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Lineage

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If the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, at least 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another — as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

— Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

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garren
2 hours ago
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Rest in Peace, Sam Neill (1947-2026) 🕊️

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mollybeenoel:

Rest in Peace, Sam Neill (1947-2026) 🕊️

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garren
92 days ago
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“The CyberTruck is 17 times more likely to have a...

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“The CyberTruck is 17 times more likely to have a fire fatality than a Ford Pinto”, a 70s automobile that put the “car” in “exploding car”.

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garren
232 days ago
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“AI skeptics need to update their priors: Plenty of cause for concern,...

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“AI skeptics need to update their priors: Plenty of cause for concern, plenty of room to hit these companies for unethical behavior, resource demands, etc, but we are so, so far past the era of ‘stochastic parrots’”.
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garren
260 days ago
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LLMs are fundamentally “next-word” predictors. I still think they solidly fall in the “stochastic parrot” category. However, give it a ridiculous amount of training data and couple that with creative training strategies, the ability to incorporate external data (Rag, etc.), innovative architectures (routing and MoE), and the ability to provide its own context (agents and “memory”), then even a next-word predictor produce remarkable results.
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Kristen Radtke remembers Alex Pretti. “I didn’t realize, in the hours before...

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Kristen Radtke remembers Alex Pretti. “I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles…was my childhood best friend.”
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garren
260 days ago
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Remember Alex Pretti.
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People Photographed With Their Vehicles

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For his project called Homo Mobilis, Martin Roemers travelled the globe and photographed people with their cars, bikes, scooters, etc. You can see a selection of the photos on Roemers’ website, at The Guardian, or in his forthcoming book, Homo Mobilis (Amazon). (via @steveportigal.bsky.social)

Tags: cars · Martin Roemers · photography

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garren
260 days ago
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