Will Oremus

@willoremus.com

78258 Followers 2650 Following

Covering online speech, the information economy and AI weirdness at @theatlantic.com. Shitposting about Bluesky on Bluesky. Signal: willoremus.24

an unbroken line of row houses with brick first floors and mostly white or off-white upper floors. one is green on top, two are all brick. gravel, weedy greenery and wires in the foreground. medium height irregular deciduous tree canopy in background. sky is a hazy mix of cloud and blue.
wrapped cover of SPIN magazine featuring the ska-punk band Sublime
Although chatbots have advanced dramatically in their research and reasoning capacities, they are still fundamentally text-prediction machines. They generate answers one “token”—or chunk of text—at a time, based on what has come before. Each successive word choice factors in both the statistical likelihood of that word coming next in a sequence, based on patterns in the original training data, and the likelihood that it will lead to a highly rated response overall. In other words, the models are always seeking a balance between the clever word choice and the obvious one. When a chatbot uses negative parallelism, according to this theory, it’s essentially hedging between the two. Once it has started a sentence whose function is to characterize something, the path of least resistance is to say first what the thing isn’t (X), and only then what the thing is (Y). Put another way: For a sentence that begins with “This is,” following it with “not just” is both more likely and safer than the many options for how to directly characterize its subject. And after “This is not just,” the rest of the sentence gets easier too. The next word can be X—the boring, obvious descriptor that gets negated—which in turn sets up the final choice of Y, the somewhat punchier descriptor.
screenshot of fangraphs blog. the text of my post covers the gist of that it says.
france vs paraguay game ends, the losing keeper offers to shake hands with mbappe, he walks right past and shouts to the crowd
Freddy from Germany’s X account has been deleted
screenshot of my quote-skeet of a bluesky post yesterday by the great Mark Joseph Stern, pointing out the 5-4 alignment on Watson v. RNC with Barrett and Roberts joining the liberals. my quote was: "the alignment here is interesting."
plate of grilled ny strip steaks in foreground with a bottle and quarter-full stemless glass of Carlisle 2016 Petite Sirah Napa Valley Palisades Vineyard behind it. to the side is a glass casserole of grilled asparagus spears and a veggie pasta. in the background is a cat asleep on a hanging platform in front of a window.
screenshot of X post by account "non aesthetic things" text: Argentina unveils giant Lionel Messi statue in Patagonia during World Cup images show, indeed, a giant Lionel Messi statue, his crotch straddling a World Cup trophy. a human is visible walking under his humongous ass
post in reddit’s “how is living there” sub reads: “what’s it like living in roku city?” image is the default sleep screen on roku tv’s.
screenshots of X posts calling will oremus a "faggot"
First screenshot is a skeet by user HK: "Out on a run and came across a couple having a break up. The woman yelled that the guy cared more about “his YouTube videos” than her. Fully expected it to be some Andrew Tate shit until he sheepishly said “trains mean so much to me but you’ve never understood that” Second screenshot is of the reply thread. Comments include: So sad when a relationship hits the buffers sometimes things just go off the rails Decoupling is the right choice here that tracks
Take the Swedish soccer fan who swooned over ranch dressing. Elsa Thora, a photogenic 24-year-old blonde, has been featured in a number of news stories about foreign soccer fans’ American exploits, exuding a gee-whiz gusto for the country’s food and culture. “I feel like I’m in a movie,” she posted, holding bags of Hostess Twinkies and cheese-stuffed Combos outside a convenience store. “OK so Amish people are real,” she marveled. What many of the news stories have failed to mention is that Thora is not new to the social-media spotlight. She’s a star on the adult platform OnlyFans and a fixture in the British tabloids, where she’s made headlines for expressing her desire to have sex in space, to birth Elon Musk’s first baby on Mars, and to sleep with a player from every English Premier League soccer club. (“Three down, 17 to go,” she told The Irish Sun in 2024.) She already has some 388,000 followers on Instagram. When I reached her by phone, on her way to Los Angeles, she told me that she works in digital marketing but that the trip to the States was just for fun and the love of soccer. She acknowledged that her posts here have raised her social-media profile but insisted that she isn’t trying to monetize them: Her enthusiasm for American culture is genuine, she said.
screenshot of headline: WordPress survey: 60% of US consumers say “AI” in a brand's messaging is a turnoff, and 86% always or sometimes check the source after receiving an AI summary
blurry "y'all got any more of them PIXELS" meme
screenshot of the first part of a tweet by Brett Kollman: “Oh Balogun is just playing for the U.S. because he couldn’t make the England squad”…Folks, that is the entire promise of our nation.
