tom bombadil

i think this is just how politics works? like some people think trans is bad and some people think trans is good. both sides make the best arguments they can and eventually we settle into some sort of compromise about it. we should expect half the population to want stricter…

it'll be interesting if we actually do see mass unemployment among software developers due to AI. a lot of the smartest people in their communities getting dumped into the labor market in very visible way

rather than think in terms of "true" or "false", i often find it's more productive to think about different models that are a better or worse fit for reality. miasma theory and germ theory are both simplifications of more complex phenomena. miasma theory is only seen as false…

it's actually sort of crazy that in our science fiction we imagined helpful AI assistants and that seems to be what we're actually getting with AI so far

this sort of thing is why i don't think AI fakes actually change much in terms of misinfo. it's trivially easy to take a picture of one thing and say it's another. what matters is chain of custody: do you trust every link in the chain that brought this image to your eyes?

i do think it's interesting how media made by people too close to your own culture can sometimes be a little too easy to dissect. knowing exactly what they were thinking about ruins the magic a little bit

on saturday mornings i often awake and feel my forager ancestors calling to me. i answer their call by walking out the door and wandering around to find something to eat. like a bagel or something though i'm not digging up tubers or shooting birds

irregardless is a word but it tells you something about someone when and how they use it. there are people who avoid it, people who call it out when they hear it, people who use it ironically, people who sometimes slip up and use it, and people who just embrace it as a perfectly…

i think talking about indigenous societies is hard because if you say mostly nice things you end up in a "noble savage" sort of territory. but if you depict the reality, people will latch on to the parts that sound really horrible. the problem IMO is that people often don't…

i'm gonna say that if your main association with hulk hogan is gawker or his political views, you're officially too online

this might sound dumb but i actually don't understand this behavior. i understand deciding to sacrifice to help others. but why grind this way for your own ambition? maybe i need to found an "effective selfishness" movement for actually maximizing personal utility

i feel like with the very smartest leftists, we share exactly the same assessment of things, except at the end i say "and that's good" but they say "and that's bad"

it truly is the dumbest timeline that we poured billions into decentralized payment systems but strictly for ponzi scheme purposes. mastercard still gets to decide what games you can play

the problem is that some patients have very serious problems while lots of other patients don't and it's hard to tell the difference. i mean that is the doctor's job so they should do their best but it is an adversarial environment

here's the deal. either you're smarter than your boss or your boss is smarter than you. if you're the smart one, then be smart! figure out why they're asking for the thing in a way that doesn't piss them off if you're the dumb one, then i guess i don't have any advice for you.…