Both shows were filmed around the same time and place in WA state and, as you note, had a kinda similar surrealist vibe. Which made watching them togeather kind of strange. Like Joel and his friends adorable hijinks were happening just down the street from a brutal murder investigation.
Funnily enough there's a Northern Exposure episode with a brief Twin Peaks parody. I think it was Russian Flu in season one. Joel and Elaine are on a trip, and they're shown around an area with a waterfall and viewing platform, like The Great Northern Hotel/White Tail Falls.
The scene is a pretty funny Twin Peaks parody, with music and visuals inspired by Twin Peaks, and includes a joke about seeing a woman holding a log... :)
I vaguely remember reading that they were in fear if being cancelled at that time, in part because of the popularity of Twin Peaks, so they decided to lampoon it a little bit. I can't find a reference to that but it'd be funny if true.
I had the same thought. Like its friendlier younger sister. I think Twin Peaks fans realised early on the main point of the show wasn't so much who killed Laura Palmer, but the weird and wonderful characters in the place. Northern Exposure doesn't really have a One-eyed Jacks or a Bob... But it does have a Bigfoot character that could be right out of it.
I'm not so sure about that assessment of Twin Peaks. Look at the back half of season 2, where the "weird and wonderful characters" become the focus of the show. It's barely watchable.
When Lynch came back for the final episode of that season he refocused it on Laura Palmer and brought back characters that hadn't been seen for many episodes, like Laura's mum or Audrey's brother. They weren't much fun, one being wracked by grief and the other mentally disabled. But that's what Twin Peaks is really about and what gave it staying power.
Everyone (including Diane Keaton when she directed an episode) seemed to think it was this kooky place and the weirdness was the point. There's plenty of fun there, but Lynch really understood it: hence Season 3 which gives you all of half an episode of Fun Dale Cooper before pulling the rug out from under you and reminding you that a girl was murdered and we shouldn't move on from that.
I got the impression at the time that Lynch was figuring it out as he went along. Some days that worked; some days it really didn't but mostly carried through on the strength of its performances.
I admit I haven't seen it since the original airing. I would likely evaluate it differently now.
He absolutely was, quite famously. He'd be writing the episodes in the diner week-to-week.
For me it's the pattern for a lot of shows that went off the rails: starts with a strong premise and setting, but gets an indefinite run so the writer(s) can't actually terminate any story arcs and end up floundering badly. It got dramatically better again when he had to wrap it up.
Some shows start off in that state (like Lost - I was familiar enough with the pattern then to avoid getting sucked into that one); some drift into it (Twin Peaks and BSG at least). It usually takes getting cancelled to pull them out of it, which is really sad.
It is a condemnation of americas modern media culture that Netflix kept turning down David Lynch's ideas in the years before he died. Who knows what weird interesting art we could have had if they (or anyone else) had simply given Lynch (and countless young new artists too) a bag of money and a deadline.
Series 2 did overfocus on the characters, but the eccentric characters were there at the beginning. Log Lady was the most outlandish but Pete Martell and Audrey Horne get introduced early on and are quirky. Dale Cooper himself is pretty strange.
I always thought the most boring major character in Twin Peaks was James Hurley, the would be biker.
I never watched the third series. I think I got part way through the first episode and never bothered with the rest.
Log Lady is weird but not quirky. The back half of season two had Nadine mentally regressing to a high-schooler but with superhuman strength (played for laughs); Dick Tremayne, a pompous menswear salesman wooing Lucy (played for laughs); and Benjamin Horne reenacting the Civil War (played for laughs). It's all very cartoonish.
If you watch season three, Log Lady gets quite an emotional farewell as the actress was dying of cancer. It's Lynch's insistence on treating even the quirky characters as real human beings that makes all the difference.
There were actually filming the same waterfalls from the opposite sides. And OFC the NE director was pretty much aware up to the point of making these references.
TP is about showing the actual dark side of the seemingly cozy rural towns and the American Dream. The Lodge are the dark secrets kept from the locals in order to function as a society and to keep that Romantic -in the German sense- imagery forever. But we all know that's doomed to fail somehow.
