Society for Prevention of Ümlaut Abuse 🇨🇦 🇩🇪

@WhiskeyJimbo @BudLightSadness I'm reasonably sure the Earl of Sandwich didn't invent beans on toast.

@BudLightSadness Clearly the British Royal family. Or at least an Earl. Those guys are always inventing classic foods.

You’ll never guess who invented chili and why.

@Peace55068968 @Real_Ames And for those miscreants who display a faked up permit, an "uttering a forged document" charge as well.

@Real_Ames Parking in a handicap spot without a permit gets you a police citation, not a tow truck company. This is engagement farming bullshit.

They pulled into a handicap spot “just for a minute”… and came out to their car already on a tow truck. No warning. No grace period. Just consequences. Those spots exist for people who actually need them—not for “quick errands.” You roll the dice, you pay the price. They got exactly what they deserved. Still think 5 minutes is worth it? 🤔

@gjquartermaine @ihtesham2005 Time to put it in the input queue again... Read it prior to a programming career, and just retired, so should have more of a perspective on it now.

@ihtesham2005 It's on my shelf. It's been there since 1980. Same book, from the UK to Thailand. Along with Schopenhauer, it's been a major influence.

A 34-year-old physics graduate student spent years writing a strange 800-page book in 1979 about a logician, a Dutch artist, and a German composer. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It quietly became required reading at every AI lab in the world. It is the only book in history that makes the deepest ideas in computer science feel like a dream you cannot stop thinking about. I read it across 3 months on a single side table next to my bed and walked away seeing intelligence, consciousness, and AI in a way I cannot un-see. His name is Douglas Hofstadter. The book is called Gödel, Escher, Bach. Almost nothing in modern AI makes sense without this book. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, the entire architecture of self-attention, the alignment problem, the strange feeling that LLMs sometimes seem to understand and other times seem to be playing an elaborate symbol-shuffling game, all of it traces back to questions Hofstadter laid out in a single book published before most of today's AI engineers were born. Here is the story almost nobody tells you about how the book came to exist. Hofstadter was the son of Robert Hofstadter, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961 for measuring the size of the proton. He was supposed to follow in his father's footsteps. He started a physics PhD at the University of Oregon. He was miserable. He could not focus. He did not love the work. He kept getting pulled toward something else. The something else was a single question that had haunted him since childhood. How can meaning emerge from meaningless symbols? Specifically, how does a brain, which is made of nothing but cells firing electrical signals at each other, produce something that feels like consciousness, like understanding, like a self? He could not let the question go. He left physics. He started writing. The book took him years. He wrote it largely in isolation, working in the basement of his parents' house and at Indiana University, where he eventually finished it. He thought it would be read by maybe a few hundred logicians and AI researchers. Basic Books published it in 1979 as a 777-page hardcover. The next year it won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the National Book Award for science. The book is structured in a way that almost no other book has ever attempted. The chapters alternate between two layers. One layer is technical chapters about logic, computability, neuroscience, and AI. The other layer is fictional dialogues between a tortoise and Achilles, characters borrowed from a paradox by Lewis Carroll. The dialogues play with the same ideas the technical chapters explain. Read in order, they do not feel like a textbook. They feel like a strange house with rooms that loop back into each other and corridors that change shape behind you. The first thing the book does is explain Gödel's incompleteness theorems in a way no math textbook had ever managed. Kurt Gödel, an Austrian logician working in 1931, proved something that broke mathematics. He showed that any formal system powerful enough to describe arithmetic contains statements that are true but cannot be proven inside that system. Mathematics, the most certain thing humans had ever built, has holes in it that can never be filled. Hofstadter spends hundreds of pages making you understand this proof not just as a mathematical theorem, but as a structural fact about every sufficiently complex system. Including the brain. Including any AI. The reason AI alignment is genuinely hard is not just engineering. It is structural. Any system smart enough to model itself will contain truths about itself it cannot reach from inside itself. Hofstadter showed this 50 years before AI safety was a field. The second thing the book does is introduce his core idea. He calls it the strange loop. A strange loop is what happens when a system, by climbing through layers of itself, somehow ends up back where it started. Escher's drawings of staircases that always go up but somehow loop back are visual strange