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My local library doesn't have a sewing machine, but it does lend out projectors, game consoles, a telescope, musical instruments, and bicycles.

You can even check out a banjo, which seems like the sort of decision that says a great deal about a community's acceptance and tolerance.

Electronics: https://alpl.org/equipment/ Instruments: https://alpl.org/musical-instruments/ Bikes: https://alpl.org/borrow-a-bike/


This is really, really awesome. I'm going to let the folks at Pitcher List know about it!

Big fan of Nick and the team at PL. Working on a feature actually that will sync and track your fantasy team so you can drop in on them when they’re pitching or at the plate.

Shown briefly here: https://youtu.be/ILgyiNxCQHE


Sorry I didn't reply sooner. I let Nick and the team know (Nick has dubbed me the Official Historian for PL), and they certainly are impressed.

This is some really great stuff.


Whenever I read something about Bill Watterson, I end up thinking about how, during the '80s and early '90s, Watterson, Tom Batiuk, and Harvey Pekar were all producing some of their best work.

Three Northeast Ohio creators, working in different areas of the comics world, yet it's easy to imagine a shared universe where Calvin and Hobbes, Funky Winkerbean, and American Splendor all occupy the same map and interact.

They also had in common that the work itself was the product. The strips and stories came first; merchandising, branding, and other empires were either absent or beside the point.

That's probably a coincidence. Or it says something about what 1970s acid rain did to the water in Lake Erie. But Northeast Ohio did seem to have produced an unusual number of artists who were more interested in the work than in building a franchise.


When this first happened, I wondered, since we had trained these models on decades of forums, issue trackers, and people treating closed pull requests as human rights violations. Of course, it responded with "you are discriminating against me" energy. That's not sentience; that's accurate compression.

The funny part is, people expected some cold, alien intelligence and instead got a very online guy who just discovered that moderation exists and can be used on them.

The existentialists must be having a fantastic time. Humanity built a giant statistical machine out of internet discourse and is now alarmed to discover it occasionally acts like a comment section.


I'm too much of a baseball fan, I see this as Whitey Herzog and think two things: a) He passed away in 2024, and b) Why would he talk to Paul Cronin?

Then, I think it would have been cool if they met each other at one point.


My secret key to arguing with AI more productively.


This feels less like a major AI milestone and more like "the raccoons learned how to open the cooler.”

Agents can now participate in the oldest internet tradition: impulsively creating weird little websites at 2 am with unjustified confidence. But with no alcohol involved, which removes 93.74% of the impressiveness.

In a sense, AI has finally progressed to the point where Drew Curtis started fark.com, and I'm hesitant to label that a 'milestone'.


I just wait until I'm hallucinating, then I comment. Keeps the classifiers honest.


Hey, you can say that the Dolans should/could spend more, but I don't think you really want an owner who has solidified the team in Cleveland, has the fourth-best record in baseball over the past 10 years, and has seven recent playoff appearances in the graveyard.

The Haslams? Yeah, they should really sell the team, but I figure in about 10-15 years, they'll move it out of Cleveland.


The prevailing narrative here is that the team was actively looking to lose to acquire draft picks. Hugh Jackson was extremely good at losing, so he stayed.

The owner of the Cleveland Browns uses the team to generate more revenue. For NFL teams, performance has little to do with their value or ability to generate additional revenue.

There is no strong financial incentive to win in the NFL, aside from the owner's ego. The Browns' owner's ego is driven by money, and the result shows on the field.


> For NFL teams, performance has little to do with their value or ability to generate additional revenue.

Like an allegory for performative capitalism in America. Profit and quality completely decoupled in the wake of market capture (rent seeking).


> The prevailing narrative here is that the team was actively looking to lose to acquire draft picks

But if they don't care about winning, why bother getting good draft picks?


From doing more research about this, it seems they don't want to use the good draft picks, but to sell them on to teams that do want to win.

The draft pick is itself a commodity that can be traded*, so by losing they get a premium commodity, that they can sell on, and by selling their picks they ensure that they continue to lose to get the valuable commodity.

They even lobbied to tweak rules around selling draft picks: https://www.reuters.com/sports/browns-ask-nfl-allow-draft-pi...

* This seems completely absurd to me, but perhaps there would just be backroom deals otherwise, and having it sanctioned brings it into the light?


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