“rural Orange County honky tonk The Kraken.” https://www.newsobserver.com/living/food-drink/article311625813.html#:~:text=rural%20Orange%20County%20honky%20tonk%20The%20Kraken.
Holy shit.
Yes, I know “best dive bars in the nation” is stupid, but, still.
https://huckberry.com/journal/posts/50-best-dive-bars-in-america
I had a bit of a realization. Maybe this is specific to a particular person (or type of), and not generalizable, but here it is:
People use the same reasoning about AI as they do vampires.
I have a friend like this. He’s a (-n otherwise) smart guy, a Ph.D.-holder (in a STEM field but not computer science) and occasional tabletop role-playing gamer (swords and sorcery as opposed to lazers and Science!).
But when we talk about AI (I’m a computer science guy, interested in AI back in the days of the AI Winter of the 1980s and super-duper cynical about all of it now), he’s basically perpetuating myth.
He doesn’t understand the issues and he is locked in hard to the mythology of computers that make decisions and think. Like… HARD. To be completely fair, this “decision-making capability” (yes, air quotes) of computers is what initially attracted me, when I was in the eighth grade, but I quickly (almost immediately?) realized that computer programs were ways of encoding known algorithms and processes, as opposed to granting computers the ability to *think*, like Prometheus stealing fire for humanity.
And when we talk, he speaks of “algorithms” and “what if computers <your-least-favorite-anthropomorphic-thing-here>?” and so on and so forth.
And it’s like talking about vampires.
“What if there was a vampire that could maybe acquire some partial immunity to sunlight?”
“What if there was a vampire that was essentially noble at heart and didn’t really want to kill humans but was cursed to require human blood to survive?”
“How could vampires actually exist in real life? Maybe it’s a virus that they catch that re-engineers their bone and muscle and creates a compulsion, like those ants that are compelled by fungus to climb to the top of a tree.”
It’s all this deep thought and conversation based on *myth and lore.*
I mean… I’m a (sci-fi) TTRPGer myself (or I wish I could be, like in the days of my youth, if I could find partners who weren’t, um… marginal) and I love the idea of throwing a micro-organism-driven vampire into the campaign (don’t tell, I want it to be a surprise), but… I don’t walk around in real life with garlic and crucifixes.
But we humans, we need our mythologies. (What’s mine? Hmmm….) So, here we are.
“Yes, I know, John, AI is just stringing words together, but what if there was some emergent unplanned behavior arising from that algorithm? After all, we’re just neurons firing, so why couldn’t a computer running a neural net achieve self-awareness?”
I’d grind my teeth harder, but I haven’t been flossing for years and the bone beneath my gums has receded, so I’d wind up just snapping one off. So, I just have to breathe deep and try to zen out.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/12/attorney-general-ken-paxton-beto-orourke-texas/
«Paxton sued O’Rourke and his political group, Powered by People, last week, arguing that the group was deceptively fundraising for and illegally supporting Texas Democrats’ walkout.»
Haven’t read this story yet, but I want to say: I SPECIFICALLY looked them up so I could SPECIFICALLY send money to support the Texas House Dems, Ken Paxton, you stupid fuck. No deception required.
Sorry to be using that language, but honestly.
Update, not 30 seconds later:
«ABC13 has confirmed with multiple sources that House Democrats will return to Texas.
Eyewitness News has not confirmed the date, but we do know that Democrats believe they’ve accomplished their mission by killing the first special session and by raising national awareness about the mid-decade redistricting effort.»
Ok, Texas Dems, now I’m a little pissed. The money I sent you is wasted? Can you use it to pay your bills? Was it a waste, since you’re folding? Would it have been better spent on Jordan Wood in Maine?
Here’s another org comfortable folks in the Research Triangle (or anywhere, really) can write checks for: https://refugeecommunitypartnership.org/
They are a community of refugees (mostly Burmese, Hispanic, Afghan, Arab, and Congolese, but with a smattering of others) that originally started as a mutual-aid network. They remain community-led (as opposed to white-savior-led), but, ya know, money makes the world go ’round….
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/470928008
These guys need some help. “Conservatives” are using the power of the state to squelch them. It’s way beyond civil lawsuits. (They’re a 501(c)(3).)
