Where exactly is the line now?
So now if Christian Scientists gain a supermajority in a state legislature, can they outlaw all medical procedures? Or is it only Catholic dogma that gets to do that?
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Trying to make stained glass with DALL-E-2
Scott Alexander’s A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows has some great examples of both the stunning images that OpenAI’s DALL-E-2 system can produce and some of the issues it still has. Some of the problems are fairly straightforward (like text will often come out as well-rendered gibberish) but the most interesting
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Live hearings on the January 6th insurrection
Quick reminder that the House public hearings on the January 6th insurrection will be streaming live at january6th.house.gov starting today at 5pm PDT. You can also get your pick of full live hearings plus commentary from pretty much every national news outlet except Fox News (naturally), who says they’ll only the hearings “as news warrants.”
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Why Pebble failed
Pebble was an early smartwatch company that launched with a successful Kickstarter back in 2012, with a focus on providing a customizable wearable front-end for apps that ran on your phone. They had pretty good success for the first few years, but then started running into cash problems, and eventually ran out of money and
Understanding what happened in Bucha
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has flagged articles from Der Spiegel and the Wall Street Journal that together paint a grim picture of how the Russian occupation of Bucha, Ukraine started as a simple occupation but quickly devolved into hellish war crimes against the civilian population. Sounds like a combination of an undisciplined occupying
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Check out Hugo short story finalist “Unknown Number”
I just learned about “Unknown Number”, a short story by Blue Neustifter that was just named as a finalist for this year’s Hugo Awards for Best Short Story. The story is told as a chat history, and was published on Twitter last summer as a series of screen shots (if you use Twitter’s default web
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Schwarzenegger’s message to the Russian people
A well done message from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Russian people (in many ways reminiscent of his message to the American people shortly after the failed January 6th insurrection last year).
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Old Gods of Appalachia
A while back my friend Jay turned me on to Old Gods of Appalachia, an eldritch horror anthology podcast set in the Appalachian mountains. Steve Shell and Cam Collins (both Virginia natives) weave the idea of ancient evils imprisoned in the mountains with the very real hardships, temptations and injustice experienced by the poor settlers,
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No, the NYT hasn’t made Wordle harder
A few days ago Wordle moved from its old indie spot at www.powerlanguage.co.uk to its new owners at the NYT, and apparently some folks have been grumbling that the words have gotten harder since the switch. And this past week the words have seemed harder both to me and friends and family I swap scores
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Resurrecting DocBug
I started blogging at DocBug back in 2003 as a way to think through my ideas about technology, culture, and whatever else was on my mind that didn’t fit LiveJournal’s vibe. For several years I was posting three to four times a week, sometimes spending hours researching a post, but after I got married and
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