Events

John Scalzi explains why he doesn't write a lot of political posts anymore: [S]o much political messaging these days, particularly on the right, is so performative that engaging with it is also performative, and a furtherance in distributing the original performative messaging. The political right in the United States understands that, inasmuch as it currently lacks a coherent political strategy other than will to power, it must keep its followers forever afraid, and its opponents forever on the...

Yesterday, Cassie and I walked about 11 km and ended the day sitting outside at Spiteful Brewery. In February. Today the weather looks about the same (right now it's 12°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters), but between work and rehearsal tonight I can't just sit on my porch reading. Dang. The forecast predicts it'll stay below freezing from Thursday night until Saturday lunchtime, but hey, it's still February. One March-like day during this stretch of April weather doesn't bother me.

One of my neighbors sent this to the HOA mailing list this morning: Since the guy didn't have a box marked "Acme," and since the rabbit he seems to have under his paw looks quite dead, he's welcome to stay on our block. We'll see a lot more of them in the next few weeks, it turns out. It's coyote cuffing season: Late winter is coyote mating season, which reaches its peak toward the end of February. And that’s leading to more sightings than usual by humans — even in downtown Chicago — as the animals are...

Here we have a typical mid-March temperature profile for Chicago: Of course, that's not from mid-March, that's today. It got up to 9.1°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, without a cloud in the sky, and it looks likely to do the same tomorrow. Cassie got a 5 km walk earlier today and I plan to do 7 km tomorrow. Consequently I won't spend a lot of time banging away at my keyboard this afternoon. Probably not much tomorrow, either.

I've got an open research problem that's a bit hard to define, so I'm exploring a few different avenues of it. I hope reading these count: Dara Massicot performs an autopsy on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Walter Kirn worries about AIs inadvertently training themselves, and the mushy content that will result. Bruce Schneier describes hacking the tax code, which I hope he goes more into in his latest book, currently on my bedside table. The Texas DOT seems to be at war with urbanism, which makes a...

Yeah, I know President Biden gave the State of the Union address on Tuesday night (while I had a rehearsal, it turns out). But I didn't get to hear it until yesterday afternoon, and I didn't get to read it until today. I'm sorry; it was a great Biden speech. Some reactions. First, from one of President Carter's speechwriters, James Fallows: Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night was effective—for him, for his policies, for his party, and I think for the country. Biden’s whole presentation...

With everything else going on in the world, the Chinese balloon that the US shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Monday has gotten a lot of attention. First, Spencer at Legal Eagle takes on the legalities of us shooting it down: Julia Ioffe too: The local photography buff raced to get his camera and used it to snap a photo that quickly went viral. “I had posted a couple of photos just to social media, just joking, like I thought I saw a UFO,” the photographer, Chase Doak, told the local news...

I made a note to myself a while ago that as of today I've had a fitness tracker for 3,000 days. Sadly, my past self got it wrong: I got my first FitBit 3,029 days ago. Oopsi. But it did give me a moment to check my lifetime stats. They don't suck. As of yesterday: Total days: 3,028 Total steps: 40,490, 400 Total distance: 34,076.1 km Goal hit (10,000 steps): 2,771 Minimum hit (5,000 steps): 3,025 Mean daily steps & distance: 13,372, 11.3 km Median daily steps: 12,770, 10.6 km Best 7-day period: 171,122...

My burn-up chart for the current sprint has a "completed" line that nicely intersects the sprint guideline, so I can take a moment this Monday morning to eat lunch and read some news stories: James Fallows has some insight into the near-miss in Austin, Texas, that came uncomfortably close to killing over 100 people. AVWeb has a comment as well. Bruce Schneier lays out how adversaries can attack AIs—by corrupting their training data, among other things. Alex Shepard argues that the English Premier League...

Molly White would like major news outlets to treat the accused fraudster like the grown-ass adult he is: [R]eading headlines and news stories, you would be forgiven if up until now you had thought he was a teenager still driving around on a learner’s permit, who picked up cryptocurrency trading to avoid the types of high school summer jobs that might force him to go outside. SBF is being extended the benefit of the doubt that many are not so lucky to get. He is affluent, white, male, and accused of...