Brian

Next Friday is the 13th day of the 13th month (since last February)

A snowy night on a wooden deck. Two mushroom-shaped cordless table lamps — one burgundy, one dark gray — stand on a snow-covered table, each with a dome of fresh snow on top. A small glass candle lantern sits between them. Snow-dusted trees and a wooden railing are visible in the background, lit by warm ambient light.

A 10-day weather forecast displayed on a dark background, showing temperatures ranging from a Tuesday low of 27°F to highs in the low 80s by the following weekend. The week begins with rain (91% and 84% precipitation chances Tuesday and Wednesday), transitioning to partly cloudy conditions mid-week with highs in the mid-70s, then a stormy Sunday before clearing into sunshine. Each day shows high and low temperatures as colored gradient bars from green (cool) to orange/red (warm).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It was 70 last weekend and will be 80 next weekend. Today we had 1” of beautiful powdery snow. That’s Smarch weather for you!

Satellite photo of the Namib Desert. The top two-thirds are covered in red, undulated sand dunes, leading down to a dry river bed, seen in bands of blue and white. Along the river bed, black dots of vegetation curl around the pointed tips of dunes.

#PPOD: Korea’s Kompsat-2 satellite captured this image over the sand seas of the Namib Desert on 7 January 2012. The blue-and-white area is the dry riverbed of the Tsauchab. Black dots of vegetation are concentrated close to the river’s main route, while salt deposits appear bright white. 🧪

🚨🚨Major League Baseball games will be played this month we almost made it!!!!

“Abliterate” = blocking it at the model level, vs blocking it in a terms of service which can be violated.

This is the big distinction between Anthropic and OpenAI.

“if you won’t let us use your product to spy on Americans and kill without supervision we will single-handedly destroy your business by fiat” is the single most authoritarian anti-business action I can ever remember any administration taking

Fascism For First Time Founders Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump t…

You know, it's funny. Earlier this week I had started to write a follow up to my "Fascism For First Time Founders" post that tried to explain to Silicon Valley how embracing fascists would destroy innovation... but now I need to spend the weekend rewriting the whole thing with a new Exhibit A.

This is Trump's former AI adviser

GPT is in 3rd place in the frontier model wars and sinking. Does anyone know if Gemini is online at the Pentagon?

Look, I don’t for a second think that Anthropic is truly as principled as they claim to be, but there is obviously a red line that they won’t cross and OpenAI (among others) will.

I just spent way too long got down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how many times I saw these guys with Reel Big Fish in summer 2001 (at least 3).

Oh man. I played “Here in Your Bedroom” for my son last week. He loved it and that opening riff took me back to high school. It holds up!

“Did you hear? It was Flock cameras that reported Braddock parking was underutilized!”

If only! Though Becca is building a movement to get the city to ditch Flock cameras, any ideas on a strategy to redirect their energy in that direction?

I speak for the Chain Gang

That’s just the madness talking. I believe my exact words were “Join #ALXSkeets, it’ll take over your life.”

Nvm, looks like it was because we only signed up to selective notifications via our family’s joint email. In the spirit of poor decisions, I’ve now enrolled my personal email to “all individual messages”.

Look, I clearly don’t value my mental health.

Is there a third Rosemont listserv beyond the RCA and rosemontva ones? The latest post I’ve received is one yesterday asking for dentist recommendations.

I worked at WBD for years, and this is such a terrible outcome. I’ve reconciled myself to tech companies swallowing the media industry, but tech nepo baby money masquerading as business is just insulting. This sucks!

There was talk about Community Praise Center (Braddock/Russell) but their congregation is largely non-Alexandrian and was not present in the debate. Plus the rumor is that church is being sold and the land re-developed.

I didn’t hear much about the Church of the Nazarene or the Church of Christ.

I wish they’d engaged looking for solutions instead of hijacking the RCA meeting, and throwing in with the “I have an inalienable right to on-street parking in front of my house” crowd.

At the RCA meeting I believe the Good Shepard folks said something about the ramp/entrance next to the existing parking space was a large expense to build.

The new solution isn’t ideal and I have a lot of sympathy for them.

one of google's huge advantages for a very long time is that they could hire people who were motivated by having access to the world's largest supercomputer but not by money. they frittered that away and it now belongs to anthropic.

“If we design our streets for cars, we get cars. If we design our streets for people, we get people” - Alex from Alx explaining induced demand.

St. Patrick’s Day is less than a month away. How good is your step dancing?

I amend my previous comment to “Longtime Alexandrian”.