Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 18/08/2026It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with em dashes that do not cease, I am the master of my fate: I am the thought leader behind the piece. 001
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 12/08/2026I'm glad the New York Times is here to explain that a total solar eclipse works the same way in Europe that it does in other places 010
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 25/07/2026It's a rare treat to witness the Dildo of Consequences actually arriving 2510
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 23/07/2026For humans on Earth, 3 accidents: - 4.2B years ago, collision of Earth with Theia (protoplanet), forming the moon & creating base conditions for life - 66M years ago, collision of the Chicxulub asteroid, ending the dinosaurs - ~5000 years ago, collision of barley with the rain, resulting in beer 060
Reposted by Daren ChapinPeter Sagal @petersagal.bsky.social · 07/07/2026Well, at least America has better beer. 6834418
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 29/06/2026I need time travel to explain this to my 1990s English major self "Oh wow so do you have flying cars?" "No, too much political strife. Conservatives feel the very constitution is being threatened" "Really, by who?" "Jürgen Habermas" "(Stunned) Wow, I could have sworn it would be Baudrillard" 020
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 11/06/2026If we just put all the screwworms on the blockchain, we'd have a complete, verifiable ledger so we could trace how they are spreading 2897
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 13/05/2026It's such a great question. I think either of the Alien(s) movies is a great choice and in the running for me but on balance the answer is probably either "Donnie Darko" or "The Game". The former probably wins on comfort but the latter on unhinged 100
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 13/05/2026I thoroughly enjoyed it in a Florence-Pugh-and-David-Harbour-are-great-in-everything way, although I was also hoping for it to succeed the way Andor did where minor character plots can shine inside a pre-established fantasy universe without the burden of producing red meat for the operatic hero arc 200
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 09/05/2026Hamlet could be talking about Yorick's capacity for jest, not merely counting noses of his jokes, but I think you could argue that Wallace had that tension clearly in mind--the man wrote a separate nonfiction book on the history of infinity with the word 'compact' in the subtitle. 100
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 08/05/2026My guess is that 1/3 of DFW would be amused by this, 1/3 would be mortified that his book was famous enough to be parodied this way, and the remaining third would be seriously irked that this is for sure a countably finite number of Jeffs 110
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 02/05/2026New York City is often a The Fix Is In voting situation so I am conditioned to embrace choice where I can find it but dang that is a lot of choice 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 02/05/2026THUNDER PARLEY How do you go through life with that name and become a Market Analyst 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 02/05/2026At least you can feel a little confident that an AI isn't responsible, because these names are amazing 100
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 19/04/2026In which the NYT commits the biggest act of gaslighting in the history of the crossword: the Sunday puzzle in the Magazine has clues that don't fit the grid. Or maybe you just aren't getting it because the title is about "Fusion". Then the next day they are not even sorry, it's just "Enjoy!" 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 14/04/2026In which I miss The Awl and specifically Balk's annual prognostications about men wearing shorts 120
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 24/03/2026Happy to report that Project Hail Mary is as good as everyone is saying, taking some justifiable deviations from the book that make sense for film, but I'll allow it. The upside surprise is Sandra Hüller, whose character is not explored enough in the novel and knocks it out of the park in the film. 020
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 18/03/2026Oh I suspect that guys like him and Ted Cruz (class of '92) still are. They behave the way they do because their will to power through MAGA politics involves a road that runs through pandering and emotional appeals rather than reason and intellectual curiosity. (Disclaimer: I also went to Princeton) 120
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 18/03/2026He was valedictorian of his *small suburban Minnesota high school*, not at Princeton University. But people interviewed from that time at Princeton remember him as a decent student, c.f. web.archive.org/web/20250125...web.archive.orgFrom Princeton to the Pentagon: The many faces of Pete Hegseth ’03When Pete Hegseth ’03 was a Princeton student, he was known as a strong conservative voice on campus, a proud member of the Cap and Gown Club, publisher of The Princeton Tory, and devoted Christian. 220
Reposted by Daren ChapinAlan Baxter @alanbaxter.bsky.social · 11/03/2026and he would have got away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling kids 342773485
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026Zion is almost unfair...impossibly cut but geology to maximally inspire. A bit like Brice in a different way. But yes you cannot appreciate from photos 010
