Barry Ezell

STANFORD TORUS MEGATHREAD You’ve seen the pictures, but you probably don’t know the full story. It's the result of a 10-week engineering study at Stanford University in 1975, funded by NASA and led by Girard O’Neill - the most thorough study on free-space settlement to date. 1/

Meta-search is inconclusive, so I tell my assistant "Browse the web for news on cyber hacks against Musk companies. For each claim, spawn a task to verify sources. Summarize the claims and give probabilities." It goes to work. I learn back in my chair. I wait. Another Tuesday.

Tucker for prez? Celebrity was how Trump got his start…

@CannabisScg @SavannahWCTV Why would you think that drag queens give a damn about your kids?

Hundreds of drag queens and allies are gathered at Cascades Park right now. They’ll be marching to the Capitol to protest legislation targeting the LGBTQ community in Florida.

Nothing makes me happier than seeing thousands of drag queens descend on the Florida Capitol. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ #WontBeErased

I described some of the most beautiful and famous mathematical theorems to Midjourney. Here is how it imagined them: 1. "The set of real numbers is uncountably infinite."

Honestly wild how willing Terry Schilling is to tell reporters that the campaign against trans rights is a cynical, calculated, poll tested attempt to keep the culture war going after the Supreme Court effectively took gay marriage off the table

They said the quiet part out loud

@CSexton25 @TheTNHoller @elonmusk 15. Sexton has taken the larger per diem, which is pegged to the cost of a hotel room in Nashville. On the form, Sexton claims a roundtrip commute of 236 miles. During the 2022 legislative session alone, he billed taxpayers $19,093.

@steph31077 @davecobb @Esqueer_ Who’s portraying sex acts in a Florida pride parade? I’ve attended St. Pete Pride for a decade and never saw anything like that. And if someone DID do that, why does it matter if they’re wearing clothes that are considered correctly gendered?

@davecobb @Esqueer_ Keep appropriately covered and don't portray sex acts, and you won't be arrested with charges that'll hold. Cross dressing hasn't been banned....

I’m encouraging everyone to dress “against gender” at St. Pete Pride this year. Arrest us all!

@slotkinjr @JamesClear PDC is a great rec! I’ve been there twice and can’t wait to go back.

@JamesClear This feels like a clear cut use for #ChatGPT, at least to start the brainstorming. *note: in similar exercises I have done it will sometimes (rarely) hallucinate entire restaurants, attractions, etc. In any case, here is the GPT-4 output to your questions:

I want to go somewhere where: 1) I can stay directly on the beach (no crossing roads, straight onto the sand) 2) I can walk to 10+ great restaurants (don't care about fancy, just great food) 3) Is relaxing and quiet (minimal road noise, etc) Needs all 3. Where should I go?

This only sells with 30-35% of voters. rawstory.com/donald-trump-m…

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again. Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge. A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way. StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day. It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views. But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans. What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on? When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on? This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies. Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default. Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer. Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go? We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done). So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions. None of which you'll find on StackOverflow. (I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

Is this why he has the personality of a turnip?

DeSantis is an Ivy League-educated lawyer lol

@blondina_winter @MarcoAFrieri @RonDeSantisFL I’ll stop whining when our governor chooses to focus on real issues instead of culture war nonsense.

@MarcoAFrieri @RonDeSantisFL Why don’t you stop whining

Good to be back in the great state of Nevada! Our Freedom Blueprint has delivered countless wins for the people of Florida, and we’re proud to share it across the country.

Interesting how NIMBY’s have no problem with tearing down old houses to build giant modernist homes that don’t match the neighborhood’s design standards in any way, but put a cute quadplex on the same lot and it’s “destroying neighborhood character”.

Freudian slip

Reverend John Dorhauer leads the church that helped found New College. He just told the board that “the long arc of history will grind you into dust and they (the students) will win this battle and you will be remembered for the sycophants that you are”