This “evidence” isn’t compelling, it’s embarrassing. GenAI is a societal catastrophe in so many ways and it deserves better critics. If you can’t understand how AI could do this without directly storing anything, you don’t understand it well enough to critique it on a technical level.

There’s no future unless these ghouls are brought to justice and every elected who chides “look forward” is pushed out of public life. And I can’t see the path to either through our sclerotic leadership and the vile machine they’ve built to retain but never wield power. It’s a very bleak road ahead.

Not sure exactly how to phrase this but I find it alarming the speed with which people default to moral/ethical shortcuts now. Like they don’t consider the specifics or context of a thing, they look for the markers that tell them Good or Bad, Us or Them, discard the rest and fully entrench there.

Pluribus rules because it’s forcing people who wanna see a bunch of sci fi lore dumps to instead watch amazing actors have incredibly interesting conversations about what it means to be a person

This is one of those things that I think is quietly important – when these people are talking shit about cities, Portland or Minneapolis or New York or Charlotte or wherever, you have to loudly say, “no, fuck you, you’re lying, that town and its people whip ass and you’re the asshole”

Pimping AI article narration on the “scope of the AI bubble” article is incredibly fucking funny

I wouldn’t say it’s a new stance, but seeing these jackboots run roughshod over my city with impunity has crystallized for me that everyone involved in this from top to bottom facing charges is the moderate, sensible position. Willingness to execute on that is now the minimum bar for Dem electeds.

I too am excited about all the other wins, but Charlotte also had a transit referendum that was very much uncertain and it passed and I am so happy to live in a city that’s actually investing in becoming livable without a car.

Many people’s experience of public life is now that everyone else is in your way, a threat, or both. Taking the most dangerous, hostile, and isolating activity and replacing it with one where we all share the same goal goes a long way towards not becoming an antisocial misanthrope about the commons.

Furthermore public transit teaches you how to live with temporary minor annoyances and cars teach you that you're god's most special baby and your moment-to-moment comfort is the only important thing in the world

i think if you ride public transit enough you learn that most weird behavior is not dangerous, and conversely i think driving a car teaches you that everyone is trying to kill you at all times

What is baseball even about

The question now and always is whether we continue to yoke the country to propagandized electoral minorities largely insensitive to material conditions and new information or whether we enact the reforms necessary to become a more democratic society. That is the choice.

Gotta stress the extent to which it really is everyone (at middle manager or below, anyways). I’ve yet to meet an exception who hasn’t personally bet the farm on the AI delusion.

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

I think the way dog people simultaneously stopped making an effort to train them and insisted their dogs must be present everywhere was an early indicator that many Americans started to no longer think we live in a society

there's more to it all than this, and Schmitt of course was a theorist interested and then complicit in how such control shifts to self-declared dictators subverting the rules of liberal democracy, but we're already at a stage of assumed impunity to federal goons. Contesting it is what's left.

wrote about a great writer thealexpress.substack.com/p/kaleb-horton

Man. I didn’t know him so it feels crude to chime in, but he was on the shortlist of writers on here I was always eager to read, and it never added up why finding places for that writing seemed like pulling teeth. Incredibly sad loss.

The “fetish for getting yelled at” meme is too liberally deployed, but given both the content and ubiquity of rejection of this take, it might be the most it has ever applied.

This is simply untenable. There is no way forward with media and political classes captured by the right. Every time someone commits a crime you have to pray it's not an undesirable or it's purge time, then when it turns out to be themselves again they just shrug and wait for the next one.

Kill recreational nihilism — wherever it comes from, whatever ideological mask it happens to be wearing. Do not engage in it. Do not indulge it. It makes you weak and it makes you stupid. If you haven't found meaning in something, don't make the void you have chosen everyone else's problem.

Re:”political violence” as a discourse, again it is entirely possible to understand the ways we already live under extraordinary violence and also that the floor can fall out so much farther. It’s not that it affects those who were comfortable, it’s how much worse it gets for the already vulnerable.

Police brutality is bad; systematic racial profiling and illegal deportations are bad; abortion clinic bombings are bad; mass graves are worse. You know what a child's skull looks like after multiple blunt-force traumas? That's the floor. Keeping everyone out of mass graves is the fundamental goal.

People don't understand that civil conflict looks like your neighbors dragging you out of bed in the middle of the night and executing you in your living room simply because they're suspicious you might be a political enemy, and it really shows sometimes.

Lot of otherwise smart people that seem committed to pretending to not understand this today.

