tristram hand shandy

@dimestorewatch

naarm (melbourne aus). lefty nerd/gay villain/whisky robot. pfp by @thxnywy.art

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tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· 1d

the perfect canned bean: just tasty enough that you can eat them unflavoured if you're stressed/lazy, but not so tasty that you can't add whatever you like to them. Go forth, traveller, and seek the bean

photo of empty can of al wadi fava beans and chickpeas in brine

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· 1d

the guardian guy who hosted the channel 4 program underwent screening, was diagnosed, took stimulants, found they made him less chatty, and seems to have presented this as evidence of the ADHD Myth

Pemberton himself undergoes a £1,200 private assessment and comes away with a diagnosis of “combined” ADHD (impulsivity, hyperactivity, inattentiveness) and a prescription for medication. He takes a dose to see what it’s like and reports feeling blunted, not wanting to chat as he usually does (“The fact you’re here is quite irritating actually,” he tells the crew) and feeling as if he could happily sit quietly alone. It’s a

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· 10d

screenshot of linked post: Almost every recommender is trained to minimise a prediction error, get the rating wrong by as little as possible, or maximise the chance you click. But the problem is that under squared-error loss, the prediction that minimises your expected error is the conditional mean. So an algorithm that is uncertain about you, and it is always at least a little uncertain, hedges toward the average. The more uncertain it is, the harder it pulls you toward the crowd. This is why more data doesn’t save us. Personalisation under a standard loss function is regression to the collective mean with extra steps. Variance, the technical word for the stuff that makes you you, is expensive to predict. Basically, diversity is variance, and optimisers are built to minimise variance.

What makes this political economy (and hence why I decided to write about it) is that the system doesn’t have to be right, it only has to be listened to. A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· 17d

"Defendant summary" button with MS Paint-ass cartoon robber icon

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Jul 17

great news: birds are probably having fun up there

screenshot of article header in BRILL: "Do birds enjoy flying? An analysis of affect after flight in galah (Eolophus roseicapilla)
In: Behaviour
Authors: Jorg J.M. Massen.."

screenshot of article text: "In sum, in this study we investigated whether galahs enjoy flying. To assess positive affect after flight, we examined three different components of affect; i.e. cognition, behaviour and physiology. We found that 2 of these components indeed suggest an increase of a positive emotional state in these birds when compared with the same birds when they were not allowed to fly. Specifically, we showed that the birds consistently choose to fly when given the opportunity, indicating that flight is highly preferred by these birds, and that behaviours indicative of (positive) arousal increased after flight. In addition, we showed that these birds were more likely to show optimisms after consecutive days of flight, while being more pessimistic after continuous days on which they were not allowed to fly freely. Our results should not only provide evidence for the fundamental discussion about whether animals have emotions or not, but should also lead the way in the search for ways to account for animal emotions in decisions regarding animal welfare (Boissy et al.,.."

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Jul 3

a Netiquette merit patch with a smiley face and checkmarks next to POSITIVE, KIND and SAFE

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Jun 23

this situation sucks and/or blows, and other vacuum cleaner words. makes me so mad i could download a car so I bought an appropriate shirt about it xx

order receipt for "drive it like you downloaded it" shirt

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Jun 15

💕💕💕 beautiful and i can see cookiemoji

picture of cookie edited to reveal smiley face

picture of cookie edited to reveal winky face

picture of cookie edited to reveal frowny face

picture of cookie edited to reveal bunny face

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Jun 14

shout out to all of us slow cookers staring longingly at inaccessible treats, like victorian orphans at a bakery window

will my husband ever return from war meme roughly edited to say will my food ever return from cook

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· May 29

gotta make a bot that automatically adds text like this

above pic of keith David but with sloppily added bright green text superimposed, reading "still alive btw! :)"

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· May 28

so many pull quotes but I'm going with this one

Sikand said today’s young investors are fascinated with Anduril, the weapons start-up founded by Palmer Luckey, the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing designer of virtual-reality headsets. Anduril is the first defense company “to build beautiful lethal products,” Sikand said. “They have an amazing YouTube channel where they play heavy-metal music and show the confluence of Silicon Valley and defense in a way that gets people really patriotic.”

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· May 25

to be clear -i am the person she spoke to -there was no other guy to speak to -she doesn't have a manager named greg -nobody in my department or any related department is named greg -am i gregnant

Photo of email on computer screen reading "Hello, I attended an AI enablement meeting this week and spoke with Greg"

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· May 16

note: using "he" for the friend could sound gay and using "she" could imply respecting women enough to be friends with them. the only option left was singular they, which their target audience thinks should be illegal

screenshot of text from quoted post: "you hand a drink to a friend seeing your place for the first time. There is always a brief pause where the conversation drops and they look around to see who you actually are behind closed doors."

