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Norfolk (Naw•Fok), VA
Joined February 2011
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Paul S. Rice retweeted
college football is a jeffersonian sport about the power of competing local elites that has been perverted into a hamiltonian sport about the tyranny of the judiciary
Paul S. Rice retweeted
So what do we have here ??
Is it :
~Gemini 4 pro?
~Gemini 3.8 Flash?
I thought it could be GLM model but they released a model last week so unlikely..
Some other Chinese model? Xiaomi.. very unlikely tho..
If it were a Gemini model would @GoogleDeepMind give it for free for a week on Opencode?
Paul S. Rice retweeted
Soon …
✅ College Gameday will return to Blacksburg
✅ Virginia Tech will play their first CFP game
✅ Virginia Tech will return to the ACC Championship Game
✅ Virginia Tech will sign a Top-10 recruiting class
✅ Virginia Tech will sign their first 5-star recruit since 2017
This is just the beginning.
This is the way
Paul S. Rice retweeted
Guys, is it starting? Are fire departments discovering they can drive slightly smaller trucks without fires becoming emboldened? That they can work with other public goals and maintain capability?
Deputy Chief: “Charlottesville is a very bike-friendly community, walk-friendly community. One of the expectations we hear often is about getting smaller fire trucks,” Broscious said. “They’re easier to drive and maneuver through city streets.”
The arrival of the newest engine means that the city’s front line is now entirely comprised of new, smaller models. He said these new trucks have a low hose bed, a shorter wheelbase that’s able to turn a lot easier than the classic, over-sized fire trucks.
Community member: “Having the city proactively getting these smaller trucks means that hopefully we’ll be able to have narrower streets. That makes room for bikes and walking, but it also makes the road itself safer for everybody...I’m so excited to see the city taking actual concrete steps to follow through on its goals of being a safer, more walkable, more bikeable city.”
Also as a side note see the pretty little gold filigree on the door that says “Class I ISO”? Turns out a smaller truck doesn’t suddenly cause them to lose ISO rating status or violate some mythical NFPA standard that equates truck size to capable response.
Now - Someone get me in touch so I can help them save money via commercial chassis instead of being abused by Pierce with an all-custom setup next time. And start a conversation about cheaper turntable ladders with superior capability.
Paul S. Rice retweeted
“Gas prices? What gas prices?”
Even without illegal wars, the thing about car dependency is that once you’re dependent, they can do whatever they want with the prices.
Real freedom is choices. Better cities create choices. Graphic via Urban Truth Collective: urbantruthcollective.com/
Paul S. Rice retweeted
“We could never do THAT in OUR city!”
Leadership doesn’t make excuses. Via our Urban Truth Collective. #UrbanTruth
For decades I’ve been talking about what I call “the 8 most unhelpful words in the English language — we could never do THAT in OUR city!” It’s critically important for us to call out the difference between energy and excuse. The Urban Truth Collective will be doing an ongoing series showing inspiring city action that we SHOULDN’T BE MAKING ANY EXCUSES ABOUT. urbantruthcollective.com/con…
Paul S. Rice retweeted
120,000 new songs upload to Spotify every single day. 43 million per year. And the share of the Top 50 held by current-year releases just dropped from ~50% to ~33% in three years.
The chart looks like old music is winning. The math says new music is drowning.
Here's what's actually happening: Spotify's algorithm optimizes for session length. Familiar songs keep listeners on-platform longer than unknown ones. So the recommendation engine systematically routes people toward catalog tracks they already recognize. Every "Discover Weekly" is competing against decades of proven hits with billions of existing data points.
The fastest-growing subscriber segment makes this worse. 89% of U.S. baby boomers now stream weekly. 60% of new UK streaming subscribers last year were over 45. These listeners aren't exploring. They're digitizing the CD collection they already own.
Now add the AI flood. Suno alone generates 7 million songs per day. Enough to rebuild Spotify's entire 100-million-track library every two weeks. Those tracks don't chart, but they dilute the discovery pool so badly that real new artists can't surface.
The 2026 line on that chart isn't a trend. It's a structural collapse in music discovery. And the platforms have zero incentive to fix it because catalog streams are cheaper to license and generate identical ad revenue.
