Fantastic live version of one of my favorite songs. Just well-written. Not bad for a group of Sooners.

I don't know this brother priest, but I can tell we'd get along. When ya gotta throw hands, you gotta throw hands. https://0x0.happytavern.co/7ef7b8eaca81551ca1d582e0b0968cb24021650341cbb6274e4747a31aa237c5

"Common sense is the most uncommon thing in the world." - G.K. Chesterton View quoted note →

Have you been on Facebook lately? I know, I know. I try not to go there, but I get reeled in by RL contacts from time-to-time. Anyway, that place is an AI slopfest, the worst kind of engagement farming. I default presume nothing I see on there is true. I don't know why people still use it.

Sitting on Spectr, watching the vibe on the timeline in one column and the zany happenings over at nostr.wine in another. The Chill Protocol, even in times of drama.

X/Twitter is such a trash site nowadays. Dumb rhetorical questions to invoke user engagement is not content.

Skip the salad dressing. Use hot sauce instead. Melinda's has a number of them that are zero-calorie and of moderate/low heat for the light-weights out there. People will think you're a freak when you do this in public, but it's worth the gains.

My ultimate hope as we enter a mainstream period of AI skepticism is that people will see this as impetus to create on their own. Arts and letters. Photography. Whatever. Just make something. Reactionary skepticism isn't enough on its own.

Spectr (https://spectr.clave.casa) is a nice client. Love the deck, speedy, responsive, and is actually good about fetching events.

Trivia tonight. Our absolute worst performance. Turned comical. A good time had by all.

Wait, so is the line here that BTC is dropping price because one dude made a (relatively) minor transaction?

I have two active lists of following, and this is getting annoying.

I've lost 96 pounds since late July. Au naturale, no drugs. I'm swirling a sub-200 weight for the first time in a couple of decades. I stepped on a scale at the end of July and blinked. It'd been a few years. Sure, my pants were getting bigger, but 298? No. Decided right then and there. Wasn't going to happen. Diet and exercise. Cardio combined with resistance, with the objective of gaining muscle. Intermittent fasting and calorie counting, followed by a shortening on the fasting, always calorie counting. Everything calories, if not with an app then mentally. The gains were easy at first. The weight melted off, because I am one stubborn Gaul, and none are as fierce as the Belgae, or so Caesar says. Plus, I was fat. I had nowhere to go but down. Anyway, I stalled out at around -70 pounds. That's okay. Stalls happen. But this one stuck around a while. I didn't know how to get 'er out of neutral. Then I stopped drinking alcohol, and the weight loss picked back up with a vengeance. I'm a social drinker, and a social guy. Only recently did I read about the metabolic effects of Mr. Booze. I ran through the chemistry today, dusting off ancient knowledge from undergrad I'd intentionally kept buried. I despise chemistry as a field of personal study, and I resent having to do this. Turns out, though, alcohol isn't just something to calorie count like I was doing previously; it's a substance that works against fat-burning metabolically. I intensely dislike knowing this. You may now dislike me for knowing this, too. I've gone 45 days without a beer, but feel no real impetus to have one now. Sometimes, ignorance is preferable.

Played bags* today, and I'm happy to report that I am still terrible. *In the midwest, we call it bags and not "cornhole," because we aren't disgusting freaks.

Friday vibes. Happy (I rarely become enamored by "new" bands I discover. I studied popular American forms extensively as a kid, especially folk, blues, rock, and country -- and there's nothing new under the sun. But these girls bring it, along with their big throat singer, combining forms to make something truly unique and worth listening to, the way select American bands (Turnpike Troubadours, Old 97's, Wilco) still combine forms to produce something uniquely their own. So, Alatau on, my Siberian friends.)

Jesse Welles is a treasure.

The AI grift track: Unsustainable cost/business model as they continue to circulate capital between themselves, calling it "income" (ala Nvidia/OpenAI swapping funds back and forth) --> --> Hype. Lots of hype. We've been living this for two years or more now. AI is dangerous. AI will change the world. AI will revolutionize the way you eat your Cheerios --> --> High IPOs. OpenAI just announced theirs. This is where the big boys get paid. --> --> Scaling back on the hype, including the quiet shelving of "Data Center" madness. Notice how none of these are actually being completed and opened? Because compute is so expensive and the model is unsustainable, I fully expect OpenAI and Anthropic to shift to legacy corporate customers only, abandoning individual users. There is no way to make it cheap enough for you to use, especially as these models keep scaling up in terms of complexity --> --> The destruction of the little guys who cannot keep up with big boys, leaving only OpenAI/Anthropic and the smatterings of Big Tech with functional (diversified) business models --> --> You and I running open local models only. Not a bad thing, as they are getting better, and will do everything you probably need them to. And that's the grift. Nostrajoshmus has spoken.

I like zaps well enough. The problem was never including them as a feature. The mistake was leaning on them so heavily as a selling point of the protocol.

My complicated view of AI and art being what it is, I find it incredibly pretentious to take issue with this, unlike our smug article writer here. Nothing wrong with taking inspiration from outside sources. We all do it anyway, as art fuels art.

Literary Hub

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel.

Update: On Tuesday afternoon, Tokarczuk sent a statement to Lit Hub via her publisher, Riverhead, denying she used AI in her writing for anything o...

Real-talk for just a minute here, friends: I know not of a single "sovereign" individual in this universe. Not one has existed free from the constraints of some governing power. There's no such thing, and any notion otherwise is self-delusion. You are subject to a governing hierarchy, both on earth and in Heaven. Not even the King of the British Empire is sovereign. Never was.