«One of the incredible things that came out of the Paxton investigation or the lawsuits around that is there was this argument in court that his team was making that essentially amounted to the fact that if anybody in Texas reads a news article that has any effect on anything related to Texas, that they have the authority to go out there and investigate all the reporting leading up to it, the journalists, their notes, their research.»
«“The unfortunate reality is there’s a microphone connected to a computer that’s connected to the network,” says Nyx. “And there’s no software patching that will make that not possible to use as a listening device.»
(Courtesy of https://infosec.exchange/@josephcox/114993289485905184, via https://mstdn.io/@ApostateEnglishman@mastodon.world )
So, theoretically, we have laws in place that cell phone companies can’t triangulate your location unless it’s an emergency or there’s a warrant.
I’m assuming we have nothing like that in place for wifi and bluetooth, so, while you’re walking around with your radio-emitting device, you’re basically broadcasting your location.
Now, we have you walking around with your sound- and visible-light-emitting self, available for detection by any microphone- or pinhead-camera-equipped device, with the possibility of your voice and actions being monitored and acted upon.
Sounds great if you’re defending against “criminals”, but… really? We’re ok with conversations being monitored?
Of course not, but the tech isn’t going away. So, we get to write laws (like, say, THE FOURTH AND FOURTEENTH AMENDMENTS) and have judicial decisions (ha) support them. And after that: massive lawsuits. Class-action-type stuff.
So, as a vendor or a purchaser of said tech: think twice.
This is pretty cool. An effort to document quaint memorials from bygone days we’d rather not think about too much.
«The experiment failed because the students rebelled against farming fields side by side with enslaved labor and burned down the institution, killing a fellow student. This granite slab represents a failed institutional landscape of White privileged sons refusing to engage in farm labor. During discussions of moving the institution in the 1840s, future president McGlothlin stated the necessary move to a location with a “larger proportion of white people.” The institute would move to Greenville in 1850.»
https://locatinglegacies.org/s/hub/item/566
Would be neat to see this database expanded.
(via https://mastodon.social/@anterotesis/114875168821388417, boosted by @BRMiller@historians.social)
“I’m not sure who or what to blame for the poorly staged “I’m melting” moment.”
Ok, well NOW I’m looking forward to it.
(At DPAC, Durham NC.)
There’s a universal truth buried in here:
«Since the late tenth century, European churchmen had been fretting over what they could do to rein in the violence perpetrated by knights engaged in local feuds. The popes had direct experience of this through the Normans of southern Italy. But trouble was—or seemed to be—endemic. Two early attempts to impose Church discipline over unruly knights were known as the “peace movements”: the Peace of God (Pax Dei) and Truce of God (Treuga Dei). These were mass advocacy programs through which clergy tried to impress on fighting men the need to refrain from plundering churches, and killing, raping, maiming, or robbing civilians. Bishops tried to enforce the Peace by putting towns and regions under the Church’s explicit protection, and threatening God’s curse against trespassers who did their inhabitants harm. The Truce, meanwhile, named days and times of the year when fighting was forbidden.3 Both the Peace and the Truce of God proved widely popular among the common people, but they were not enormously effective. So among the many things that vexed Urban at the outset of his papacy was how to support moral censure with positive action.
Then, in 1095, an intriguing solution presented itself. In the first week of March, ambassadors from Alexios I Komnenos’s court in Constantinople appeared in the west.4 They tracked down Urban in the city of Piacenza, where he was holding an ecclesiastical council known as a synod. And they made him a proposal. According to the German chronicler Bernold of St. Blaisen, they “humbly implored the lord pope and all Christ’s faithful people to give [the Byzantines] some help against the pagans in defense of the holy Church, which the pagans had almost destroyed in that region, having seized that territory up to the walls of the City of Constantinople.”»
– Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones)
https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/62d88b8f-2c22-4ad5-b27a-14f655d1cb7a
Every Western (movie) starts with the townspeople trying to enforce their rules against guns in town.
So here’s the truth: violent, armed men are not popular. They’re not the heroes.
Also: all that “Deus vult” horseshit is (excuse me, was) just an excuse for said armed, violent men. The First Crusade was just a way to ship those guys off, away from “here”, wherever “here” was.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/caracas-on-the-potomac
«From here on, I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to private surveys. And when they tell a different story from the official numbers, there will no longer be a reason to take the official data more seriously.»
I’m sure Susan Collins and other sober Republicans have concerns.
Here, Read This 