“…Utterly destroyed the Columbia Broadcasting System. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it…”, Orson Welles, 1938
I guess this time, they did mean it.
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Bill Leininger
572 posts
Very funny that there’s still a section of Ogden north of the river
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Bill Leininger retweetledi
Despite 3 years of Mike Johnson & Trump trying to stop it, the plaque honoring Jan 6 cops plaque was finally installed overnight.
Johnson had the workers do it quietly, at 4AM, hoping it wouldn't get any press.
Let's ruin his plans... and make sure that one of the first crimes he's prosecuted for is breaking the 2023 law that required him to put it up. VIA~ U.S. Democratic Socialists
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Your periodic reminder physics has a set of terms for each increasing derivative of position with respect to time:
velocity
acceleration
jerk
snap
crackle
pop
(Yes, really.)
Math Files@Math_files
Richard M. Nixon used calculus as a politician to win reelection. When campaigning for a second term in office, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing, which has been noted as "the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection." Since inflation is itself a derivative—the rate at which the purchasing power of money decreases—then the rate of increase of inflation is the derivative of inflation, or the second derivative of the function of purchasing power of money with respect to time. Stating that a function is decreasing is equivalent to stating that its derivative is negative, so Nixon's statement is that the second derivative of inflation—or the third derivative of purchasing power—is negative.
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@CompSciFact As someone whose startups are all shot down and my code disposed of, the idea that someone wrote COBOL thirty years ago and it’s still in use is validating
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People are now gambling millions on snowstorms, using prediction markets to bet exactly how much snow will fall.
During the last big storm, over $6 million was bet on New York City's totals alone.
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NASA should go back to the companies that built Mercury, Gemini, Apollo & Shuttle and get them to build a crew spacecraft:
Shuttle: Rockwell International
Apollo CM: North American Aviation
Mercury & Gemini: McDonnel Aircraft Corporation
Oh Wait, they're all part of Boeing.
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@arihyena Let me introduce you to
33 Thomas Street
-Literally number 33 (freemason dogwhistle)
-Has no windows
-Built by AT&T (evil)
-was built to survive a nuclear bomb
-the central hub for the NSA's surveillance programs
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@JustDeezGuy See also, “The Astrological Engine”, Analog, September, 1977
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At this point, there is no question that a disquieting percentage of people using LLMs—including developers using coding agents—are exhibiting EXACTLY the same reaction as many people first exposed to ELIZA around 1964-1966. The scale is different; the mechanism, not at all.
octo@the_octobro
Just one more prompt bro this time itll be a one shot youll see bro this time will be different just one more prompt i swear bro im gonna use a different model bro this time its gonna be different just one more prompt bro
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@themaxburns Being on Nixon’s enemies list was the high point of some people’s career
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Bill Leininger retweetledi
🦔A cooling system failure at a single data center in Aurora, Illinois took down virtually all CME futures and options trading on Friday. The facility handles an estimated $25 quadrillion in notional trade volume daily and serves as the backbone for CME's Globex trading platform. The outage wreaked havoc for traders across equities, foreign exchange, bonds, and commodities markets globally.
The Infrastructure
CME built the facility in 2009 but sold it to CyrusOne in 2016, agreeing to rent space for 15 years. In 2021, KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners bought CyrusOne for $11.4 billion as AI demand sent data center valuations soaring. The site is famous among high-frequency traders who've mounted antennas on nearby utility poles and bought property across the street to shave microseconds off latency. CyrusOne's website says the facility has redundant chiller units to protect against failures. One consultant noted "normally, in data centers of this type, there is a lot of redundancy to avoid this kind of problem."
My Take
$25 quadrillion in daily trading volume running through a single building in the town from Wayne's World, and a cooling system failure brought it all down. CME decided in 2016 it didn't want to own infrastructure anymore. Now the infrastructure that global markets depend on is owned by private equity firms chasing AI-driven valuations. CyrusOne's CEO at the time called the facility "ground zero" for high-speed trading and emphasized "speed is of the essence." Nobody emphasized what happens when the cooling fails. This is what critical infrastructure looks like when it's optimized for returns rather than resilience. CME's CEO once bragged they had 29 data centers to choose from if they needed to leave Illinois. Apparently activating backup wasn't as simple as he made it sound.
Hedgie🤗
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Bill Leininger retweetledi
Today marks Fibonacci Day (11/23), a date that reflects the famous numerical sequence 1, 1, 2, 3.
This sequence appears in mathematics, nature, architecture, and many scientific phenomena, reminding us of the elegance and order underlying complex systems.
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@baddantakes Any man left on the rio grand is the king of the world, as far as they know…
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Planet-heating methane is escaping from cracks in the Antarctic seabed as the region warms!
Thomas Reis@peakaustria
Planet-heating methane is escaping from cracks in the Antarctic seabed as the region warms, with new seeps being discovered at an “astonishing rate,” scientists have found, raising fears that future global warming predictions may have been underestimated. cnn.it/4h5g0gb
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Oh, no. Robert Redford died!
Time to queue up:
* The Sting
* Sneakers
* Spy Game
Rest in Peace, to one of the best the world has ever seen.
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