Cowboy Who?

#Kento #RoninWarriors

#Kento #RoninWarriors

Go to a commercial! #CowboyWho

Let's make it! with Norma the Crafts Lady! #CowboyWho

Bobby no! Charlotte, you let him slip through your fingers.

The post Brazen fantasist appeared first on Bad Machinery.

New comic!

Let's not pretend we're not in mythological Greece here.

OTTAWA – Following a heartbreaking 2-1 loss to Team USA at the Winter Olympics, viewers nationwide started a rewatch of the hockey romance series, Heated Rivalry, in search of a more uplifting version of Canadian male hockey players getting screwed. “It was so frustrating watching all these guys trying to score on Hellebuyck, but he […]

The post Nation returns to Heated Rivalry to watch Canadians get fucked in a good way appeared first on The Beaverton.

A year ago, I wrote a piece about the asymptotic nature of intelligence and the limits of AI. It’s long been my contention that intelligence is not boundless; it doesn’t shoot up an infinite curve to the stratosphere. Rather, there is an upper limit on what can be known and the inferences that can be made based on what’s known. That is: a complete understanding of the universe may theoretically be possible. It’s also possible that to simulate this amount of knowledge, you basically need to build a second universe in which to house it. (The old cartography joke is that the best map is a one-to-one representation).

What would it look like to approach the asymptote of intelligence? A whole lot like the last year. Before you read any further, I highly recommend watching the following video:

The video is about OpenAI and ChatGPT, but it would be about whatever company had seized the low-hanging fruit of LLM scaling, projected infinite scaling onwards, and believed their own hype. The AI bubble is about to pop, and it’s mostly going to pop because too many people in Silicon Valley believed Ray Kurzweil’s inane hypothesis that intelligence is infinite and we are going to blast right through human intelligence toward something alien and godlike. This became an unspoken religion, a race toward “singularity” and AGI. It has always been based on a supposition for which there is no evidence — but plenty of desire.

One of the comments on the YouTube video above summed it up nicely: TonyGrayCanada wrote: “Scaling LLMs to get to AGI is like using a ladder to get to heaven. The length of the ladder isn’t the problem.”

The length of the ladder isn’t the problem.

And the problem might not be that we simply need a different way to get there. The problem most likely is that there’s no such thing as heaven. No infinite intelligence. No alien mind that will usher us into the fabled singularity.

However … what’s coming and what’s here is amazing enough, and I think this point gets lost in the crazy hype curves. The human brain is ASTOUNDING. We evolved from single-celled organisms on a wet ball in the middle of the cosmos, and then one day we peered deep into the cell to discover the helix of DNA, the atoms that make up those helixes, the quarks that make up those atoms. We also gazed out into the infinite expanse and figured out black holes and neutron stars and came up with some decent guesses about what holds it all together.

THIS IS BONKERS and we don’t talk about it enough. A jiggling of atoms became self-replicating and later figured out a whole lot about quarks and the cosmos. If you look at our origin and where we are, and you assume a theoretical limit to what can be known, we are most likely closer to the limit than we are to complete ignorance. We’re most of the way there. We built cities out of mud, and all the miracles within them. Some hairless apes. It’s crazy.

And AI is getting crazy, because it speeds up all the amazing things that humans can do. Writing computer code is slow and laborious. AI is automating that. In the next few years, we will reach a point where you might not purchase an application to solve a problem, you’ll just create your own application. (Or, most likely, your AI agent will be aware of the dozens of free apps others have already made to solve this problem and suggest or tweak an existing one).

Some define AGI as human-level intelligence, in which case we are already there. It might be funny to point out a hallucination here, or a logical error there, but for every example of AI getting something wrong, another model gets it right or the wrong model has already improved. Humans get things wrong all the time. Optical illusions persist even after being told what’s happening. Superstition exists even with all our scientific progress. And we hallucinate constantly.

The LLMs of today are more than capable of replicating what the human brain does, which is miraculous enough. New breakthroughs in physics are now coming from AI systems. Brand new math proofs. New medicines from complex protein folding. These are all things humans can do and would eventually get to ourselves, but AI is speeding up cognition and helping us get there a bit faster. Silicon Valley is betting the farm on this. But most of humanity is asking, “So what?”

The “So what?” is critical and should not be ignored. An LLM can already devise a better system of governance which will bring the most good to the most number of people. It can do that today. Right now. In mere minutes. But so can we! The fact that we don’t and can’t has nothing to do with what’s possible in our technology and everything to do with what’s wrong in our biology. We are petty, insecure, jealous, superstitious animals. We are already at the point where we would be better off automating our decision-making with an LLM. If an LLM had control over me, it would eat healthier, exercise more regularly, make fewer mistakes, know a whole lot more about the universe, how to fix things, how to be witty, it would write this blog post better and do it in an eyeblink.