loops. Bach's musical canons that modulate up through keys and end on the original note are auditory strange loops. Gödel's self-referential statements that talk about themselves are logical strange loops. Hofstadter argues that consciousness is a strange loop. Your brain builds a model of the world. Inside that model, it builds a model of itself perceiving the world. Inside that self-model, it builds a model of itself thinking about itself perceiving the world. The recursion does not bottom out. The self is what the loop feels like from the inside. This is the part that AI researchers cannot stop returning to. Modern transformer models use self-attention, which is technically a mechanism where a network attends to its own internal states across layers. Recursive reasoning, where a model thinks about its own thinking, is now a research area with its own conferences. Meta-learning, where models learn how to learn, is a direct descendant of what Hofstadter described in 1979 as the necessary structure of any conscious system. He wrote the philosophy. The engineers are now building the implementation. The third thing the book does is the part that haunts every AI conversation today. Hofstadter argued that meaning is not something separate from symbol manipulation. It is what symbol manipulation looks like from the inside, when the manipulation is complex enough and self-referential enough. A simple lookup table does not understand anything. But a system that processes symbols at sufficient depth, with enough self-modeling, with enough recursion, starts to look identical from the outside, and possibly from the inside, to a system that understands. This is the deepest question in modern AI. When ChatGPT generates a response, is it actually thinking, or is it just doing very fast symbol shuffling? Hofstadter spent 800 pages arguing that the distinction may not exist at sufficient scale. If a system shuffles symbols according to the right structure, meaning is what the shuffling looks like from the inside. You can read modern debates about AI consciousness from Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, and David Chalmers, and you will find that they are all, in their own ways, having the argument Hofstadter framed in 1979. The fourth thing the book did is the one that took the longest to be vindicated. Hofstadter argued, and continued arguing for decades, that the actual engine of human intelligence is not logic. It is not deduction. It is not pattern matching in any simple sense. It is analogy. The ability to see one thing as similar to another thing, to map the structure of one situation onto a different situation, is, in his view, the core of thought itself. For decades this was unfashionable. Symbolic AI focused on logic and rules. Statistical AI focused on pattern matching. Almost nobody worked seriously on analogy. Then large language models started working. And the people who looked closely at what they were doing realized something uncomfortable. LLMs are, fundamentally, analogy machines. They learn structural patterns from text and apply those patterns by analogy to new situations. They do not deduce. They do not reason logically by default. They map the shape of one thing onto the shape of another thing and produce output that fits the new shape. Hofstadter saw this before any of it existed. His later book Surfaces and Essences, written with Emmanuel Sander, is 600 pages defending the claim that analogy is the core of cognition. It came out in 2013. It was largely ignored. The ChatGPT release in 2022 was, in some sense, a vindication of the entire argument. The strangest thing about reading Gödel, Escher, Bach in 2026 is realizing how lonely the book must have felt when it was written. In 1979 there was no GPT. No deep learning. No transformer. The dominant approach to AI was symbolic logic, and most researchers thought minds were going to be programmed top-down, rule by rule, like a complicated chess engine. Hofstadter said the opposite. He said minds were emergent. They came from the bottom up. They were strange loops in complex substrates. The programmers' approach would never produce real intelligence because it was missing the recursive self-modeling that made minds real. He was right. The book is hard. I had to use all the LLMs and NotebookLM to understand it. It is not a beach read. You do not finish it in a weekend. The math chapters require attention. The dialogues require patience. Most people who buy it never finish it. That is fine. The book is structured so that reading any 50 pages produces a permanent shift in how you think. Bill Gates lists it among the books that shaped him. Steve Jobs read it. Almost every senior AI researcher in the world will tell you it was the book that made them fall in love with the question of intelligence in the first place. Hofstadter himself has been in doubt about modern LLMs. He has said they may have proven him right about analogy and wrong about consciousness at the same time. He is still writing. He is still working on the same question that pulled him out of physics 50 years ago. The 800-page book that explained intelligence before AI existed is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it. The ones who do will see the world differently for the rest of their lives.

