Edgerrin James is ready for TV analysis. His NFL peers support his authenticity https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6973527/2026/01/16/nfl-miami-hurricanes-edgerrin-james-tv-personality/
I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
New #ThingUmbrella example to create a parametric, grid layout-based calibration sheet for black and white photography development. The sheet includes different swatches and gradients to measure results/responses of different exposure times and developer solutions/processes. The sheet also includes a placeholder for a custom test image to be added later...
All sheet components are pa…
If you use #zsh and are interested in plugins, themes, tab completions or example setups for it, check out my https://github.com/unixorn/awesome-zsh-plugins/ list.
The Trump administration is reportedly trying to strongarm the International Criminal Court (ICC) into changing its founding document
to carve out an exception for Donald Trump and his top officials
ensuring that they are never prosecuted by the court for potential war crimes.
The administration is threatening the ICC with yet more sanctions
if they do not amend the Rome Statute, which established the court in 2002,
to ensure Trump and his administration’s top …
Only one day left in the first work week of 2026, so don't miss today's Metacurity for a concise run-down of the top infosec developments you should know, including
--Salt Typhoon infiltrated US House China Committee, other committees, sources,
--TX court enjoins Samsung from using or selling consumer data,
--FCC exempts some Chinese tech at Pentagon's request,
--Man accused of stealing Snapchat access codes for 600 women for university coach,
--Ni8ma…
NBC's entire primetime lineup on Sundays and Tuesdays is now reserved for sporting events through the spring, a stark example of broadcast TV's focus on live TV (John Koblin/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/business/media/broadcast-tv…
Global Convergence of Four-Layer Matrix Factorization under Random Initialization
Minrui Luo, Weihang Xu, Xiang Gao, Maryam Fazel, Simon Shaolei Du
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09925 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09925 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.09925
arXiv:2511.09925v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Gradient descent dynamics on the deep matrix factorization problem is extensively studied as a simplified theoretical model for deep neural networks. Although the convergence theory for two-layer matrix factorization is well-established, no global convergence guarantee for general deep matrix factorization under random initialization has been established to date. To address this gap, we provide a polynomial-time global convergence guarantee for randomly initialized gradient descent on four-layer matrix factorization, given certain conditions on the target matrix and a standard balanced regularization term. Our analysis employs new techniques to show saddle-avoidance properties of gradient decent dynamics, and extends previous theories to characterize the change in eigenvalues of layer weights.
toXiv_bot_toot
Good examples in that article for why a prompt-based system for system administration seems odd: You type a hundred-word question and are told by the AI to use apt when the Fedora system doesn’t use that package manager at all. https://mstdn.social/@osnews/115702679695335298
Taboo in the clean room: workers in #semiconductor fabs, e.g. TSMC in #Taiwan, face high mental pressure. They cannot eat pizza – it’s too similar to the form of an IC waver. 😬
I will continue dropping these insights, here from clinical psychology. Unions are banned, btw., so better med…