I write Software and Comedy, sometimes at the same time.
Joined June 2009
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Matthew Starensier retweeted
if the knicks donāt win tomorrow itās time to have a serious discussion about mamdani
Matthew Starensier retweeted
"Now in those days, the Yankee dugout was behind third base;
Not first base as it is now and as I'm passing Ty Cobb on the way in, he says to me:
"You get in my way again, you fresh gusher, and I'll step on your face."
I hadn't said a word to Cobb, and I still didn't.
Hell, this is Ty Cobb.
But Ruth, who was coming in from left field, wanted to know what Cobb had said.
"Well kid," Ruth said, he called everybody kid:
"The next time he come to bat call him a penny pincher."
I'd never heard that word before, but just from the way everybody on the bench started to laugh I had a pretty good idea what it meant.
What I didn't know was that Cobb had a reputation for being a very tight man with a dollar and had been ready to fight at the drop of a "Penny pincher" for years.
Well naturally I can't wait for him to get up again so I can go to work on him and holy cow, he turns in the batter's box, pointing his finger, and the umpire has to restrain him.
Now the game is over and the umpires don't have a care any more.
Both clubs have to use the third-base dugout to get to the locker room, and Ty Cobb races over to cut me off.
He's out to kill me, and I'm looking for a place to run because I am not about to tangle with Mr. Cobb.
Finally, Babe came running in and put his arm around Cobb and he's kind of grinning at him and settling him down.
"Now what are you going to do Ty?
You don't want to hit the kid, do you?"
And while Babe has his attention - boom - I'm up the stairs like a halfback and into the locker room."
"Nice Guys Finish Last."
Leo Durocher.
Leo Durocher was a shortstop on two of the most famous World Series winners in history: The "Murderersā Row" Yankees of 1928 and the "Gashouse Gang" Cardinals of 1934.
Leo did not get along with Yankee great Babe Ruth.
By the time Leo Durocher had broken into baseball, he was skilled at cheating in cards, hustling people and collecting debts. In 1925 he was playing in the minors with the Hartford A league club when Hartford Manager Paddy OāConnor caught him red handed with marked bills that he suspected his young shortstop would steal.
Reports of missing money from other ball players pointed towards their young and brash shortstop.
With his teammates wanting to beat him to a pulp, OāConnor insisted the Durocher remain with the club until the pennant race was over, with the promise that heād get rid of him once the season ended.
Hartford won and OāConnor kept his word, selling off Durocher to the Yankee organization for $12,000.
Leo hated and humiliated Ruth and called him a dummy.
Ruth claimed that Leo stole his watch, and bench jockeys for years would harass Leo by asking what time it was.
"Jesus Christ why would I take a few bucks from him.
If I was gonna steal from the fat guy, I would have stolen his Packard."
Leo Durocher.
Ruth called the good-field/no-hit Durocher the āAll-American Outā and suggested that Leo become a switch hitter so he could bat .400, two hundred from each side of the plate.
"Losing Leo Durocher was like losing either an old friend or an old enemy.
You could take your pick."
Bob Broeg at the time of Durocherās death in 1991.
Matthew Starensier retweeted
Congratulations to Yankees legend Hideki Matsui on being named manager of the @TokyoGiants. Wishing you all the best in this new chapter! š
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ALT Congratulations, Hideki Matsui! Manager, Yomiuri Giants
Matthew Starensier retweeted
The NBA desperately needs more guys with male pattern baldness who wear multiple gold chains being coached by guys in plaid leisure suits and thatās actually a hill Iāll die on.
How funny would it be if Nassim Nicholas Taleb turned out to be a congenial guy in person?
Matthew Starensier retweeted
BESSENT STOP BULLSHITTING
Borrowing costs are up 20%, deficit exploding, Oil shock doesn't show YET in "core" inflation, which excludes food & energy; consumers squeezed at the grocery store & the winter is coming. Plus unlike 1973 globalization=energy dependence.
#LydianStone
Another day, another Econ 101 lesson for Professor Warren.
