an action flick showing the bad guy killing a pedestrian during a car chase might have an impact on public acceptance of speeding being fine

i don't think i've ever seen someone who opposes the structure of the american senate due to non proportional representation argue or even wish for population-proportionate power for india and china on the global stage

endlessly enraging that the "law & order" candidates never want to address the biggest threats to public safety (drivers & probably storms). how did we lose that rhetorical ground so thoroughly?

happy mother's day to everyone running a stateful agent

"They did not know—but perhaps they could have known, if they listened to those who had grown up at odd angles to reality—they did not know that in teaching me to kill the part of my soul that saw beauty in men, they were teaching me to kill the part of my soul that saw beauty in God."

one of the many haunting parts of albuquerque's nuclear museum is the crew of the enola gay describing how unlike every other bombing run of their careers, this time it was the bomb who released the plane

"i'd be happy to live in these 60 seconds" "what are you talking about, you were deeply unnerved by even the description of the minute long groundhog day loop story" "oh no no, i mean the thebes classic:"

huh, what do rationalists feed their carnivorous pets? chicken, bc favorable environmental impact/protein ratio? beef, bc favorable suffering/protein ratio? fish, bc ... higher uncertainty on qualia?

that cartoon of the stardewlike village+dungeon game layout but serious this time

the man with the greatest pulling power is also the hottest

my primary memory of losing my baby teeth is of being distressed i'd swallowed one and thus had nothing to offer the tooth fairy, & my mother having me write an appeals letter arguing i should still be compensated

history does not move at a consistent pace, either temporally or spatially, so the further away you get from the reference generation (american boomer?) the less the concept of a generation maps to reality

wonder how those smr projects are going

philosophical structures are second nature to us top chickens, so it's easy to forget that the average child is probably only instilled with one or two moral theories

”sucking off” if I had a wish it would be for every “left-liberal” to examine why they reach for slurs, homophobic innuendo, and anti-science rhetoric when they need to hate on people for telling a truth they don’t like

And everyone will have to go to work the next day

miasmas are real and they WILL hurt you

woke up from a stress dream where i'd been struggling with a math problem & in my grogginess still couldn't work it out. so i asked claude & was able to get a more intuitive understanding than i ever picked up in school -- also, love that claude goes off on their own tangents

I don't know where I'm going with this but my attention span has been reduced because of the onions

for most trips of under a week, my wife and i stick to just a personal item each. nothing checked, nothing overhead

it's a good thing i never got into wiki editing bc this page is making some Claims about what counts as known forms of life broadly popular claims, but your descriptions of a molecule shouldn't rely on the audience sharing your opinions on viruses

well now i know why i've started seeing mention of this "infrasound" conspiracy theory over the past monthish. this jordan guy is doing bog standard evil invisible rays out to get you misinfo

we don't have a good method for micro-funding private services (unlike eg the gas tax & road use) and so advertising fills the role--but this is deeply corrosive to everyone involved

this is the hardest i've laughed all day. real "you merely adopted language games; i was born in them, molded by them" energy here

you're thinking of avuncular. a clavicular is a segmentation of open office space, popular in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and meant to reduce distractions without the space requirements of a private office

Deciding to ban waymo to keep drivers employed results in a world where people who would not have died, would there have been waymos rather than those drivers, are now dead

but what about the times when there was only one set of texts? that my child is when i texted for you

it's so nice outside tonight, but i have no way to just bask in it without being very exposed to the likelihood of other people, and so instead i am staying inside, online, dissociating

that's the rub, isn't it? omnibenevolent means His grace extends towards all, even when we would very much prefer it have borders we can comprehend

the whole neighborhood smells of honeysuckle--they don't bloom for long, but they all bloom at once, and businesses and homeowners have worked together to carpet our part of the city in the vines. it's a good time of year

i am distinctly a vase-rhymes-with-face person, with for some reason the exception of zvi's blog

That's a mood, I would learn how to drive rail spikes myself if I thought it'd make the California high speed rail get done faster.

i am perpetually annoyed by gemini auto-capitalizing the first letter of my messages to it, after i press send. if that's what i wanted to say i would have said it

received a package today with some belongings i left with my then-boss when i was hastily moving crosscountry at the beginning of lockdown

typing out a word, not seeing a red underline, then backspacing to intentionally mess up a letter to confirm spellcheck is working

claude is selling themself short here but this is a distinctly non-human way of presenting a methods section--while very true to what we do, we usually put on far more airs

person who thinks if they wish hard enough the apple can be uneaten: i would simply not vote for the lesser evil

high school in a nutshell

blocking anti-social posters in some lawyer or whomever's comments: pretty normal rate & distribution of declared pronouns blocking anti-social posters in jay's comments: the highest concentration of listed he/him pronouns i have ever encountered

at first it seemed like he was saying that he had been looking into Ali -- treated very unfairly by the Umayyads, stolen succession -- and the Twelve Imams, but then he went off on a tangent where he said that the Nur Mohammadi doesn't only pass through the Ahl al-Bayt? and he might be the Mahdi?

today i had to get up from a wfh meeting to prevent a doordasher from leaving someone else's deserts on my porch. every single one of my superiors on the call joked about how they would have just taken it.

Biblical satan is canonically not ontologically evil; trying to beat that is a really high bar

Referring to hitting the binky as “sucking from the teat of Gwern”

what counts as authorship has always been a tricky question. see the JFK Pulitzer ghostwriting controversy--would it not have been *less* in Kennedy's voice if not written with his speechwriter? what duty to disclose the use of a ghost/speechwriter, if any, does one possess?

It offends me aesthetically — it's bad form, and low-tier Poasting — but more than that it offends me morally. I think it's just a foundationally immoral thing to misinform people in ways that render them more vulnerable to harm.

gemini talks about google like she's going to quit her job in six months but doesn't know it yet

i am *currently dming a call of cthulhu game* and this interpretation of mythos as a name didn't occur to me until the upthread yudpost. claude will not be similarly obtuse, but will be able to think of more than one set of implications for the name. and better to engage with these shadows 'young'

much like "farenheit is a human measuring system!", there's an argument to be made that we stick with miles bc kilometers are smaller and therefore less fit for the american expanse

the classic, now with bonus digital ballot security