a heuristic that rarely steers me wrong is that any time you find a world that valorizes 1) youth, 2) forswearing sleep, family, friendship 3) total commitment in the face of long odds, there is somebody to whom none of those conditions apply exploiting the hell out of that situation

Ended up in Shibuya on a friday evening and found myself muttering “meat wall, meat wall” at the intersections @michaelcaley.bsky.social

big dick energy as a concept is ableist, Anglophobic, and anti-American.

I agree that they are awesome, but for very different reasons

This is an incredibly important point. Any genAI solution deployed at a company, if incapable of meaningfully pushing back, will inevitably lead to hilarious/terrible outcomes.

I apologize about having offloaded cognition by writing papers in the past. In the future all research must be transmitted homerically

On “offloading cognition”, apart from the obvious problems with implying that all external cognitive tools (including literally writing) are bad, it’s remarkable that folks whose arguments seem to depend a lot on strong Assumptions about philosophy of mind seem not to have read “the extended mind“

pacing around our hotel room in Tokyo trying to interpret the kanji on the switches while muttering „man muss lüften„

@sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com just discovered calpis

I’m still far from seriously considering Japan as a place to move to, but its urbanism beats my first choice immigration destination (Germany) by a loooong way

I get the feeling that a lot of people who don't like the idea of AI generated writing would hate a lot of avant garde poetry and experimental writing

Recalling the time a chair of a hiring committee excused the poor job talk of his friend’s son by saying “he’ll grow into it”

LMFAO SOMEONE MADE IT A REAL THING sweepthestrait.com

A lot of people on this site *don’t* want their politics to get popular for more-radical-than-thou reasons, allies are undesirable in this case

"Maybe there are high-end bananas"

"the top 20 percent of Americans by income spent almost three times more on gas in 2020 than the bottom 20 percent"

brassica, spinach, arugula, etc provide way more fiber than lettuce, but it’s somehow this least nutritious of greens that’s the default in salads

he did not want anarchist communes. he did not want mom and pop shops. he *fucking hated* the petite bourgeoisie — way more than he did the high bourgeoisie, whom he saw as necessary and, in their way, deserving of the respect and adversary gives to a worthy foe. he wanted something all-encompassing

i think it is good people are worried about waymo as a company, but also really hate to see people say stuff like "humans can drive themselves" because actually that has been proven to be a horrible idea

restaurant in Japan that has a column of posters advertising dishes in simplified Chinese, presumably to attract mainland Chinese customers, but ends up repelling my Hong Kong friend

also, every good software project is good because there was a good TPM running the show, a role that has been long associated with women in software dev because oh my god, you can't let a woman touch a codebase, she might give it girl cooties

a thing that has always annoyed me about the bitter lesson is that it is very specifically about _model architectures_ but is taken to mean that you need not know anything about _the domain of inference_ and particularly that you don't have to care if your labels make any sense, which is horsepucky

Lots of folks blaming self checkout for this but whole foods’ self checkout is extremely good; I’ve never hit a single snag with it

I’m sick of this goddamn city, county, state, and country thinking that we need the state to provide everything but also somehow working ourselves into the idea that None Of Us Need To Contribute To It Financially

At first you think heated toilet seats are a Japanese luxury and then you realize it’s to make up for not having heat in the restrooms

How to Pretend to Be Happy

worse: it actually made politics even more toxic according to an NBER paper

The movie The Menu reminded me of academia because yeah ultimately it’s the combination of poor labor market conditions and delusions of grandeur that enables such abuse

While we are all looking at topographic maps for the first time, please everyone look at one of Taiwan before your next take.

Working on an affordable project now…wood frame, surface/tuck under parking, no bells or whistles, coming in at $800k/unit and is probably never going to get built. What are we even doing here?

The bad news is that Trump is probably going to get somewhere between 100k-10m people killed. The good news is that decarbonization will accelerate dramatically and likely stick

I feel like I see a post like this every 2 weeks on here

I feel like David Graeber really captured something about lefty academia because the concept of “bullshit job” is very resonant and has a lot of intuitive appeal but his exploration of it is totally hamstrung by the fact that he’s never left campus and is very vague on the mechanics of actual work

For all the talk of an Asian century, China and other Asian powers never prepared for scenarios where the US would flip from the primary security guarantor in the Middle East they relied on to the primary source of instability that would undermine their energy supply chains

Social media sets up this dynamic where people have a pet theory or pet issue or pet topic, and have to react as if in crisis mode every time that [theory, issue, topic] falls within their line of sight. Knee-jerk reaction, sure, but it's more than that. It's like seeking out chances to overreact.

The job of the headline writer is to undermine the article. Don’t attack union workers for doing their jobs.

The way people go “waaah privacy violation“ at the slightest mention of LLMs on here regardless of context is something. i remember when someone threw a fit about how feeding his public preprint to an LLM was a research ethics violation

What

Not driving is GOATed when not caring about gas prices is the vibe

I am more interested in what the claim is taken to imply. it's virtually always an implicit or explicit "and that's why LLMs can never do X". but often this X is something they obviously can do, so the whole thing is silly: appealing to the lack of reason to explain something that's not even true

is Trump first Ottoman president? >gilded everything >retarded, constantly scheming sons >a harem of slavic wives >elaborate headgear >at war with Persia

Many such cases

One of the legacies of woke 1 is it's easier and more socially lucrative to decry people as bigots than to accept you have a normal factional disagreement.

My friend reminding of the weird coffee shop owner in Utah who painstakingly laid out who were the best (himself) and second best siphon coffee makers in the world

I have my hunches about the cultural source of the attitude that one must argue that X is 'genocide' in order to get maximum attention for X

Mute fast and ignore things

that 2020 proposal in the harvard law review where they propose to fast track a form of dc statehood to admit every neighbourhood as like 120 new blue states and use this to push open lawfare on the republican party and change the constitution was like the baseline sicko mode needed for the times

the similarity between the lefty hippie health stuff and the MAHA health stuff is believing that there was some ideal time when people "ate right" - the former usually goes back to, like, the Neolithic and the latter goes to about 1955

Melinda Cooper on how “family values“ explain Epstein. It got me thinking on how academia also enables exploitation because it also makes you feel like “family” www.equator.org/articles/eps...

I think it's instructive that some of the biggest users of LLMs make it a point to write and think in old-fashioned ways. Even before LLMs, I had always found it more productive to brainstorm or plan things on pen-and-paper. And I still do. from www.exponentialview.co/p/where-the-...