AnIndefiniteArticle

But some of us have certainly stoked it

Or the flame war

Love and tolerate the hell out of people.

At least people online are kinder than people irl, and this strategy can actually work.

Hmm, yes that makes much more sense.

Definitely more than bike dogfighting or a chase scenario like I was thinking.

Ok, but the bike frame isn’t stationary. With a shoulder-mounted weapon you can brace for the recoil with your legs. If you are trying to move forward and shoot at the same time, firing the gun will slow you down. If you try to turn and shoot at the same time, the recoil will push your front wheel in the opposite direction that you are trying to go while your back wheel keeps trying to go forward which is very unstable.

Newton’s 3rd law.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Shoot the gun, and the bike will get pushed in the opposite direction and be hard to control.

recoil

Relevant Carlos Santana

Fun fact, when the jet stream gets perturbed like that and develops the sinusoidal deviations that we are experiencing, it’s called a Rossby wave.

These waves are actually super normal as the jetstream shifts with the seasons and moves north/south, especially when in a La Niña phase of the ENSO, which we are in right now.

The Hadley circulation cells whose boundaries define the jet stream are driven by convection. The US lies right along a jetstream boundary between two cells, and just downwind from the pacific ocean, so our weather is particularly sensitive to the temperature differences across the pacific ocean.

El Niño patterns have a hot equatorial pacific ocean which drives significant convection on the southern cell of the jet stream crossing the US, stabilizing it. La Niña patterns have a smaller gradient between the temperatures in the cells to the north and south of the relevant jet stream, especially as climate change relatively warms the arctic faster, leading to higher amplitude destabilizations during La Niña patterns like we are experiencing now.

More fun facts about these Rossby waves: they have been proposed as the mechanism to drive the eddies that end up forming planets in protoplanetary disks around baby stars (see the wikipedia page for Rossby waves above), and as the mechanism behind the hexagonal shape of Saturn’s polar cell. Worth noting that the exact mechanism for that hexagon is still highly debated, but Peter Gierasch used to have a fun model using a modified record turn table to create a rossby wave that formed a hexagon as a proof-of-concept that has stuck with me.

Try asking one to write a sentence that ends with the letter “r”, or a poem that rhymes.

They know words as black boxen with weights attached for how likely they are to appear in certain contexts. Prediction happens by comparing the chain of these boxes leading up to the current cursor and using weights and statistics to fill in the next box.

They don’t understand that those words are made of letters unless they have been programmed to break each word down into its component letters/syllables. None of them have been programmed to do this because that increases the already astronomical compute and training costs.

About a decade ago I played with an LLM whose markov chain did predictions based on what letter came next instead of what word came next (pretty easy modification of the base code). It was surprisingly comparably good at putting sentences and grammar together when working at the letter-scale. It also was horribly less efficient to train (which is saying something in comparison to word-level prediction LLMs) because it needs to consider many more units (letters vs words) leading up to the current one to maintain the same coherence. If the markov chain was looking at the past 10 words, a word-level prediction has 10 boxes to factor into its calculations and trainings. If those words have an average of 5 letters, then letter-level prediction needs to consider at least 50 boxes to maintain the same awareness of context within a sentence/paragraph. This is a five-fold increase in memory footprint, and an even greater increase in compute time (since most operations are at least of linear order and sometimes more).

That efficiency hit would allow for LLMs to understand sub-word concepts like alphabetization, rhyming, root words, etc. The expense and energy requirements aren’t worth this modest expansion of understanding.

Adding a General Purpose Transformer just adds some plasticity to those weights and statistics beyond the markov chain example I use above.

According to his father, Elon was named after the fascist dictator of Mars that starred in the scifi novel Von Braun wrote to learn English.

Or just empathetic enough to recognize the beauty and capacity of love within all flora and fauna.

You mean the only pony in ponyville brave enough to live right on the edge of the everfree forest?

The one wandering into the woods to massage the bears and mediate the dragons?

No way, she would be too scared. She is too shy and quiet to do something like that.

Pinkie representing pan makes sense. Her balloon cutie mark is the pan flag.

Twilight’s mane is the bi flag. Yet she’s shoehorned into ace in this meme.

Rarity is the graytones with purple of an ace flag.

Dash is the rainbow flag.

AJ is the red/orange/yellow of the lesbian flag.

Fluttershy is also a pony, but not a pride flag. Maybe she’s just supposed to be straight. I’ve seen her pink and yellow shoehorned into the purple and yellow intersex flag back when futashy memes were big.

The spa twins are the trans flag.

I’ve thought of this as well.

Git is a great version control and distributed collaboration system.

Just need to use it to manage a constitution, a bill of rights, and a legal framework. Legal code instead of computer code.

Technologically super easy. Convincing a government to switch to a new constitution is hard. We just need an amendment that amends the amendment process into a pull request approval.

It’s preparation.

Now that human craft have finally made it back to the moon for the first time in decades, human beings and development are set to follow.

I disagree with this point.

I used the internet extensively as a minor to socialize and find friends and to be exposed to viewpoints different from those of my peers. If I only had my peers to socialize with, things would have been much worse off for me. I found kind and supportive influences as a minor that kept me away from the hate/conservatism/fascism that many of my classmates descended into. I learned about the world and gained skills that made me a more well-rounded person. I even met up in person with thousands of strangers and had a grand time.

I see the gatekeeping of minors from internet spaces and worry about the impact that would have had on me and my development as a young person. If I hadn’t been welcomed as a minor online, I would not have been welcomed anywhere.

That said, I stayed the hell away from corporate spyware like facebook and twitter that only serve to reinforce existing problematic systems, expose people to the toxic IRL social environments that they may otherwise be trying to escape, and amplify the kind of hatred and bigotry that I personally was evading.

I miss the old internet where kids were safe. I don’t think that the solution is to ban kids; the solution is to ban platforms and profiteering incentive structures that create unsafe environments. The kids are the canaries in a coal mine. If the canary isn’t doing well, you don’t just ban it and keep digging: you get the hell out and find somewhere else to be.

This was on the door to my office before my life ended in 2018.

Thank you for making me remember and cry.