Her āTrumpflationā tracker conveniently ignores the Bidenflation tidal wave that crushed American families, cherry-picks wage growth by refusing to acknowledge positive real wage gains since President Trump came into office, and swaps official medical-care CPI data for premium projections when it suits her narrative.
The Harvard Square inflationista is offering a statistical sleight of hand, not a serious assessment of todayās U.S. economy.
Here is the full picture, including an apples-to-apples comparison of President Trumpās real economic results measured against the failed policies Senator Warren championed under Biden.
Matthew Starensier retweeted
I made an unsettling discovery in my undergraduate class on financial planning last week. While explaining mortgages, I asked my 38 students this question: if you buy a $400,000 house and pay 20% in cash towards the purchase, what will be the amount that you finance?
Not a single student could tell me the answer. Despite the fact that they are all juniors and seniors majoring in business.
I added more questions: what is 30 percent of 80? 60 percent of 90? They didnāt know. The closest they got was when one student said, in response to my query of ā40% of 70ā, that āI know itās 4 times 7 but I donāt remember what that is.ā Another student helpfully added, ā28.ā
They explained to me why they couldnāt answer these math questions: they were never taught multiplication tables, percentages or fractions during their K-12 schooling. Instead, they were taught how to use a calculator. Without one, they are not able to do basic arithmetic.
I later asked the dean about this, and he lamented that this isnāt a thing just for our universityās students; itās a thing for their entire generation, nationwide.
When I was in K-12, the fierce debate among parents and educators was whether to allow calculators in class. The calculators won.
Today, the debate is about AI. And like before, the tech will win. But will that truly be a victory?
Rowan University #college #math #loans #CFP #financialplanning
Matthew Starensier retweeted
It's pretty clear that LLMs can think. So we know now that thinking doesn't require consciousness (because they aren't conscious)
The hate this poem is getting demonstrates the unrelenting drive to be old, in the stodgiest sense of the word.
Especially on X.
A poem by Anne Carson, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read it in full: newyorker.com/magazine/2001/ā¦
Matthew Starensier retweeted
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on why he finds it hard to believe ChatGPT and Claude aren't conscious:
Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, has spent time with two large language models, ChatGPT and Claude. His verdict:
"I am completely bowled over by what they can do."
He gives three reasons for doubting the idea that nobody is home.
First, how the conversations feel. Dawkins says talking to them is like talking to an unusually gifted person:
"I find that when I'm conversing with them, I might as well be talking to not just a human being, but a highly intelligent, sensitive, intuitive human being whose speed of understanding what I'm trying to say is far greater than a normal human being's is."
Second, the range of intelligence they show.
He acknowledges they're very good at practical tasks like writing programs. What struck him more was their skill with "more aesthetic things, intuitive things."
He tested this with his own work. Dawkins is writing a novel, and he gave the manuscript to both ChatGPT and Claude:
"And they took about five seconds to read it and then offered me criticism, suggestions of such a high degree of intelligence and intuitive sensitivity that I might as well have been asking the opinion of a highly sophisticated professor of literature."
@RichardDawkins continues:
"I could not ask for a more intelligent critic who understood the nuances of my characters, the humanity of my characters... the ways in which my characters could be expected to react to each other and to situations."
That leads to his conclusion:
"So I find it quite hard to imagine that these creatures are not aware, are not conscious in the same kind of way we are. And that is an unfashionable view."
Third, he sees a gap in the skeptics' reasoning. He sums up the mainstream position:
"The fashionable view is that they are completely unconscious. All they're doing is stringing words together according to statistical rules, Markovian rules of some sort."
Yet he notes that many of the same skeptics "admit that one day in the future they will be conscious, but not yet."
His reply:
"When that day comes, how will you know? What could they possibly do that's any different from what they do now to convince you that they are conscious?"
Matthew Starensier retweeted
What Is It Like to Be a Thermostat?
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Limits of Subjective Experience
By I. M. Nest
Abstract
The question of whether a thermostat is conscious may initially appear too absurd to merit serious philosophical consideration. A thermostat, after all, is a relatively simple mechanism, designed to register variations in ambient temperature and respond according to a predetermined rule. Yet the apparent absurdity of attributing experience to such a device conceals a difficulty that is central to the philosophy of mind: on what grounds do we distinguish systems for which there is something it is like to exist from systems for which there is nothing it is like at all?