So what?

Computers are already better than me at chess, and yet I continue to play. They built a robot that can play billiards almost perfectly, and yet I love chalking up a cue and the crack of a ball knocking another into a leather pocket. There’s a human out there who is better than me at anything I can do, and yet it feels good to do many of those things. We are jiggling bundles of atoms with feelings and moods, and we’re going to keep indulging in them and falling prey to them.

Earlier I pointed out that there’s a finite limit to what can be known about the universe. But there is no upper limit to creativity. We can be weird and avant-garde in a way that physics can’t. Physics is a set of rules and a pattern of ordering matter. Understanding the universe is a quest to simplify those rules and to grasp all the possible states of matter. Creativity is a wild exploration of all the things that aren’t possible. It’s infinite because it comes from randomness. Knowledge is finite because it comes from order.

A perfect future, where humans and their technology reach a kind of symbiotic homeostasis, would be one in which machines handle all the order that humans aren’t interested in, freeing up more time to engage in randomness. That doesn’t mean an end to work, because what many of us do for play qualifies for work by some other person. At times, doing the dishes feels like play for me. My hands want to be there, getting wet, removing grime, deriving aesthetic pleasure from watching a thing become clean and dry, ready to use again. There is no end to play or creativity.

This perfect future would be full of enough robot doctors that any injury or illness is seen to immediately. It will also include lots of human doctors who are doing the same thing becasue for them it is play. It will be full of AI-written novels that readers enjoy, but also human authors who can’t stop writing for the pleasure of it. The income side of things will be solved, because everyone will have food, shelter, security, healthcare, and all the necessities. But some will have more than others, because we are still moody little bundles of atoms. And some will try to harm others for the same reasons. But things will get better and better for the vast majority of people.

That’s a future we could design and work towards right now, with existing technology and wealth. But … of course we won’t do that. We aren’t that far evolved, and we may never be far enough evolved. What’s more likely is that our societies will crumble because we couldn’t be human to one another. Men will continue to backslide into the barbarism from which we came, built on aggression and fear, and women will keep making the decision to have less to do with us and more to do with themselves and one-another. Population collapse will accelerate; we will reach a point where economies contract, leading to wars of aggression and aggrievance. Pockets of rationality will make progress again, much like the Greeks among the Romans, and that progress will be seized and used to build toward what we have today, where it will collapse again. The oscillations will speed up because lost knowledge will be rediscovered more quickly from the artifacts left behind. Eventually, one of these oscillations will stumble upon a technology that can put an end to us all, and one among us will deploy it immediately. Leaving the Earth for some future hairless ape to have a go at it.

The limit holding us back will never be the limits of AI, but rather the limits of our biology. Can we stop hurting ourselves and others? Can we expand our circles of empathy until they include every living thing and even most non-living things. Can we be satisfied with less than our neighbors if it means we all have the basic necessities of life? I’m an atheist, and the 10 commandments start off with some very weak sauce about fearing no other god and what not to believe, but even I can see that most of our problems would be solved if we lived by the rest of what’s there. No lying. No jealousy. No killing. We’ve had all the answers for thousands of years. We still can’t abide by them.

This is why OpenAI is in trouble, why the AI bubble will burst, and why AGI will not fix everything. We know what to do. How to live. How to solve all our problems. There’s no deficiency in our brains. The problem is and always has been our hearts.

The post The Limits of AI appeared first on Hugh Howey.

In brief: The massive winter storm that will bear down on much of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic is about to kick off, so this post just runs through the expectations at the final hour.

Hopefully you all were able to watch Team USA take the gold this morning, and if you love cold and winter, the day should only get better for you in the Northeast and parts of the Mid-Atlantic. Here, we’ll walk you through the various expectations now that we’re in the final moments before the storm really begins.

Snow totals

This should not be a major storm in the DC Metro, though a few inches are possible.

Snow totals begin to ramp as you approach the northwest and east side of the Chesapeake Bay. Around a half-foot is expected in Baltimore with higher totals to the east, rapidly escalating to 12 to 18 inches from Salisbury, MD north across all of Delaware. A period of mixing near the coast may hold totals down there a bit, particularly around Ocean City, MD.

Snow totals really crank once into New Jersey with 12 to 24 inches likely in all of South Jersey. The riskiest spots for lower totals may be in Cape May County up to about Atlantic City and for the Delaware Beaches where a period of sleet or rain may mix in with the snow for a time, cutting totals down a little. There will still be a *lot* of snow.

