Connor Baird

@PyresMagicka If that’s true, we have some serious un-canceling to do!

If the content of a book is good, why should anyone care how it was produced? Did the writer use AI? Did the writer use drugs? Did the writer use ghostwriters? Did the writer use trauma and vices?

Style: western RPG; looking for retail quality (Magic the Gathering cards, for example). Primarily an interior shot; includes one character on a “spell card”

Looking for a fantasy illustrator for book cover. Not cutesy or romance or cozy, but also not quite epic and definitely not grimdark. Yes, your budget is acceptable.

DMs now open

@monsterhunter45 Cozy Fantasy is in the fantasy genre for a reason.

Yeah, I know this is engagement bait bullshit from a European with no clue, but I see this kinda RETURN TO FARM post on X all the time, and it's always some idylic dreamscape of rural niceness, which makes it really fucking obvious to all of us who come from farming backgrounds that these people have zero fucking clue, and would probably end up wrapped around an auger on their first day. News flash. Farming is HARD. What these people are imagining is rural living on a big plot of land, where they've got income from something else, and maybe a couple of animals to keep down the grass and a little garden on the side. That's what I do now that I'm a rich guy. It's pretty awesome. I also know that if I had to make a living off this land I could probably do it (because unlike these weenies, I know how) but I don't want to, because it would absolutely fucking suck. Because in reality making a living off being a farmer is brutal. It's nonstop backbreaking labor where everything that can go wrong, will. And it will go wrong at absolutely the worst possible time. (especially if cows are involved!) Modern squishy internet people do not even sorta comprehend how hard farming is. I worked on dairy farms. I can't speak for the dirt farmers but I'm sure they've got their own set of wacky nonsense they get to put up with. It is LONG hours. I once did a stint opening up a new dairy where I worked 72 hours straight, with a couple of thirty minute naps in a truck or on the barn floor snuck in. There's nothing quite as fun as dealing with fifteen hundred pound animals and dangerous heavy equipment when you're so tired you're starting to see things that aren't there. Oh, and you'd better get real comfortable with blood, shit, piss, and death. Dealing with lots of farm animals is not for the squeamish. They're going to get sick, get injured, get stuck in infuriating and mysterious ways, and die stupidly on you. Every kind of livestock has got its peculiar way of being a pain in the ass. Cows are loveable, curious, stupid, and sometimes homicidal. I've been kicked, trampled, hooked, and smashed into/through fences. These sheltered idiot city people say crap like "go buy a farm" having zero comprehension of how much good farmland costs, or the insane costs of equipment, or livestock involved. If they saw what a good tractor cost they'd shit themselves. "Buy land"... Have you priced land? Oh, you can still buy cheap land, but it's usually cheap for a reason. As in you can't farm it, or it doesn't have water, or it's a nightmare hellscape of windy death. So farming is expensive to get into, hard to make a profit at, and insanely difficult the entire time. Oh yeah, and just when you think you've got it figured out, the government will absolutely fuck with you, because it's also super regulated. Yay. "skip the degree"... Lady, I got into college on an ag scholarship, and started out as an ag science major. Successful farmers are educated because this shit is complicated. (I then changed majors and got an accounting degree so I wouldn't have to pull calves at 3:00 AM, a decision which I have not regretted) These fuckers think farming is just strolling around in a sun dress picking wild flowers or some shit. Oh hell no. Farmers farm because they want to, and the juice is worth the squeeze for them.

@Colin_d_m Ironically, public educators kept schools shut down far longer than necessary under COVID, causing that very lack of socialization, while those evil homeschoolers got together and defied the state in order to socialize their kids

Homeschooling should be illegal. “But I teach my kids better than the state!” Doesn’t matter, the primary purpose of elementary/middle school isn’t to teach it’s to socialize your kid. You can’t do that alone. And this isn’t even mentioning how it can be used to abuse kids

In writing, they say you have to know the rules before you break them, but fortunately I have been able to skip that first tiresome step.

@zarathustra5150 It’s a decent book. Not amazing. But solid craft. Goodreads in general has really wacky ratings; the ratings say far more about the readership than the books. Popular romance novels have astronomical ratings (4.5+), and acclaimed literary stuff is often sub-4.0.

Unfathomably bleak.

