Tootfinder

'We're 0-5 and we own that': Just how bad have things gotten for the NFL's lone winless team? https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46510084/new-york-jets-0-5-start-winless-aaron-glenn

NFL pre-camp observations, plus crazy NBA-style trade proposals and Buccaneers All-Pro to miss start of season

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-p…

What TV channel is Cowboys vs. Rams on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL preseason game https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/08/09/where-to-watch-cowboys-vs-rams-today-tv-channel-…

Ok, yeah, I'm not done processing my anger over liberals doing shit like this. So this historian sees a rise in right wing violence, sees the US government carrying out ethnic cleansing, sees a rise in white supremacist terrorism, and then says, "oh yeah... this reminds me of a time right around the 1920s. Hum... yeah, ANARCHISTS fighting the government! Yeah, that's the same thing."
FFS, IT'S THE RED SUMMER! If you want a parallel between today and some horrible time in US history, TALK ABOUT THE RED SUMMER. The point of the language of dehumanization that the right uses, the point of all the anti-black and anti-emigrant rhetoric, is that it leads to genocide. Trump already carried out an act of genocide (#USPol

Hi everyone, I am the Signal Angel for "How to build and launch a high-altitude balloon project" by Aleksander Parachniewicz.
It will start at 12:35 in #Delphinus at #WHY2025. You can watch the livestream here:

This month's digest/newsletter is being sent from my server to all the respectful one-time protestors who asked for it.
The rest of you disrespectful unbritish repeat protestors ought to be arrested but you can read it here:
https://dalliance.net/blog/sep25/
Featuring descriptions of the start of the building of a bedroom, a fediverse rant or two, and Greens Vs Gary plus a Greg Egan's latest short story in the links section.

What TV channel is Cowboys vs. Rams on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL preseason game https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/08/09/where-to-watch-cowboys-vs-rams-today-tv-channel-…

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

2025 NFL preseason Week 1: Six things to watch for Thursday night from Joe Burrow's rare start to a kicker

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/2025-nf

Gutierrez: Raiders’ season hits a crossroads in Indianapolis https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-season-hits-a-crossroads-in-indianapolis-nfl-week-5

Day 12: Laura Zimmerman
We're back to a YA author here, and Zimmerman has been floating in my list of people to include since the start. I've read "My Eyes are Up Here" about dealing with misogyny and just general logistics while having very large breasts in high school. It's both engaging & educational, but also very well written in terms of the pacing, comedic moments, and turns of phrase. That led me to check out "Just Do This One Thing For Me" which is extremely dark, *incredibly hilarious*, and so thick with dramatic irony it had me constantly amused. It's also really touching at times, and a beautiful ode to the bonds of siblinghood that made me cry as well as laugh. I won't spoil the plot at all, but it's one of the best YA books I've ever read.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Cowboys vs Jets, NFL Week 5: Start time, live stream, TV channel https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-jets-nfl-week-5-start-time-live-stream-tv-channel

The most underrated code comment continues to be:
// Start here tomorrow

I'm not even a developer (used to be), I'm the technical writer - so I know as much, sometimes more (been here a while) than they do. So I am frequently Tier 2 support.
If I had $1 everytime _"they"_ came upstream with "its not working", I'd be retired.
What, specifically, isn't working? What product? Version? Clean install or upgrade? logs? diagnostic dump? snap of the license page? Does it start or not? If it starts, is a particular feature n…

Very good take on this topic. I was about to say nuanced, but it's not really. It’s pretty plain, just not a POV you hear all that much.
Also, props to @… for the boost. I absolutely would not have seen this toot without the boost from Allison, and I’m so glad I did.