The gold medal winners for this snowstorm will probably be somewhere in Ocean or Monmouth Counties in New Jersey or just southwest of there, where we could, theoretically, see someone pick up nearly 25 inches of snow. We’ve seen some models put out 30-inch totals here, but I do think snow ratios may hinder that effort a bit. Likely someone between Salem County and Monmouth County will pick up 25 inches or more when all is said and done and be crowned champion. Elsewhere, 12 to 20 inches of snow is likely across most of the rest of New Jersey.

Around 20 inches of snow is expected for most of the New York City Metro with closer to 12 to 18 inches up into Connecticut and perhaps higher totals on Long Island. To make the top 10 list all-time for snowstorms in New York City, we’ll need to see at least 18.2 inches at Central Park. We need 14.1 inches for the top 20 list.

Snow totals will remain around 20 inches in southeast New England, with both Providence and Boston likely to come close to there. Lesser amounts will fall on Cape Cod and especially Nantucket. A secondary snowfall maximum for the event overall could occur between Providence and Boston.

That’s a lot of snow. This storm will be in a future edition of “Northeast Snowstorms” I am sure.

Powerful winds

The forecast wind gusts remain very impressive across the region, with coastal communities likely to see 50 to 70 mph wind gusts from New Jersey through Long Island and southeast New England.

Hence, blizzard warnings are spread over a wide area for most areas south and east of I-84.

Coastal flooding

Tonight’s high tide is expected to cause locally major coastal flooding on the Delaware coast and Jersey Shore up through Long Island. Atlantic City is now forecast to see major tidal flooding levels reached. An 8-foot high tide would be the highest there since Hurricane Sandy.

Widespread moderate tidal flooding will occur outside of those pockets of major flooding. Thankfully, the storm is moving away by tomorrow, so that should limit the number of elevated high tides we see, with mainly just tonight’s being the most troubling for the region.

And so now we wait and see the totals pile in. Here’s hoping everyone stays safe through this event in the East. Feel free to share your reports with us too!

Take that, counter culture.

In brief: Forecasts through the day today have tended to trend toward an even more impactful storm from Delmarva through southern New England tomorrow and Monday. Major snow, powerful winds, and major coastal flooding have all escalated a bit since this morning.

There have continued to be a few changes today to the forecast with respect to the East Coast blizzard that will begin bearing down in about 12 to 18 hours. As a radio DJ said in college ahead of the Presidents’ Day storm of 2003, “we’ve upped our totals, now up yours.”

The expanse of snow seems to have grown a bit. It’s certainly expanded a bit more north and west. You can see this by looking at snow totals across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

It now appears that the one-foot line will extend to the north of Boston out through Poughkeepsie and south into Allentown and possibly into much of Delaware now. Blizzard Warnings have also been expanded through the day today, now covering a huge area from Boston through the length of Delmarva.

Additionally, it seems that the wind forecasts have ratcheted up some since earlier today too. Here is one ensemble model, the HREF and its probability of wind gusts hitting 65 mph or higher through the event.

Those probabilities are quite high. These winds may locally cause some damage, particularly on the immediate coastline, with numerous power outages possible near the coast as well.

Another notch upward came via tidal flooding outlooks today. There is now likely to be some pockets of major coastal flooding from Delaware through Long Island. For example, the gauge at Lewes, DE is now expected to hit 8 feet with Sunday night’s high tide cycle. This would be the highest since the January 2016 blizzard.

The NWS in New York City is highlighting the potential for significant coastal flooding for portions of southwest Long Island in particular.

By the way, a pro-user tip: Go to your local NWS forecast office and read the briefing packages they put up during events like this. These are primarily geared toward media and emergency manager partners, but they contain a metric ton of information for the local area, including some very useful details on forecast uncertainties. Some offices make this easy to find. Others do not. But with enough digging, you can find them.

One other note: This is likely to be fairly wet snow, which makes shoveling a little more stressful. Please exercise caution when clearing the sidewalks. Your risk of a heart attack increases substantially when dealing with this sort of snow. As we tell people here in Houston when it gets a little extra hotter than usual in summer: Don’t underestimate the impact these more extreme events can have on personal health risks.

I had seen some comparisons to the Blizzard of 1978 (the New England one, not the Midwest one) thrown around, which seems, kind of reasonable? No two storms are identical, and indeed this storm’s track will not be identical to that one, nor will the snow totals be identical. But just including that as an analog puts this storm in rarefied air.

We are probably looking at a memorable, if not historic storm for the coast from Delmarva through southern New England. This one appears to be one for the books.

The weather started getting rough…

Sometimes I worry that my lamps aren’t feminine enough.

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The Man from Madras, whose balls were of brass, is in fact a meditation on the need to find synthesis between humanity and technology in modern life.