tweet from opta jack on x: Chris Richards completed all 83 passes he attempted for the #USMNT  against Paraguay, the most passes with a 100 percent accuracy rate by any player in a FIFA World Cup match since 1966.
screenshot of will oremus's bluesky for desktop web, showing several custom feeds: following, popular with friends, discover, a few favs, tech sky, et al. the one that's highlighted is "a few favs." at the top of the feed is a post from Hypervisible, one of will's favorite thinkers about privacy, surveillance and race
Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden introduce the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression Act, or JAWBONE Act.
"always has been" meme with two astronauts looking at earth. astronaut 1 says "wait, so they just put all the worst people in charge of everything?" and the other one with a gun to his head says "always have"
82-0 squad with michael finley bc wilt
82-0 squad is 70s Jerry West, 70s John Havlicek, 00s T-Mac, 80s Bird and 60s Wilt
Hoos-Foos is separated from a squirrel on the patio by about 18 inches and one storm door
Matt Walsh on X criticizes the Iran War and its advocates. Thomas Massie replies: "I hope you get to keep your job after this post."
Screenshot of email from Polymarket with subject line, “Candace Owens for president?”
pic from amtrak window approaching nyc from roughly secaucus(?)
Evernote updates allow AI assistant to move notes to trash and manage my notebooks
notification on phone is a suggestion from siri to edit my usual monday 7:20am alarm because tomorrow is a holiday
AOC quote tweet text: This is absolutely disgusting. This bigoted garbage and antisemitism should be nowhere near our politics. If you’re in TX-35, vote for @johnnygarciatx . And the donors behind the Republican super PAC funding her should be exposed. Original tweet from Michael Karlis: TX-35 Democratic candidate Maureen Galindo says she will convert ICE detention center in Karnes County into an internment camp for "American Zionists." "It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists," she added.
In his statement, Mr. Rosenbaum said that if the episode “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” “These A.I. errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and A.I. and its impact on society, democracy and editorial,” he added.
post on r/geography titled “tallest vs highest mountain.” meme is from “jingle all the way” showing a short man labeled “everest” sitting on the shoulders of arnold schwarzenegger who is labeled “mauna kea”
Drafts page is empty. "No drafts yet"
iMessage draft says “Happy Mother’s “ Predictive text suggests “week,” “month,” and “weekend”
picture of a kids menu. it asks you to “help the frog find all 6 hidden items,” then lists only 5. on a series of cobblestones are random integrated but one is an L? etc etc
We tend to think of our minds as things we possess rather than activities we perform. We speak of “having” a mind the way we speak of having a liver. But this easy intuition is increasingly being strongly challenged by the latest neuroscience research. As I’ve argued at length elsewhere, minds are things that our bodies do rather than separate entities that magically float within our skulls. Realizing that minds are processes continually enacted by our embodied perceptions and responses seems exactly right to a lot of people, especially those coming from Hindu, Buddhist, or Aristotelian traditions. But to a lot of people, the idea of mind-as-process makes no sense, especially since when you think about your own consciousness, it’s so easy to think of a permanent “I” that’s always there. Conceiving of the mind as a thing that exists separately from your body works well enough to think about what “you” are going to do tomorrow, but as a scientific paradigm, it’s broken a lot of people, especially eliminative materialists like Dawkins who are so desperate to avoid deities that they want to reduce all thought to just chemicals sloshing around.
"Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion"
a mint julep on a countertop
Screenshot from a search result that shows a YouTube video of how to play "drop" coverage in defending a ball screen in basketball. Below the video is an ad slot for "Related products." The related product shows a woman wearing a red jumper. The product name is "Pull Up Jumper," at a price of $36. If you need me to explain the joke any further you're not going to get it anyway, sorry. Gotta know ball!
We definitely have a very busy few weeks ahead! The kids are working very hard and I know they will rock it on state testing!! Coming up at the end of May is our last big social studies project...Cake Wars!!! The kids will be researching different battles of the Civil War and then they will create a scene from the battle using a cake! The kids had a blast doing it last year!
Shoe company Allbirds, which sold last week for $39M after its valuation fell from $4B+ in 2021, says it aims to become an AI compute provider; BIRD jumps 800%+
Photo of a huge line at “On the Border,” a shitty Mexican chain restaurant
pan with chopped onions, celery and carrots
Duke 67, St. John’s 67
screenshot of a reply thread to a post by terrence peterson about masculinity. first reply is from rebecca scales. peterson responds. next reply is from rebecca solnit. finally a reply from rebecca schoenkopf: “i’m just replying to add a fourth Rebecca”