Simple task: Which days of class should go on my syllabus?
❌ 4o-mini: shortened Nov break
❌ 4o: omitted days in Aug, Dec
✅ o3
❌ Claude 3-haiku: extended Oct break
❌ Claude 3.5 Sonnet V2: ext Oct br
✅ Claude 3.7 Sonnet
❌ Claude 4 Sonnet: extended Oct break
This is really unreliable AI performance.
#generativeAI

Gutierrez: Raiders’ season hits a crossroads in Indianapolis https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-season-hits-a-crossroads-in-indianapolis-nfl-week-5

Topological band insulators without translational symmetry
Shuo Wang, Jing-Run Lin, Zheng-Wei Zuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03208 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Topological band insulators without translational symmetry
In the research of the topological band phases, the conventional wisdom is to start from the crystalline translational symmetry systems. Nevertheless, the translational symmetry is not always a necessary condition for the energy bands. Here we propose a systematic method of constructing the topological band insulators without translational symmetry in the amorphous systems. By way of the isospectral reduction approach from spectral graph theory, we reduce the structural-disordered systems forme…

Looky here, America
What you done done---
Let things drift
Until the riots come.
​
Now your policemen
Let your mobs run free.
I reckon you don't care
Nothing about me.
​
You tell me that Hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
From the Ku Klux Klan.
​
You tell me Mussolini's
Got an evil heart.
Well, it mus-a been in Beaumont
That he had his start---
​
Cause everything that Hitler
And Mussolini do,
Negro…

I do follow God around here.
But I just had to add a personal note, otherwise I might even start believing in weird shit.

Just look at the start of chapter 12 of “It can’t happen here” with an excerpt of the book of dear leader. Sound familiar, doesn’t it?
I'm still wondering whether Trump (or his writer(s)) could be sued for plagiarism?
#SinclairLewis #ItCantHappenHere

Kenny Clark is 'here to ball' in fresh start with Cowboys https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/kenny-clark-is-here-to-ball-in-fresh-start-with-cowboys

Sometimes you want to check how other distributions are packaging something, so you could do it consistently in #Gentoo. The problem is, which distros to check?
At a first thought, you'd start with the few "root" distros. But then, you start asking yourself: does Ubuntu do the same thing as Debian, or does it do its own thing? Is openSUSE like Fedora here, or is it different? Does Exherbo use the Gentoo package, or does it have its own?

Here's Nº 31 Zoraida Icabalceta from IC's Bombers Turning a Corner and the back Side of Nº 11 June Dickson -- College sports is starting up again and I'm looking forward to seeing some Soccer games and developing Cornell Basketball shots from last Winter while waiting for the season to start
#photo

While editing my current #WIP, I've noticed I start the scene info-dumping and only after pages get to the action. Here's how I restructure the scene to be less info-dumpey.
#amediting #creativewriting

Kenny Clark is 'here to ball' in fresh start with Cowboys https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/kenny-clark-is-here-to-ball-in-fresh-start-with-cowboys

Sergey Shulubin wurde am Strand in Constanța das Fahrrad geklaut. Das ist mies!
#tcrno11 #tcrno11cap104

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
2/2
To address the bigger question I started with ("should we teach AI-"assisted" coding?"), my answer is: "No, except enough to show students directly what its pitfalls are." We have little enough time as it is to cover the core knowledge that they'll need, which has become more urgent now that they're going to be expected to clean up AI bugs and they'll have less time to develop an understanding of the problems they're supposed to be solving. The skill of prompt engineering & other skills of working with AI are relatively easy to pick up on your own, given a decent not-even-mathematical understanding of how a neutral network works, which is something we should be giving to all students, not just our majors.
Reasonable learning objectives for CS majors might include explaining what types of bugs an AI "assistant" is most likely to introduce, explaining the difference between software engineering and writing code, explaining why using an AI "assistant" is likely to violate open-source licenses, listing at lest three independent ethical objections to contemporary LLMs and explaining the evidence for/reasoning behind them, explaining why we should expect AI "assistants" to be better at generating code from scratch than at fixing bugs in existing code (and why they'll confidently "claim" to have fixed problems they haven't), and even fixing bugs in AI generated code (without AI "assistance").
If we lived in a world where the underlying environmental, labor, and data commons issues with AI weren't as bad, or if we could find and use systems that effectively mitigate these issues (there's lots of piecemeal progress on several of these) then we should probably start teaching an elective on coding with an assistant to students who have mastered programming basics, but such a class should probably spend a good chunk of time on non-assisted debugging.
#AI #LLMs #VibeCoding

