Keynotes by Brian Moriarty (Loom) are such treasure troves. The secret of Psalm 46 was a fabulous read. Totally worth the 1h musical reading, but even if you’re in a rush do yourself a favor and read the transcript.
Paradocsical – impossibly good docs
My good friend Davis and I have been working together on creating a repository for our favorite documentaries. As of today, this receptacle takes the form of a website where anyone can go through our curated list of what we consider the finest documentaries ever made, and can stream the ones that are available free …
ZOOZVE is just begging to be pen-plotted.
Of Magic Mushrooms and their connection to the Chicxulub impactor
https://buttondown.email/carlzimmer/archive/fridays-elk-january-12-2024/
The maquech beetle, which some people wear as a living brooch, remains one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in Yucatan. Here’s a description of the tradition.
I remember a full dozen years ago the feeling of independence, tinged with some slight digital survivalism, of running a local version of Wikipedia from my Nexus One smartphone. It was cool, but I used that feature on maybe a couple of flights. I know better now that I feel a similar impulse about running powerful LLMs from my smartphone.
Phishing/Malware attack (“WordPress Patch CVE-2024-46188”)
I’ve received this email: If you follow the link to phishing URL https://us.en-wordpress.org/plugins/cve-2024-46188/, download the file, and analyze the code, you immediately realize that this plugin is malicious and does the following: Pretending to be the Red Cross to perform a sneak attack is one of the vilest things a human being can do. Stay …
Replace a fine-tuned text-davinci-003 with Mixtral 8x7B
In a few short hours, OpenAI will shut down access to a few old large language models, the text-davinci series. Everyone who depended for some project on a fine-tuned version of these models and who hasn’t found a replacement yet might soon feel some pain. I was in that cohort until I found out how …
To mitigate the double-user compromise described here, I’m testing a simple script to automatically boost posts by the #WordPress instance: https://gist.github.com/zkg/30d0c02eabb36b976f706f9c36e22f59
I’ve just finished integrating ActivityPub into my WP blog. Trying out a plugin by @pfefferle