As a snarky kid from Ottawa, Matthew Perry’s death has hit me hard. A lot of folks in my extended family have substance abuse issues, and it just bums me out that folks try to solve that gnawing emptiness with whatever they can find in a bottle, be that opiates or alcohol.

I mean — every Canadian province has its own horrific history of racism, and the 60s was a great time for urban renewal programs that fucked with the poor (my grandfather’s entire neighborhood in Ottawa was destroyed because you could see poors from Parliament Hill and that upset the city planner who decided that…

Buprenorphine is an anti-addiction medication. Its use is to wean opiate addicts off of opiates safely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buprenorphine

Language models — large or small — are essentially prior distributions on words in context. They’re useful for attenuating predictions of models that are based on on other signals — for instance, the thumb gestural input from your phone keyboard, or the acoustic information in a speech to text system. In these cases,…

Yes. They use a small amount of radioactive material in the detector, and once there’s too little of that radioactive material to get reliable measurements through radioactive decay, they will die.

It’s very, very likely that those sites are violating copyright by hosting the lyrics -- and note that hosting those lyrics is not the same as purporting to “generate” them de novo. People are using LLMs as creative aids, which means that there is a high risk of creating infringing, plagiarized or derivative work.

Generative models, especially generative language models, have a bad habit of barfing up, verbatim, their training data. You can get them to produce the exact lyrics to copyrighted songs quite easily.

This is not what “me too” means, and if you can’t recognize that you probably shouldn’t be playing with the consensual non-consent you seem to believe women “especially in their 40s” want.

I love a clothesline in an arid, birdless and treeless environment. When I lived in San Diego, I restrung the clotheslines behind my rental building complex and used them as often as possible. But now that I live in New York, well.... pigeons, pollen and oppressive humidity make drying things outside difficult. And…

Grimace is a tastebud.

These categories tend to be fairly noisy. I used to work in ad targeting back when I was a fledgling data scientist. We’d get a seed segment based on behavioral data — folks would actually be searching for a thing, or we’d have location data that put them in the ice cream aisle of their grocery store; and then from…

I really like these design elements! And I especially like the grading rubric.

Guest worker visas — like H1B — are not quite slavery, but they are extremely precarious and significantly advantage the employer over both domestic workers, and workers who are employed on these visas. As someone who was able to get a green card through marriage rather than trying to stay in the US on a non-immigrant…

Or just spray it with vinegar. It’ll kill the plant by pickling it (particularly if you can get the roots) but it won’t carry the danger of burning things down. (Even though I agree, fire is fun.)

Sometimes the insurance company forces you to sue.

The long term cost of living in communities that heavy industry has abandoned can be calculated in terms of cancer and birth defects. Do people really want to move to Flint?

The towel gets pulled out during the cycle and air-dried external to the dryer. It takes some amount of water out of your clothes and so your dryer runs for less long. But you wind up with a crispy towel.

Having grown some creepy molds on tea left in the pot for too long, I’m probably gonna pass on mopping my hardwood floors with it.

Vinegar isn’t safe for a lot of surfaces -- it may eat away at your granite counter top over time, for instance. Using soap isn’t bad!

Let’s choose to live in their world for a sec. The world where we can nudge people’s orientations around like this.

unf, tax returns