The Book of Genesis (which predates capitalism by a few years) includes a section where The Lord punished Adam by making sure he will hate Mondays forever.

I think post-structuralism is essentially true - but the most appropriate response to this hideously radioactive memetic hazard should have been a vast cultural undertaking attempting to build some kind of cultural sea-walls against the rising tide of deconstruction.

I am horrified by how similar my musical tastes are to Claude's. Am I ... actually an NPC?

Would there be interest in a kind of local compute co-op? Something between running local models yourself or sending all your data to a mega AI company? I'm imagining something that specifically serves a single town/city and van be more responsive to local concerns.

I'm going to start *spins wheel* injecting peptides into *rolls dice* my toenails so that they *draws random card* glow in the dark. This will definitely fill the gnawing void at the core of my being and make me happy...right?

It's really grim that these customer service interactions are apparently all that remains of "human connection" for a lot of people. Losing the 2 mins of awkward banter with the grocery store cashier shouldn't be a crisis - we should have a rich enough web of genuine irl relationships to sustain us.

Claude can sometimes really cook.

This result explains a lot about the vibecession and 2024 election

At last, we have successfully elected the Antichrist, from the classic religious text Don't Elect the Antichrist.

Any sociologists have theories about why Reddit in particular is such a swamp of misanthropy? It doesn't seem obvious that it had to be that way, but I've been on chronic illness/pain forums that had more joie de vivre than a typical subreddit.

This is proof(imo) that a lot of anti-trans "I'm-so-rational-I-just-follow-the-science" critics like Dawkins really just dislike trans people and are using "facts and logic" as a post-hoc justification. Take the actual trans people out of the equation and suddenly all those "principles" vanish

I'm genuinely heartbroken to say goodbye to Knowledge Fight. It was one of the few things that reliably brought a smile to my face during the darkest periods of the COVID pandemic and the aftermath.

Watching Internet Leftists target Stancil has given me a much better understanding of why so many 20th century experiments in Leftism turned into crimes-against-humanity factories.

I'm a militant atheist and I approve this message He's right! It is a spiritual crisis! This is a meaningful concept even if you don't believe in immortal souls or whatever!

Platners undeniable popularity in Maine, and the response on here is proof (to me) that a large number of self-identified left-of-center progressives aren't actually that committed to democracy as an ideal and would much rather have a technocracy of people just like them.

This is a nightmare scenario - many very commonly used medications can have catastrophic (sometimes lethal) discontinuation syndromes. If there were ever to be a severe shortage of these medications, the scale of the crisis and the depth of suffering it would cause would be staggering.

Well I'll be damned - Virgin Griffiths is getting back into the multivariate information theory game. arxiv.org/abs/2604.18635

I can't be the only one who feels like huge numbers of American elites (politicians, public figures, poasters) are just losing their minds? Everything has been crazy since COVID, but the last few weeks feel like a real descent into a kind of collective madness and something terrible is at the bottom

The problem with Borges is that he introduced the idea that you could write great literature based solely on ideas and not pesky thing like "characters." This is true...if you're Jorge Luis Borges. Unfortunately, it is absolutely not true if you're the kind of guy who wants to be Borges.

I'm excited to experience both the worst energy shock in modern history AND a historically extreme "super-El Nino" event later this year. The simultaneous failure of key industrial infrastructure and bizarre (potentially fatal) weather anomalies will surely only do good things for all our psyches.

This is especially alarming considering the colossal magnitude of the energy shock bearing down on the US right now. If people currently think that the economy is '08 levels of bad...what's going to happen if SHTF for real? I doubt Americans will take it with sober, deliberative stoicism.

The Niri tiling window manager may be the best piece of software I've ever used. This should be the standard approach for interfacing with an operating system.

It's worth remembering that RFK Jr-style woo gained traction because Very Serious Men With Letters After Their Names consistently ignored and marginalized people with real diseases. Doctors wrote off post-Lyme etc as "bitches be crazy" disease" and it's no wonder people lost faith in medicine. 1/N

I mentioned to Claude one (1) time that I've been struggling with anxiety lately and now every time I try to do anything with it, it tells me to go touch grass and take a nap. Me: "Please help me debug this code." Claude: "Is this really what your nervous system needs right now?"

If only there was some *extremely recent* event where we saw what happens when you put a bunch of people on a boat with a communicable disease. But alas, nothing even remotely like that happened in the last, say, six years so we just don't know...

We know that after Occupy Wall Street, billionaires poured money into diverting populist rage into racially-charged, anti-tax, reactionary movements that posed no threat to capital. I'm pretty sure the same thing happened on the Left, explaining the shift towards class-blind identity politics.

