One of the main reasons this mess is as bad as it is, is: the press and politicians decided some time in 2018/19 that it was No More Mr Nice Guy and gave themselves free rein to just go as apeshit as the wanted, screaming and roaring. And now it turns out the toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube.

Super excited to share this: 'On For the Love of,' my new lyric essay for London's alt-quarterly The Toe Rag

The way all of these people convinced themselves that Mamdani is antisemitic is a subject far more worthy of media examination than any of the ‘groupthink on campuses!’ thinkpieces we’ve been subjected to

Because the left are viewed by the press and by our abysmal political class as hated enemies and as automatically and fundamentally illegitimate, in a way that even the nastiest and craziest right wingers are not. Because Thatcherism itself is their only non-negotiable red line.

Obligatory pinned post: my new book, The Revenge of Reason, is now available to buy: www.urbanomic.com/book/the-rev...

ah but i am neither right nor left, you see, i believe the best solution for economic inequality is to further loosen remaining restraints on capitalist expansion, and LGBTQ people deserve ALL rights currently enjoying majority support among straight whites in an ongoing dynamic poll updated hourly

everything else aside, “i got the issue i cover completely wrong for several years straight, anyway let’s all move on” is an incredible move.

Today is the official UK publication day for Silicon Empires! I'm excited to have it out and hear what people think. There's an enormous amount happening every day in AI, and it's difficult to gain a stable perspective. I wrote the book to try and get some secure hold on that constant flux. 🧵

This may sound trite, but a key problem for definitions of intelligence as problem solving capacity is that some problems are genuinely insoluble (at least as posed). These definitions thus exclude the ability to recognise when this is the case (and thereby reorient our aims).

It exists!

This is all downstream of the US government steadily atrophying its ability to punish executives and board members who betray their investors. It taught these guys how to screw their investors with raw power politics, and now they're applying that attitude to our entire system of government.

Here are my worst socio-political thoughts. I hope I am not really the person who believes these things. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/10/misa...

Almost like the problem is and always was elite radicalisation, and not Yer Da on Facebook

Labour are just all in on the "concede the basic framing to Reform, argue that they are preferable within that framework" approach and in addition to thinking it is bad on merits I also sincerely think it is going to get them absolutely mullered at the polls.

as someone who lives in a country that unfortunately has a king, the US is correct no kings means no fucking kings

I think part of this is, in the lifeworld of the discourse worker, you're more likely to find people from the right whose social and professional training involves code-switching for sales purposes.

The UK has somehow managed 4 prime ministers in a row who have each been the worst prime minister of my lifetime, how are they even finding them with this consistency

A media/political class who don’t give a fuck about anything except endlessly running their dumb yakking mouths at each other and getting whatever it is they want, now sitting in the wreckage they have jointly created saying, Duh, does anyone have any good ideas

The reason people do NOT opt out of online dating, despite its engineered horrors, is because increasingly it's the only dating. Period.

The absolute bloody vandalism of austerity in one chart. Good analysis of the overall picture here.

Two big changes to the precarity of the AI industry in the last year: (1) more and more companies are turning to debt to finance AI capex (see Meta, xAI, Oracle), and (2) OpenAI's flurry of deals in the past month are tying major companies to the fate of this startup

I’ve heard people give variants on this argument for 30+ years, and mostly all they say is: we don’t understand either QM or consciousness, so they’re obviously the same thing. I don’t want your “spooky” unification concepts, you better have a damn good theory, and I haven’t heard one yet.

the weak should fear the strong

The one that always gets me is that the last American born into slavery died the year John Lennon released “Imagine.”

Incandescent anger decaying into sadness. An all too familiar arc. Small, in the scope of things, but too personal to simply ignore. If only I believed in grace.

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

I’ve just finished reading the Yudkowsky/Soares book (though I’ve not gone through the supplements in detail yet). Think I know what tack I want to take in a review. Has anyone found any good reviews already, just so I know what else has already been said?

While I’m on a posting roll, I just realized that the way to save the Humanities is by rebranding Higher Ed as where you go to learn how to Do Your Own Research

This is good and all, but what I really want is a story about the banking system in Commorragh. Soul banking. Slave market futures. ROI on realspace raids. Interest still paid on pre-fall accounts. An ancap paradise with Medici style hijinx.

From my book: www.amazon.com/Did-Science-...

A memorial event for Helen de Cruz, featuring talks, remembrances, and musical performances, is taking place later this month.

One from left-field: Superhot VR.

Constantly shocked by the cottage industry of tenured philosophers who used to do M&E and now publish papers on social justice that literally don't contain a single paragraph a random 18 year old college activist couldn't put together on the spot

Imma be real with you guys the "TESCREAL" stuff is basically the libleft version of rightist paranoia over "Cultural Marxism", where you just smash together a half-dozen things that annoy you and go "these things are all connected and being pushed by a nefarious secret cabal of my political enemies"

I do not like that LLMs are turning folks in our coalition into IP zealots.

Can't believe it's been a decade...

Giving students thoughtful, personalized feedback and instruction is not a problem that originates from the difficulty for an instructor to generate feedback, it is a problem that originates from institutions pivoting to student:instructor ratios where that dynamic is not logistically feasible.

my takeaway from climate week nyc is that "climate storytelling" is a little too much "we must reimagine our deepest souls in relationship to mother nature and the moral abyss of the polycrisis into which we must now stare" and not enough "ok but get a heat pump"

To be clear! This is “burn everything to the ground in purifying flame” levels of bad. It is so awful, so disgusting, so insanely reckless and destructive that *everyone tangentially involved in an anti-democratic atrocity this horrific must be hounded out of public life entirely*, just for a start.

this makes the connection clearer bsky.app/profile/polp...

anyone telling you that palestinians should peacefully resist the zionist occupation of their land should remember the last time they did that israeli snipers fired indiscriminately into the crowd, specifically aiming at people's legs to cripple them

Remember how lefties used to say "abolish ICE" back in the 2010s, and got roundly scolded by the centrists for it ever since, and now events have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were 1000% on the correct side of history, but somehow they're still being scolded? Fun.

CHOTINER: Record shows you didn’t post a Chotiner meme until Thursday? ME: That’s correct. CHOTINER: That seems unusual. Wouldn’t you say you usually jump on all the viral ‘bits?’ ME: I’d say so, but I had lots of work to do yesterday. CHOTINER: So, that work is done now?

As an aside, now that my new book is finally coming out, if there is anyone who wants to invite me to give a talk or go on a podcast or whatever, hit me up. Would very much like an excuse to travel in Europe next year.

More than ever, all I want to do is dedicate myself to writing books (philosophy, politics, fiction). And yet there’s no way to sustain this financially. Le sigh.

when the LLM makes mistakes: garbage, offensive, repugnant when I make mistakes: ineffable, a sublime creation of a universe desperate to understand itself, doing the best it can within the hard limits of context and capacity

There is this very Silicon Valley phenomenon of LARPing an engineer/philosopher type, where the engineer part is "everything is computer" and the philosopher part is "everything is Bayes rule." Many such cases.

Anyway, here is some actually incredible news www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...