Patrick LaForge

@palafo

“There is a true person of no rank who is always coming and going through the portals of your face.” — Linji Yixuan Writer, reader, watcher, cyclist, walker, meditator, enjoyer of things, ex-nyt, he/him . Signal: Palafo.38

2.483 Folgt15.189 Follower5.738 Posts

Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir palafo.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Patrick LaForge@palafo· 23d

Bow down!

Patrick LaForge@palafo· 23d

So I mostly buy ebooks, used books or I go to the library but @colsonwhitehead.com is one of the few authors who rates a hardcover. Mainly for his extensive knowledge of furniture styles of the 60s, 70s and 80s

Book cover: Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead, signed edition from the Strand in Manhattan

Patrick LaForge@palafo· 24d

The monocle is the least of it. Is that the funny part?

Heathcliff on stilts with a monocle and a balloon that says "bro." One bird to another: "When did he start wearing a monocle?"

Patrick LaForge@palafo· 24d

I don’t know how this guy was doing this, especially on such a warm day

Human statue perfectly still in Washington Square Park, on a bike with rear wheel off the ground

Patrick LaForge@palafo· 26d

“Wicked!”

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jul 15

Ok bro

Heathcliff in ice cream shop: Bro
Caption: “that’s our most popular flavor”

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jul 13

What

Heathcliff the cat on a boat. The fish sat bro. Caption: “I thought he was crazy.”

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jul 11

I don’t get it

Heathcliff the comic’s titular orange cat and a mummy with surfboards are walking on the beach. Caption: “fun, sun and the summer mummy”

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jul 9

Heathcliff used to be funny but something happened

Heathcliff the cat walking on a front sidewalk in a yam costume in the June 19 strip. Three birds say “yam.” Three humans watch from a window. Caption: “Yam.”

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jul 9

I asked Claude about this

LLMs struggle with math for a few structural reasons:

- **Tokenization mangles numbers.** Models don't see digits individually--they see chunks like "347" or "89" as tokens, sometimes inconsistently split. This makes reliable place-value arithmetic (carrying, borrowing) harder than it should be.
- **They predict text, not compute.** An LLM generates the most statistically plausible next token based on patterns in training data, not by running an algorithm. Basic arithmetic can be "memorized" from seeing similar examples, but this breaks down fast as numbers get larger or problems get more novel.
- **No working memory or scratch space (by default).** Multi-step calculations require tracking intermediate state precisely. Humans use pen and paper; a model has to hold everything in its forward pass or context window, which is lossy for anything nontrivial.

Errors compound. In a long calculation, one wrong digit early on cascades through everything after it, and the model has no built-in way to “notice” and self-correct mid-generation.

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jul 2

Incredible footnote to the story of the East Side Gallery: Most of the artists returned in 2009 to repaint the murals after the restoration work destroyed them

The East Side Gallery was restored in 2008/09. In the process of renovating the masonry, most of the paintings were lost.
The artists then repainted them. Five artists did not take part.
Their Wall parts are now painted in the colour of the Berlin Wall
before 1989.
www.eastsidegalleryausstellung.de

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jul 2

Happy 250th birthday to an imperfect country that in its best moments inspired people to risk their lives to flee and fight authoritarianism. Detail from a mural on a remnant of the Berlin Wall:

Detail from the East Side Gallery in Berlin showing US Flag imagery, from murals on a remnant of the infamous Berlin Wall (1961-1989), that the Soviet’s and their puppet state in East Germany built to keep people from fleeing to freedom

Patrick LaForge@palafo· May 27

Little lost Waymo in Manhattan.

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Apr 27

Move over, Mamdani.

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Apr 5

They flutter out of my old books, reminders of dead bookshops

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Feb 15

Looks pretty good

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Feb 14

Vonnegut told it better

Joe Heller

True story, Word of Honor:_
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,_
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"_
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!

-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , The New Yorker, May 26, 2005

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Feb 12

Thinking about it

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jan 30

What’s up, NYC? I hope these are ironic purchases. Surely you have better things to do on a Friday night. Your hair, your nails, cleaning the litter boxes…

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jan 30

“That’s called journalism” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/u...

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jan 11

Empire State Building

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jan 11

Bob Weir is gone. Bob Weir is gone. Flight of the seabirds, scattered like lost words

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jan 4

The parallels in the first grafs…

power-hungry president had twisted the government into a tool for his personal political benefit. His aides kept an “enemies list” of opponents to be punished. His cronies ran the Justice Department and he made puppets of other agencies that were meant to be independent. Corporations that wanted favorable treatment from the White House were pressured to make illegal contributions to the president’s political coffers.

As revelations of rot in the Nixon administration tumbled out through the 1970s, Senator Lawton Chiles, Democrat of Florida, captured the alarm of the Watergate era: “Nothing will bring the Republic to its knees so quickly as a bone-deep mistrust of the government by its own people,” he said. “We have seen other democracies fall within our own lifetime. Fall through internal corruption rather than outside invasion.”

The Watergate scandal had convulsed the nation. Coming near the end of the disastrous war in Vietnam, the scandal sent trust in the presidency into a tailspin. The sense of shock and shame prompted an extraordinary period of bipartisan congressional activism to impose checks on the power of the presidency.

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Jan 4

On the NYT print front page today, Matt Purdy gives a master class on how Trump has revived and exceeded the corruption of Nixon’s imperial presidency, blowing past ethical checkpoints of the Watergate era. Gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/u...

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Dec 25

They have now moved as far away as possible. (We are waiting for the rest of the household to wake up.)

A gray cat (Max) and a black and white cat (Audrey) sit at the far end of an apartment building hallway. They are 10 years old and have recently taken up exploring.

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Dec 25

Merry Catmas from the apartment building hallway to those who celebrate

A black cat cleans herself and a grey cat lounges on the carpet in an otherwise empty hallway in an apartment building

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Dec 24

Locally in NY, Cafe Grumpy has some tasty decaf beans and also sells this… not your grandpa’s instant coffee. OK in a pinch

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Dec 4

My Spotify yearly stats are skewed because I stream in a lot of other places but 233 genres and a “listening age” under 40… I’ll take it

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Dec 3

Generation generalization is bullshit yet I do care about this point www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/t...

Still, a 2017 Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies article placed Gen X at 1965 to 1984, recasting four years of millennials as Gen X-ers, in part because “using 20-year age spans for each generation” makes it “easier to compare them.” It also renders much generational theorizing meaningless.

The original Gen X-ers offer some clarity: Douglas Coupland, the author of the 1991 novel “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” which gave the cohort its name, was born in 1961. The title, he’s said, was inspired by the cultural historian Paul Fussell’s “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System” (1983), in which Fussell designates an “X” category of people who, as Coupland once put it, “wanted to hop off the merry-go-round of status, money and social climbing that so often frames modern existence” — an inclination shared by the trio of disengaged characters in Coupland’s book. The media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, who edited 1994’s “The GenX Reader,” was also born in 1961; he tells me he’s part of “original Gen X … the Michael Stipe generation of Gen X-ers,” referring to the R.E.M. frontman (who was born in 1960), and agrees the dates have been retroactively tweaked. When I reach the other Gen X Doug — Coupland — by phone in Vancouver, he simplifies the entire issue for me: “If you were born in the ’60s and you don’t remember the J.F.K. assassination, you’re X. Boom, it’s a given.” I am unaccountably relieved. It would have been a tad too Gen X if the person who coined the term was excluded from it.
Image

Patrick LaForge@palafo· Nov 27

Serendipity of the social graph