Evenly divided between waiting for the Act I patch that is definitely coming, and pushing through for the pre-nerf Radahn “I beat Last Judge on launch” cred.

Have a theory that the combination of passive investing dominance and the remaining market movers embracing an unreality that ignores fundamentals is turning the stock market into a second social security for the upper classes where the only real variables are how many are paying in vs cashing out.

Imo the real version of "Nobody wants to work anymore" is nothing works anymore. If the business you're dealing with isn't outright defrauding you it's incompetent at the most basic things

We're now in a redistricting arms race. Dems are properly fighting back. But the endgame lets mapmakers pick lawmakers and render elections irrelevant. Yet the problem is not the mapmakers; it's the maps. The debacle reflects the urgent need for proportional representation. From me:

All my friends should be made to live walking distance from me. I don't care if this massively upends their lives

This article on on NYC landlords unable to pay their expenses gives a foretaste of what I suspect the pushback to a rent freeze is going to look like. www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/07/b...

It really feels like we’ve lost the ability to consider almost anything on its merits and can instead only wage proxy wars about whatever tribal allegiance we can assign something to. “Good things are good and bad things are bad regardless of who is saying it” seems self-evident, and yet…

So you have people defending the big container and attacking the big container even tho it's a big container that (by design) holds a mixture of good and bad ideas. You can just talk about whether or not things are good ideas. The horse doesn't exist, it's just a fake thing two guys made up.

I’ve seen several discourses here recently that all boil down to “my actions and values are misaligned and that makes me defensive” vs “how can you not see that you’re not being a perfectly consistent moral agent, a real thing that definitely exists.” Shocking that these never seem to get anywhere.

"why don't you have the same anger for republicans" I do I just don't think you can get fire to change direction by yelling at it while I have to assume firefighters are at least amenable to feedback

Don't have anything new to say about AI here. One thing I will say is that higher ed has long been broken. If elites had spent more time thinking through the point of education and how well we really do it than stoking woke panic, maybe we wouldn't be staring at this abyss. nymag.com/intelligence...

There’s a lot of reasons to hate Sam Altman and ChatGPT but top of the list for me has gotta be the reflexive AI hate they’ve inspired such that people think of it in the same vein as NFTs. It’s like snake oil and penicillin being sold as cure-alls and calling them equally useless since neither are.

okay now that you all have gotten a taste of America's rational and predictable new trade policy, everyone who wants to build your new factories here just form an orderly line

Everyone wants there to be a grand scheme behind all of this but the terrible truth is that extremely stupid people are in charge and they have a fanatical devotion to wrong, childlike concepts of society and economics cooked up by right wing radio hosts in order to sell tainted dietary supplements

if the united states ever has even a hope of recovering we have to destroy the idea of american individualism. "they don't owe you anything" we owe each other everything actually

It’s important to know that there’s not even a pretense that the escalating violence and displacement in the West Bank is about Hamas. The Zionist project is fundamentally eliminationist, and every atrocity abetted by the US and its allies has emboldened it a thousandfold. These are the results.

I am begging leftists to learn just a little bit about how government financing works. “It’s all made up and doesn’t matter” can get you by right up until it does matter, but by that point the options left on the table are really, really, not good for people who support a robust social safety net.

There is not a single blue state senator who should know a day of peace until they’re chased out of public life entirely. This was the last test and they all failed, there’s no coming back from this one.

Silver lining: If D leadership really does roll over here, I think even the most milquetoast Dem comes to understand there’s no future for this party as currently constructed. They successfully impressed upon the normies that this administration is an existential threat, then capitulated completely.

I'm sympathetic to this idea, because it makes sense, it's rational, it's how someone smart but evil would act. It only falls down when you listen to the actual words Donald Trump says about it, such as "trade deficits are stealing from us" and "tariffs are free money they will pay us"

The placement of "trans issues" here is, without exaggeration, one of the most depraved things I've ever seen in the pages of this publication.

I think if you don't want to buy things from major retailers today or any day that is great, and I would also love for everyone to remember that successful movements usually need to involve labor, and to start thinking of yourself as a worker first and a consumer second

strongly agreed with Cara. some of y'all talk like you have hidden a spare population of unproblematic, unpropagandized people to build a mass movement out of under your couch cushions or something.

I deleted a post because “do what you can” preaching felt so impotent against the enormity of what we’re facing, but with the EEOC being explicitly weaponized I’m gonna repeat it: you need to make sure your workplace is a safe place for trans people. Do not accept “just following orders” bullshit.