yes, though the same reasoning should lead you to expect that a few specific prices would be extremely salient: housing, maybe rent especially, gasoline, labor (i.e., your wages)

Words to live by tbh

applying for jobs again

slightly metaphorical but real sense in which the future changes the past: we understand our lives as narratives, but we don't (entirely) select actions that way and the narrative that best explains what you've done can change as you do more things

The brain specifically I dunno about: 2+ rather than one must be energetically expensive, why not selection pressure for fewer? How do they multiplex access to motor control centers? But the immune system! It does complicated, goal-directed, long-term adaptive action and planning. Is it conscious?

Trump actually acting like a king is really helping me understand why various parts of Anglo-American government work the way they do

This is the crux of the problem. In the age of highly-centralized media, there WAS a strong relationship between "narratives about the economy" and "the actual economy." But that relationship is falling apart. So suddenly it matters a lot whether the real driver was "narrative" or "real conditions"

Why you should always have been (and still be) skeptical of arguments for foom

ITS A COYOTE! CHASING A ROAD RUNNER!

More than choosing good project ideas, to me "research taste" means recognizing what the interesting part of a result is and how it connects to a bigger narrative. Almost any nontrivial result can be important within the right lens. More than anything my PhD taught me this.

What is this feeling that isn’t cynicism and despair?

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" fits awkwardly with the Church-Turing thesis. It would sound less obviously applicable to a (certain sci-fi kind of) robot, right?

This should be a sarcastic street name for cocaine

I don’t think how people are tracking how quickly this is happening, for better or worse.

You can write “Neil Postman vindicated again” every day and have it be correct about something

”AGI”:

This is very literally better journalism from People than the NYT manages now. The audience is better informed about the world after reading this than after reading analysis of how Democrats think it’ll play in Pennsylvania in the midterms

star trek and famous art: a thread

AS IT IS HALLOWEEN, It IS TIME FOR ME TO POST THE HALLOWEEN POLLING JOKE:

Our generation’s Virginia Woolf typing out a social media ad that says “it’s giving GIVING: gobble up these turkey day discounts” and throwing herself in the east river

I use Claude (an AI) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors. On the most recent post (about the East Wing, link below), I got a really amazing addendum. www.pbump.net/o/yes-most-a...

motion to ban the phrase "no evidence" from the English language it's ~always used to mean "no proof" which is a better and clearer thing to say. there's no proof the guy discovered a block away near a discarded gun wearing gloves shot the victim but, like

Across social media sites, political posting is tightly linked to affective #polarization - the most partisan users post the most As casual users disengage & polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

CHOTINER: So you asked for a Birkin bag? KOKO: Yes. Possession Bag. CHOTINER: And you had the funds to acquire this? KOKO: No, Professor Purchase Koko Gorilla CHOTINER: That doesn't sound like the funds were justifiable. KOKO: Hostility Interviewer

Change one letter, ruin a candy Reese’s Peanut Butter Pups

just a friendly reminder, this is a nude pic of your waifu/husbando (when AWS us-east-1 does not cause a global internet fallout)

a more or less orderly succession of several hundred years of republican Roman consuls followed by a civil war after the death of about every third emperor

an awful lot of why politics is so deranged now in four easy steps:

Another example of the increasingly common situation where AI helps an academic with intellectually challenging work (solving a 42-year-old open math problem). Seems like real value in combining expert human guidance and increasingly powerful LLM. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23513

We are introducing a very early research preview of Letta Code. Letta Code is our solution to the terminal-based coding assistant, but with state and learning built in. No more compactions. Just specialist agents that learn your code with every commit.

I reposted this in the 12th.

More broadly: Most voters just don't have particularly stable or strongly held views on most policy questions. They'll tell a pollster something or other, which will often change if you vary the question wording slightly, which creates the illusion of hard quantifiable data about voter preferences.

In the absence of cryptographic trust, we have social norms and faux pas. Sharing realistic-looking AI video without a visible watermark or disclaimer should be a faux pas imo

yeah, i’m just realizing that twitter does indeed feel dead. i’ve been using it as a source of AI news, and that’s not working anymore pretty sure other people are seeing that too. we have an opening

I am out in nature and on a farm. A bug just flew right at me and hit me in the face I just can’t get away from software it seems

This morning, I had OpenAI's sketchy agentic web browser open up my facebook feed and scroll it, clicking "hide ad" on every single ad and "not interested" on every suggested post for about half an hour. My Facebook feed is now...a list of posts by people I know.

It’s nice to see that sometimes the best way to do an exciting ML paper is still to prove some theorems

Every secret service in the world has multiple assets at Mar-a-Lago. “Nice work on that round of drinks, man. Are you Mossad?” “No, ISI. Ben at table 12 is Mossad.” “Right. He’s dating the GRU girl at reception, right?” “No, they split up. He’s hooking up with Sophie from Paris. That canteen…”

The sitcom almost writes itself. The Trumps are part of scripts (golf tournaments, etc) but are never seen or heard. There is one elderly British employee who is *not* an intelligence agent but who is believed by every other operative to be a master of the craft.

90% of being a good candidate is being able to chit chat without people thinking you're a malignant creep. 90% of being a good campaign manager is making the candidate keep doing that even when they're sick of it.

Strange Gray Substance Recently Discovered on Maryland Cars for President 2028

Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts finds that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...

twitter is making mainstream reporters dumber, and because they're all getting dumber together, none of them can recognize it and they actually think they're getting smarter

Finally out in TACL: 🌎EWoK (Elements of World Knowledge)🌎: A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models tl;dr: LLMs learn basic social concepts way easier than physical&spatial concepts Paper: direct.mit.edu/tacl/article... Website: ewok-core.github.io

American journalism, despite a lot of good work and good journalists, has a culture problem

the British PM is, formally speaking, a pretty random junior-ish official, and I have faith we in the US can invent parliamentary government through an even sillier route

Any industry where the price you charge for your services is a trade secret has a serious problem. That should literally be illegal