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.

Guy I don't know trots in here and starts complaining about Nostr so I check out his protocol. Realize it's kinda like BlueSky with centralized servers where you can export your data, laugh, close tab. He's right about you coiners and how you limit the adoption of the protocol, though. That much, he's right about.

The Vatican has provided some pretty slick infographs for "Magnifica Humanitas." I have some quibbles with some of the contents of the encyclical (namely, the intentional misreading of the Tower of Babel story at the beginning in order to score cheap metaphor points; unity is an original blessing, and "diversity" the punishment for humanity's transgression), but the overall message is a good one.

First sunburn of the year, let's go. Get it over with and get outside.

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.

Best there ever was. Best there ever will be. Ad multos annos, Bob!

True.

A beautiful visualization of the grift in real-time.

Is AI Profitable Yet?

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.)

I consider my Signal chats private. I consider my hotel traffic via Obscura to be... mostly private. I consider nothing I do on a publicly viewable chain to be private. We should know this by now. If privacy is the aim, I'd use XMR under the presumption that it is still not compromised. All this to say that I find current debates about zaps... amusing.

Mo Bitar brings the goods again.

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.

Big, awful, oversized frames for glasses are back from the 1980's, and I just want to say: no, kids. No.

One of the better criticisms of the state of modern AI I've seen in a while.

32 years ago on this date. I was 13, about to turn 14.

I just updated Brave and I'm stunned. All windows returned to their proper desktop positions in MacOS. This one small thing is the best development I've experienced technologically speaking in years.