Phil debating Joe Rogan on the moon landings was my “Rogan is a POS moment.”

a future equivalent of someone playing with a PBX they've installed in their living room (probably next to their model train set)

Bugger

The fact that the SoH has been closed for four months is too wild to contemplate.

"It's the same agreement that was nearly agreed to last time and the seventeen times before that." "Exactly! And that is precisely what the Ayatollahs are expecting us to nearly agree to! We shall catch them completely off guard! Baaaaaah!"

watching people get into fights with the discourse bot is incredible

A few years ago, @brasidas.bsky.social asked for some recommended books on topology, a subject that makes PhD candidates weep (in my personal case). That led to a thread (in the “other place”) that @gtotango.bsky.social reminded me of today. I’ll roll that out here.

I think the Jets would benefit from intelligence regardless of its source.

What submarine commanders learned from decades of operating blind can now inform the operations for the rest of the military. warontherocks.com/2026/05/lead...

God forbid a spook has a hobby

This is exactly what I’m talking about - material conditions aren’t economic security and the latter is often much more stressful, concerning, and motivating than the former.

So the fact that devices need to be fixed more *IS* a form of inflation. Yes the answer in a Reddit forum on buying something that lasts forever usually is “this make/model that has been out of production for decades.”

Baye's theorem basically. Shotspotter could tell you that the false positive rate of their tech in tested conditions was very low - very few cars backfiring were identified as gunshots. But they couldn't tell you how many noises that *could* trigger false positive there are in the real world.

I have bad news on the history of technology when it comes to it's adoption by lazy people.

There's nature and then there's nurture. And when the kids and the dogs have the same behavior, that's nurture. Anyway, I was thinking about this while I was re-plating my dog's new dog food because "the bowl was wrong" or something.

That was a threat

Helen should only be played by an actor born from an egg and fathered by a god disguised as a swan. Anything else is a travesty.

No Helen of Troy was probably not Kenyan, but I am more certain that Odysseus would not have been from Boston so I guess we'll all need a little suspension of disbelief when watching this modern film adaptation of a 2800 year old work of fiction.

A Classical Era Ionian Greek would also not really have thought that someone of Germanic extraction was substantially closer to being “ethnically correct” than an Aethiopian would be, they just didn’t have the same racial categories we do

“The clever fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog, one good AHHHHHH!”

That face you make when you’re a historian and someone asks you if you’re reading any good fiction books? And all you can say is, um, the Historia Augusta.

In addition, literal stacks of M4000 chemical bombs, used by the Assad regime to drop sarin on civilians in 3 recorded incidents, were found and photographed. Yet more evidence everything we published at Bellingcat based on our open source investigations of chemical attacks was accurate.

I forget who it was on Bsky who said that it's totally fine to say cars are terrible for cities, but insane to say "and they also don't get people from point A to point B." There are a lot of valid critiques of LLMs, but "...and they don't at all work" is not one of them.

WSJ's news side actually cares a lot about the truth and has a reputation for exposing frauds. Like Elizabeth Holmes, who was *fantastically* well-connected and influential, beloved by Venture Capital world. She even tried to pressure Murdoch to kill the story. WSJ DGAF and gutted her like a fish.

Hallucinations are a permanent fixture of LLMs. Just like Adversarial Examples being an intrinsic part of convolution neural networks.

remarkably idiotic to think that fuel prices don't cause lives lost and ruined because you're so parochially focused on being bitter about the United States that you don't consider the Asian energy crisis meaning, for instance, Pakistanis can't heat their houses or cook.

Swarthmore college activism was primarily about left confrontation with libs, bc there really weren’t any conservatives (or even really centrists) on campus in any significant numbers

It’s “Babus Freak,” get it right.

So how did the Razorcrest II get from the cabin to the New Republic base?

6. The Star Wars universe continues to be a good advertisement against contract labor, mercenaries, and bounty hunters. They make side deals, ignore orders, and force messy rescues. Terrible principal-agent dynamics.

always left kind of vaguely staring into space when people talk as if the korean war had the exact same moral and geopolitical valence as the vietnam war

I do love that we've stumbled into AI using the same BS scientific management principles that made IT relatively invisible in business data.

AQAB

im just kinda curious whether they allow trans women to compete or if that's just too terrifying a concept for our tech libertarian self styled transhumanist organizers here

And while this is normally emotionally crushing in a way that's difficult to recover from, sometimes it results in a needed pat on the back - like finding this after taking her to a book signing with an author in a wheelchair about accepting all people:

Children are a savage mirror of your own faults reflected back at you.

Melian Dialogue mentioned time to deploy the goose meme.

Not Thucydides, but Xenophon…Again.

Automate Bullshit, Not Rigor

or as someone said, I think it was yeats, malone 509 bandwidth exceeded malone 999 request denied malone 530 origin unavailable malone 413 content too large malone 520 unknown error malone 429 too many requests

POST Malone implies GET Malone

Early to bed Early to rise Work like hell And amortise

*Foucault voice* "Everything is a bubble"

this is just completely batshit

Hey everyone, Fox has an oped about the "moral clarity" of war and West Point by a 1980s retired LTC who never heard a shot fired in anger.

A furniture catalog from 1930 brags that with it, five rooms can be furnished “simply but soundly” for $800, which was seven months of household income (equivalent to about $50k today). To furnish “magnificently”, ie with the furniture that survives to this day, would cost the equivalent of $600k.