Been playing this game I dig on the Android tablet called Dungeon Raid. It's a card flipping dungeon crawler (the dev calls it an 'adventure card roguelike') that's fairly easy to figure out-- lots of strategy and replayability. At first, you can start out playing as either a knight or a vampire, delving down, trying not to die of hunger.
If a relic in a game you can choose is a fried egg, you can probably assume it's a game for me.
There's also Linux, M…

Here's the start of an idea:
Those of us who end up directly getting a tariff payment demand on a purchase from overseas (especially if the purchase is from Brazil) might want to consider filing a personal Federal civil action against FFOTUS, as a private person, for recovery.
The basis would be an ultra vires government action, not authorized by law (this is why the Brazil path is particularly interesting, because there is no real way that this is in any way authorized by Co…

Anyone else having the problem that `byobu` takes ages to start up on a remote Linux server? I'm talking like 20-30 seconds here. The machine isn't under heavy load. :BoostOK:

Steelers overreactions after 3-1 start: Is Pittsburgh AFC North's best team? Another MVP for Aaron Rodgers?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/steelers-overreactio…

My wife's Corsa replacement is finally here - a 2022 EQA. Good first impressions, though bemused that it doesn't appear to support deferred charge-start time in-car. Hoping it'll cope with the charger deciding when to start charging instead...

Dignan analysiert: Apples KI-Rückstand ist so gravierend wie Microsofts „Mobile-Fail“. Perplexity als Allheilmittel? Kaum. Aber Tim Cook braucht dringend eine Story für den Kapitalmarkt—zur Not für 20 Mrd. Dollar. #TechDebatte #Apple

Why Apple should buy Perplexity and possibly keep going
Apple needs to jump start its AI strategy and the only way it's going to get there is through acquisitions. Here's why a purchase of Perplexity makes sense and why Apple may want to keep shopping. Bloomberg reported last month that Apple was discussing a purchase of the AI search startup. Let's look at why an Apple purchase of Perplexity, reportedly valued at about $14 billion or so, would make sense. Apple needs an AI strategy and story. Let's state the obvious: Apple is an AI laggard. Apple's…

Thanks for coming to my talk at @…, everyone! It was a joy and an honour to be invited – and I hope it was valuable! 🤗💚 Here are the slides: https://noti.st/matthiasott/ZXgFeg

Painting With the Web by Matthias Ott
Today’s Web is more complex, unpredictable, dynamic, and powerful than ever. Yet, 25 years after “A Dao of Web Design” we still approach building for the Web with a mindset of control, using linear workflows and static design tools that often don’t reflect the Web’s true nature and potential. The canvas we work on has transformed, the materials we use have changed. Together, we’ll explore how we can use web design engineering to start painting with the Web and create designs that ar…

Considering seminary or divinity school? We are having an open house for prospective students on October 27, and you're invited. Join us and learn about our offerings, meet faculty, staff, and students, and gain an insider's perspective on YDS.
Learn more about the Oct. 27 Open House and start your application process here: h…

It is not wise to piss off your partners and allies.
The EU is starting an initiative to define an EU-specific technology stack. There is an impressive set of companies and organizations signing on. If you are a US technology firm you need to start tracking this and figure out a strategy. Caving in to autocrats has its downsides. More here:
https://…

Entent, which has received funding for 96 CCS chargers for heavy-duty vehicles, has now opened its first location in Rotterdam 🇳🇱. Interesting to see a newcomer in this space.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/entent-bv_entent-evcharging-em…

Today, we officially open the barriers on the 's-Gravenweg in Rotterdam. | Entent BV
Today, we officially open the barriers on the 's-Gravenweg in Rotterdam. A very special milestone for Entent and the start of our network of smart, business charging stations throughout Europe. Enough reason for a celebration, right? 🎉 Besides the official opening, there is plenty of room to toast during a nice networking reception with tasty snacks and drinks. And to bring a bit of Amsterdam to Rotterdam 😉, there will be a real Dutch herring cart with an accordion player. Here's to mor…