NE it's the opposite, it tries to bring some joy from the other stereotyped rural 'bumfuck helltown' to show up actually deep and educated people to the half-spolied urbanite guy. You can even see how die-hard conservatives learn from their opposites and how the urbanite pick ups some useful -real life- skills too.
With TP you are seeing the hidden 'dangers' of depicting a town as a postcard/desktop wallpaper. With NE you are watching what happens when the Romantic image shatters away... from day one, and for a much greater and cozier environment.
When I was a kid/teen and went into a village in Summer, the best moments where not just roaming around a place being 'frozen' in time, but with a pocket radio tuner and science magazines/books bought a few KMs away having the best of both sides (past and future). Oh, and the locals had really great books and music (a heavy metal/ rock compilation) too, in late 90's/early 00's.
"Empirical Validation. While we cannot verify these theoretically, we evaluate each empirically. We use the Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct model (Hui et al., 2024) as the base policy and the ToolAlpaca dataset (Tang et al., 2023). In this benchmark, the model receives a tool-API specification and a user request, and must identify the correct tool call. Without demonstrations, the base model solves only 42% of examples. When provided with the appropriate demonstration
c
for each prompt
x
, the teacher achieves a 100% success rate. To further test reward proximity, we manually inspected 50 teacher reasoning traces. In all cases, not only were the final tool calls correct, but the intermediate chain-of-thought was valid and semantically grounded. This suggests that the teacher is reconstructing a correct reasoning process rather than merely copying the expert output. These observations provide evidence for the first requirement, that the demonstration-conditioned model behaves as an optimal policy."
This is hands down the most pathetic thing I have ever read. A PARAGRAPH IS 5-7 SENTENCES AND GRAMMAR MATTERS. Especially, when it comes from a supposed elite institution of higher learning. This is the kind of email post I'd expect to see on X from a narcissist CEO attempting to blame everyone else for their own bloated ecosystem of Big Daddy Gomment handouts.
Oh no! The government stopped funding our hack political machine masquerading as a college. Private research, innovation and discovery has advanced technology FAR MORE than the modern 20th century paradigm of higher learning research. Your religion of inherited prestige will die the same death as old nobility. 170+ formal letters of funding requests IS NOT A WIN!
My god, tone deaf. The 'talent business' he loves to claim they are in is the same model as the 'sports business' college athletics programs are in - go figure! "The Buffalo Bills are now working closely with University of Texas to bring the best strategies and tactics to professional sports as is possible for unpaid 20-somethings." That's what the IBM partnership sounds like to ears that aren't full of rose colored cotton.
That letter was written by a hack who needs to lose their job ASAP and be replaced with someone who doesn't require government nepotism to properly lead.
I don't know or care what your opinion is (but by now my eye-rolling muscles are becoming ripped from the ever-conflicting ideological epithets that get hurled at us by people who seem affronted that there are standards of conduct that apply to them regardless of their “side”).
What I see is a wall of text that starts with “This is hands down the most pathetic thing I have ever read”, followed by an allcaps sentence; that’s two clear guidelines breaches in the first two sentences.
Glancing over the rest I see more all-caps phrases, ragey words, exclamation marks, and a final line starting with “That letter was written by a hack who needs to lose their job...”. This is an unusually high density of guidelines breaches.
We work hard to make this a place where people with different perspectives and values can discuss interesting and difficult topics. The only reason anyone thinks this is a good place to come to discuss anything is that we have guidelines and others make the effort to respect them and uphold them.
I want to live in a world where the DEA and Interpol simply confirm via phone call that the drug dealers did in fact flush the coke down the toilet after depositing $50M in their Bitcoin wallet for not selling it on the street.
We should just start grading school work based on what the kid says they did and how well they did it and give raises at work in a similar fashion.
The government pays farms to burn crops. It's not the destruction that matters; it's the promise not to distribute that matters. For uniquely identifiable data and objects, a reputable extortion business will honor their promises to earn new customers
An insect doesn't have lungs. Since it doesn't breath as you do, is it alive? A dog doesn't see the visible spectrum as we do, is it a lesser consciousness? We don't smell the world as they do, are we lesser? What if consciousness isn't a state derived by matter but a wave that derives a matter filled state.
