Tootfinder

By post, it's mostly web rather than Phanpy.
Suspect it's mostly replies over stand-alone only because of threads here really. Most of a thread counts as a reply because it's a reply-to-self.
I mostly use the web interface for new posts rather than the phanpy one because I can't type an emoji in Phanpy. Only instance custom-emojis can be typed starting with a colon and I usually want 😄 or 😉 or 🙄 not the custom emojii. Can't type them on Phanpy. So I mostly compose on web.
Maybe the Phanpy dev has some kind of emoji plugin or something? Dunno why he makes it only do the custom ones.
But this is why I mostly post from web even though I almost entirely read from Phanphy. Which means replies mostly come from Phanpy but standalone mostly from Web.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
Magdalena Bay:
🎵 This Is The World (I Made It For You)
#MagdalenaBay
https://magdalenabay.bandcamp.com/track/this-is-the-world-i-made-it-for-you
https://open.spotify.com/track/6xgNV9489zKLRXnvpiZQXJ

Sources: Nvidia's licensing deal with Groq, which has raised ~$1.8B, includes payouts to Groq's key execs and investors, including BlackRock and Tiger Global (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-struck-20-billion-megadeal-gro…

Why Nvidia Struck a $20 Billion Megadeal with Groq
Nvidia stunned Silicon Valley on Wednesday by agreeing to pay about $20 billion to license technology from Groq, one of the best-funded startups trying to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in chips for powering AI applications, known as inference computing, according to a person involved in the deal. ...

RE: https://thecanadian.social/@MostlyHarmless/115961798558875182
For my part, I am very good at this. Would probably thrive on a long interstellar journey.

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

These AI companies are really different.
- OpenAI: Used to be true believers but now mostly cynical scam
- Microsoft: How garbage can we make office and people still pay any markup?
- Google: Sure we can throw AI everywhere as well. No we still don't have product management or strategy
- Anthropic: But dude what if my stochastic model is my soul mate? Or god?

Made it through solstice with only some scratches. 5h of sleep in the bag. Cooking is mostly done, kitchen is mostly cleaned, and parents will be here soon.
#mostly #xmas

Storm bound in Antarctica and catching up with reading, including an *excellent* paper by one of our PhD students on #DeepLearning applications, soon to be submitted.
Not for first time I'm struck that 1) there is a genuine #AI revolution in climate 2) It's mostly based on ERA-5 reanalysis.

"Digitale Auslöschung": Wie US-Sanktionen einen europäischen Richter lahmlegen
Nicolas Guillou ist von beinahe allen digitalen Diensten dieser Welt gesperrt – von Amazon bis Paypal. Europa wirkt dagegen völlig machtlos
https://www.

"Digitale Auslöschung": Wie US-Sanktionen einen europäischen Richter lahmlegen
Nicolas Guillou ist von beinahe allen digitalen Diensten dieser Welt gesperrt – von Amazon bis Paypal. Europa wirkt dagegen völlig machtlos

A night of weird, vivid dreams, mostly about personal loss, but over it all a sense of an utterly weary God, disillusioned with humanity, tired of our vanity and our heedlessness, no longer thinking that it's either possible to save us, or that we merit the effort of trying.