Feeding therapy question
(Boosts appreciated for reach)
Has anyone had direct experience with "Sequential Oral Sensory" feeding therapy? Was it a good/bad experience?
We're exploring this as an option for my kid, and from what I've heard online I want to stay far away from ABA therapy, but I know nothing about this. The materials presented by the therapist's office make it sound reasonable, and of course I'll use my best judgment as things go along if we start it, but I thought I'd ask here first in case anyone has wisdom to share.
#FeedingTherapy #SequentialOralSensory

Is Brock Bowers playing tonight? Raiders star off to quiet start vs. Chargers https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/brock-bowers-playing-tonight-raiders-star-quiet-start-chargers…

@… @… @… I’d start here:

What channel is the Eagles vs Cowboys game on tonight? Start time, schedule, streaming https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2025/09/04/eagles-cowboys-where-to-watch-channel-time-nfl-schedule/85808170007/

Series A, Episode 13 - Orac
BLAKE: We got here as quickly as we could.
ENSOR: I don't want to hear your feeble excuses. Now let's get on with it. I've developed a system of electronic anaesthesia that I shall administer myself. Shan't need your filthy drugs. Now, you can start carving me up as soon as you like.
https://

Input-Driven Pushdown Automata with Translucent Input Letters
Martin Kutrib, Andreas Malcher, Matthias Wendlandt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15310 https://a…

Input-Driven Pushdown Automata with Translucent Input Letters
Input-driven pushdown automata with translucent input letters are investigated. Here, the use of translucent input letters means that the input is processed in several sweeps and that, depending on the current state of the automaton, some input symbols are visible and can be processed, whereas some other symbols are invisible, and may be processed in another sweep. Additionally, the returning mode as well as the non-returning mode are considered, where in the former mode a new sweep must start …

the City just put in Stage 1 restrictions (we're very lucky here that we have abundant water resources, many places on Vancouver Island have restrictions almost immediately every summer)
So the clock is ticking! If we get to Stage 2 and I haven't filled the pond yet, I'll be prohibited from doing so until the rains come! We can only "top up" pools and ponds in Stage 2. And (god forbid) we get into Stage 3 or 4, the pond will have to be left to dry up. (at which point I would probably just use it as a watering source for the gardens)
I don't think we've ever reached Stage 3. The last time we got to Stage 2 was about 5 years ago I think, after the Heat Dome.
I would be surprised if we got to Stage 2 this year. It has been dry, but not excessively hot, so hopefully our resources can hold through August.
The good news is... I'm close to at least filling the intake bay and wetland filter.
Once the rest of the rock/pebble comes tomorrow I'll immediately start moving the rock into those two holes as quickly as I can, and once done, I'll start filling them with water so I can test out the pumps.
I might set up a temporary path for the water to recirculate through the intake bay and filter, avoiding the pond. That way those two parts can start to grow good-bacteria for the filter while I work on the big pond.
#pondlife #poolpond #backyardPrpject #diy #rock #labour

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

Are the Eagles the worst 4-0 team ever? What history tells us about five trends https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46464771/five-early-2025-season-nfl-dvoa-stat-historical-trends-watch-cowboys-…

Is Trevon Diggs starting for Cowboys on Sunday? https://ftw.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2025/10/05/trevon-diggs-status-starter-cowboys-jets/86482807007/

How hopeful is every NFL fan base? We have the answers. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6592993/2025/09/03/nfl-hope-o-meter-the-pulse/

Good Morning #Canada
Today, we celebrate #PunctuationDay. I restrained myself from placing several exclamation marks after that opening line. You're welcome¡
Canada generally follows the American rules for punctuation, except when we don't. I believe punctuation was invented because the English language was not confusing enough for English professors who needed more than a comma to get angry about. But I'm not here to discuss the proper rules of using the squiggly bits because I don't know them, and rules are for civilized people.
Instead, I would like to offer an article from the archives of that radical media provider Reader's Digest Canada. Here are some unique punctuation marks that I highly recommend that we start us8ng to confuse and enrage those pesky English professors.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CreativeWriting
https://www.readersdigest.ca/culture/little-known-punctuation-marks/

Cowboys drama with Micah Parsons hits another level, plus rookie quarterbacks who could start in 2025

