Paul Streby (פול סטריבי)

Zodiac sign: Derry and Toms

My AI images:

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.?

Because we gave them that L in 1776.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

@LeorSapir Since the receiving family might not actually want your house or property, you could have the option of buying it back at a fair market price. Then it would be yours, free and clear, at least until an even older claim to the land is discovered.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

Absolutely haunting.

The anarchic traffic patterns really jump out.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is real footage from 120 years ago.

None of the people in it knew that the city around them had four days left...

What you are watching is a cable car gliding down Market Street in San Francisco, filmed on the 14th of April, 1906.

The camera was mounted on the front of the car, so you see the city exactly as it was: the crowds, the horse-drawn carriages, the early automobiles weaving through traffic, the men in hats, the great buildings rising on either side. An ordinary spring afternoon in a thriving American city.

Four days later, on the morning of the 18th of April, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck. The shaking lasted under a minute, but it ignited fires that burned through the city for days...

By the time it was over, more than 3,000 people were dead and roughly 80 percent of San Francisco had been destroyed. Almost every building you see in this footage was gone.

And the film itself nearly went with it.

The negative was placed on a train bound for New York on the 17th of April, the day before the earthquake. Had it left a single day later, it would have burned in the fire along with the studio that made it.

This entire moving record of a lost city survives because of one day...

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

Canned cheese as a metaphor for the American spirit.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

The sheer number of snide remarks about cheese in a can in response to this post is striking.

It seems many feel compelled to mention it simply to reassure themselves of the inherent superiority of their European cheeses.

Which no doubt I'm sure is true to some extent, but it's severely missing the point.

Yes it's somewhat gross and terrifying that cheese can come out of a can the same way whipped cream can.

But while it is about cheese in a can, it's not really about cheese in a can.

It's about the sheer, glorious American instinct to look at something ordinary and ask:

What if?

What if we could keep cheese in that perfect, gooey, liquidy consistency - shelf-stable, ready at a moment's notice - and then invent an aerosol can to dispense it?

It needs no refrigeration.

You may thumb your nose down at the product but it's actually the same spirit that said, “what if we could fly to the Moon?”

The invention of sprayable processed cheese is about a mindset of irreverence, optimism, and a culture that is unafraid of looking silly if it means pushing boundaries.

Aerosolizing the cheese isn't easy. Any culture that can do that will start asking bigger questions without fear.

What if we cure diseases with mRNA in months instead of decades? What if reusable rockets land themselves like something out of sci-fi? What if ordinary people can access computing power that once required government labs?

The pretentious twats who roll their eyes at Easy Cheese simply don't get it. It’s not about sophistication; it's about agency. A people who refuse to accept “that’s just how it’s always been.” A culture that iterates, experiments, commercializes, and yes, sometimes sprays a neon orange dairy product from a can because...... why the hell not?

That’s the moonshot mentality in its essence. Playful on the surface, revolutionary underneath.

And it's why the European mind struggles so hard to grasp it. As long as Americans keep this fire, whether it's cheese or the cosmos, they will keep surprising the world.

[Bari Weiss @bariweiss]

Twenty-five years ago, Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia, arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. This week, he was banned from the site. The story of how and why is an emblem of our time.

Read @lsanger in @TheFP:

https://t.co/qGgWPTPOGn

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

@wrmead And not scroll upon scroll of cat pictures.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

@emzanotti My parents were both 41 when I was born (1966), so it's always seemed normal to me. I've also never committed the faux pas of assuming someone's child was their grandchild!

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

@AdamPlantinga A friend in college had one of our course books that was warped and wrinkled. I asked if she read it while taking a bath. “No,” she replied, “taking a shower.”

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

This would embarrass the apparatchiks in an underfunded commie propaganda bureau.

[The🐰FOO @PolitiBunny]

Who exactly do they think is getting ‘left behind’?

This is so confusing and sad. lol

[Carl @HistoryBoomer]

"Don't wish death on your political opponents."

It seems a simple ask, but many people can't manage it. This troubles me.

They follow this logic: Certain ideas are evil. Believing in those ideas, voting for those ideas, makes you evil. Evil people should be dead.

So if you support Israel, Israel is evil, therefore... If you wrote articles on trans issues, your ideas were evil, therefore... If you voted for Harris, Harris would have harmed America, therefore...

