Castle Tristenoira exists in three different times simultaneously, looming above the Lake of Red Tears, home of “Aggie” the undead sea serpent (Dana M Knutson box art for Ravenloft supplement Castles Forlorn by Lisa Smedman, TSR, 1993) oldschoolfrp.tumblr.com/post/710613053…
Antique silver memento mori watch, 925/000, pocket watch in the shape of a skull, richly decorated with engraving and fitted with silver chain and key. Movement with engraving: carnu a paris. wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/710617924…
Illustration by Charles Robertson for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Sensitive Plant”, 1911. https://pipedreamdragon.tu Bing… 1960 Country Squire wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/710626622…
Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it."
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A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and postdocs - for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.
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The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is *letters of reference*. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them.
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I have an excellent excuse for this week's linkdump: I'm in Germany, but I'm supposed to be in LA, and I'm not, because London Heathrow shut down due to a power-station fire.
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Which meant I spent all day yesterday running around like a headless chicken, trying to get home in time for my gig in San Diego on Monday (don't worry, I sorted it):
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Paula Le Dieu is one of the smartest, most committed archivists I know. Many years ago, she shared a neat analogy with me about the paywalling of public archives.
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AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:
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If you pay attention to the hype, you'd think that all the action on "AI" (an incoherent grab-bag of only marginally related technologies) was in generating text and images. Man, is that ever wrong.
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Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing.
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