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/cowboys

The new Mastodon version seems to shit itself on Safari? The Home/Trending/etc links don't work when clicked. And then after a few minutes they start working again, randomly. I only have this in the console.
Anybody using Safari here? v18.5
#mastodon

Fully-compensated ferrimagnetic metal in the electric-field-tuned $\mathrm{Hf_2S}$ monolayer
San-Dong Guo, Alessandro Stroppa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08609 https://

Fully-compensated ferrimagnetic metal in the electric-field-tuned $\mathrm{Hf_2S}$ monolayer
Fully-compensated ferrimagnet has garnered widespread attention due to its zero-net total magnetic moment and non-relativistic global spin splitting. In general, for a fully-compensated ferrimagnet, at least one spin channel should be gapped to ensure a zero-net total magnetic moment, which would lead to a fully-compensated ferrimagnetic semiconductor or half-metal, and appears to limit the existence of a fully-compensated ferrimagnetic metal. Here, we propose to start with a spin-degenerate tw…

People complaining do not become friends with each other...
I complain...you find it aggressive and you mute or block me...now I haven't blocked you nor muted you but when you also start complaining I go like:
"This guy/gal hates EVERYONE, including me"...ok I guess I'm muting or blocking.
I guess the reason my follower count has remained mostly stable recently is because I always throw in a complaint here or there...
just to make sure nobody likes m…

Cowboys vs Falcons, NFL preseason Week 3: Start time, live stream, TV channel https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-falcons-nfl-preseason-week-3-start-time-live-stream-tv-channel

With Vauxhall finally able to acknowledge that the 3rd party warranty *that they sold us* is valid to start work on the OBC replacement, we get to pick up the car we traded the Corsa in for tomorrow!
(this was an epic journey of how not to do customer service - not Vauxhall's fault, but a franchised dealer here. I bet they don't treat their Ferrari customers like this...)

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion

Ultra-high-gain water-window X-ray laser driven by plasma photocathode wakefield acceleration
Lily H. A. Berman, David Campbell, Edgar Hartmann, Thomas Heinemann, Thomas Wilson, Bernhard Hidding, Ahmad Fahim Habib
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06403

Ultra-high-gain water-window X-ray laser driven by plasma photocathode wakefield acceleration
X-ray free-electron lasers are large and complex machines, limited by electron beam brightness. Here we show through start-to-end simulations how to realise compact, robust and tunable X-ray lasers in the water window, based on ultra-bright electron beams from plasma wakefield accelerators. First, an ultra-low-emittance electron beam is released by a plasma photocathode in a metre-scale plasma wakefield accelerator. By tuning the beam charge, space-charge forces create a balance between beam fi…

Jayden Daniels injury update: Marcus Mariota to start for Washington vs. Raiders https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2025/09/19/jayden-daniels-injury-update-marcus-mariota-week-3/86242648007/

Cowboys vs. Packers live updates: Start time, TV channel for Sunday Night Football https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2025/09/28/cowboys-packers-live-score-updates/86391185007/

Browns' Quinshon Judkins expected to start in NFL debut, will be on 'pitch count' alongside Dylan Sampson

