I’ve been overwhelmed and thrilled by the response to this! I’ve also gotten a lot of questions asking how I did it. So, this weekend I sat down and wrote a detailed narrative documentation outlining how, exactly, I built Mr. Chatterbox: www.estragon.news/mr-chatterbo...

Wanted to share a personal project I've been working on: I love classic literature, and I'm also taking an AI class here at UIUC, so I trained an LLM from scratch on Victorian lit from 1837 to 1899. This is Mr. Chatterbox, the Victorian Gentleman Chatbot: huggingface.co/spaces/tvent...

Sometimes I catch myself wondering what it must be like to lack the ability to feel shame, sort of like the disorder where you can't feel pain.

This ‘Chris Person’ guy keeps coming up in my feed with the dumbest ideas and opinions I’ve ever heard. I don’t want exposure to these people.

Maybe in basketball, but in eg soccer the whole sport is set up as pay-to-play in the US. It’s precisely why we have massive resource advantages but weak players on the men’s side at the international level: the best players are gatekept out of contention.

i think this is exactly right and it is part of what i was trying to get at last week when i wrote about the narcissism of the president and his allies. they fundamentally do not believe other people are real, and do not understand the decisions they make.

‘Succulent Chinese meal’ speech added to Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive

Sounds bad

Among other problems, "fuck this refugee" should be as non-negotiable as a swastika for a party than need to be aggressively pro-immigration from here on out.

Hmm

Had never heard of this Hasan guy a few days ago.

This is wild:

One small thing is to stop using ‘normie’ and ‘lib’ to refer to people because in so doing you’re adopting far-right incel framing for mainstream politics.

Fascism is worse than neoliberalism in literally every way

I have to say, as a competitive athlete, there’s no better surefire sign of a loser than someone who’s happy to be in the slow heat.

Interesting if depressing thread:

Thought on "No Kings" and popular resistance from Nancy Rosenblum: democracyproject.org/posts/bearin...

Dave Whamond

My legacy is that, shortly before I was born, I invented the internet. That's why they call me the Great Networker.

There's a moment in Christopher Caldwell's recent appearance on Ezra Klein's pod where CC is trying to pussyfoot around such restrictions of the administrative state imposed on 'free association' caused by 'civil rights' and it's just...truly astonishing.

The conversation sequence from 'DOGE is doing what we want it to do' to 'wanna bid on OpenAI IP' is, uh, telling.

For more on this: www.cambridge.org/core/books/e...

1) A few quick thoughts on this, which I found generative. When I say the problem of literary studies is the problem of Modernism, I mean in particular: ...

heh

a common enough foundation for liberals, look at how keynes starts his treatment of 'laissez‐faire':

this sort of extreme dichotomy is neither historically accurate, or useful liberalism has always had an ambivalent relationship with capitalism

Good thing everyone hates universities

i said last year that these people were segregationists and that “merit” just meant “white and male” to these people

& that's not gonna happen because **liberalism itself** is female-coded being on our team - regardless of your own gender identity & presentation - will make you be perceived as less male that's what the dirtbag, lib-hating left are trying (& failing) to grapple with

I'm expecting a wheelbarrow-full of pardons for insider trading on January 19, 2029. Note that the prospect of those pardons helps to keep subordinates in line. Corrupt-cop style, make sure that lots of people get a little taste, then make clear that the pardon depends on continued loyalty.

I guess not:

The Peter Thiel-Palantir plan to give Trump's secret police access over data on all Americans akin to that possessed by the Chinese Communist Party takes another major step forward. Meanwhile, very few people in America have any inkling of the project. www.cbsnews.com/news/justice...

This is excellent:

I’ve started blocking for ironic detachment on here. It’s just a show of weakness, not up to standard, that I don’t need to be around in any way.

A liberal arts and sciences undergraduate education is globally underrated, I think. At the very least it would’ve saved someone the embarrassment of explaining to me what a cell is when I introduced myself as a PhD student in English at Oxford in 2008.

Also as a professor who teaches historical manuscripts I think it’s not the worst thing if students have some basis for being able to read English-language handwritten documents from before 2025.

In fairness, Hegseth is one of the least compelling speakers I’ve ever seen or heard.

I think it’s a grave mistake to conflate the technological and epistemic value of AI with the financial bubble it’s enmeshed in and the broader failures of Silicon Valley. Doofuses may be the face of AI, but don’t constitute it or its possibilities.

Spot-on:

PSA: Evil people don't mind being called evil. They revel in it. What they don't like is being called stupid, because even though stupid and evil are highly correlated, they like to see themselves as intelligent. By virtue of my surname I'm allowed to modify Hanlon's razor thusly. Call them stupid.

“There's no accountability,” one expert tells WIRED of ICE’s ability to lie to the public. "The consequence of this is that it’s going to be a systemic harm across all law enforcement.” www.wired.com/story/why-ic...

Jaw-dropping admission by DOJ to court. DOJ admits to having repeatedly made "material mistaken" representations to judge - ICE never had authority (under 2025 Guidance) to conduct arrests at immigration courthouses! DOJ admits court "relied on...prior misrepresentations." DOJ blames ICE (page 2)

UK academia has a special way with how it condescends to ‘humanities’ students. From my first year in Oxford, when a guy started explaining to me what a cell is, this odd tendency persists.

The press spent a decade calling college students Maoists and ‘little Robespierres’ to the point the nation elected a federal govt to make protest and op-eds punishable by deportation and prison—and they did—and now you’re asking what happened to student protest. Are you stupid?

According to documents filed this morning by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of NY, ICE has been lying for a year — not only to the public, but to the courts and to prosecutors — about being authorized to make arrests at 26 Federal Plaza and other immigration courts. (1/2)

Hegseth is metaphorically applying kinetic operations and total systemic friction on himself.

An annoying externality of the online-left focus on vibes / aesthetics of argument and politics is they’ve also co-opted the salutary sense of ‘radical,’ even though much liberalism is more radical (in that sense) and much online leftism straightforwardly reactionary.

It’s a great time not to own a car.

She’s the perfect destruction flunky for media. Might as well be a cabinet pick for the 4th estate.