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yardcg.bsky.social
@yardcg.bsky.social
6 followers 160 following 180 posts
Australian student, writer, video game modder. (He/him) Acronym = Yet Another Roguelike Dev (and) CinemaGoer.

Fan of world cinema; perennially procrastinate on updating LB.

https://boxd.it/ciP1z

Has ascended NetHack.

Knowing history changes lives.
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Reposted
lawnerd.bsky.social
Reminder that celebrating thanksgiving annually on the last Thursday November (switched to 4th Thursday by FDR to extend the Xmas shopping season) was by Lincoln to celebrate crushing the armies of the slaver insurgents at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

🎶let the Hero born of Woman…🎶
November 14, 2025 at 1:18 AM
yardcg.bsky.social
Unfortunately, people in democracies can very much support incredible violence. I think just about everybody ought to be familiar with both this poll, and the contemporary American society's response to the atrocities at My Lai.

www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ghos...
Two paragraphs: "Despite the overwhelming evidence that Calley had personally killed numerous civilians, a survey found that nearly four out of five Americans disagreed with his guilty verdict. His name became a rallying cry on both the right and the left. Hawks said Calley had been simply doing his job. Doves said Calley had taken the fall for the generals and politicians who’d dragged America into a disastrous and immoral conflict. In newspaper articles around the world, one word became entwined with Calley’s name: scapegoat. Within three months of the verdict, the White House received more than 300,000 letters and telegrams, almost all in support of the convicted soldier. Calley himself received 10,000 letters and packages a day. His military defense counsel, Maj. Kenneth Raby, who spent 19 months working on the court-martial, told me Calley received so much mail that he had to be moved to a ground-floor apartment at Fort Benning where the deliveries didn’t have to be carried up the stairs." Text just outside the screenshot: "Some of Calley’s supporters went to great lengths. Two musicians from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, released a recording called “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley,” which included the line, “There’s no other way to wage a war.” It sold more than a million copies. Digger O’Dell, a professional showman based in Columbus, Georgia, buried himself alive for 79 days in a used-car lot. Passersby could drop a coin into a tube that led down to O’Dell’s “grave,” with the proceeds going toward a fund for Calley...Indiana Gov. Edgar Whitcomb ordered the state’s flags to fly at half-staff. Gov. John Bell Williams of Mississippi said his state was “about ready to secede from the Union” over the Calley verdict. Gov. Jimmy Carter, the future president, urged his fellow Georgians to “honor the flag as Rusty had done.” Local leaders across the country demanded that President Nixon pardon Calley."
November 13, 2025 at 10:06 PM
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kevinmkruse.bsky.social
Oh, it's gonna happen.
Megyn Kelly questions whether Jeffrey Epstein's desire for "very young teen types" made him a pedophile Kelly: "I think there is a difference. There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old."
November 13, 2025 at 2:48 PM
yardcg.bsky.social
READ THEORY

acoup.blog/2022/02/11/c...
A text screenshot from the link + a graph. (Does text news alt text?)
November 13, 2025 at 5:30 PM
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ianboudreau.com
Really wild how all these Harvard scientists and mathematics guys constantly talked about how Jeffrey Epstein was this brilliant, "misunderstood" man and then you read his emails and he's clearly a barely literate lecher, extremely easy to understand
November 12, 2025 at 8:27 PM
yardcg.bsky.social
Learning the geography of just about any country is incredibly rewarding, tbh. The below rivals those "15 ways to draw China as a chicken" maps.
15 maps of China (PRC) each with extra red lines to make it look like a chicken with its head in different positions.
November 13, 2025 at 4:58 PM
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heatherrandell.bsky.social
This is amazing work coming out of the med school at UMN. We used to call this “machine learning” but apparently now everything is “AI”. I wish the terminology remained different to distinguish this sort of life saving work from ChatGPT slop.

twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/...
Artificial intelligence models help diagnose cancer
University of Minnesota researchers use artificial intelligence to sift through mountains of data in search of better care for each individual facing cancer.
twin-cities.umn.edu
November 12, 2025 at 12:34 PM
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checkthatout.bsky.social
That’s where they make the cow tools
November 13, 2025 at 3:47 PM
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jadehawk.bsky.social
the cows are both racist and WANT to be kept as foodstock?
November 13, 2025 at 1:24 PM
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mesosuchus.bsky.social
This is the same university that awarded Douglas Mastriano a fraudulent PhD.
November 13, 2025 at 3:24 PM
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editr.bsky.social
Morgan Stanley is abandoning their AI endeavors, saying the costs aren’t worth the return. Hopefully this is the beginning of the AI bubble bursting
November 13, 2025 at 1:01 AM
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edzitron.com
Exclusive: Based on documents viewed by this newsletter, OpenAI spent over $12.4 billion on inference from 2024 to September 2025. As part of its Microsoft revenue share, it sent $493.8m in 2024/$865.8m Jan-Sep 2025, implying lower revenues than previously reported.
www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
Exclusive: Here's How Much OpenAI Spends On Inference and Its Revenue Share With Microsoft
As with my Anthropic exclusive from a few weeks ago, though this feels like a natural premium piece, I decided it was better to publish on my free one so that you could all enjoy it. If you liked or f...
www.wheresyoured.at
November 12, 2025 at 4:30 PM
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alphaville.ft.com
Chatbots as a luxury good.

on.ft.com/4p4LRQS
How high are OpenAI’s compute costs? Possibly a lot higher than we thought
Inference inferred, revenue reconstructed, cash burn quantified
on.ft.com
November 12, 2025 at 5:43 PM
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thehistorydr.bsky.social
Just because a system has been working for you doesn't mean it will always work. The lives of Nicias and Crassus are a cautionary example of imperial overreach and fighting the war you want, not the war you have.
Nicias and Crassus: Plutarch’s Lives, Part XIV
Nicias and Crassus were the victims of imperial overreach, at times when both Athens and Rome felt they could not fail at anything they tried.
josephstoltz.com
November 11, 2025 at 3:05 PM
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krasnoviancommando.bsky.social
The Army post renaming cost about $6m a pop
November 12, 2025 at 10:22 PM
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adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com
TV conspiracies: we’ve hacked their computers but they’ve perfectly cleaned up the evidence!

Real conspiracies:
To: conspirator
From: famous person
Attachment: evidence.png
November 12, 2025 at 8:19 PM
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emilynussbaum.bsky.social
I hereby apologize to Eyes Wide Shut for thinking it was hyperbolic
November 12, 2025 at 10:10 PM
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kenwhite.bsky.social
Did Underage Girls Ruin Politics?

Tomorrow in the @nytimes.com
November 12, 2025 at 8:17 PM
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adamserwer.bsky.social
Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.
November 12, 2025 at 2:29 PM
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calliope5431.bsky.social
The column on the right is the inflation rate in the years leading up to Harry Truman's reelection in 1948:
November 12, 2025 at 4:54 PM
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davidzipper.bsky.social
Remember all the hype about how Uber and Lyft would allow people to live car-free?

Well, it turns out ridehail has no discernible impact on car ownership at all.

Analysis from Glenn Mercer's excellent newsletter:
glennmercer.substack.com/p/the-impact...
November 12, 2025 at 7:54 PM
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yonahfreemark.com
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed 4 years ago. In new research @urbaninstitute.bsky.social we study its effects.

US transport spending increased by 30%, but:
—Funding for non-highway projects flatlined
—Construction cost increases resulted in no actual increase in infrastructure
Federal Infrastructure Spending on Transportation, Four Years after the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is up for reauthorization in 2026. New analysis shows that the act increased spending on transportation infrastructure, but…
www.urban.org
November 12, 2025 at 5:32 PM
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yonahfreemark.com
After the law went into effect, we find that it produced a major boost in spending on streets/highway-related investment, adjusted for inflation.

But spending on non-streets/highway investment, like rail transit, flatlined. States & cities *reduced* spending on rail transit after the law passed.
Federal, state, and local spending on transportation infrastructure. State and local spending on transportation infrastructure, by type.
November 12, 2025 at 5:39 PM