We live in a golden age of negation. It is far easier to take down a burgeoning line of thought with a few googled facts than it is to formulate it. Social media promotes herd orthodoxy by brigading anyone who steps out of existence. Earnest belief is easily mocked.

When it's all said and done, the consumer launch of AI is going to be seen as one of the most awful flops in history. The technology will certainly end up making a very big impact, but it's crazy how fast these people turned everyone against the idea of AI by shoehorning it into the dumbest places.

Can't get the idea from @jamellebouie.net that Trump is the white Idi Amin out of my head. I mean, big, menacing, book dumb but with a dangerous cunning. Both have an unrequited pathological need to be loved by Scotland.

Not complaining too hard because I want it to stay on and have time to grow, but 1.5 episodes in... how tf does Alien Earth have "universal acclaim"? There's enough there to see it rounding into something good, but wow are these two episodes unfocused.

Outside of self interest, there's another reason Trump might want interest rates lower. There are a lot of "zombie corporations" that are perennially unprofitable and survive on new funding and/or low rate loans. If the economy slows, they're in rough shape. If rates also go up, they're toast.

Tagging this thread about a career in domain-specific writing and communications in case it can be of use to anyone looking at these tags. Feel free to suggest more. #writing #writingq #career #careeradvice #writer #careerdevelopment

Often, these careers pay more than the jobs they are writing about. It's kind of hard to get doctors to stop being doctors if you don't pay them comparably.

Random piece of career advice that I like to share every once in a while: If you are a good writer and have some domain-specific knowledge that applies to almost any job that makes money, hybrid careers from technical writing to trade-media journalism are real options.

Systems of systems of systems. It's impossible to know which (or even how many) fuses have been lit in such a massive interconnected machine like the global economic-political order. But we are going to see things "randomly" explode for decades as causality loops its way through the world.

A disturbingly rare, well-balanced take on the state of AI. It's increasingly clear that the people pushing LLMs don't understand the technology, and they're setting the terms for the discussion. Hence, it's usually a fucking stupid discussion.

TIL that the "batman" was the unit of mass used in the Ottoman Empire. I humbly suggest we only measure punching power in batmans form here on out.

Slightly different domain, but all of these companies pushing customer-facing AI will eventually realize that it's going to be seen as digital polyester--perhaps functional, but cheap and tacky. Mark my words, "written/spoken by real people," will be mid-upper tier selling point very soon.

Wealthy Democratic-aligned groups and individuals want people to turn away from the fascist cheerleading ecosystem, but I'm not seeing them put their money where their mouth is. Start writing checks for: -pro-democracy media outlets -online communities -meatspace clubs and organizations

Rewatching The Hunt for Red October for the 150th time and something that never occurred to me because the plot is humming along so quickly at that point...

Our shared story goes on and on, but it takes familiar shapes along the way. In this moment, our own little section of that story, we haven't even hit the low point, the "dark night of the soul." But we will, and we will endure it.

It's going to take trillions of dollars of wealth vaporized before the people writing the checks for this nonsense put an end to it. And even then, I wouldn't expect any personal accountability. They're elite geniuses, you see. If they did it, it wasn't wrong.

Elite power is entering into a feeding frenzy, grasping for direct control over that which they've on previously only been able to indirectly influence. That type of maximalist approach can result in real short-term gains, but it risks giving up the whole system of control for a few bites more.

This. The discussion of LLMs, pro and con, is stuck in this absurd dichotomy of "they are god machines and therefore good" vs. "No they agent, hence they are bad." An LLM is a natural language interface! It's very good at that job!

Rubio is like a fashion model who never really wanted the gig, but the money was good and people said they should do it and now it's all they know how to do. This poor, sad, man-shaped gelatinous entity had the misfortune of being born looking like what people think a leader should look like.

Colbert speaking truth plainly, knowing he could pay the price for it, invokes such a sharp contrast with the sock puppet "leaders" across all aspects of American society. Business, politics, academia, journalism... We've developed a class of people who lead by surviving to take the credit.

The biggest obstacle to creating useful analysis right now can be summed up by the old adage, "professionals are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs." To which I'll add, "and right now they're in charge of fucking *everything*"

Turns out, all you had to do to defeat the Deep State was to give them a raging case of Bystander Syndrome.

The moment everything will change is when "our" side-- the people who value democracy, rule of law, and empirical reality-- stop trying to hold onto a world that is over and embrace what can be built from the ashes of the late 20th century world.

These assholes really can't fathom that people don't bow down to them because they wrote a check for "Hotdog or Not?" or an app that allows you to finance handjobs at 26%.

