Big win for Bafana Bafana last night to get through to the Round of 32! ⚽️ 🇿🇦
South Africa are now the first country to hold the Rugby World Cup and the ICC World Test Championship whilst qualifying for the Round of 32 of the FIFA World Cup at the same time, as my friends at FanCode told me this morning. 🥳
PICARD: Data, shields up
DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.
[camera shakes]
WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS
DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't
Some things never change. If you don’t understand this one, you don’t understand what’s happening AI.
Marcus, 1998: neural nets have trouble generalizing far beyond the data.
Marcus, 2001, 2012, 2019, 2022, etc: neural nets have trouble generalizing far beyond the data.
Apple, 2025: neural nets have trouble generalizing far beyond the data.
Meta/Stanford/Harvard, 2026: neural nets have trouble generalizing far beyond the data.
It's wild to think about how massive 1M token context windows in LLMs really are
That's roughly equivalent to:
- The complete works of Shakespeare
- 11 hours of audio
- A 5-minute session fixing some TypeScript issue
The 11 world wars:
1. Greece (250 BC). Alexander the Great. Owned that planet for a bit.
2. Rome (0 AD) did the same but more biblical. Many statues remain.
3. Middle Ages (800 - 1899 AD). The europoors basically never stopped fighting.
4. Napoleon and Russia (unknown). I haven’t looked at this closely but that’s at least two continents, so.
5. American Revolution (1776 AD). Not just two countries! All the Brits were German hires. The French helped the Americans. That’s a good chunk of the world.
6. The Great War (1914ish). The whole “World War 1” was more of a branding thing for merch than anything else.
7. WW 11, also sometimes called WW II (1939-46 AD). Involved several important nations and also Canada.
8. Cold War (1946 - present). Spilled into Nam, Cambodia, Korea, China, Cuba. Perhaps also Canada I don’t know.
9. Ongoing Middle East F**kery (4000 BC - present).
10. China Pissing Me Off (1953 - present).
11. AI Destroys Humanity Setting Off Every Nuke Simultaneously and Everyone Dies and the Only People Who Survive Are Alexandria Daddario and Me and We Must Repopulate the World (May 2026 - 2085).
"History PhD here--the number of World Wars is actually a *very* controversial topic in academia. Some say there have been two (traditional view), while others say up to sixty-four. Scholars disagree, and that's okay! What's NOT ok are these RACIST attacks on Rep Omar!"
make sure you choose a password that contains capital letters, numbers, and special symbols so that someday the data broker who purchases your info can go "ooh good password" after your login details are inevitably leaked in a data breach you can do nothing to prevent
So prompt engineers learned English is imprecise for coding and started using stricter syntax. I wonder how long it will take before they come full circle and land back at programming languages again.
Mahatma Gandhi walked barefoot most of the time, which produced a impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him (brace yourself): a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
Them: Are you Jewish?
Me: Yup.
Them: And you're from Toronto?
Me: Yup.
Them: Do you know Dave Rosenberg? He lives in Toronto.
Me: Not every Jew knows each other. There 200,000 Jews here.
Them: Okay, so you don't know him then?
Me: I do. He happens to be my cousin.
We have gigantic creatures in the sea which can sing for hours and have arteries so big you can crawl through them. (whales)
We have birds that fly 50,000 miles every year. From the antarctic to the arctic and back again. (arctic tern)
We have living creatures which never get old and never die naturally. (jellyfish)
We have animals which you can force through a sieve, and they can reassemble themselves. (sponges)
We have an ancient line of animals which once had 30 or more successful species, and has gone extinct down to just one single representative, and that representative has conquered the entire world (us).
We have horrors that look just like rocks and if you step on them your whole world becomes agonizing pain. (toadfish)
We have animals who hide inside other animals, and when you eat that animal, they enter your intestines and live there. (tapeworms)
We have plants which live on other plants and never touch the ground.
There's a fruit tree that grows around another tree, and eventually kills and replaces it. (strangler fig)
We have gliding lizards, marsupials, snakes, frogs, and rodents.
What the heck do you need fairies for?