Michael Shook @[email protected]

@mshook" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mastodon.social/@mshook

Eydie Gormé y el Trío Los Panchos cantando el clásico ‘𝗦𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿 𝗔 𝗠í’ en ‘The Hollywood Palace’, año 1964.

When the vikings first arrived in Iceland in 9th Century CE, they discovered a coarse yet manageable new world ripe for the picking, uninhabited but for a few Gaelic monks on the southern coast. This strange, rugged land was worthy of conquering and survival over their scandinavian homeland stricken with civil strife and running short on arable land. That force of adventure, strength and resourefulness in a new land cultivated Iceland’s ancient survivalist architecture. It was and still is a vast territory with dramatic rising glacial ranges from moonscape fields that run into coastal beaches of black sand and a land of no native timber. Where necessity became and still is the mother of invention. Homes were constructed of turf and drift wood that would wash upon the shores as well as from the endless supply of lava stones abound in the fields. Stone constrution also proved functionally sensible in this frequent earthquake prone environment, as homes could then “easily” be cobbled back together. These buildings still exist at the ancient homestead of Keldur in Iceland’s southeastern region. This last remaining and fully intact early settlement farmstead can be found mentioned in Sagas from 12th Century CE. Traditionally a clan would head the farm with extended family living and working on site. Originally all living in the long house, there is evidence to think that a sudden and drastic climate change caused the move to smaller residential spaces to be built and long houses to be divided up to make easier to heat. Additions and improvements at  Keldur had been made over the centuries, but the original main hearth room still bears the dirt floors and ancient timbers with fascinating hints of traditional communal living. A tunnel discovered in 1930’s runs from the main hearth room to the nearby small river and was thought to be for defensive purposes. Inside smaller spaces were formed originally for cooking and food storage and a connecting string of smaller turf structures served as various work and storage spaces such as a smithy, a mill, and livestock corral. Newest addition from early 19th Century remains near intact from it’s former glory, furnished with beautiful and simplistic folk furnishings and the silence combined with the spirits of those who still long remain at Keldur. The last owner, whos family had farmed Keldur for almost two Centuries, knew of its great importance to Icelandic heritage and over the years had collected much history on the site. In 1942, he sold Keldur and his extensive collection to the National Museum of Iceland who continue to care for and manage this amazing historic site. Upwards of 200 of these man-made caves with wooden or cobbled facades are scattered about 90 farms in the region used over the centuries for storing hay,corralling livestock, smithy’s and even for trade. Forty one of these caves are now protected sites, but many still in use today. We stopped roadside on HWY 1 at Rútshellir, and explored this t-shaped ‘building’. The front entrance to the turf structure is a feeding area for sheep, then stepping up into the cave (approx 6’ft tall and 10 ft wide) where they take shelter. Walking up the left side exterior is an entrance to another connecting cave space much smaller and where a smithy had a shop for many years. Yet another example of Iceland’s people understanding and using Mother Nature to their benefit through their ancient survivalist architecture. #archaeohistories

Justin Martyr, writing to a pagan emperor around 155 AD, described what Christians did on Sunday. Walk into a Catholic Mass tomorrow and tell me what's changed.

WOW! The Iranian AI Lego team has another video out. They are doubling down on building bridges between Americans & Iranians while depicting the US gov and "system" as the real enemy. The music, lyrics, and imagery are all designed to appeal to disillusioned Americans.

É maravilhoso ver como as inovações da tecnologia digital estão sendo usadas nas obras de artistas como os Beatles, que revolucionaram as técnicas de gravação. Um trabalho incrível liderado pelo diretor Peter Jackson. Essas ferramentas de IA permitiram "limpar" gravações de baixa qualidade e separar instrumentos e vozes que antes eram inseparáveis. Dito isso... esse show ao vivo é incrível. Legado The Beatles é imortal.

The Semantic Web Project—stubbornly resilient and rich with critical infrastructure that complements the emerging age of AI agents—is making a marketing and communications comeback. Like the Unix philosophy and filesystems as universal interfaces, it forms the third leg of an important stool upon which secure, useful, and scalable AI will be built. You can’t keep good technology down, even when its existence predates broader commercial awareness—which is exactly what’s playing out now. Compute economics is forcing AI agents to “look back to the future” in search of Internet & Web infrastructure for business models that actually scale. Here's a Semantic Web vision demo I put together as I continue to see a growing number of posts celebrating the Semantic Web vision and the power of ontologies (once a banned word too!). See comments for links. Enjoy!