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· May 15

first try:

screenshot of mino.mobi where I have drawn an admittedly not great circle, which is identified by the app as "Triangle - 0% regularity"

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· May 9

my search for umami got me thinking about u, mami

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 27

boss asked me about my weekend in a meeting this morning and i did in fact start saying stuff re the metro tunnel because that's what i was thinking about

screenshot of Free Press headline "I Thought I Was Autistic. I Was Wrong" except "Wrong" has been megalazily mspaint-edited to say "correct"

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 25

skeet from me, May 12 2024: "has someone already opened a repair cafe/ttrpg space called Greater Restoration because if not im calling dibs"

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 25

"The rally is also... very reliant on the continued dominance of Big Tech... The Philadelphia Semiconductor index has not had a single down day in April and is up by a stonking 30 per cent in this month alone. Rightly or wrongly, we once again have a lot riding on this one, highly uncertain, theme."

line graphs illustrating that philadelphia semiconductor index is up 30% since before the Iran war

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 22

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 17

this is also me btw (except I am ambivalent about ani difranco)

I think these people are soulless. They are empty. Hollow. Watching people get away with murder (often literally) is so difficult to swallow that it actually makes me hope the afterlife they profess to believe in is real. It would be appropriate for them to suffer in eternity for their actions. But right now on Earth, the psychic damage of watching them surge ahead has given rise to a strange new feeling in me. It’s not faith, but it’s a feeling that humans can be a great deal better than this.

I won’t ever get to a place of religion, but I find myself feeling more connected to other good people. It’s making me seek out people who care, who want to look after each other and Earth herself. This is not because I’m some hippy goodwill-to-all-creatures Ani DiFranco lesbian (although I love Ani DiFranco, am a lesbian and enjoy quite a few creatures). I am no Dominican Sister of Mary with a gentle nature, sweet thoughts and ultimate Frisbee skills. I want the world to be better, and I am angry at the people making it worse. I want them to face consequences, but none are forthcoming, so I find myself drawn into a powerful moral solidarity with other people, one that seems to resemble spirituality, a kind of non-religious faith in each other.

Those who can need to push back against the darkness – not to get into heaven or avoid hell, but because it’s the right thing to do. And Sister, you could be so good at that.

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 13

looks like my ex is doing great. I'm soooo happy for her

screenshot of al-jazeera article: "Dated Brent last week hit an all-time high of more than $144 a barrel – about $35 above the price of Brent futures."

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 11

@cheatlines.co Tip Tinner

pic of (soldering iron) tip tinner in a tin on a checked background

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 9

one big wife

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 6

me hearing that the moon, which is big & gay, is also brown:

David lynch tweet: "I'm pretty sure I'm connected to the moon."

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Apr 2

tweet from @elonmusk dated 03 Apr 22: "They wrote PEACE on the wall at Berghain! I refused enter."

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Mar 21

author has QPs turned off but I wanted to highlight these final paragraphs of the Kill Chain piece: artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/kill-chain...

Congress did not authorize this war. In three weeks, American forces struck six thousand targets. The school was one of them. American forces killed almost 200 people, and the reporting reached for “AI error,” which domesticated the event into something a better algorithm or better guardrails could have prevented. In the days after the strike, the charisma of AI organized the entire political conversation around the technology: whether Claude hallucinated, whether the model was aligned, whether Anthropic bore responsibility for its deployment. The constitutional question of who authorized this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question that is easier to ask and impossible to answer in the terms it set. The Claude debate absorbed the energy. That is what charisma does.

It has also occluded something deeper. The philosopher Mark Wilson has observed that concepts often appear stable while the work they do shifts entirely as they move between domains. He calls this “wandering significance.”41 “Decision” is wandering now. In the military context it means the system’s output, a targeting nomination scored and forwarded. In journalism and tech criticism it means much the same, the thing the AI got wrong. In neither of these does it mean what it used to mean, which is a person choosing to do something for which they could be held accountable. People are still making decisions in that sense. Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces a thousand targeting decisions per hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an “AI problem” gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide.

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Mar 11

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Mar 3

every single time it's all i see. equally convincing and fated to receive equally mixed to average reviews

promo image for Justin Timberlake's 2018 album man of the woods, featuring the dancy boyband guy looking about as authentically rugged as buttigieg in the quoted post

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Mar 2

me after uploading the metacog md with ${substance} set to methylphenidate

screencap of matrix neo saying "I know kung fu" but kung fu is edited to dopamine

tristram hand shandy@dimestorewatch· Jan 9

unknown computer gremlins apparently