andeux

@weedatman

Berkeleyan. Lover of groovy music (jazz and rock).#BillsMafia 🦬, Buffalo Sabres, formerly Oakland A's. Math nerd, programmer. Crossword junkie. Part-time 🐈cat bed. Reader.Modified free-form bocce player. Also @andeux@sfba.social

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Bluesky

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

andeux@weedatman· 23d

San Francisco Mime Troupe on point as usual. #sfmt

The San Francisco Mime Troupe stage with characters holding signs reading "Fight for your Freedom," "Close the Camps," "Tax the Church," and "AI is a con game perpetrated on our society by greedy sociopaths only interested in squeezing all the investments they can from greedy capitalists before the bubble bursts!"

andeux@weedatman· 23d

I hope the neighbors are OK

A house covered in Argentina soccer banners, flags, and jerseys.

andeux@weedatman· 25d

A couple shots of Sex Mob (or if Steven Bernstein insists, Sexmob) from last night at SFJazz. Liberty Ellman, Steven Bernstein, Kenny Wollesen, Tony Scherr, Briggan Krauss. #jazzsky

Sex Mob (or Sexmob) on stage at SFJazz. Liberty Ellman, Steven Bernstein, Kenny Wollesen, Tony Scherr, and Briggan Krauss.

Steven Bernstein playing his slide trumpet.

andeux@weedatman· 26d

I thought of you as soon as I saw the grid, which for me even came up in this order:

andeux@weedatman· Jul 13

Apparently the Spelling Bee does not know any brewers.

Picture of the NYT spelling bee game with "KEGGING" shown as "not in word list."

andeux@weedatman· Jun 27

A fan in a Buffalo Bills 32 "ALLEGEDLY" jersey

andeux@weedatman· Jun 26

Beat my previous personal best for a Friday NYT puzzle by 15 seconds.

Congratulations! You solved a Friday Crossword in 3:25.

andeux@weedatman· Jun 23

Math jokes!

"OK, a million in front, plus half of the gross receipts after gross equals 2.71828 times the negative cost."
Sid's tan faded to a kind of fragile bisque. "Strange multiple," he choked.
"Sounds real natural to me,"

andeux@weedatman· Jun 23

Who the fuck wants this?

On June 19, a new high-protein, low-calorie, no-added-sugar ice cream shop debuted...

andeux@weedatman· Jun 22

This description of Brock Vond echoes Dorothy Thompson's description of "Mr. C" in her famous "Who Goes Nazi?" essay from 1941.

He'd caught a fatal glimpse of that level where everybody knew everybody else, where however political fortunes below might bloom and die, the same people, the Real Ones, remained year in and year out, keeping what was desirable flowing their way. Prosecutor Vond wanted a life there, only slowly coming to understand that for someone of his background there would be no route to this but self-abasement, fawning, gofering, scrambling for tips and offering other such hints of his eagerness to be brevetted on life's battlefield to a rank higher than he would ever, by the terms of his enlistment, have deserved. Though his defects of character were many, none was quite as annoying as this naked itch to be a gentleman, kept inflamed by a stubborn denial of what everyone else knew — that no matter how much money he made, how many political offices or course credits from charm school might come his way, no one of those among whom he wished to belong would ever regard him as other than a thug whose services had been hired.

He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him — or his wife— to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him — he despises, for instance, Mr. B — because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy.

andeux@weedatman· Jun 22

Another passage from #Vineland extremely relevant to our present times. (And note in both cases it is women who are so clear-eyed about these political realities).

"Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it — dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity — I don't like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.? If the President can act like that, why not Brock?"
"You always did look at things more historically. What I just figure is is he's a mean mother fucker, that's a technical term, and a lot of these MMF's as we call 'em tend to be spoilers which if there's somethin' they can't have, or they know they've already lost, why, they'll just go try and destroy as much as they can anyway, till it's over."
"But what if it keeps going?" inquired Prairie, "what if he hasn't
'lost'?"

andeux@weedatman· Jun 19

Welcome to #Berkeley home of the Tesla with an anti-Elon sticker on it.

A Tesla cybertruck with a sticker with Elon's face with a red slash through it.

A Tesla with a sticker saying "Bought it before I knew how awful he is"

A Tesla with a sticker saying "ELON" with a red slash through it.

andeux@weedatman· Jun 18

Doing a third read of #Vineland, after (finally) watching One Battle After Another. Obviously it is extremely relevant to our times, but I had forgotten just how direct Pynchon can occasionally be.

After a while her thoughts started falling into place. The injustices she had seen in the streets and fields, so many, too many times gone unanswered - she began to see them more directly, not as world history or anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here on the planet, often well within reach, committing these crimes, major and petty, one by one against other living humans. Maybe we all had to submit to History, she figured, maybe not - but refusing to take shit from some named and specified source - well, it might be a different story.

andeux@weedatman· Jun 14

Seriously though, I've seen my share of geriatric rock stars and it's pretty remarkable how good a show 85-year-old Bob and his band still manage to put on. It's a vibe, as the kids these days say.

