CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• The black holes are watching
• Principles of education

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“American whale draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale” – Herman Melville (in Moby Dick)

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• A Catholic makes the case that both candidates are too evil to bother voting (bear in mind this is basically about abortion, of course, but the roundabout path taken has some interesting twists)
• Postmodern conservatism

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Immigrants are just the kids on the lawn – the old man wants the damn kids to get off his lawn. The old man is a jerk.”

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Test your iceberg concept
• Who are the revolutionaries?

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Milei’s libertarian paradise, so far
• Finding Myths

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Speaking as someone who hates AI, you are more than welcome to train your AI on my writing. Because I would love to see your AI fail, and there is nothing the market wants less than my writing” – Jason Lefkowitz

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• TBH I’m not sure I understood this
• Or this… Small bits of negative time, due to quantum superposition
• This makes me think many of my neighbors

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“In 1972, the CBC had a contest to complete the phrase ‘As Canadian as ____’ (cf. ‘As American as apple pie’). / The winner was: ‘As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances.'” – the internet

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• A brief history of Lebanon
• The best wikipedia illustration

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Pretentiousness… is a necessary condition of the artistic process.” – Thomas Bevan

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• LLM’s are culturally centripetal
• Calvin and Muad’Dib

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Utopia is never a place you arrive at, but it’s a journey you’re on” – Sherryl Vint, discussing Ursula Le Guin’s novel, The Dispossessed.

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• “the most cost-effective treatment for even severe depression was problem-solving therapy”
• On the matter of sovereign wealth funds: obvious, but needed to be said

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“The only possible excuse for God’s behavior is that He does not exist.” – Stendhal

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• D&D is anti-medieval, despite appearances. Actual genre: Western
• Something bothers me about this argument, but it’s hard to explain. Where does the presumption of god’s GOODNESS come from? did I miss something?

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Facebook was a mistake. Books were not meant to have faces.” – someone on the internet

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Hack your printer ink
• Book review: Sandra Newman, “Julia”

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A quote.

“Here is one trick to see the future. From the standpoint of the domestic American economy, the difference between outsourcing to robots and outsourcing to China is negligible. China’s impact is a preview of AI’s impact.” – Curtis Yarvin (grains of salt, and all that: Yarvin is an extremely weird neo-reactionary monarchist, but I think he’s not wrong on this point)

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Frederic Jameson died – his work heavily influenced my never-actually-completed PhD dissertation
• Fasting and cancer (a mixed bag)

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“The burning keeps me alive” – David Byrne (of the band Talking Heads, in his song Life In Wartime)

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• I’m a big believer in Hanlon’s Razor
• Semicolon;

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse” – Herman Melville (in Moby Dick)

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Self experimentation and the obstruction of cancer cure research (regulatory failure)
• A low-tech website

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“There will be chronic food shortages and gas shortages and people will live in hovels. Paradoxically, they’ll be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches. Calculators will be cheap. It’ll be as easy to hook up your computer with a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries. I think we’ll be cushioned by amazing technological development and sitting on Salvation Army furniture. Everything else will be crumbling. Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there’s this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience – but as more information gets on file it’s bound to be misused.” – David Byrne (NME, 1979) [Note that date! – not all correct, but interesting how much he DOES get right]

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• US-made icebreakers are not a thing
• nothing works anymore … and the rest of us get Schrödinger’s Cat

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“It turns out that hope doesn’t just float in on feathers. It can actually take out an eye.” – Dahlia Lithwick