Broke: the world went to crap in 2016 (Trump). Woke: the world went to crap in 1913 (Federal Reserve Act). Bespoke: the world went to crap in 1622 (ascent of Cardinal Richelieu).

learning is food, and it is not good to starve by way of the chatbots

Wise words from Federalist No. 43 (James Madison)

"Idea guy vibe codes new app" is to 2026 as "dudes we are frickin' hilarious, we should totally start a podcast" is to 2020... or 2010. There is no upper bound for stupidity here, and no upper bound for creativity or usefulness either.

Find someone who loves you like my agent loves grep.

Stephen King has a great essay about the difference between being 19 and 39. I think about this paragraph, in connection with higher education as we know it. A nightstick-wielding Patrol Boy is on the prowl.

horror story in six words: "Can you jump on a call?”

BREAKING: powerful iPhone hacking tools used by Chinese criminals originated from US defense giant L3 Harris. Their zero-click exploits went to Russian spies too. Unbelievable harm to our collective security. Scoop: @lorenzofb.bsky.social, here's why it matters 1/ techcrunch.com/2026/03/09/a...

Live every day like Anna's Archive, Pirate Bay, RARBG, 1337x — all of them — are being shut down for good. (This is spiritual advice, and of all the advice I give, it's some I actually follow!)

A Philosophy Documentation Center that contains people's best work but which nobody has access to feels like something from Borges. I love it.

Pig butchering is creating entirely new industries protos.com/pig-butcheri...

When did mankind fall? Catholics: 500,000BC. Adam and Eve. Chicago Conservatives: 1287. Birth of William of Ockham. Constitutionalists: 1861. First Lincoln executive order. Goldbugs: 1913. Federal Reserve Act. Bitcoiners: 1971. Fiat money. Me: 2009. Node.js.

Protos is broadly skeptical about bitcoin and crypto. But to their credit, they never shy from saying truthful things that sound positive, when apt. Good job, @protos.com.

Outsourcing thought to AI comes from the same place as outsourcing governance to authorities. From Baudrillard's Impossible Exchange.

There is no bigger red flag of charlatanism, for people in my line of work, than dropping a new take on unifying quantum and gravity. AI glazing is making this worse, because now the quacks can spit infinite technical slop for free, in addition to their usual metaphysical hokum.

We're about to see a new surveillance trap: "Plaid for AI" This will look like slick middleware that seamlessly hooks CRMs to Claude, gmail to GPT-5 etc, etc. UX will be great & founders well-meaning. Then the VCs ask: what else can we do with this sick tokenflow data? 1/

when philosophy is made to look like an explainer fo EV charging

There's a curious and overlooked case for the claim that there are nature spirits. In this lecture, we explore one version of the argument (as presented by the philosopher Tiddy Smith) and what it means for worldview selection, naturalism, and the big questions. www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5eB...

You understand philosophy a lot better when you see it as The Inter-discipline

There are a ton of philosophy-trained people in tech, whose training shows, but who now poo-poo the humanities. Guy climbs ladder, pulls it up behind him. Guy writes essays about how you don't need ladders.

Systematic philosophy and tight deadlines do not mix well. There's always a string to pull. But if you give that bad boy a tug, as intellectual honesty often requires, the whole thing starts to untie.

oh good, they've moved past Epistemic X to Non-Epistemic X

A more general principle here is worth noticing — good education often involves uncovering new sites for agency. There's a reason I end many of my lectures with "the choice is yours"! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.16656

AI can be used to either extend your abilities or stunt them. The line between is fuzzy, but quite real. We'd do well to say the Serenity prayer here, and ask for wisdom to tell the difference!

The Sovereignty Go Up tech stack: - Host your own AI infrastructure (local models) - Host your own media (plex) - Host your own money (bitcoin) - Host your own social media (nostr) No censorship, no big data, no surveillance, no subscription fees, no blockades

Why is slop bad? One answer is that it took no effort to produce. Via the labor theory of value, we can immediately infer that it is of little value itself. Because the labor theory of value is incorrect, this can't be quite right.

Traditional paths into bitcoin face serious competition: - "gee wiz this is nifty tech" (full AI capture) - "wow, I enjoy gambling" (sports gambling, prediction markets) - "I have weird politics" (podcasts) Still strong, still GOATed: "I need this technology"

The marginal cost of producing quackery is now ~zero. So it's good to remember, chatbots notwithstanding: You did not unify gravity and quantum. You did not solve the hard problem of consciousness. And you should definitely not post your quackery to Substack or email it to academics in these fields.

Top cringe topics for an academic to write about: - AI - Aliens - Bitcoin - Electoral politics - Pop culture - Sex It is very unfortunate that these topics are also super interesting.

"(a) What are the most important problems in your field? (b) Are you working on those? (c) Why not? These three questions have stayed with me, and I try and encourage people around me to try and reflect in this manner as well." — Balaji Padmanabhan

The great joy of philosophy is that you can just make stuff up. This is also a serious serious problem.

my kind of pope: "Do not renounce your ability to think"

Academic slop has long been with us. Witness: this analytic philosophy generator I made as an undergraduate in 2005.

The lesson from “AI can now generate semi-convincing academic papers” is not that AI is amazing (though it is). It is that academic papers were more formulaic slop than we were ever willing to acknowledge: “A Marxist Analysis of Jane Eyre”, “Does X Granger-Cause Y? Evidence from Z”, etc.

When disputes at the bar or seminar table turned on facts, an old friend used to say: "We don't need to not know" and would pull up Google. The catch phrase is even more apt today. IYKYK (and if you don't see it: skill issue).

A few thoughts on Christian Smith's recent essay about his departure from the University of Notre Dame: It’s a heavy piece. And while I feel for the guy, I can’t help but think he could have been happier had he ditched the attitude. 65 is a perfectly fine age to retire without fanfare or manifesto.

money is for spending books are for reading and yes... bitcoin is for criminals

tumblr still has it, despite everything. social media platforms are really almost impossible to kill.

I renounce Satan and all his works, and career-worship, and the vain idols of analytic philosophy. But this is kind of fun. publishingforthecycle.com

I re-read Stephen King's Dark Tower books every year or two, and occasionally revisit bits and pieces of the 2017 film, in the hopes that it was better than I remembered. My memory, I'm afraid, is sound. The movie is flat. So disappointing!

Bitcoin is for criminals.

One of my very good friends, @resistance.money, said an objective truth on X. It was not well received!

guy who says "right?" every other sentence — bad vibes, inspires no trust, unpersuasive

The best horseshoe theory is a 3D political compass, where all four extreme corners bend towards a totalitarian singularity. Their uniting impulse is the Reformer's: I know how society should be run, and family, state, church, and capital must bend to my vision.

both-sides guy who is still angry at Janet Reno and John Ashcroft (guy is me)

this is very true btw

Make broth this year

I don't usually tell my students the answer, but in the final lecture for this class at the National University of Singapore, I did so. Meaning in life is found in subjective enjoyment of objectively worthwhile projects. www.youtube.com/watch?v=slNN...

Interesting hypothesis about AI ethics: "The prevailing negativity is a result of the particular way the discipline is institutionally organized, which pressures AI ethicists to portray AI in a critical light."

the people are starting to understand