Trump: "Somalia, it's a beautiful place. It's got no anything. It's got one thing that's really strong -- crime. All they do is run around shooting each other. It's filthy dirty, disgusting dirty. It's a horrible place. They come here, and Ilhan Omar, she heads it. She married her brother. I would imagine they're looking at her. Isn't she despicable? We ought to get those people the hell out of our country."

@TradVat2 Indeed, per the Catechism, there is no requirement to affirm *any* apparitions or other "private revelations."

Eno is a 1973 documentary short film directed by Alfons Sinniger. The subject of the film is musician Brian Eno (shortly after his departure from Roxy Music), and features the recording sessions for Eno’s record Here Come the Warm Jets. ubu.com/film/eno_doc.h…

Reminder: When the Panama Papers came out it revealed all the rich people in the world are part of an enormous criminal conspiracy to dodge taxes and hoard stolen wealth in offshore accounts and literally nothing happened except a reporter working on the story was assassinated. Let's make this go viral 👇

Softmax vs Sigmoid ✍️ Interact 👉 byhand.ai/Khlg9b = Softmax = Softmax is how deep networks turn raw scores into a probability distribution — the final layer of every classifier, and the core of every attention head in a transformer. To see what it does, picture five boba tea shops on the same block, all competing for your dollar. Five candidates: a, b, c, d, e — different chains, different brewing styles, different pearls. A boba reviewer hands you a 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘦 for each — higher means perfectly chewy "QQ" pearls with the right bite (ask a Taiwanese friend to find out what QQ means). Negative scores are real: mushy bobas, overcooked pearls, a batch left sitting too long. How do you turn five chewiness scores into an allocation that adds to a whole dollar? You could spend everything at the chewiest shop, but that ignores how good the runners-up are. Softmax is the smooth alternative. Read the diagram left to right. First, raise each score to e^{x} — this does two things: it turns negative chewiness into small positives, and it stretches the gaps between scores exponentially. Then sum all five into a single total Z. Finally, divide each e^{x} by Z to get a probability. The five probabilities add up to one, so you can read them as percentages of your dollar. The chewiest shop gets the biggest slice — but never the whole dollar. That's the point of softmax: it ranks confidently while still leaving room for the others. = Sigmoid = Sigmoid squashes any real number into a probability between 0 and 1 — the classic activation for binary classification, and still the gating function inside LSTMs and GRUs. Same boba block as the previous Softmax example, narrowed to just two contenders — a hot new shop `a` with chewiness score x, and your usual go-to `b` whose score is pinned at zero (the neutral baseline you've come to expect). Sigmoid is just softmax with two players, one of them pinned to zero. Read the diagram left to right. First, raise each score to e^{x} — for the usual shop `b` whose score is zero, this is just e^0 = 1 (the constant baseline). Then sum the two into a total Z. Finally, divide each e^{x} by Z to get a probability. The two probabilities add up to one — the new shop wins more of your dollar when its pearls get chewier, and your usual keeps the rest. That's the point of sigmoid: it turns a single chewiness score into a clean 0-to-1 chance you'll try the new place over your usual. --- AI Math, Algorithms, Architectures by hand ✍️ Subscribe to my 60K+ reader newsletter 👉 byhand.ai

Foreigner 🎩🪄 I Want To Know What Love Is (1985) A powerhouse ballad that defined an era, with soaring vocals and gospel soul. Happy 76th Birthday to the legendary Lou Gramm, born May 2nd, 1950 🎂🎂🎂 @GrammLou

This is one reason that Toni Morrison reminds me of Nabokov, as I say in ON MORRISON. Oprah once asked her, "Is it true that sometimes people have to read over your work in order to understand it, to get the full meaning?" Morrison replied, "That, my dear, is called reading."

