All (or almost all?) of my great-grandparents spoke Pennsylvania Dutch, but only my maternal grandparents, born before WW1, could speak it, and it wasn’t their primary language
One was a farmer and had a small pork business that he and my uncles grew into a decent-sized local/regional producer by the 70s/80s
The other dropped out of HS to join the Navy in WW2, worked at a brickyard and eventually as a foreman, then later worked as some kind of line supervisor for Alcoa
Has anyone admitted to giving Claude real money and setting it loose on the financial markets yet? Somebody is obviously doing this, I’m just curious if anyone has admitted it
Fond memories of San Diego, where the question of “what are we going to do if the tracks on the bluffs fall into the ocean” was a recurring live issue
I tried to do this with a 2009-ish netbook recently. It installed, but even with a very lite Linux still unusably slow
My advisor knew Likert’s… I want to say daughter? which is why I am also cursed in this way
There was a sandwich place in my hometown called Penn Cup. It has been about 30 yrs since they closed, I haven’t eaten beef in ages, and I can still *taste* the cheeseburger if I think about it
Thai Xing in DC
The original version of Taylor Gourmet in DC before they expanded, got worse, and closed
My writing (or at least my posting) might not read well. I do dash these off usually. But at least there are enough idiosyncrasies that there’s anything at all to latch onto
I remain skeptical that AI is going to write any substantial amount of text meant to be read by humans that isn’t a miserable slog to read anytime soon
People think you can’t tell, but if you’re somewhat literate and they haven’t made significant edits to the output, you can always tell
It really does grate when one remembers all of the ridiculous things one has had to do to comply with these rules (which overall exist for a good reason!)
I’m a manager, I have to worry about the people I manage thinking they should be working at midnight or whatever
But also now I do it for everyone and I have no excuse for that
Heads up US demographers. Our main NIH study sections (SSPA/SSPB) are being disbanded. I don’t know what this means. public.csr.nih.gov/StudySection...
That, and the constant antisemitism, of course
Namely, it’s similar to working on a demoralized team: people are gassing each other up with constant cynicism and negativity, which leads to people jumping on the most negative possible read on every little thing, which fuels further negativity
It makes following current events and politics hard
As I have limited my use of this app in recent weeks, I think I’ve honed in a little more on the precise dynamic that gets unpleasant, at least for me
Aren’t many of the replacements vacant or condemned? Or did they replace those too
Four year olds just want to build the thing on the box, they don’t understand that no one has ever built the pictured structure because it can’t be done
One particularly irritating brand of what I assume is AI slop that I encounter as a parent is the magnetic tile box that shows a structure that is physically impossible to build, as in it defies the possibilities of how objects of particular sizes can relate to each other in three dimensional space
A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.
NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)
Directorates to follow
1/10
Also buying young kids white clothes, no matter how cool they look
This is such a well done piece that reports out, with hard data and interviews, something profound about what's gone wrong in this country.
www.wsj.com/us-news/amer...
Too lazy to make a version of this chart that replaces the labels on the exponential up and down lines with “lol no” but that’s my reaction
Ah but one never gets a TED talk asking those questions
Even people in my life who know better take it at face value regularly! Hell, I do occasionally if I’m in a rush or not paying attention
Truly spoken like someone who has never tried to change a process in a large enterprise
But… their estimation of what AI will supposedly accomplish in the next 18 months and how widely it will be adopted and used in 2027 strikes me as borderline-absurd
That Citrini post is silly, sorry
There’s almost a point there: the SaaS/XaaS world has always been dependent on locking a customer into a product that might not actually be very good to get recurring revenue, and if AI really does disrupt that, a lot of XaaS is already overvalued and overlevered
That was also ten years ago and I’m 90+% sure that class must have been reworked by now; it was on the older side of our offerings even then
Yeah, I TA’d/taught intro mapping and GIS asynchronously a couple times in grad school, and it was kinda a bummer, although admittedly that’s not a class I would read much into about the program. (Penn State Geography takes online education much more seriously than many programs!)