@TheGregYang It’s okay to need help and not have the answers, to not have a solution and to not be accomplishing things. The mindset you have cultivated to get to where you are is currently maladaptive.

obsession is the only way to solve this, creating a health foundation for me to do bigger things but it helps to look at the data in zen, like you are a scientist observing an animal

@NateSilver538 Star Trek future requires it. Who doesn’t want Star Trek future?

Opposition to building data centers might be irrational at the mircoscale (they're just gonna be bulilt somewhere else). But at the mesoscale, people are profoundly doubtful about whether AI will broadly benefit society and that's not so irrational at all.

@jaketapper Rejecting primitive theocratic weirdness is progress.

Disgusting bigotry.

@mcahogarth Deep cut: “My Claim to Fame” - Mark Knopfler

One of my favorite genres of songs is "band realizes fame is awful. (Queensryche's "Is There Anybody Listening", George Michael's "Freedom", Rush's "Limelight", etc).

@tszzl Asimov’s views on robot ethics and humanity’s ideal future kept changing, to the point where he eventually went, “never mind all that earlier stuff; robot-enabled benevolent communist hive mind run by a supreme mind is what I really meant.”

one of the short stories in this incredibly farseeing 1950s book predicts the idea of ai sycophancy. a robot convinces a woman that her unrequited romantic affections are sure to be successful because doing otherwise would violate it’s understanding of the 1st Law of Robotics

@TheGregYang It’s not Lyme.

I'm posting honestly about how I feel as I feel it so folks can have a transparent view into how up and down Lyme is when my energy is good, I may craft some bangers when my energy is bad, I try my best to stream my raw thoughts here it's ok if most people don't find such posts interesting but to current or future sufferers of chronic diseases, I'd like my posts to serve as a source of strength and comfort we will get back on our feet!

@TheGregYang @tferriss I would bet $1000 you do not have actual Lyme disease that a physician specialized in infectious disease would confidently diagnose, and as a result you are going to do some things to your body that you should not (e.g., antibiotics).

trying keto now thx @tferriss

@Shelter9_Radio @TheCinesthetic I exist solely because of Basic Instinct

@TheCinesthetic We exist solely because of UHF and Short Circuit. 🥰🥰🥰

UHF (1989) is the kind of studio comedy that feels impossible now. Total creative anarchy, joke density through the roof, and Weird Al operating at full cartoon-brain power. It flopped on release but quietly became a cult classic.

feel/felt and other linking verbs (can be legit but are frequently weak and overused), adverbs (not all, but prefer conveying their meaning though the action/dialogue itself; be especially suspicious of adverbs that convey degree “somewhat” “slightly” etc.), glue words. FWIW, tools that help you find these aren’t AI; they’re more akin to spellcheck.

I used the word "just" 369 times and "still" 176 times in my 67000 word manuscript. Yikes. Are there any other words I need to search and remove?

From reading the article, this appears (by your own accounting) to be largely due to bad data (bad Apple Watch VO2 estimates and resting heart rate measurements varying with device model). It’s also partly due to your prompt to return a simple letter grade, when heart health is not naturally distilled into one. The grade would swing from one cardiologist to another if you asked different human doctors (especially if they are looking at bad data), and different instances of ChatGPT conversations are somewhat analogous to talking to different people. I’d be curious to see what happened if you prompted it for a detailed analysis first, using good data (e.g., have your VO2 and resting heart rate measured properly). While you couldn’t provide accurate long-term history, a current accurate snapshot is more relevant to current heart health anyway. Then, after it has done the analysis, ask it to generate the grade. That way, it can use the intermediate analysis to formulate the grade instead of making a difficult jump from data straight to grade.

You can now connect ChatGPT to an Apple Watch. So I imported 29 mil steps and 6 mil heartbeats into the new ChatGPT Health. It graded my heart an F. Cardiologist @erictopol called it “baseless.” Any bot claiming to give health insights shouldn’t be this clueless. Even in beta. 🧵

The problem with talking in French is that you can’t just throw in a French phrase to add a touch of sophistication.

@achingkneejoint en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_b… Also, In Illongo, doubling of words is common and changes the meaning somewhat

as English speakers we have to sort out the 'had had' situation. it's frankly embarrassing to the language