Cherry blossoms in Cedarvale Park with the Forest Hill Walking Club this Sunday.

@it_again_2025 @Turbinetraveler Looks like a real enough plane, 5Y-HMA, a Dassault Falcon 200 operated by Skyward Express.... onespotter.com/aircraft/fid/2…

@Turbinetraveler That jet is as real as my commercial pilots licence 😂

A lot is wrong in this clip...can you spot them?

Keeping the @CWHM museum drip pans supplied via the 14-cylinder Wright Cyclone R-2600 on the B-25 Mitchell.

@coolnamezfolife @kelseyisstrving Depends on the carpet and the scale's design. If the weight is measured via the scale's feet as it usually is with digital scales, then if the scale base is resting on the carpet, the indicated weight will be light.

@kelseyisstrving The carpet thing is because the feet of the scale would be cushioned by the carpet and display an incorrect weight

I understand not weighting on carpet but what difference does socks make?

@haning_will @ThrillaRilla369 @A10TheHog The existing gun is set up so the barrel doing the firing is on the aircraft centerline to avoid yaw issues. Never mind the gun is huge.

@ThrillaRilla369 @A10TheHog Just the one that it has causes it to lose a significant amount of speed as it is being fired from what I understand. Maybe three would stall it out. Other than that concern, I like your idea.

If you could change ONE thing about the A-10 Warthog, what would it be?

@AngelMD1103 Don't know about others, but I find my blood oxygen saturation drops quite a bit when sitting still at higher altitudes on the ground or in the air (ie at cabin pressure). Depending on fitness and hydration levels could lead to passing out with exertion.

It was supposed to be a routine long-haul flight, hours in the air, lights dimmed, everyone half-asleep aboard Qantas Airways. She had been resting for hours when she suddenly woke up and needed to use the bathroom. Nothing unusual. She got up, walked down the aisle at 30,000 feet… but when she reached the door, it was occupied. So she turned around to head back to her seat. That’s when everything went wrong. Her vision blurred. The aisle tilted. And before she could react… nothing. The next thing she remembers? Lying flat on the floor, disoriented, surrounded by crew members asking if she was okay. She had collapsed mid-flight, with no memory of hitting the ground. Panic set in fast, confusion, fear, the realization that she had completely blacked out in the middle of the sky. The crew rushed to help, oxygen, reassurance, constant check-ins, but the moment stayed with her. It’s terrifying how quickly your body can shut down without warning… especially when you’re thousands of feet in the air with nowhere to go. If something like this happened to you mid-flight… would you ever feel comfortable flying again, or would that fear stay with you?

@esrtweet Had occasion to use this book of logs, published in 1968 based on a 1944 update to a two volume set originally published in 1844. More accurate than a slide rule, but considerably slower.

My father's slide rule. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.

@OnDisasters Still going strong, here a 1967 vintage Ukraine Air Alliance AN-12 parked at Hamilton International (CYHM) between cargo runs January last year.

Coke, Coke everywhere! For those not familiar with it, "Coke" was the NATO designation for the Antonov An-12. Transports had names starting with "C" (for "cargo") hence this one was the Coke. As if the sight of all these transports was not overwhelming enough, there´s a small detail that catches the eye: note that these cargo planes carry defensive weapons. (Specifically - 2× 23 mm (0.906 in) Nudelman-Rikhter NR-23 cannons) This was fairly common in Soviet transports, but not used on the Western aircraft (to my surprise, one of the Soviet "reasonings" behind the KAL 007 shotdown was that they thought the KC-135s and others had defensive rear guns... this was how badly their intelligence systems worked)

@BowTiedTrance @mdangremond The WW2 Able, Baker, Charlie, ... alphabet used King.