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026I love photography and I feel that many of the best of them are truly transportative. But nothing prepared me for the West, like weak-in-the-knees stuff processing what you are seeing. 010
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026Somewhere I have a photo of us driving out to Bryce Canyon & arriving at night. We ate at the national park restaurant and after dinner we walked to the rim for the first time. It was summer and still twilight, so you could see the landscape to the horizon. Our girls were speechless, for 20 minutes 020
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026It's impossible to explain how large the observable universe is to non-science people, if they are not engaged to listen 010
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026Maybe not just because everything in space is so far that it doesn't matter for human perception. I think the mind-blowing thing with space is that once you get even plausibly close to a Thing, you cannot get any sort of view of the thing. We know what every galaxy looks like, except our own 100
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026This is something I tell to everyone on the East Coast that I can. If you have never gone out and physically stood in front of The West before but just seen it in photos, you absolutely must. You think you have an idea, but you have no idea: it is stupendously, ridiculously bigger than you think 106913
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026It helps that I am a diehard WWDTM listener but the man has the voice of a generation, so head and shoulders above the others and still somehow only nipping at the heels of James Earl Jones for The Voice 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 09/03/2026We saw this yesterday and I was too stunned to compose a post about how remarkable it is. Tickets had gotten very scarce but the show was recently extended through early April. 010
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 09/03/2026I didn't think these were particularly difficult to classify tbh 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 08/03/2026Funny you should mention it, we have tickets for this afternoon. Very excited. Word is definitely out though! Not a lot of seats left when we got them a couple weeks ago 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 06/03/2026My question is more epistemological--say for the moment they were approaching this question formally and seriously, can one even design criteria that can distinguish the presence of 'feelings' vs LLM emulation of them? What would it even mean for a language model to have feelings? And so on 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 06/03/2026It's not regime change, it's a Special Leadership Operation 030
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 06/03/2026Exactly. Kat's quote "beginning to show signs of..." makes it sound as if they think they are observing some sort of delta in the way it is reaponding--which still feels suspiciously like relying on vibes--and concluding that it must represent emergent phenomena 110
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 06/03/2026I find all this quite worrisome in its real world practice but also fascinating in the abstract. How can you tell if your LLM is exhibiting 'anxiety' vs. emulating it, having been trained on an enormous corpus of material produced by anxious humans? It's weird Voight-Kampff-Turing-Test territory 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 28/02/2026As someone who enjoyed ER I've been struggling with this since you posted it and does it mean that it's cringe that the ER producers set the title sequence to hold music or that hold music is good and compelling actually if you just set it to visuals that accompany an emotionally complex narrative 110
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 28/02/2026Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed. 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 19/02/2026If you deploy a reference to the questions Deckard asks to Leon as schtick and someone doesn't get it, they can be said to have failed the Voight-Camp test 000
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 18/02/2026This is wild, it sort of reads like Whitman but if you ran it in reverse gear. Song of My Self-Loathing. 🌿 050
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 17/02/2026But! Unlike some of the other sports where the commentary has enhanced the viewing experience by providing expert context/useful info, I completely agree that that big air commentary was laughably bad 110
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 17/02/2026I'm a lifelong and expert downhill skier and I still had to look up what "tail butter" was. Trick ski culture seems to delight in jargon, but ultimately the terms take on a life of their own. Curling has a hog line, a house, and a button, etc. 110
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 15/02/2026Another banger, about Dylan Deschamps, a Canadian jumper: "Gravity just called, and Dylan sent it to voicemail" 010
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 15/02/2026Watching the Men's FreeSki Big Air Qualifiers and the NBC commentator just said, "You know, skiing takes place on snow" 210
Daren Chapin @dchapin.bsky.social · 12/02/2026At some point, maybe soon, they will try to do this at scale and people will vote with their feet. Why do we go to the movies telling human stories once we know we are not seeing humans 020
