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Joe Thompson

@kensey.bsky.social

290 followers 230 following 1K posts

That guy in that place who does that thing.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 1h

The gap between "what government officials and employees are compelled or forbidden to do" and "what people assume is compelled or forbidden because it's how they remember things always working" is a yawning chasm.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 1h

Or "Presidential pardons go through a vetting process and candidates are assessed against certain criteria". That was a consensus that held across several administrations, but the President always had absolute pardon power for federal crimes; several Presidents just elected to put conditions on it.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 1h

A good-size chunk of that destruction is just ignoring consensus that's inconvenient. Like "the Senate votes on judicial nominees". What if they don't? "Well uh..." It was just always understood that the Senate would rarely fail to do that, until failing to do it became a strategy.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 1h

But "concept" here still boils down to "a close association of tokens to other tokens in the training corpus", and isn't the same as an actual semantic understanding of a language, correct?

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 4h

Unsolicited Glick pic

A photo of Martin Short playing his character Jiminy Glick.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 4h

(Or maybe it *was* intended to say that -- which would just make the irony even more intense.)

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 4h

In a case of "no one would believe this if it were fiction", one of the branded swag items they gave employees was a T-shirt with the portal's logo on it surrounded by artistically arranged text. Unfortunately the arrangement made it look like it was intended to say "Ready, Fire, Aim".

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 4h

Back in 2000 the small online game company I worked for was bought by Electronic Arts. They wanted to make our technology the center of a new EA dot com online gaming portal, and the financial projections looked *great* -- it was all going to be funded by the booming revenue in banner ads!

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 4h

You could buy a pile of cheap Dell servers that used to be say, pets dot com, and use them for a different thing like a software startup, but it will be harder to get investors for "we bought a sack of thermally-stressed GPUs and we're going to... hey Jim, what is this junk any good for again?"

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 4h

The trouble is that where a lot of the pieces of the dot-com boom had retained value (some of it, like dark fiber, even years later), most leftovers of the AI bubble will be GPUs that have more limited application *and* are obsolete in months (the ones that aren't literally burnt out, that is).

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 4h

Wonder if pud will reactivate fuckedcompany dot com?

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 4h

"We lose money on every sale, but we make it up in EYEBALLS!"

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 18h

"Gaze upon me!"

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 18h

I don't think cowsay is actually part of the GNU utils, though.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 1d

Noooo! You lie! The '80s were 20 years ago! I swear it's true! It has to be true! *sobbing as I crumple to the floor* I was just watching the premiere of _Scrubs_ on my 27" TV a few years ago...

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 1d

If I recall, the first _American Recordings_ was in the catalog when I DJed at WNRN in 1997. Our GM back then, Mike Friend, was not in the habit of keeping uncool artists or tracks in our catalog.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 1d

I mean Trent Reznor himself said when he saw the video for Cash's version of "Hurt", his immediate reaction was "I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore." And that was when Reznor was at the top of his popularity, in the late '90s.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 1d

Wait, no, are you talking about _Walk the Line_? That came out much more recently, in... oh no.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 5d

"In the majority of cases in which the government is losing in the lower courts, it is (1) not seeking emergency or expedited intervention from above; and (2) otherwise complying with the adverse rulings while the cases move (very slowly) ahead."

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 5d

The idea that the courts are taking a long time or failing to redress harms and that as a result, legal action is largely ineffective is a widespread one, but apparently not very accurate: www.stevevladeck.com/p/179-whithe...

179. Whither the Birthright Citizenship Cases?

Notwithstanding the Court's June ruling, President Trump's birthright citizenship executive order remains blocked—a broader lesson on the risks of paying attention to only one part of the news cycle.

www.stevevladeck.com

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 5d

I mean, that sounds like a completely unfair summary, even to me as I write it, but I'm not sure which part of it is *wrong*.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 5d

Because frankly it sounds like you just don't want this proposal *to be critiqued at all*, because it's getting *popular* and knocking it down without providing something equally activating is depressing to people. And I guess depressing people by arguing a popular idea to be unworkable is bad?

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 5d

Now you're criticizing the alternative I gave you on, apparently, the grounds that it isn't... what? What criteria would a proposed alternative have to meet for you to be content that critique of this proposal is not "a problem"?

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 5d

But let's step back a second. You asked for an alternative if I wanted to critique the proposal under discussion, and I actually gave you one (while still feeling it's not really incumbent on me to do so, which you seem to actually agree with).

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 5d

"Work it out in the courts" seems to be *working* much more often than not, which I see as a clear leg up on proposals that won't work at all, but I don't exclude the possibility that other things might work just as well, or better.