Learning lessons from Jurassic Park

Dirac equation: (i ∂̸ − m) ψ = 0 Heisenberg's Uncertainty relation: Δx · Δp ≥ ħ/2 Schrödinger equation: iħ ∂Ψ/∂t = [−(ħ²/2m) ∇² + V] Ψ

🇪🇬 3,500-year-old Ancient Egyptian geometry papyrus written in Hieratic script. Dating back to the Second Intermediate Period, this work is one of the most tangible examples of mathematical thought in the ancient world.

This site is incredible, all the NASA Artemis photos in one timeline: artemistimeline.com

Having been part of the industry for 50 years, I can confidently report that none of this is true. Sure, writing code has a non-zero cost; this is true of any artifact. But you know what costs even more, Jonathan? Writing bad code; writing unnecessary code; writing more code than you really need simply because you think you might need it someday or you are too lazy or sloppy to clean up after yourself. Anything that costs nothing is often worth nothing as well, and results in significant unintended consequences.

China's rail system in 25 years jumped two centuries It's the same guy on both photos!

Elon Musk is the Ivar Kreuger of our time, and the OpenAI trial is PROVING it in real time. If you don't know who Kreuger was, you should: In the 1920s he was the most admired businessman in the world. The "Match King." He controlled 90% of global match production, lent money to sovereign governments, and his securities were the most widely held in America. But after his death in 1932, auditors spent 5 years untangling over 400 subsidiary companies and discovered the whole thing was held together with fictitious assets, forged bonds, and the unquestioning loyalty of people too dazzled to ask questions. Investors lost $750 million (~$17 billion in today's money). His deficits exceeded Sweden's national debt. Doesn't this sound familiar? The Musk playbook is the most DANGEROUS house of cards I've witnessed in my career. This week in federal court, Musk took the stand to argue that Sam Altman stole a charity. 3 days later he'd contradicted himself under oath so many times that the judge told his lawyers she suspected plenty of people don't want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands. OpenAI's attorney asked if Tesla is pursuing AGI. Musk said no. The attorney then pulled up Musk's OWN post from March 4 where he wrote Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI. His own words entered into evidence against him. BY HIM. Then the attorney asked if xAI used OpenAI's models to train Grok (which violates OpenAI's terms of service). Musk called it a general practice among AI companies. Pressed for a direct answer, he said "partly." Think about that: Musk is in court accusing OpenAI of betrayal while admitting under oath that xAI violated the very same company's terms of service to build Grok. Then came the credibility test: Musk was asked to name his companies that benefit society. He listed Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X without hesitation. Every one of them is an uncapped for-profit enterprise. Then why did xAI start as a benefit corporation and quietly flip to a for-profit C-corp? No clean answer. This is someone who repeatedly launches entities with noble-sounding charters and converts them into for-profit corporations once the money gets serious. Then his money manager Jared Birchall took the stand: OpenAI's lawyer asked about the donor-advised funds at Vanguard and Fidelity that Musk used to send his $38 million. Did Musk have any legal right to direct where the money went once it entered the DAF? Birchall couldn't answer. Said the legal question was beyond his expertise. The entire lawsuit hinges on that donation creating enforceable obligations. But the man who managed Musk's money just told a federal jury he can't confirm Musk had any enforceable claim over those funds. Now step back... This is a man who promised full autonomy by 2018, a million robotaxis by 2020, and unsupervised FSD by June 2025. EVERY deadline was missed. He claimed he invested $100 million in OpenAI. The real number was $38 million. His defense? His "reputation" made up the difference. Kreuger had 400 subsidiaries and used one entity to prop up another through structures nobody could follow. Musk has Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and X. He shifts AI talent from Tesla to xAI, has xAI building the brains for Tesla's Optimus robot, and uses X as a megaphone while the algorithm amplifies his narrative to 200 million followers. Kreuger's investors trusted the man, NOT the math. They loved the confidence. They stopped asking questions because the aura of genius made questioning feel foolish. The same psychology applies to Musk's empire today. Kreuger's reckoning took 5 years of forensic auditing after his death. But Musk is providing his in REAL TIME: contradicting his own posts under oath, admitting to the practices he's suing others for, watching his logic collapse under cross-examination. Different decade. Different industry. Same ending. The truth always catches up.