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/browns…

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, my attempt at (hopefully widely-applicable) advice about relationships based on my mental "engineering" model and how it differs from the popular "fire" and "appeal" models:
1. If you're looking for a partner, don't focus too much on external qualities, but instead ask: "Do they respect me?" "Are they interested in active consent in all aspects of our relationship?" "Are they willing to commit a little now, and open to respectfully negotiating deeper commitment?" "Are they trustworthy, and willing to trust me?" Finding your partner attractive can come *from* trusting/appreciating/respecting them, rather than vice versa.
2. If you're looking for a partner, don't wait for infatuation to start before you try building a relationship. Don't wait to "fall in love;" if you "fall" into love you could just as easily "fall" out, but if you build up love, it won't be so easy to destroy. If you're feeling lonely and want a relationship, pick someone who seems interesting and receptive in your social circles and ask if they'd like to do something with you (doesn't have to be a date at first). *Pursue active consent* at each stage (if they're not interested; ask someone else, this will be easier if you're not already infatuated). If they're judging you by the standards in point 1, this is doubly important.
3. When building a relationship, try to synchronize your levels of commitment & trust even as you're trying to deepen them, or at least try to be honest and accepting when they need to be out-of-step. Say things and do things that show your partner the things (like trust, commitment, affection, etc.) that are important in your relationship, and ask them to do the same (or ideally you don't have to ask if they're conscious of this too). Do these things not as a chore or a transaction when your partner does them, but because they're the work of building the relationship that you value for its own sake (and because you value your partner for themselves too).
4. When facing big external challenges to your commitment to a relationship, like a move, ensure that your partner has an appropriate level of commitment too, but then don't undervalue the relationship relative to other things in life. Everyone is different, but *to me*, my committed relationship has been far more rewarding than e.g., a more "successful" career would have been. Of course worth noting here that non-men are taught by our society to undervalue their careers & other aspects of their life and sacrifice everything for their partners, which is toxic. I'm not saying "don't value other things" but especially for men, *do* value romantic relationships and be prepared to make decisions that prioritize them over other things, assuming a partner who is comfortable with that commitment and willing to reciprocate.
Okay, this thread is complete for now, until I think of something else that I've missed. I hope this advice is helpful in some way (or at least not harmful). Feel free to chime in if you've got different ideas...
#relationships #love

Cowboys vs Giants, NFL Week 2: Start time, live stream, TV channel https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-giants-nfl-week-2-start-time-live-stream-tv-channel

Let's start football season with some takes, plus the strangest walk-off win https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6506943/2025/07/22/nfl-power-rankings-the-pulse/

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

Cowboys vs Giants, NFL Week 2: Start time, live stream, TV channel https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-giants-nfl-week-2-start-time-live-stream-tv-channel

Cowboys injury report at halfway point of 2025 training camp in Oxnard https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-injury-report-halfway-point-2025-training-camp-oxnard

Seahawks-Cardinals on 'Thursday Night Football': What We Learned from Seattle's 23-20 win https://www.nfl.com/news/seahawks-cardinals-on-thursday-night-football-what-we-learned-from-seattle-s-23-20-win

What TV channel is 49ers vs. Raiders on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL preseason game https://ninerswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/niners/2025/08/16/49ers-game-today-tv-channel-live-stream/85670876007/

Giants making QB change from Russell Wilson to Jaxson Dart for Week 4 vs. Chargers

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/giants-making-qb-change-from-r…

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

One early stunner among the NFL's undefeated, plus an incredible catch https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6650195/2025/09/22/nfl-undefeated-teams-the-pulse/

2025 NFL, College Football Odds: Best Bets for USF-Miami, Raiders-Chargers https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/2025-nfl-college-football-odds-best-bets-usf-miami-raiders-chargers

Check out the 2025 Dallas Cowboys holiday gift guide and rep America's favorite team! https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/shopping/dallas-cowboys-2025-holiday-gift-guide-jersey-apparel-shoes-wall-art/863176600…

You picked the most overrated and underrated NFL teams https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6509332/2025/07/23/nfl-underrated-overrated-teams-the-pulse/

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

NFL Week 3 Recap: 10 Stats from Jordan Davis to Caleb Williams https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/nfl-week-3-recap-10-stats-jordan-davis-caleb-williams

3 backup QBs Cowboys need to target to finally end disastrous Joe Milton experiment https://fansided.com/nfl/3-backup-qbs-cowboys-need-to-target-to-finally-end-disastrous-joe-milton-experiment

Details of Cowboys, Donovan Ezeiruaku last-minute deal before training camp https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-donovan-ezeiruaku-rookie-contract-details-info

Details of Cowboys, Donovan Ezeiruaku last-minute deal before training camp https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-donovan-ezeiruaku-rookie-contract-details-info

Gut Feeling: Staff predictions for Giants-Cowboys https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/gut-feeling-staff-predictions-for-giants-cowboys-x1594

Gut Feeling: Staff predictions for Giants-Cowboys https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/gut-feeling-staff-predictions-for-giants-cowboys-x1594

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI