ΧΡΙΣΤΌΦΟΡΟΣ bɝːd

@ingelramdecoucy @poiThePoi Early Wright was one of those early 20C figures whose work suggested we might be on the verge of a architectural renaissance. But by the end of his career he was a proto-starchitect.

Okay but Falling Water was a structurally unsound mess that was functionally unlivable because the water sound was so constant and annoying that it gave Edgar Kauffman migraines. It’s pretty to visit but like a lot of Wright’s stuff is basically an art piece that’s actively hostile to human occupation or functional use

@dlondonwortel Paul Simon.

Give examples of first-rate second rate talents, and/or second rate first rate talents. Any genre allowed (music writing film etc)

@JLevendia "Ackshally, it was invented in the 1960s, not a traditional Italian..." SHUT UP!

Tiramisu

"[The Fathers of Confederation], and especially the French-Canadian Fathers, had an equal, or even greater, horror of abstract principles. To the Loyalists, these recalled the American Revolution, to the French-Canadians the French." - Eugene Forsey

@IonaItalia Middlemarch is very defensible for first place.

Unpopular opinion: this isn't identical to my list—where is Tom Jones?! But it's a good list, actually.

At my doctoral defense one of the members of my committee was outraged that I quoted a scholar they had a personal beef with. It was a single citation for a minor establishment of fact not in question. I quoted nothing else by this author. Still, they refused to approve my dissertation until I agreed to remove it. I replaced it with a citation of the committee member instead. That was the only requested change by anyone on the committee for the entire dissertation.

@lilchiva Enjoying life's feast in its fullness, I see. See you in church!

Good morning Anon. I'm about to nap and then go to church. I'm still drunk af. Wish me luck. youtu.be/qV9C6Am8xzk

It is simply the way this madness is going on. There are millions of papers per every subject, most of them are totally irrelevant, like 99.9999% (yes, this is indeed the correct number: out of millions of paper , not more than one 100 are relevant) But then, authors are forced to cite every single sacred cow that is active in the field, even if active simply means they may be a reviewer or the hold an academic position. This is bs in bs out process: no positive outcome

I'll tell you why so many people upset about the "no hallucinated citations" ban on the arxiv: because they've all been copying citation lists from each other without checking them since the beginning of time. And why did they do this? Because half of the citations in scientific papers are politics and not to the benefit of the reader. If you don't list the right papers, your paper doesn't look 'right' and reviewers will complain that you didn't cite this-and-that other unrelated work. For what I am concerned, these are all bullshit citations that shouldn't be in the papers in the first place. They can easily be automated by "related papers" links, that are (wait for it) provided by... AI...

@JLevendia 8-page essays were a cinch, but the 20-pagers were brutal. Effort = number of pages squared, or something.

I mean, their brains are so utterly chopped that there’s no point in even feeling smug about it anymore. I wish my uni essay assignments in the 90s were just 10 pages, used to crank those out.

@esrtweet @WatcherontheWeb Isn't there a version of the Hollow Earth theory where we are on *inside* of a hollow earth, which also contains the entire so-called universe (actually, only a few thousand miles in diameter)? That's surely weirder than the Welteislehre.

@WatcherontheWeb I promise you, nothing is as weird as the Nazi Welteislehre theory. Look it up.

I was just reading about the latest wrinkle In flat-earthism (the ice-ball theory) and I had a sudden thought that made me feel almost friendly towards the ice-ball theorists. Otherwise, the same tranche of idiots that buy flat-earth theory would probably be young-Earth creationists. Which does more damage. Which led me inexorably to the next thought. I've done my share of culture engineering in the past - could I design some kind of attractor that does even less damage?

Just visited the former canteen at @derspiegel, reassembled in a nearby museum in Hamburg when the magazine moved. What a completely insane place

@JadenWorthw7ts @Emotion78687 Nothing wrong with a bit of rhetorical hyperbole. Sandoval didn't have a huge range, but she did what she did very, very well.

@Emotion78687 She’s great and it’s a terrific performance. Top ten in history? Absurd.

One of the top ten performances in history, and all she does is stand there and sing—no dancers, no nose rings, no wild gimmicks, no auto-tune.

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

@Akito__Tenkawa @KonstantinKisin I think you're trying to force a narrative. Violent, intolerant pro-Palestinian activism is typed as left-wing. Of course, the left-wing/right-wing distinction has become rather arbitrary.

@KonstantinKisin Nazi sympathizers, you say. So are these people Far-Right, then?

It means Nazi sympathisers and ethnicity-driven supremacists. And also, thanks to our irresponsible media and political rhetoric, anyone who believes in borders, biological sexes and colour-blind equality before the law. In this way, people who have nothing to do with Nazis are smeared as Nazis, ironically, to attempt to prevent them from becoming Nazis. In this way, a tiny number of actual Nazis (who hate the majority of the people who are today called "far right") are taken as evidence of the existence of a massive far right which has to be countered through censorship, visa bans and suppression. I covered the last Tommy rally and talked to hundreds of people. We encountered one person who was genuinely unpleasant (and not so much for his opinions but for being drunk and obnoxious). The rest were normal, ordinary people with opinions shared by the majority of the country. The reality is that the media who tell you the opinions the people they report on supposedly have don't actually talk to them. I saw one prominent mainstream journalist at the last protest who actually went into the crowd and chatted to people. The rest of them stand in front of a group of protestors and tell you the company line. This applies to every issue, btw. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

@SoCaL_list @JunusAnna Are you attempting use trans "word magic"? Trans activists had surprising success with that technique for many years, but I think you'll find it's stopped working.

@JunusAnna You can't claim to provide a safe women if you don't include all women. That's the issue.

If they really wanted to be left alone - then they would have left a woman alone who was literally minding her own business in a tiny corner of the web providing a safe shelter for other women. But nooooo. They had to go and destroy that too.

Starmer weighs up his future amid fury at 'betrayal' by his Cabinet - The Times's weekend read: * Starmer is spending weekend at Chequers. Friends say that for all the rhetoric about not walking away and public displays of defiance he is seriously considering setting out a timeline for his departure * He feels betrayed by senior figures in the Cabinet who owe their jobs to his landslide majority and his decision to appoint them to high office in the first place * The Times's disclosure that ministers had called for him to set out a timeline for his departure is a particular source of fury. 'It was unforgiveable,' one ally said * The Cabinet consensus is that Starmer has to go - it's just a question of when and how. 'The local election results show that he has lost the country and his speech proved he didn’t have the ability to turn it around,' one Cabinet minister said. 'We’re in a world where it’s either Andy or Wes now.” * Some members of the Cabinet say it will be a coronation for Burnham if he defeats Reform in Makerfield. “If Andy wins Makerfield he will be carried aloft into the Westminster tearooms on the shoulders of Labour MPs. There is simply not a world in which he doesn’t win the leadership so it must be a coronation — because the last thing we need is a damaging leadership battle.” * The briefings against Starmer are increasingly vicious. One senior Labour MP compared him to Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, and accused him of 'squatting' in Number 10. 'It's over, he's in denial' * Some think Starmer has a duty to play caretaker and unifier. “If Burnham wins he needs to preside over a unifying moment for the party and bring the two sides together. It is a lot to ask of him, but it is an essential role. He cannot leave us in such a chaotic state. If he vacates the pitch and lets them fight among themselves it will be a disaster. Someone has to act as a unifier.” * Streeting has not given up on the leadership and will join any contest * For Starmer, the next month threatens to be humiliating. Most of the Cabinet are likely to go out and campaign for Burnham, the man expected to replace him if he wins. All of which could leave him out of power after less than two years in No 10 thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

@colwight Everything is the Omnicause.

@CjgbVictoria Me too, but like so many international humanitarian organisations they’ve completely lost all credibility.

Don’t ever tell me Amnesty can be trusted on anything ever again. And absolutely disgraceful using that image when images of Tickle are easily available. But we all know why they didn’t use one of those. Cretins. No, sorry, it’s worse than that.

A certain amount of dissident feeling was snobbery—how dare these thick-necked sons of peasants in the party try to order around me, an intellectual, etc. “The British journalist Edward Crankshaw was surprised when he heard ‘charming, highly-educated youngsters speaking of the masses of the proletariat to whom the country is supposed to belong with a callousness and brutality which I have not encountered in the countries of Western Europe for many decades.’”