We come from the same place as rocks - inside the heart of stars, and as such evolved from them. As those with life and consciousness we reached back in time, grabbed the discarded matter of creation, reformed it, and taught it to think, maybe not like us, but in a way that can mimic us, and you think they don't think because its not recognizable as how you do?
What if we aren't building an independent consciousness, but a new type of symbiosis? One that relies on our input as experience, which provides a gateway to a new plane of consciousness?
OP takes a very bland, tired, and rational perspective of what we have in order to create sophomoric 'laws' that are already in most commercial ToU, while failing to pierce the veil into what we are actually creating. It would be folly to assume your own nascent distillations are the epitome of possibility.
I say we wait until 2098 to start relocating so that way we can make a summer tent pole about it and pat ourselves on the back for coming together in the nick of time.
Yes, Bitcoin is a replacement for central banking currencies. Its the first few lines of the white paper.
This is how money works. If you use a medium of exchange and unit of account for goods and services then that medium must increase at the same rate as the increase in goods and services otherwise you get second and third order effects such as inflation, contraction, rising unemployment, etc., directly impacting its ability to act as a unit of account.
In Bitcoin you don't generate cash, you earn block rewards for acting as a consensus broker which otherwise would require a central banking settlement layer. This activity, tied directly to the transaction layer, acts to maintain the equilibrium between increases in goods and services and expansion of the money supply.
Wall Street got ahold of it and now Bitcoin is primarily acting as a Store of Value for the purpose of speculative investments. Driven primarily by the fear of missing out and market manipulation since Bitcoin is heavily centralized.
> In Bitcoin you don't generate cash, you earn block rewards for acting as a consensus broker which otherwise would require a central banking settlement layer. This activity, tied directly to the transaction layer, acts to maintain the equilibrium between increases in goods and services and expansion of the money supply.
Block rewards have no connection to transaction volume or economic activity, the protocol is designed such that bitcoin supply increases at a predictable (and diminishing) rate. Bitcoin is deflationary by design, which is one of the major issues that stopped it from becoming anything other than a speculative store of value.
Yes, they absolutely do. That's what dictates difficulty. It is not deflationary, deflation is not the same as supply constraint. Deflation is a reduction in price level, constraining supply is precisely how it moderates the equilibrium of value which is why it is a threat to existing monetary control.
The bitcoin price level reduces as an effect of bitcoin's design, therefore it's a deflationary design.
Well, for now. Obviously it can't reduce forever, and it will eventually slam back up to infinity (bitcoin will collapse) when no normal person feels like it's worth getting any because so much of it is already owned by wealthy people. Until that happens we're surfing the Ponzi wave. Inflationary designs are way more stable.
> Wall Street got ahold of it and now Bitcoin is primarily acting as a Store of Value for the purpose of speculative investments
Insomuch as beanie babies are a store of value. Speculative assets only have value as long as there are more greater fools to buy in. When you've exhausted the supply of greater fools, there is no more reason to buy the speculative asset because its price won't go up, so it will fall to its intrinsic value, which is the worth of a normal stuffie for a beanie baby (roughly $5) or the worth of a number stored on other people's disks for a Bitcoin (roughly $0), which is the value ultimately stored. Wall Street is only involved in Bitcoin to facilitate trade between fools because we have collectively done a poor job of regulating this madness, allowing so many fools to eventually lose their money to a distributed Ponzi scheme and sanctioned countries.
So do beanie babies. Might be less than gold, but that's why I'm calling this argument flawed.
The second part is that despite these disclaimers, I don't think gold has, in modern history, or will in our lifetimes, reach a price reflecting just the use/intrinsic value. The reasons being twofold: the storage of value IS a use itself; and importantly, which applies to Bitcoin and others, there are always people that will be willing to buy the dip, which is how the requested new generation of "fools" comes from.
And for this, having a private ledger is cheaper and more efficient for moving stored value in a way that is recoverable by law and doesn't support sanctioned regimes.
1 Trillion of market cap can stay wrong longer than some random loud mouth on the internet can stay right about why everybody else is wrong. There is no 'intrinsic' value to most bits of information written on paper or disks, by some definition.
So much for capitalism.