Notes for August 17–23

Tomorrow I’m going back to work after a rather lopsided summer break (not feeling up to it physically or mentally), and the social network pendulum is swinging back into a bit of normalcy as I progressively tune nearly all of them out. Twitter (which I refuse to name otherwise) is still a controversial (but time-boxed) part of my news intake since Mastodon has turned into a desert for any serious AI discussions other than violent opposition, LinkedIn is still crammed with sales-y ego trips and YouTube keeps peddling glitz rather than substance, but I do need to figure out what is going on. For science, I dipped into a few of them over the weekend, which did not improve my general mood–it doesn’t look like I am going “back” into a saner industry (rather the opposite), but at least I sort of got my book reading habits back over the break, and I can finally say I did more productive stuff than just doomscrolling. 3D Stuff First my shaver broke in the most subtly annoying way (the…