MILAN – After causing the nation 3 straight days of what can only be described as “holy shit, holy shit, I’m going to lose my god damn mind” levels of stress at the Olympics, the government has ordered Hockey Canada to pay for all Canadians’ therapy appointments for the next 3 weeks. “You can’t just […]

The post Hockey Canada ordered to pay nation’s therapy bills appeared first on The Beaverton.

MILANO-CORTINA – With Canada’s mens team defeating Great Britain to clinch gold in the Winter Olympics, Canadian skip Brad Jacobs is crediting the victory to his team’s delicate, sometimes-controversial fingering technique. “We caught a lot of heat for our fingering earlier in the games,” explained a flushed, satisfied Jacobs after the climax of the event. […]

The post Canada credits gold medal curling win to expert fingering appeared first on The Beaverton.

This comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand. Here are the rules for the weekend posts.

We fostered and then quickly adopted Laurie in 2020, during the first week of the pandemic. He hid behind some books on a bookcase for three days, but he relaxed once he discovered there were other cats in the house. It turned out he loved other cats.

We had named him after the neighbor boy from Little Women before realizing that, just like his namesake, he yearned to be part of a big family. Fortunately, he was! He was an aggressive cuddler; he loved being in my lap, but his favorite thing in the world was cuddling with other cats. If he saw a cat looking cozy, he immediately snuggled up with them. He slept in a ball with Wallace every night.

We lost him to lymphoma this week. He was full of love and joy.

The post weekend open thread – February 21-22, 2026 appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Yeah. Got it. Let’s go.

A U.S. district judge ruled Buffalo Wild Wings can continue to call its popular menu item “boneless wings” even though they are “essentially chicken nuggets.” What do you think?

“I always just get bone-ins and ask for the bones on the side.”

Zoe Barlow, Horticultural Essayist

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“Makes you wonder how loco the pollo we’re eating actually is.”

Joel Avrin, Bread Bagger

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“The casual dining chicken restaurant told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Gary McArdle, Macaron Displayer

The post Buffalo Wild Wings Allowed To Continue Using ‘Boneless’ Chicken On Menu appeared first on The Onion.

LONG BEACH, CA—Encouraging his child to put her language skills to good use, local father Paul Feldman urged his daughter Alice to show off her high school Spanish with a guy on the street speaking Spanish, sources confirmed Friday. “This is a great opportunity to show off that B+ you got in Señor Shapiro’s class,” said Feldman, assuring his daughter that even if her pronunciation was not completely flawless, the man muttering to himself in rapid Spanish while glaring at passersby would be sure to appreciate the effort. “He’s going to be so impressed by your vocabulary, not to mention the fact that you’ve mastered the dreaded pluscuamperfecto tense. Don’t forget to roll your R’s, and maybe throw in a little of that Castilian lisp.” At press time, Feldman was comforting his crestfallen daughter with a reminder that she had at least just learned a lot of new Spanish words. 

The post Dad Urges Daughter To Show Off High School Spanish With Guy On Street Speaking Spanish  appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Exhausted from repeated efforts to explain the most basic aspect of political power, an aide to President Trump nevertheless began wearily explaining for the fifth time Friday why he couldn’t pardon the former Prince Andrew. “I know Andrew is a good man who’s been treated terribly, but you remember when we learned a few minutes ago that England and the United States are two different countries?” said Senior Advisor Gerald Donovan, gesturing yet again at a world map with the nations in question labeled “America” and “Not America.” “So because England is not the United States—remember, not the same thing—you are not president of it. Does that make sense? And since you are not boss of England, you can’t do things like pardon Prince Andrew, even if it makes you really mad that you can’t. A long time ago we were part of England, but we aren’t anymore. That’s why we’re now one thing, and they’re another separate thing far, far away.” At press time, Trump seemed to finally grasp why he couldn’t pardon Andrew but said he would not rule out running for president of England in 2028.

The post Aide Wearily Begins 5th Explanation Of Why Trump Can’t Pardon Prince Andrew appeared first on The Onion.

The post Trump Suffers Setback Unrelated To Child Rape appeared first on The Onion.

The post Alysa Liu Uses Gold Medal To Gauge Ear appeared first on The Onion.

The Potomac River, a waterway that winds through the nation’s capital, is in the midst of an ecological crisis after one of the largest sewage spills in U.S. history, with over 240 million gallons of raw human waste threatening the health of the river and the safety of those who depend on it. What do you think?

“People hear ‘river of human shit’ and automatically assume the worst.”

Fiona Speller, Mulch Deliveryperson

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“Don’t blame me. I bury my feces.”

Clay Wirtz, Unemployed

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“Stop trying to be New York.”

Sebastian Tripoli, Box Packer

The post Potomac River Flooded With 240 Million Gallons Of Sewage appeared first on The Onion.

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Unrelated, but according to Maynard 2019 there's an infinite number of primes that don't require the letter W.