Not exactly a positive piece of advice, but any writing advice that doesn't start with "read a lot" falls flat to me.

Anscombe x Weil, just to get some F/F ships out there

Been thinking about veganism, linux, masking, not owning a car and the class of "mildly to moderately inconvenient sacrifices that are, all else being equal, morally correct". My conclusion has been that it's probably unreasonable to expect one person to do all of them, but also we should all

Yep! Do not recommend it, honestly. And of course, I've now fucked my chances of getting a less exalted job because "my vibes are off" or some such shit.

Fáfnir must be excited!

"Zrób mi łaskę" and "Zrób mi laske" encode very different concepts yet are only distinguishable by a fairly fine-grained understanding of phonics. Honestly, I think learning a heavily synthetic language with a strong case structure early did me a lot of favours: like, Goodman's technique just flat

So, I think the correct thing to do here would be for a university somewhere else (perhaps outside of the USA?) to offer this graduate a fully-funded PhD. Any takers?

bouncing off @iris-meredith.bsky.social i have a little mini thread here about "high decoupling" just being "insufficient metacognition" in a lot of cases, illustrated using multiple testing

No Aegis? Seriously? What?

Bill Kristol gets one (1) regime change. As a treat.

I'm really not sure I want to read about Olivia Nuzzi getting waterboarded: I do not think she could do it as well as Hitch did back in the day.

Please, I beg of you, just write some SQLMesh models. You can even just use a DuckDB backend. Save us from the pain!

This place really is becoming the Vienna coffeehouse of social media, isn't it? (Adrian, I love your books! Emma, I'm afraid I've not read any yet but I'm pretty sure I will love them when I read them!)

From the archives: 2025-12-22 at 21:34 PM What this election means for trans people outside the USA

I made pierogi ruskie to celebrate the summer solstice, and now we are food-fat and sleepy

I want guesses on the identity of this video game. no peeking until you answer

okay great an evangelion is riding a robot giraffe in a yes album cover. what does this have to do with the clip i saw of moebius' design for galaga

I don't know so much about the analogous groups here, but "product manager" being an oppressive class is... less off-the-mark than I'd like

Question for the field: does anyone have some good, publicly available and interesting data that I could use as an example problem for Approximate Bayesian Computation? Ideally something with no closed-form likelihood

I am thinking that a surprising amount of good could be done simply by banning chat interfaces to LLMs. Most of the plausible use-cases that might turn into something good don't use them, basically all the awful ones do.

You know, if I were still speaking to my parents, I would *really* like to know what my dad has to say about some of his favourite intellectuals post-Epstein. Has Stephen Pinker lost a bit of his shine, perhaps?

To be fair, there's a good chance that this time things will go badly enough that they end up in prison.

Feeling some kind of way about my career at the end of 2025. I don't like the fact that to even have a hope of getting a decent job these days, you need to be fairly well-known. I enjoy writing, and I enjoy writing what I write, but I wish so much other shit didn't hinge on it, as it were

My last long-form essay of the year (there will be a few more book chapters and probably a retrospective article, but this is the last of the heavy analysis). It's about why bad politics is tedious politics, tedious politics is bad politics and how we can insulate ourselves against both:

Look, all I'm saying is that if you hit Matt Yglesias with a tranq rifle full of estrogen, society would probably improve

This is a good way of phrasing it, I think. At least from a Polish perspective, right belief is *important*, but it's also something for theologians. Expecting that everyone have the correct beliefs about God is rather like expecting that everyone have a solid understanding of quantum mechanics

My last long-form essay of the year (there will be a few more book chapters and probably a retrospective article, but this is the last of the heavy analysis). It's about why bad politics is tedious politics, tedious politics is bad politics and how we can insulate ourselves against both:

Honestly, this is why I think we need to move towards policy-forward politics in favour of leaning on more abstract political alignment. There's a startling amount of policy overlap between "left" and "centre", and occupying that seems like it might work?

Yglesias, the fact that you're thinking about this as a bet is the problem in the first place. Do you have any actual values other than "feel like the smartest person in the room"?

The data boys are, on the whole, rather silly people, as any serious statistician would be able to tell you given about five minutes' thought.

I'm seeing weapons-blink from adoption abolition discourse on this website. I will not argue the rights or wrongs of that, but I will ask of the proponents: what are you going to do in order to make sure that the alternative doesn't look like the state care system? Because unless you have a very

Oh, FFS, not *again*

I do think that the fact that, for example, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand has been known to choose cut-offs for their statistical collection deliberately to push a narrative (I've seen the leaked git repository where they cut off the most recent data because if it was included, their modelling

An question that @bretdevereaux.bsky.social will hopefully forgive me for pinging him on: how useful are landmines for a modern-system army, especially the US army? It seems to me that they'd have a lot of the same issues as chemical weapons inasmuch as they make maneuver difficult for a military

Put up or shut up, Luxo

I wish to scream. The education and the industry are the fucking *point*. I... this sounds deranged, but literally every last fucking person who wants to study maths should be allowed to do so to the best of their ability. A world where everyone who can understands the Calculus of Variations is a

I will admit, I find it somewhat disconcerting just how much I relate to Su Dongpo at the moment

I mean... I would absolutely *never* suggest launching a denial-of-service attack on this chatbot. Because that would be illegal and I would get into a lot of trouble for suggesting it. So obey the law and don't do it, and you need to be careful, because it would be very easy to stage such an attack

The entire anglosphere appears to be accumulating so many stains on our history that at this point it's mostly stains with the occasional patch of unstained cloth.

OK, but I unironically think that a) this is right and that b) Liam is probably one of the best moral philosophers of our time.

Newsom, it seems, can see where the wind is blowing. I have little love for the fact that this is how he makes his decisions, rather thatn like, on principle, but at least he can respond and trim sails effectively.

Once again, Iris sounds more and more like a libertarian.

*winces*

A stupid thing, I know, but I find it deeply disconcerting to be able to actually read this

I am slightly disconcerted by the fact that I appear to have partially turned into a classical libertarian. I have a right to buy Shadowheart hentai on the internet with Bitcoin while injecting estrogen, and by God, nobody will take that right from me!

I think the mediocrity thing is a part of supremacist movements that we *really* haven't reckoned with enough. We have reckoned with it to a degree, but the sheer, pervasive extent to which the worst bigotry flows from mediocrity is still something we haven't addressed sufficiently.

Oracle must die. It will do us all a favour

OK, but the issue is that this one genuinely isn't. I fear the principle is "American wars are about oil except for the ones about oil, which are for patching up the egos of some very sad, very fragile men"

You know, I think there's something to be said, when doing politics, in favour of just... not being unbelievably tedious? Like, not even as a question of right or wrong or whatever. Just... if you make people sigh and say "yes, we've heard this a hundred times before", you might be doing it wrong

Chapter 1 of R the Software Engineering Way is now up! In it, we learn about R functions, how they work and when to write them, and we learn about control flow tools that software engineers use a lot but statisticians don't: #R #rstats