Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 1d

'Tis the season!

There's nowhere I'd rather be for Halloween than Del Ray.

A house decorated with a Return of the Jedi theme. Next to the hedges, a speeder bike flies past an ewok. On the porch steps, Emperor Palpatine sits on his throne while a red guard stands to his right. Also there's a pride flag, and I'm dying inside thinking that—for all his other faults—Palpatine is an ally.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 2d

Yes, all of this please!

a man in a suit is speaking into a microphone with a wrestler logo on his jacket

Alt: Vince McMahon increasingly aroused

media.tenor.com

Reposted by Tom VanAntwerp 🔵

The Onion @theonion.com · 2d

Woman Tends To Do Best Creative Thinking When Backed Into Corner With Livelihood At Stake https://theonion.com/woman-tends-to-do-best-creative-thinking-when-backed-in-1851338274/

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 2d

How could I forget to list tension headaches?

My headache has only grown worse, and now my traps hurt too. 🤷

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 2d

The other party has many, many more candidates/electeds calling for political violence—not just as gripes in private texts, but publicly and as matter of policy. Doesn't make those texts OK, but I definitely perceive higher risk of actual political violence from supporting GOP candidates.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 2d

It *has* been a few years since I got new glasses... 🤔

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 2d

I've considered laser eye surgery, but 1) I hate things in my eyes so much I can't even use eye drops so scalpels and lasers sounds bad and 2) I have permanent dark spots under my eyes and the glasses make them just look like a shadow instead of me looking like a Sith Lord.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 2d

An increasingly large fraction of middle age is being taken up with speculating why I've got a headache.

Is it ragweed? Some other allergy? Air pressure? Temperature change? Dehydration? Oncoming sinus infection? Too much time spent thinking about the state of civilization? Loud noises?

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 3d

It's not ok to pin every policy proposal you don't like on "special interests".

It's not the autists' fault. Leave them out of this.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 3d

I miss when I was a kid when there was a plethora of first-person shooter games where the bad guys were the Nazis. Good, wholesome entertainment.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 3d

It's still so weird to me to see copyright become left-coded rather than right-coded.

When I was a kid, the lefty thing to do would've been to pirate whatever the fuck you wanted and screw the fat-cat megacorps and their copyright. 🤷

“Moral policing and leftist ideology are destroying America's AI industry. I've cancelled my OpenAI PLUS subscription,” another replied, implying that copyright law is leftist.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 3d

How exactly do you conduct "bipartisan negotiations" when the other side's goal is to dismantle the government and replace it with an authoritarian regime?

a cell phone with the words -no - we don 't negotiate with terrorists

Alt: Scene from Tropic Thunder where Tom Cruise's character hangs up the phone on a gang of drug traffickers and tells the listening room "We don't negotiate with terrorists".

media.tenor.com

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 3d

🥰

5 dots for "Reservation of funding for IT System Replacements

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 3d

I hear there were big federal tax cuts passed into law, and I see that federal funding for anything good is drying up.

That *kinda* feels like an invitation for state and local governments to raise their own taxes to make up the difference. You know, cutting out the middleman.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reposted by Tom VanAntwerp 🔵

eliza🌻 @elizas.website · 4d

META: “hiring AI researchers to build a version of TikTok that saps the human will to live! your salary will be the GDP of Malaysia!”

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Reposted by Tom VanAntwerp 🔵

Peter McGladdery @petermcgladdery.bsky.social · 4d

'"Motorists" is a strange name for a political party (6 seats in Czech parliament)' I thought. 'Must be a wonky translation'

Nope. And each section in the wiki gets worse.

Snippet from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorists_for_Themselves

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 5d

Who we are is heavily influenced by our patterns of thought. And if we carve out a piece of our thoughts for "it's fun to be mean to LLMs", that attitude can take root and flourish and eventually mutate into "it's fun to be mean" period.

It's not about the LLMs. It's about who you want to be.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 5d

I don't think it's a huge cognitive leap from "I treat chatbots as inferior" to "I treat the waitstaff as inferior" and so on.

"That's stupid!" you say, and maybe *you* won't fall for it. But what about others?

Hasn't social media depersonalization already made society meaner in general?

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 5d

LLMs don't have consciousness and you can't actually insult them by calling them "clanker".

But I also don't think that it's healthy to talk like that. It's a pattern of thought that generalizes. If it feels good to treat the robot like shit, you'll start to want to try it on humans too.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 5d

Curious, but wouldn't parallel Claude Code instances be anti-flow state?

I can see myself switching between instances and not remembering what I had it working on. Or worse, I might go back to one and *think* it working on X when it was tasked with Y—and then start giving it the wrong next steps.

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Reposted by Tom VanAntwerp 🔵

DarkAndSpookyMikey @lightmikey.bsky.social · 6d

Day 2 of Fat Fed week. So far I'm in the lead because I haven't seen anyone else posting their salmon gluttony.

A selection of sliced salmon sashimi with a dish of soy sauce to the left and chopsticks to the right.

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Reposted by Tom VanAntwerp 🔵

☠️deadward niedermurder☠️ @niedermeyer.online · 6d

we're bringing back the miasma theory of medicine and the belief that a nearby city/startup posesses the ancient secret of mechanical human slaves, and yet somehow I can't get funding for my startup to transmute bas lead into noble gold using the philosophers stone

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 6d

Look I hate social media mobs as much as the next sane person, but what exactly does Jay think is going to be the outcome of this continued posting?

To paraphrase, nobody has ever made a controversy go away by telling people to shut up about it.

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Tom VanAntwerp 🔵 @tomvanantwerp.com · 6d

TL;DR

Quote from the article: "I am apparently still a child, plus alcohol, is what I learned."

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Reposted by Tom VanAntwerp 🔵

dame @dame.is · 6d

why are you, a grown ass human, making a hobby out of bullying and being mean to random people on the internet? and for what? fleeting clout points that give you dopamine in exchanging for hurting someone you don’t know???

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