Claude Code/cowork usage constraints are going crazy right now. One prompt eating 30%+ of my usage limit is wild. We're gonna need a lot more tokens
Paul S. Rice retweeted
"In other words, stealing a laptop could get you more prison time than killing a pedestrian and fleeing the scene."
Great story from @SamuelParkerRTD on why no-one who struck one of the 13 pedestrians killed last year has been prosecuted.
richmond.com/news/local/gove…
Movie pitch: 6 state legislators and a few staff from opposite parties were working late and end up getting snowed into the state capitol building together. Hijinks and hilarity ensue
Paul S. Rice retweeted
Many are talking about Miyares and Sears not showing up, but that pales in comparison to the most glaring absence of the day…the Hokiebird from the mascots parade group 🧐🦃
Paul S. Rice retweeted
2026 career advice
Warren Buffett:
"Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks".
As you approach 2026, realistically evaluate the boat you're on and ensure it's worth salvaging. high.
If I was a betting man I'd say Google puts this as a core part of the Aluminum OS. Next gen OS with deep native AI integrations, works across the phones, watches, desktops, tablets, and whatever is the next hardware form factor. Alphabet wins big with this
Google just quietly dropped an AI that runs on your Mobile and doesn't need the internet.
- 270 million parameters.
- 100% private.
- No servers.
- No cloud.
- No data leaving your device.
It's called FunctionGemma.
Released December 18, 2025.
And it does something wild:
It turns your voice commands into REAL actions on your phone.
No internet required.
No data leaving your device.
No waiting for servers.
Just you and your phone.
That's it.
Let me break down why this matters:
Current AI assistants work like this:
You speak → Words go to the cloud → Server processes → Answer returns
The problem?
→ Slow (internet round-trip)
→ Privacy nightmare (your data travels everywhere)
→ Useless offline (no signal = no help)
FunctionGemma flips this completely.
Everything happens ON your device.
Response time? 0.3 seconds.
Battery drain? 0.75% for 25 conversations.
File size? 288 MB.
That's smaller than most mobile games.
Here's how it actually works:
Step 1: You say "Add John to contacts, number 555-1234"
Step 2: FunctionGemma understands your intent
Step 3: Translates it to code your phone understands
Step 4: Your phone executes it instantly
Step 5: Done. Contact saved. No cloud involved.
The numbers that blew my mind:
• 270M parameters (6,600x smaller than GPT-4)
• 126 tokens per second
• 85% accuracy after fine-tuning
• 550 MB RAM usage
• Works 100% offline
But here's the real genius:
Google calls it the "Traffic Controller" approach.
Simple tasks? → Handled locally (instant + private) Complex tasks? → Routed to cloud AI (when needed)
Best of both worlds.
What can it actually do?
→ "Set alarm for 7 AM" ✓
→ "Turn off living room lights" ✓
→ "Create meeting with Sarah tomorrow" ✓
→ "Navigate to nearest gas station" ✓
→ "Log that I drank 2 glasses of water" ✓
All processed locally. All private. All instant.
The honest limitations:
→ Can't chain multiple steps together (yet) → Struggles with indirect requests → 85% accuracy means 15% errors → Needs fine-tuning for best results
But that 58% → 85% accuracy jump after training?
That's the unlock.
Why should you care?
This isn't about one model.
It's about a fundamental shift:
OLD thinking: Bigger AI = Better AI
NEW thinking: Right-sized AI for the right job
A tiny 270M model trained for YOUR app can outperform a general 7B model.
While using 25x less memory. While running completely offline. While keeping all data private.
The future of AI isn't just in data centers.
It's in your pocket.
And it just got a lot more real.
Want to try it?
→ Download: ollama pull functiongemma
→ Docs: ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/fun… → Model: huggingface.co/google/functi…
PS:) Like, Repost and Bookmark!
If this was useful - Follow for more AI breakdowns
Paul S. Rice retweeted
When I was 20, all I wanted was to live in an apartment above a bookstore on a block like this.
What I did not then understand was that this block typology (mixed use, small-scale multifamily) was a stunning triumph of pre-war urbanism.
Only later did I realize how thoroughly such blocks were dismantled by postwar zoning regimes and car-centric planning, which nearly rendered this way of building, and living, extinct.
