I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

Pretty clear already that you don't need a US visa to be wildly influential on X the everything app, amirite?

Bro, your robot says this is a bad idea

An Irish Goodbye is just leaving without saying anything. This is more like a Mob Goodbye.

Imagine you had millions of people in your life who ignored everything you ever said but would show up once a year and make a huge deal about your birthday, claiming they were your biggest fans. Crazy, right? Anyway…Merry Christmas.

Plato also described the debate bros (and children), who get an unguided taste of philosophy, as like puppies who emulate their parents thinking themselves doing the real thing. Yet when confronted with the real thing and tasting defeat, assume the entirety of philosophy to be the problem.

Plato, by way of Socrates, illuminating the idea of "annoying the country into fascism" (or tyranny) nearly 2500 years before Marc Maron

Quoting Charlie Kirk's statements is beyond the pale, but this is fine

Verso's 54 bestselling print books of 2025, plus so much more, on escalating holiday sale support left media! www.versobooks.com/collections/...

Department of Defense Law of War Manual, Sec. 18.3.2.1 states the "requirement" to refuse illegal orders. What’s its key example? Wait for it . . . It’s "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked."

I’ll be discussing Language Machines with Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social and Mike Lipkin @mlipkin.bsky.social at the Sem Coop on Dec 12 www.semcoop.com/event/leif-w...

This has me immediately thinking about Obrador and Sheinbaum's huge popularity in Mexico: "For the good of us all, the poor come first!" From the Catholic mythological tradition.

What if these Ned Ludd followers stopped fighting the exploitation of children by the owners of these machines, and instead empowered themselves by buying the machines? And a lot of the Luddites saying (rightly) this tech is bad for children, are also against led painted candy for kids!

last week i remembered that macOS lets you set your own icons and that *I* have the power to delegitimize the professionalism of the software that runs on my machine, so here's a thread of the 16 new icons i've made so far i really forgot how fun it was to just sit down and make art for myself :')

When I see LLMs pitched as a guaranteed productivity tool for software engineering, the is the counterweight I keep trying to get people to seriously engage with and not handwave away is the future cost, and “oh everything tech gets cheaper” isn’t an answer. Services don’t and LLMs are a service.

Same picture as Musk hyping up the billions invested in his "AI" because he can take a picture of someone at a party and have grok roast them over and over.

The only valid use for something like the Meta Ray Bans is to implement a strand system so I can "like" the sign a neighbor put on the trail to remind people to pickup after their dog.

If your newspaper headline isn't "VP Vance says soldiers are full of shit," you don't deserve to be the editor of a newspaper.

Was this an impromptu speech? How could one prepare remarks so dumb?

And I don't know if the answer is: everyone is too traumatized to do work and we need to reinvent society. Or if it's more like: generations are losing their cognitive abilities and willpower due to destructive technologies. Or: we all have post-viral brain damage. Or: all of the above.

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

Must read for anyone watching The Last Waltz today.

🧵 I wonder how useful it could be to look at LLMs and other AI tools with an understanding like how computer graphics programmers think of physics. This may be a bit of a stretch for many, but I think it well within reach of people with no background in any of this. The trick: It's all cheating

"Skandalakis moves to drop the case against Griftopoulos, Judge Korruptides agrees"

I love you and I love this comment but it does need to be said it sounds like a quote from Ghostbusters

Its means testing, not evidence. Mamdanis grocery policy is evidence based. But he is saying lets have the city build grocery stores and keep prices affordable. He isn’t gonna try to check people’s income at the door. Anyone can go. It will still be hugely impactful for food security.

The grand cosmic irony is that Thiel and Yarvin imagine themselves as Nietzschean Overmen, wielding the will to power, when they’re actually the Last Men—terrified of chaos, addicted to control, fleeing the tragic dimension they pretend to transcend.

I have good news: assholes are a minority. Look around you. The world runs on kindness and empathy. Hardly anything in our daily life would function if assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of the population. It takes a vast machinery to suppress this fact, and to reward evil behaviour

Wild list. Stretching "comedy movie" to include standup specials and things like "Being John Malkovich" is odd to me. But PlayTime made the list, and top 20. So I'm conflicted, to say the least.

The onion layers of "but even dumber that that..." that I just went through is nuts. Imagine thinking any of that would be funny. Imagine needing an app to produce it. Imagine showing off your billions of dollars of investment with the phrase "unhinged". What a tool.

Wow, I just learned about the USDA Thrifty Food Plan, a measure of cost for a basic healthy diet. Holy hell! I berate myself anytime I go over $200/week (1 adult, 2 teens) but that is literally the Thrifty Plan cost!

Funny to complain about lack of sourcing while not sourcing the thing you're complaining about, but my main push back would be that wages essentially haven't risen since 1970. Most people have no numerical conception how far behind we are.

What if the GOP wasn't full of cowards?

I don't know that "nicer" is the goal, but I'm a firm believer that modeling the behavior you want to see is by far the best way to get it. Even if we could flip a switch to turn the patriarchy into a matriarchy, the vast majority of societal problems would remain. Patriarchy isn't the root cause.

I'd love her to explain how the number of requirements is a problem, but I can't even get her to know the correct term is "fewer", not "less" 🙄

evergreen

Can't let people know about midwestern leftism, breaks the narrative that its "coastal elites".

Solange Knowles’ Saint Heron has launched a free digital archival library of literature by Black and brown authors, poets, and artists. Readers can borrow rare and out-of-print books for up to 45 days

louder

My most "unwoke" opinion is that everyone should understand why the handle of a hammer is as long as it is.

Narrator voice: What they don't understand is how that didn't disappear. It became commodified and aimed at profit, rather than connection.

I love this thread beyond words.

So we are going to bring forth a world where anyone who wants to be a lone wolf is welcome to walk into the woods without a single damn thing a global community made for him, and perish howling at the moon. The rest of us will live in a society.

I've been thinking about anonymity a lot lately. How it seems possible that its existence is actually a root cause of many of our modern ills. I've been a big privacy head since the earliest days of the internet, supported the EFF early on, etc. But it seems like a form of hyper-individualism 🧵

The hyper-individualization, atomization, inherent in capitalist alienation, is now coming for your engagement with modern technology like medicine. It's not up to society, and thus government, to ensure technology is safe. It's up to you.

i genuinely think this is a better analysis of the "problem with men" than what we're getting from "professional smart guys" like Scott Galloway www.theringer.com/2025/11/12/t...

We need a constitutional amendment that grants a universal cause of action, thereby creating universal standing, to enable citizens to sue any officer or representative of the federal government who denies constitutional rights. Canada's constitution has this—sec. 21(1). And we need its equivalent.

The value of reading history is you know that in 1860 there were abolitionists who were so demoralized that they thought chattel slavery would be permanent. 5 years later those still alive had lived to see its end.

Even worse: charter schools and voucher schools (in Wisconsin, at least!) can pick and choose which students they accept, even expelling kids with special needs. That puts the cost back on public schools -- who are only reimbursed around 42.5% of the cost. It's a failed, unaccountable system.

In case you're interested in what we're cooking up.