GRADS, CONGRATS, and if you are the Indiana University student who put this on your mortar board for your ceremony, please DM me so that we may figure out a way for me to buy you every last beer or cocktail you would like to consume to properly celebrate your graduation.
A pair of really sweet uploads in the last bit of time: Two Pacific Bell specialized home phone catalogs, encouraging you to break out of the standard telephones (that they offered) into a plastic insane world of pure 1980s kitsch.
The Burlington, #Vermont, area where I live is right in the path of totality for the solar eclipse coming up on April 8, 2024. Naturally there is a great amount of excitement! (And hopefully we don’t have a cloudy day… hard to know… it’s April!)
I was greatly amused to see that one of our local churches is selling T-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts with a distinctly Vermont flavor! 🤣🐄 🐮
> OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
This is such an incredibly bad definition from OpenAI that hours after reading it I still can't believe they'd pick something so bad.
prosperity gospel-ass definition that fully lines up with the brainwormy tech shit effective altruists seem to keep churning out though, so sure why not.
I've podcasted and written a lot about the Christian Right, but wait until you hear about TESCREALism, a new post-libertarian parareligion based on the very worst scifi
It's totally insane, but many of the world's richest people have bought into it. It's like Scientology for oligarchs, minus the centralization.
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and many others seem to be devotees.
@mattsheffield Another religion that tells rich people they don't really have to care about this world because there's a magic world in which they will live forever.
@universalhub Probably only for song parodies. I did a huge "Ship Titanic" thing describing the decline of The Bird Site and I'm still dissatisfied with one of the rhymes.
NASA is sending a software update to the Voyager 2 spacecraft today!
The patch contains logic to auto-recover from glitches similar to one in May 2022, when the AACS system on Voyager 1 started sending garbled data. The root cause was not fully diagnosed. The patch will be activated/tested on Oct 28. Voyager 1 will be next.
Data will be sent at 16 bps with a 19 kW transmitter using the 70-m dish at @canberradsn.
Distance: 20 billion km; 18:40 light hours