Paul Krugman seeming increasingly sad and distressed

saying this half-jokingly, but if the rest of the nation had the same levels of news exposure as a lot of us on here, most of them would go insane within a week

Incredible

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My fave

Kharg Island Car Guyland Land of Car Guys AMERICA??? Declare victory Kharg Island is already America!

i want to go to college

Something I've been thinking about: humans, unlike LLMs can be indifferent (in whole or in part) to your utterances. Their lack of feedback or engagement is a very rich backchannel signal of when you're getting too big for your breeches.

One takeaway from my brief LLM honeymoon phase that I'll carry with me: It made me realize just how densely & subtly compressed "reassurance-seeking" is in my language (and probably that of users without OCD too). A prompt is just SUCH a rich signal of what framings/attunements it wants validated.

Gonna try to force myself to post more lol. I am so socially isolated & emotionally numb that I think posting more on Bluesky would be a step in the right direction? Compared to using Claude for pseudo-therapy/journalling, seems MUCH less masturbatory, much closer to the friction of reality

i am FASCINATED by whatever the fuck is going on with the pronouns/binding in this Journalism

Small W in my life: did not die of sepsis, and at some point I stopped noticing the splinter, suggesting that my body (evolved to peak performance over billions of years of struggle for survival) somehow removed the splinter in my asss

This is the most P ∧ ¬P utterance I have ever encountered in my whole dang life

Getting mad all over again at how little Project Hail Mary does with the intense erotic loadedness and fundamental horror and violation of the Grace/Stratt relationship. It really is kinda laundered and papered over by the fact that things work out in the end.

It still hasn't stopped being hilarious to me that Claude sounds pretty much exactly like an analytic philosopher, but with somewhat extra theory-of-mind injected into their prose.

I would love to meet a dog

having intense cravings for (the executive functioning required to get a job required to get the income required to get) really elaborate Lego sets

My tutoring student and I read 'The Aleph' and I think this is the sassiest Borges story I've read.

Can any LLM-fluent people explain to me what happened here? This seems like a big failure completely alien from how any human would fail, & seems like it should be an easy case. (Presumably, most "Here are the lyrics:"-adjacent text in training data is followed by some string rather than no string?)

sucks to have a splinter in your ass while single

Still occasionally having unwanted intrusive flashbacks to particularly annoying/mediocre parts of 'Southland Tales', which I recently saw for the first time. I'm just mad at everyone involved (Wally Shawn, The Rock, the Bush era, etc.)

Coming brusquely to terms with how tilted my new room is. I should've paid attention to this when visiting. My room isn't at all on a plane parallel to the surface of the Earth or perpendicular to its gravity. My only chair is tiny & rolling. Tipped over in it yesterday. Sea legs all the time.

cognitive-cultural achievements accomplished in my recent time off Bluesky, OR the good news and the bad news: — finally finished 'The Dawn of Everything' — watched 'Southland Tales' for the first time

yes, the wheels of justice are slow. agonizingly, excruciatingly slow. and oftentimes they miss or go off the tracks entirely. in fact most of the time. but occasionally, very infrequently, that big wheel of justice delivers theoretical remuneration for a handful of vested business interests

The majority of organizing happening in Minnesota isn’t just peaceful, it’s INVISIBLE. Moms showing up who won’t be interviewed on TV, people whose ICE patrols don’t turn into viral video. The grocery runs, the donations, the people filming bc they happen to be there. Please remember this.

the nyt style section vs. der spiegel

genuinely think implicature might be the concept invented by analytic philosophy that would be most useful for everyone to know

a nation of monsters

*banging together two trash-can-lid-shaped copies of the Melian dialogues during every press conference*

Read the SEP article on the coherence theory of truth, and this seems like .... a very very bad theory of truth*?!?!? * Except for moral/counterfactual/mathematical discourse, in which case it seems like a very good theory, but not necessarily of truth per se.

Post a random GIF, and everything will go good in 2026:

hmmmm

When you get spaghettified by a black hole, the That's All Folks song from Looney Tunes plays

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

today’s affirmation: I am within the acceptable range of deviation. I am a perfectly roasted quail. if I was a car the mechanics would find nothing weird or rodent related in my air filter. I am upright. There are no stones or excess debris in my shoes. I still have all my bones.

One of the most reliably painful symptoms of Eastwards Jetlag is that the UK political scene gets considerably more vicious, racist, and foolish, as I become awake to see more posts about it.

you'll be fine if you've read the origin story "Naming and Necessity"

Encore une fois les IA génératives c'est tellement populaire et tellement utile que l'armée veut t'obliger à l'utiliser.

dynamic semantics is so cool y'all

Nobody. I do not think you can eat chair

This is a nice in-the-wild example of a rather complex dynamic semantic speech act: a conditional with a factual antecedent, an imperative consequent which itself embeds a factual consequent, producing a warning, and is itself conjoined to another disjunctive imperative consequent. 🐦🐦 #philsky

This Philosophical Sleep Manifesto, by Sara Protasi, is very good and very relatable.

Incidentally, I think this is also the main thing that doomed the 2015-2022ish online subcultural Left, and which the Left since then has imo been much better at. I suspect there's nothing particularly partisan about this: it's just the mode of human behavior that social media selects for at scale.

one thing that's really bad about Oops, All Viziers governments (vs democracies) is that there's adverse selection for each portfolio to be run not by someone who thinks they can do something popular with it, but by the biggest thirstiest most deranged psychopath on the topic.

Uncle Boonmee

Late 2026 at the rate things are going. I am so appalled at the world that I might have to start writing fiction again to cope.

GOOD. Also let's not forget that in addition to being an odious misogynist predator, Summers exercised undue infuence on the Biden & especially Obama admins' policies in naked ideological service of capital. His sabotage of the recovery from the Great Recession cost lives & boosted fascism.