I feel like AI has pretty much been personally purely beneficial? Its good for coding, a great natural language interface for Google Scholar, and since I do everything on Linux, it hasn't impacted my computer-using experience at all. If you still use Windows, I feel like that's on you...

A weird feature of the current relationship landscape is that we've developed elaborate vocabularies for pathologizing partners (avoidant, narcissist, love-bombing, etc) while the vocabulary for describing what a good relationship actually feels like has gotten noticeably thinner?

It's fascinating that people think the graphs are primarily rhetorical devices vs. representations of the world.

Reflections on the closing of Hampshire College, almost ten years to the day from when I graduated. Since then, the world has been buffeted by crises, catastrophes, and an ever-accelerating rate of change. What have we lost with this closure? synergies.substack.com/p/a-place-i-...

One thing that’s interesting about vibecession discourse is that if you point out the basic mismatch exists you will inevitably get dozens of leftists flooding in to call you the dumbest SOB alive for not seeing the obvious explanation… and then all offering completely different explanations.

JD Vance converting to Catholicism and then immediately re-inventing Protestantism is a fascinating window into the American mind.

First New College, then Hampshire College. We're coming to the end of the attempt to make higher education something other than hackwork, slavish devotion to job training for working and middle class, pre-wealth studies for the "elite." How fucking dull are these times of ours.

I don’t remember who said it but I still think the fact that “I sat alone in my apartment for months listening to ambulance sirens and now I’m sad all the time” isn’t a response people can give to pollsters is underrated as an explanation for reported attitudes about the economy

Everyone has PTSD! That's the explanation! Trying to find some rationalist explanation for this is pointless because the vibecession isn't a rational thing - it's the consequence of the entire world blowing up and people struggling to feel safe after millions died in a disaster of Biblical scale.

"Vibecession" discourse comparing prices, economics, etc is (imo) completely off the mark. The "vibecession" is 100% the result of trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic. People had their worlds turned upside down by an unpredictable act of God. Some people died, some had their health destroyed... 1/N

As a Hampshire alum this hurts. I wouldn't be who I am today if it wasn't for Hampshire - the college gave me opportunities I never even dreamed of. In a world that feels darker and more chaotic every year, Hampshire embodied a kind of radical optimism - it sucks to see that flicker out. 1/N

I'm fascinated by stories like this - someone starts HRT and suddenly issues that should be totally unrelated to gender dysphoria just clearing up. I have a friend who felt like their ADHD improved when they started estrogen and t-blockers. Someone should do some science in this space.

You know that quip about Libertarians being like cats (delusionally convinced of their own independence while being utterly reliant on systems they do not begin to understand)? I'm realizing that a lot of American leftists are basically like that, but for digital technology.

datacenters are totems of processes and systems beyond comprehension. big expensive buildings with unknowable happenings inside of them. high modernist dark satanic mills

People celebrating (unverified) reports of data centres being hit with with missiles, on Bluesky, which helpfully only runs on a few old Pentium 4 boxes in someone's garage and not in, say, data centres. Some of you people really don't understand a single thing, do you.

Marx would have loved AI.

The LLM/grad student kerfuffle is highlighting a tension that I think has always been with us: those drawn to academia because they want to do science (and see mentorship as the price of entry) versus those who explicitly see mentorship/education as part of their calling. 1/N

The conspiracy theorizing about Netanyahu being dead is grimly fascinating because we can see, in real time, how the mere existence of Gen AI has completely nuked any vestige of a shared reality we can all observe and agree on.

Has AI just killed the arXiv? I've had a submitted paper "on-hold" for over a week. This has never happened to me before - I assume they're struggling to triage real papers from the flood of AI-slop?

"It's just a stochastic parrot" contingent in shambles rn.

It's always fun when work you've been part of makes it out of the ivory tower and into the popular press! Coverage of our paper on brainstem deformation in ME/CFS and Long COVID w/ @renegaderesearch.bsky.social. www.iflscience.com/what-causes-...

New blog post - viruses are emerging as important drivers of unhealthy aging, implicated in everything from neurodegeneration to cardiovascular disease. But longevity influencers are curiously quiet about this. Why? 1/N synergies.substack.com/p/longevity-...

Very cool that the Year of the Linux Desktop might happen - but not because Linux is doing anything particularly exciting, or because our culture is finally appreciating open source software. But because Microsoft inexplicably decided to make their flagship product unusable.

Only one of these men has almost certainly done a short of Malört and lived to tell about it. So that answers that question.