It's worth considering how hard it is to create an agent that is both "anti-woke" and *not* Nazi. I have thoughts. CW: suggestions that LLMs are an actual technology.

Calling a concentration camp what it is is a good thing, but "Alligator Auschwitz" is pretty yuck. Concentration camp =/= extermination camp. Plus, "Gator Gulag" is way better (and more accurate, in my opinion).

"The diving directions it gives me are always 'back to my country', but I'm from New Jersey!"

Great thread, and I agree it's important to not mistake 3rd party interference w/collusion. I will also add that a lot of released info (e.g. the Mueller report) has been memory holed or simply rewritten as a nothing burger but is extremely concerning from a counterintelligence perspective.

I really feel like not enough people are practically thinking about what it means for *how* we move beyond a paradigm where this guy basically has a Marbury v. Madison veto over everything any part of the government.

This type of thing is what people are getting so wrong about what the Democrats need to do. We don't win by electing party elites because they are toward the middle of the US political spectrum. We win by nominating vibrant and appealing at the center of the *democratic* political spectrum.

Two totally compatible statements presented as being at odds. Does CNN think secret police wear masks just to complement the rest of the outfit?

Rewatching Thor: Ragnarok, it strikes me for as much of a kind of silly romp as it is, it's actually a legitimately *good* movie. How often do you get four protagonist arcs fully developed and leading to real growth in the same superhero move? There are "serious" movies that fail to stick that.

I spent the first few months wondering how he'd do it. Would he aggressively subvert the military or FBI? Nope, he's paralyzing the other power components and building a new army from the bones of an existing agency. This will be used against the American people, and not just immigrant Americans.

Many valid complaints about the Big Beautiful Clusterfuck, but maybe the most consequential thing is that it creates a private MAGA army out of ICE. 100 billion dollars for ICE in addition to its regular funding. For reference, total of all state and local LE budgets was 135 billion in 2021.

Quarterly eval time.

The primary divide in liberalism is, "when free markets and individual liberty are at odds, which should take precedence?" I think the next groundswell movement will be an alliance of people who believe individual liberty is sacrosanct and the economics is up for debate.

It's depressingly clear at this point that no amount of warning is going to dissuade elite individuals and institutions to oppose this regime. Only when the pain arrives for them personally and it's clear that the stupidity will not let up will this assault on America end.

Reform of the American media landscape, especially the spinning off of news organizations from profit-centric conglomerates, is a non-negotiable baseline requirement for reestablishing and reconstituting a serious, rule-of-law based Republic.

What this moment really, truely needs is art. Not songs, not books, not images--not anything that checks the boxes of the commercially defined genre or medium--but *art*. Insight. A reminder that life is bigger than we remember, that life is now.

What I really hope YOU are doing is taking the lead in building the sorts of structures that will take advantage of that moment to replace the darkness with light. But know it will get very, very dark before that dawn. Please don't lose hope. Just as good things come to an end, so do evil things.

I have been too resistant to accepting the reality that our civilization just doesn't want an offramp from the current lunatic course of action. If we could have been warned off of this madness, it would have happened already. We have no need for Cassandras, only people planning for the rebuild.

Things will continue to get worse until people and institutions understand that this regime is an existential threat to anything and anyone that is not part of its core constituency. And then begin to act like the threat is existential.

Something that sounds bonkers, but just might be true: The ultimate downfall of the United States of America may have been triggered by Millenials luring Boomers onto Facebook with the promise of pictures of their grandchildren.

We are on the verge of crossing this Rubicon, if we haven't already. What you have then is no longer a citizenry of free people, but subjects to an autocracy cloaked in the threadbare trappings of liberty. But subjects do not obey any law that is not manually forced upon them.

The legitimacy of the US Supreme Court (or any court really) is built upon its willingness to act in consistent accord with the law. If it fails to uphold rule of law, it is not a court. It is gaggle of robed court eunichs laying out administrative rules to enact imperial decree.

All this bloviating about "total obliteration" of the Iranian nuclear program are going to put the Trump regime in an uncomfortable position when in like 18 months and the stories start circulating about a bomb being imminent.

BESSENT:

One striking contrast in this conflict is the lack of nerve this Iranian regime seems to have. They've spent years talking a big game but were attacked absolutely abused. In response, they put up the lamest "retaliation" imaginable and declared victory.

While I think it's great that the European portion of NATO is taking the Russia threat seriously (mostly because their traditional security blanket is now under personal rule of an unreliable dipshit), the idea of much of the developed world spending 5% of GDP on defense is kind of scary.

Oh, look, they completely ignored sputtering, impotent grandpa. It's almost as if all the tough talk in the world don't actually make you tough or respected.