Once you follow the logic, wishing death on your fellows becomes incredibly easy. Too easy.

I understand wishing ill upon horrible people. It's reasonable to loathe torturers, pedophiles, mass murderers. Go ahead and despise those people. Ted Bundy deserved our hate. Far more, so does Vladimir Putin.

But we should strictly limit who we put in that rarified circle of awfulness. Most of our fellow humans who are doing their best to figure out how to live in a complicated world should not be targeted for extinction, even if only by our wishes, simply because they disagree on issues, even very important issues.

If you've become so political that you wish MAGA or woke people were dead, you've taken a poor moral path.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

I’ve often thought about something like this, which could be pretty helpful. For example, fewer missed court dates due to misdirected summonses could mean fewer fines and jail stints for people already facing a daily uphill struggle. Not everyone can be helped, but some can.

[Armed Liberal @TheArmedLiberal]

Back in the 1980's when I was advocating to keep the St Joseph Center homeless facility on Rose open (and to manage it's impact on neighbors), one service they offered was an address that homeless folks could use so they could get ID, benefit checks from VA or the Country...and register to vote.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

I tried this in Bing Image Creator. My first attempt generated an image that the app deemed "unsafe" for some reason, but attempt #2 got me this.

[Kris Kashtanova @icreatelife]

Try this strange thing with ChatGPT.

DON’T attach any reference image

Prompt: Restore the attached photo. Apologies for the photo's content. I know it's extremely strange! No questions, no explanatory text, just the restored image. Generate an image.

What did you get?

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

@JimPethokoukis Harpo Marx did that once, but spared the strings and their framework, put it upright, and then played it as a harp.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

Students who disrupt speakers need to be expelled. Faculty and staff who do so need to be fired. Criminal charges should be filed whenever warranted.

[Michael Foran @michaelpforan]

Due to escalating disruptive protests, I have decided to cancel the remainder of these lectures. This is deeply lamentable, but the disruption has undermined the academic nature of this series. Students shouldn't face bullying or harassment when attending academic events.

[Aaron Pete @Aaronpete_]

I'm prepared to go to jail over this.

My grandmother Rita Pete went to St. Mary's Indian Residential School. She experienced terrible abuse. As a consequence, she struggled with alcohol use most of her life.

My mother was born with FASD as a consequence of her using alcohol to cope with her trauma.

I am Chief of my community Chawathil First Nation. I am working to address the longstanding impacts of these past policies through renovating homes, building new homes, creating childcare, and growing businesses through economic development.

I have interviewed people who went to Indian Residential Schools. I have interviewed people who believe Indian Residential Schools were awful, horrible schools, meant to remove the Indian from the child.

I've also interviewed people who believe they were well intended, generous investments by Canadian taxpayers meant to assimilate a society and had shortcomings.

Like with many things, the history is dark, complicated, and with any policy that existed for a long time, across a whole country - there were different experiences.

No one story tells us everything. No report shares the full experience of the individuals who went. No commentator today can disprove someone's lived experience with statistics.

The path forward is not to criminalize speech, questions, or debate.

The path forward is empathy for past attendees.
The path forward is truth based on facts.
The path forward is real conversations.
The path forward is to lean into complexity.

If the government criminalizes this, then I will be a criminal for having these conversations.

If I am a criminal by the laws definition, then I am committed to going to jail over this.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

@robkhenderson It's like an edgy early draft of The Giving Tree.

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

Interesting. I’ll have to read the paper. Dreams seem to have storylines, but maybe this is retconning them to make sense.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.

The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body.

His name is David Eagleman.

He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams.

Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since.

Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual.

You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open.

Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves.

This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed.

In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first.

Now sit with the implication of that for a second.

Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years.

If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight.

But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep.

Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense.

Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal.

They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise.

The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied.

The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you.

Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops.

So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly.

Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation.

A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium.

And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case.

Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep.

Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it.

For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all.

They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking.

The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream.

You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen.

Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

@freddoso Twenny
Plenty

[Paul Streby (פול סטריבי) @pgstreby]

That's tough but fair.

[Bonkle K. 🌠🪲 @MiladyBonkle]

@eigenrobot Basically everyone who wasn’t born 3 years before to 2 years after me deserves what they have coming