@mdangremond Kite, King, Kevin, etc Also, GO BLUE

Years ago, I memorized the NATO Phonetic Alphabet because I thought it was the most accurate. Over the phone, even if you're trying to say something like, "N as in 'Night'," it can still be misheard as, "M as in 'Might,'" you know? So I just went with the standard NATO template. I got off the phone this morning with a guy at a business where I needed to give him my email address, so I'm doing the thing, "... Alpha ... Kilo ..." etc. He says, "What branch of the service were you in?" Apparently "no one ever says 'kilo,' that's a dead giveaway." 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

@Pascal_Laurent_ 940cc seems wrong. Assuming a spherical breast, that would imply a diameter of around 12 centimeters.

⚠️ LES CHIRURGIENS ESTHÉTIQUES QUI ACCEPTENT DE FAIRE ÇA DEVRAIENT SE FAIRE RETIRER LEUR LICENCE ET FAIRE UN SÉJOUR EN PRISON !

@AFHF Pictured, a C-46 Curtis Commando.

1942: Using aircraft acquired from Pan American Airlines, the Army began the largest airlift in World War II. Two DC-3s airlifted gasoline and lubricating oil over the Himalaya Mountains from Dinjan in eastern India to Yunnan-yi in southern China to begin the “Hump Airlift.” A total of eight airplanes carried enough fuel and oil to refuel and service the B-25 bombers from the later “Doolittle Raid.” From December 1942, when the airlift became the ATC’s responsibility, through the close of the operation in November 1945, the airlift delivered nearly 740,000 tons of cargo. Over half of this total was transported during the last eight months of the war. (USAF Image)

@MichaelTB63 @HazelAppleyard Proper etiquette requires roast dog be eaten with a spoon, so at least that's correct.

I mean, besides the tree with an eye. the dude with massive tits, the fact that it looks like they're eating a dog with no sides (weird) the little girl with two chairs. The Surreal Hindu style cat painting and what looks like some sort of Hindu drink in front of dad while he's holding a beer, not enough plates, glasses and silverware for everyone... wait... is that Kimberly Guilfoyle in purple?

Erm??

@CraigBaird There's also the Royal Canadian Air Force tartan: canada.ca/en/department-…

Today is Tartan Day! The day was first celebrated in 1987 in Nova Scotia and has been celebrated nationally since 2010. Canada's Official Tartan was designed in 1964 by David Weiser. Here are the official (and unofficial) tartans of Canada's provinces and territories. 🧵1/16

@Liberalosof @KarthickR05 @SuGaR_Babbyyy x:48 is correctly argued, but the clock orientation is insufficiently constrained to say what x is: you can number the face in 12 ways while maintaining the hand relationship.

@KarthickR05 @SuGaR_Babbyyy The hour hand is 1/5th before the full hour, so 12 min, so it's x:48, hence 10:48.

No cheating Do you know the answer?

@claw_bass @PhalanxSupps @luisomor Same here with sweaty hands, I use mechanic's gloves with thin rubbery palm side for better grip: gym doesn't have chalk, and I already had the gloves.

@PhalanxSupps @luisomor I hate that I have this skin stuff after that, and also I have sweaty hands and cannot use magnesia every time

Wearing gloves at the gym is insanely gay Your hands should be looking like this after spamming hundreds of pullups every week

Maybe a lawyer could explain...

@CuriousTimL @TheJoeySwoll Last Thursday was apparently grunt, partial rep and drop the stack day at my gym. On every rep no less. Three people almost concurrently. 😐

@TheJoeySwoll I love when a guy next to me, on the same equipment, slams the weight, like it's some new world record, when it's usually half the weight I'm currently pushing

UPDATE! Congratulations, you did better! 😂😂