Hell yeah the US just gave like 8 billion dollars in funding to intercity passenger rail. Including some HIGH SPEED RAIL?!?!?!??
can’t overstate how massive this is, i used to work in rail and US trains were so pitifully underfunded that my employer wouldn’t even bid on those projects because it wasn’t worth the time. This is actually putting us on the level of other countries that invest in transportation as a public service??? And 8 billion? Like this could actually really make some massive change.
Yeah, I announced this yesterday and that was one of the most exciting days for US rail in years
hell yeah, here’s a source from the department of transportation, dated dec 8
HIGH SPEED RAIL HIGH SPEED RAIL
(via stupidsexyfuture)
Voting as Fire Extinguishter (poem by Kyle Tran Myhre)
When the haunted house catches fire:
a moment of indecision.
The house was, after all, built on bones,
and blood, and bad intentions.
Everyone who enters the house feels
that overwhelming dread, the evil
that perhaps only fire can purge.
It’s tempting to just let it burn.
And then I remember:
there are children inside.
(via quiddie)
So I was made to feel old today…
Two decades today
(via wilwheaton)
That. Includes. Hiring.
That. Includes. Scheduling.
That. Includes. Firing.
That. Includes. Approving. Or. Denying. Social. Benefits.
(via wilwheaton)
hex-is-gone asked:
Are you John Green or a Company? or both?!
sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog Answer:
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, I am actually TWO PEOPLE–one a human being endowed with a soul called John Green, and the other a corporation that gives its profit to charity called the Awesome Coffee Club.
Both these people have equal rights before the law, except that the corporate person can’t commit assault or go to jail or be killed by the state, whereas the non-corporate person can be all of those things.
It’s fun! It’s a great system! Buy our coffee!
When questioned, chatgpt doubles down on how it is definitely correct.
But it’s not relying on some weird glitchy interpretation of the art itself, a la adversarial turtle-gun. It just reports the drawing as definitely being of the word “lies” because that kind of self-consistency is what would happen in the kind of human-human conversations in its internet training data. I tested this by starting a brand new chat and then asking it what the art from the previous chat said.
Google’s bard, on the other hand, interprets it differently
Bard has the same tendency to generate illegible ASCII art and then praise its legibility, except in its case, all its art is cows.
Not to be outdone, bing chat (GPT-4) will also praise its own ASCII art - once you get it to admit it even can generate and rate ASCII art. For the “balanced” and “precise” versions I had to make my request all fancy and quantitative.
With Bing chat I wasn’t able to ask it to read its own ASCII art because it strips out all the formatting and is therefore illegible - oh wait, no, even the “precise” version tries to read it anyways.
These language models are so unmoored from the truth that it’s astonishing that people are marketing them as search engines.