Bob Dylan and his band at the Berkeley Greek Theatre.

andeux@weedatman· Jun 4

Shout out to the fan of "The Main Ten," "Pump Song," and "Happiness is Drumming." (Actually a bit surprised Hornsby didn't make the list.)

Editor's Note:
The combined individual vote totals for members of the Grateful Dead might rank roughly here. Unfortunately, if you discard votes for members (or combinations of members) who are no longer living, you would be left with only a handful for the Grateful Dead as an entity and one for the percussionist Mickey Hart.

andeux@weedatman· Jun 4

As always, Douglas Adams FTW:

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating the obvious... At first Ford formed a theory to account for this human behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

andeux@weedatman· May 31

Bob Weir in tie-dyed and mustachioed disguise to go into the lot incognito.

andeux@weedatman· May 19

In addition to the "Kelly's Heroes" poster shown above there was also the "Machine Gun Kelly" one from around the same time (late '80s). Bills fans ate this shit up (and we still do.)

"Machine Gun Kelly" poster, with Jim Kelly dressed in a suit taking a football out of a violin case in front of a vintage car.

andeux@weedatman· May 18

Let's also acknowledge the OG, Old Hoss Radbourn.

Major league pitcher Old Hoss Radbourne giving the finger in a team photo from 1886, the first documented flipping of a bird.

andeux@weedatman· May 17

andeux@weedatman· Apr 14

Nicely charred hot dog with Weber's mustard, diced onions, and a pickle, with a side of onion rings, from Ted's.

andeux@weedatman· Apr 11

I did laugh at this anecdote, even though it comes from a Musk friend. But it is frustrating to see so many otherwise good articles like this focused on the business details but missing the larger issues with OpenAI and its competitors. (8/8)

Altman has at least two hypercars: an all-white Koenigsegg Regera, worth about two million dollars, and a red McLaren F1, worth about twenty million dollars. In 2024, Altman was spotted driving the Regera through Napa. A few seconds of video made its way onto social media: Altman in a low-slung bucket seat, peering out the window of a gleaming white machine. A tech investor aligned with Musk posted the footage on X, writing, “I’m starting a nonprofit next.”

andeux@weedatman· Apr 11

There is one paragraph toward the end that addresses some of these concerns, the only time issues like slop, suicide, or scams (in this context) are even mentioned. An earlier quote about Altman being a potential con man is most focused on the business side, not the tech. (7/)

A.I. doomers have been pushed to the fringes, but some of their fears seem less fantastical with each passing month. In 2020, according to a U.N. report, an A.I. drone was used in the Libyan civil war to fire deadly munitions, possibly without oversight by a human operator. Since then, A.I. has only become more central to military operations around the world, including, reportedly, in the current U.S. campaign in Iran. In 2022, researchers at a pharmaceutical company tested whether a drug-discovery model could be used to find new toxins; within a few hours, it had suggested forty thousand deadly chemical-warfare agents. And many more mundane harms are already coming to pass. We increasingly rely on A.I. to help us write, think, and navigate the world, accelerating what experts call “human enfeeblement”; the ubiquity of A.I. “slop” makes life easier for scammers and harder for people who simply want to know what’s real. A.I. “agents” are starting to act independently, with little or no human supervision. Days before the 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary, thousands of voters received robocalls from an A.I.-generated deepfake of Joe Biden’s voice, telling them to save their votes for November and stay home—an act of voter suppression requiring virtually no technical expertise. OpenAI is now facing seven wrongful-death lawsuits, which allege that ChatGPT prompted several suicides and a murder. Chat logs in the murder case show that it encouraged a man’s paranoid delusion that his eighty-three-year-old mother was surveilling and trying to poison him. Soon afterward, he fatally beat and strangled her and stabbed himself. (OpenAI is fighting the lawsuits, and says that it’s continuing to improve its model’s safeguards.)

The senior executive at Microsoft said, of Altman, “I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

andeux@weedatman· Apr 11

As is often the case, this means that the discussions of "AI safety" are mostly about doomsday scenarios of how to prevent this powerful technology from falling into the hands of dictators or from autonomously wiping out humanity on its own. (4/)

Around this time, a former employee told us, Sutskever “was getting super safety-pilled.” In the early days of OpenAI, he had considered concerns about catastrophic risk legitimate but remote. Now, as he came to believe that A.G.I. was imminent, his worries grew more acute. There was an all-hands meeting, the former employee continued, “where Ilya gets up and he’s, like, Hey, everyone, there’s going to be a point in the next few years where basically everyone at this company has to switch to working on safety, or else we’re fucked.” But the superalignment team was dissolved the following year, without completing its mission.

andeux@weedatman· Apr 11

But those are all arguments among people who are mostly in agreement that LLMs constitute an imminent path to "artificial general intelligence" and will soon (though always at least 6 months away, of course) be immensely powerful. (3/)