what if bojangles was pronounced like los angeles

this is aaron swartz' opinion of lesswrong, by the way! from his lesswrong account, no less

Food comes the grocery. Power comes from the wall. Bluesky comes from the phone.

with zero sarcasm this is good government and we should do this immediately

absolutely disorienting experience of rather enjoying spufford’s latest “nonesuch” until literally the last page which left me sputtering with outrage. if it was a physical book and not an ebook i would’ve hurled it.

china exported enough solar panels in march to power an entire mid-sized country.

Your annual reminder that William Shakespeare was born in what is now Turkey, never visited England and almost certainly could not read or write in English.

well *that* is a lede www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

"zionists"

the profundity of this comment on a random thread about the obsequiousness of AI chatbots stopped me dead in my tracks

flipping through a proof of yet another book from a somewhat well known liberal voice diagnosing “where the left went wrong” and i’m struck, again, by the fact that a large part (if not most) of the liberal commentariat simply does not believe that the political right has agency.

congrats to sen. talarico

TIL that while Colorado basin municipal water districts pay an average of $512 per acre-foot, irrigation districts pay an average of $30--and fully a quarter of all water diversions, all going to farms, pay nothing at all prospect.org/2026/04/17/w...

the Friday 'stack, where I ask what makes it feel so wrong to LLM generate a misery memoir? backofmind.substack.com/p/authentic-...

the tech fascists think they are so clever and smart but their entire worldview is just a bunch of stale apologetics for race hatred and fascism

Woke 2

that’s that me gazpacho

i think this speaks to the poisonous interaction between the shadow docket and the Fox News Alternate Universe. if SCOTUS is making equity rulings without briefing or arguments by the parties, they are deciding cases based on *what they have already heard from the media about the balance of harms*

Woke 2

i click on one video essay and now youtube is filled with thumbnails that have exactly one word in impact font and an arrow pointing to a thing

time travel as a concept is anti-Semitic, Sinophobic, and identitarian.

AGATHA CHRISTIE'S POIROT: DEATH ON THE FILES (Drama) When a New York financier is found dead in his jail cell, the famous Belgian detective faces a baffling array of billionaire suspects. (9pm)

if it keeps expanding exponentially, sure. but solar has an exponential curve too - if it continues, within 20-30 years the entire surface of the earth will be covered in solar panels. personally I do not think this is going to happen

yeah if you claim AI is what’s going to kill the climate, I will assume you are insane AI is still a rounding error compared to, like, gasoline. it’s nothing. it’s like maybe an eighth of the carbon emissions of cement

At some point I want to put together a comprehensive taxonomy of AI-use failure modes, but for now i think the biggest ones are: 1. No seriously it's not an oracle 2. Lying/bullshitting about what it did. 3. User checking fatigue 4. Just Weird Shit (usually because you ran out of context)

If you see this, post something you saved because it's funny.

The fact that Mamdani just seems like a cheerful normal guy who's policies are things like "we're going to tax second homes to fund pothole repairs" or whatever and yet this generates panicked responses like "This is basically Stalin's great purge turned up to eleven" is... telling. It tells things.

thanks again joe manchin!

In ten years, this image will recirculate on the internet as evidence of spontaneous human combustion.

aurora, “running with the wolves”

new high for battery production

Fascinating paragraph from Scott Alexander, where he admits he’s the dog that caught the car

he came to win, battle him, that’s a sin

Everyone wants there to be a way to use AI so that you continue to get the credit but you can blame it for mistakes but there isn't one; society just hasn't agreed to this kind of accountability sink.

americans stop inventing puritanism (impossible difficulty)

if the UK used proportional representation this result would be so funny. angsty-AF reform-tory bloc and already-barely-hanging-together lab-lib-green-SNP bloc both fiercely wooing the decisive 3% from wales and NI

Kind of amazing in a fully unhinged way

absolutely devastating own of one of my least-favorite internet dipshits

as artemis ii returns in triumph for north america, a check-in across the pond

ok so my ex yc vp is vv go go on ai rn bc he is in an sv vc gc or we -- my em is in on it w/ ai as an os to do ui qa in ci -- so tl dr ig im tl of ai ui qa ?? rn ai ui qa v1 is cc in an hv vm on my pc on gh pr xd

guys i think i roko'd the basilisk

people want stability, security, predictability. they don't have that, they don't like economy, even if bigger house, sicker car, PS5, moar stanleys, whatever

okay calling it Lazarism after Emma Lazarus might actually kinda hit

i do think it's a genuine loss for Jewish intracommunal discussion that as far as i can tell Bundism, Communism, and Zionism were all named ideologies, but the political project that I grew up in (Lazarusism? Newyorkism? Ganzism???) never really got its own name.

They are signaling that they are evil

Trump's post on the pope is simply demented (and evil). In its claims, and in the tone it strikes toward the Vicar of Christ, the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion.

this rules

especially interesting for the evidence that this helps engage and integrate young male migrants