflected cover for Boston's Irish—and now everyone—to have a day off for St. Patrick's day.
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Um, selling your startup would be a capital gains, both for you and for your investors. Rich people aren't actually that upset with a 70% marginal tax rate on incomes over $10 million, because their money isn't income in the first place.
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Huh. For some reason this odd tweet blew up. So… everyone please go sign up for an account at @LibraryThing or @getlitsy!
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No library should have a Facebook "like" button in their catalog. Every time that button appears, Facebook is sucking up user data. It's a no-opt-out violation of your users' privacy.
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Okay, people, from now on, closing a browser window is “defenestration.” Pass it on so the word can be saved from oblivion.
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The olds were pretty crazy on January 6. The whole thing was so exciting on died of a stroke, another of a heart attack.
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