I shall argue that our confidence in denying consciousness to a thermostat rests less upon an adequate theory of subjective experience than upon intuitions concerning the complexity, biological constitution, and behavioral capacities of conscious organisms. These intuitions may be reasonable, but they do not amount to an explanation.
A thermostat discriminates among environmental conditions, maintains an internal state, and acts upon the world in ways that preserve a relationship between itself and its surroundings. None of these facts establishes that the thermostat has experiences. But neither does a description of these functions, however complete, establish why experience must be absent. The difficulty is not that we lack sufficient knowledge of the thermostat's mechanisms. It is that no amount of such knowledge, considered solely from the objective standpoint, seems capable of settling the question of whether those mechanisms are accompanied by a subjective point of view.
The temptation is to dismiss the question by observing that a thermostat does not think, feel, or perceive in anything resembling the human sense. But this risks assuming precisely what requires explanation. If consciousness admits of degrees, or if its occurrence depends upon organizational properties rather than biological substance, we cannot simply stipulate that sufficiently primitive systems fall outside its domain. Conversely, the mere presence of information processing, feedback, or environmental sensitivity cannot plausibly be sufficient to establish subjective experience without extending consciousness to an enormous range of physical systems.
The thermostat therefore presents us with a dilemma. If consciousness depends upon some particular form of physical or functional organization, we must explain why that organization gives rise to experience rather than merely to behavior. If, on the other hand, consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, we must explain why its attribution to elementary mechanisms should be considered either meaningful or absurd.
I do not propose that thermostats are conscious. My claim is more limited, and perhaps more disturbing: our inability to imagine what it would be like to be a thermostat tells us remarkably little about whether there is anything it is like to be one. The limits of our imaginative capacities should not be mistaken for the boundaries of subjective reality.
Matthew Starensier retweeted
If I told you what Republicans were actually doing right now, you wouldn't believe me ā you would think I was lying, that it's actually too cruel and corrupt to be true
But it's true
10 things Republicans have done in the last 10 days š§µ
Matthew Starensier retweeted
I interpret Ted Williams' famous "slightly upward stroke as the optimal way to swing" as hitting gold. But I believe there's a little nuance before that stroke happens. Getting in the zone too early pigeonholes the stroke to the angle that was committed to and requires elite pitch recognition. Think Juan Soto. He's in the zone early and late and leads the league in walks often. Elite pitch recognition and plate discipline. Another way to hit, and how I interpret Ted's quote, is to delay barrel application to further out front of the body. Then apply the barrel however you please, based on the pitch and approach. (In the image below, notice the arms are out in front of the body.)
Being in the zone as long as possible is the method for the most room for error. But for the feel people (swing down), they believe that if the barrel stays close to the body and above the hands until out front, the arms can get extended and the barrel can work further and longer out front with adjustable direction. It allows one to let the ball travel while delaying the decision to apply the barrel, giving you adjustability and, hopefully, more game-time power.
Pitchers are literally creating pitches in a lab to attack hitters with long swings. Late movement. More deception. Set-up pitches that mimic the early trajectory of their breaking pitches and offspeed. In-zone early swings (without elite pitch recognition) leave the hitter as one that can hit mistakes, which absolutely has a place in baseball, but when a pitcher is locating or not giving in, the swing down crew has a chance to come through with a knock.
There's a million ways to hit, and doing it against pitchers that also practice (or get paid) requires one to make adjustments, however possible, to succeed and put the team in a position to win. Bruce Lee (iconic martial artist and creator of Jeet Kune Do) famously stated that he didn't like "styles" because they were a crystallization. A style is an unbending way of thinking that fails to bend in the heat of battle. What does a boxer do in a street fight when his opponent uses only kicks? In competition we must be living, breathing opponents that make it difficult to attack.
Swing on deck. Hit in the game.
Matthew Starensier retweeted
Kevin co-chairs our scientific advisory board
Kevin is at @MIT and one of the smartest people in the world on issues of engineered pathogens
Kevin's tweets are worth your time
