Category: Links

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

• Lotta people (yeah, I know… more techno-optimism)
• Personally, I’d recommend Mastodon: you can just bypass for-profit social media altogether
• (somewhat related to previous) Fediverse explainer (in French, just for obstreperosity)

An illustration from the internet (or rather, MY internet).

A quote.

“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I am going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

• Implausible optimism
• Bell Labs’ legacy

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” – HL Mencken

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

• “Mr. Rogers, in a bloodstained sweater”
• There’s a weird but deep connection between my former career (data analytics) and the outcome of the 2024 election (Thiel’s fantasy world)

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“And just like that, the voting machines are totally fine.” – Alex Cole

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

• Is elno trolling us? DOGE bubble (caveat: do not read if earnest trumpism makes you uncomfortable)
• The Genesis of the Nerd Reich

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Cumulative cultural evolution requires both the conservative impulse to imitate and the progressive impulse to tinker. These two processes — imitation and innovation — make up the ratcheting effect by which complex cultural products (e.g., institutions, practices, technologies, etc.) evolve over time.” – Brett Andersen

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

• • Donald Grover Cleverump
  • Lots of cancer

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“There is significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human.” – a US park ranger, on the issue of trying to bear-proof trash cans in national parks.

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

• Immigrants voted for Trump in massive numbers – invalidating one of his key arguments against immigration (ie that large-scale immigration would lead to Democrat dominance)
• Monarchist Moldbug gets some things right, but on prescription, rejects rule of law and loses my interest – tldr (major paraphrase): you’re all really lousy fascists, you wouldn’t deserve Hitler if he showed up!

An illustration from the internet.

Two quotes.

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” – Margaret Atwood

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” – Stafford Beer

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• On the Port Huron Statement
• “Libbing out”

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.” ~ Terry Pratchett

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Things are not so bad
• The Zvi with in-depth AI stuff

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” – John Stuart Mill

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Let’s be optimistic and terraform earth (I’m not being sarcastic, I believe in this kind of thing)
• Zeitgeist

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“How many words would a wordcheck check, if a wordcheck could check words?”

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Pew research political typology quiz (my results)
• Gospel of Judas (text)

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“The great trouble with religion – any religion – is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both.” – Robert A. Heinlein

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• • Some light reading from early 1945
  • The “sovereignty of felt need”

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“World War II is closer in time to the US Civil War than it is to the present day.”

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• People actually don’t have that many misconceptions about what the opposite party believes
• (related to above) Take your own ideological turing test (I got 7/10 which is apparently typical)
• Show how confused you are

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Your enemy is not the refugee. Your enemy is the one who made him a refugee.” – Willie Nelson

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• • UAE Panegyric (anti-democracy rant)
  • The future must be stopped

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Desire is, by nature, childlike and chary of government. The day we begin to qualify it by the righteousness of its political content is the day we begin to prescribe some desires and prohibit others. That way lies moralism only.” – Andrea Long Chu

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Looking back on the way out (leaving the planet)
• nostr
• Moldbug is not exactly wrong (caveat: he’s still a reactionary misanthrope, though – he wants better fascism)

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one’s bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one’s head under the cover, giving one’s self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind…” – Marcel Proust

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• Pro-lifers should be longtermists (but not necessarily vice versa)
• Rivers!

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Twitter is a charnel ground, to be sure, and this is for now and among other landscapes, where I choose to practice.” – Roshi Joan Halifax

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• ASCII smuggling
• Nah, just do the right thing

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“My love grows stronger as my stomach grows emptier.” – any dog, anywhere.

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• This is important: hamster rides a subway train
• Mordor Inc warns of data breach

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“While the secret knowledge is only available to some members of the society, there is an ideology, an ethics, and a phenomenology of ignorance that is shared, to some degree, by all.” – Jonathan Mair

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”

An illustration from the internet.

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

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• The disutility of work
• Technocracy ascendant

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“Neoliberalism is not the celebration of the market, but the denigration of the state.” – Attributed to Francis Fukuyama by Matt Yglesias

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

• An easy way to tell if your computer is working
• Koreans of Ukraine

An illustration from the internet.

A quote.

“‘Needless to say’ is, needless to say, needless to say.” — Enoch Haga