2023-03-21

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Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco

I could have stayed in Michigan. There were forests and lakes and homes with little gardens. Instead I’m here. We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history. It will be the best investment we ever make. Imagine living when the first lungfish crawled out of the primordial ooze, and missing it because the tidepool down the way had cheaper housing. Imagine living on Earth in 65,000,000 BC, and being anywhere except Chicxulub. Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro. Everyone here is complicit in their chosen ending - plane flights, porn, $20/month GPT-4 subscriptions.
Why All the ChatGPT Predictions Are Bogus
SlamBall combines basketball and football with trampolines, snags big investors
Responsible AI Principles from Microsoft
Sharing a bed with pets may disrupt sleep.

NYPD and Capitol Police Putting Up Barricades, Expecting Riots When Trump Is Arrested.
Trump arrest photos powered by Midjourney
Trump Supporters Plan Bank Run to Protest His Arrest
For Democrats, the weakness of Bragg’s case against Trump is the point.
- Glenn Reynolds
Part of this is sending a message to anyone else who might challenge the Establishment, that all rules and norms will be cast aside to punish you in every way possible, even if — as with Trump — it involves perverting and discrediting the entire system, as it has done here. In fact the willingness to openly pervert and discredit the entire system is itself a declaration of power. “We don’t care about what you and the voting public think, because we don’t have to care.”
700 NYPD Riot Cops Mobilized, Steel Barriers Deployed Ahead Of Potential Trump Arrest

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools
"regular" models go up to 80GB per. Nvidia Announces H100 NVL – Max Memory Server Card for Large Language Models

There are a few things that make this card atypical from NVIDIA’s usual server fare – not the least of which is that it’s 2 H100 PCIe boards that come already bridged together – but the big takeaway is the big memory capacity. The combined dual-GPU card offers 188GB of HBM3 memory – 94GB per card – offering more memory per GPU than any other NVIDIA part to date,
Matt Blaze on early modem phreaking

Insiders spill details about life at the highest levels of FBI.
Rolling Stone left out the reason why FBI raided journalist's home

As edited by Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, however, the article omitted a key fact that Siegel initially intended to include: Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until last month. Why did Rolling Stone suggest Meek was targeted for his coverage of national security, rather than something unrelated to his journalism?

Unpriced climate risk and overvaluation in US housing markets
Toxic pet flea and tick treatments are polluting UK freshwaters, says paper
Why are so many whales washing up dead on east-coast beaches?
University of Helsinki gives Greta Thunberg a Doctorate of Theology.
Between A Rock and a Cold Place - Doomberg

there is a widespread belief among many otherwise rational people that humanity no longer needs fossil fuels, that we can stop relying on them soon without meaningful consequences to our way of life, and that our refusal to do so is a mere political choice. Given the intensity with which such dogmas are held, it is understandable that politicians have played along, assuring these intellectual adolescents that Rudolph’s nose is indeed shiny and red. Some might even say it glows.