Them: "What are you doing?" Me: *taps a couple lands* "Writing code."

An atheist as in there doesn't seem to be any such thing as a deity. An anti-theist as in if there was any such thing, it would be our moral duty to build a Tower of Babel, launch an invasion of Heaven, and guillotine the sky tyrant.

If Twitter is the bird site and Mastodon is the elephant site, which site is Bluesky?

That painful yet gender-affirming moment when you accidentally smack your new boobs on the doorframe. On a completely unrelated note, progesterone is awesome.

Never would have guessed the Unruh effect would be measurable this century.

Reminder that you can find all of Lawvere's work for free here, including his high school level introduction to category theory ("Conceptual Mathematics"): https://github.com/mattearnshaw/lawvere/

An interesting historical exposition of the influence of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics on mathematician William Lawvere's pioneering work in topos theory.

RIP Breakthrough Starshot.

An interesting idea to put satellites in an extremely low orbit where the air density is high enough to use air-breathing ion engines.

Alan Kay is always a joy to listen to, and he contributed so much to computing as we know it.

I've been waiting for this one for a while.

Classical socialists: Capitalism is bad in part because its irrationalities artificially constrains production And the building of infrastructure, thus preventing us from achieving abundance. Modern "socialists": Capitalism is bad in part because it produces too much abundance.

“Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance.” ~ Sylvia Pankhurst

Now that we have a cause, maybe we can start fixing it.

So many socialists and communists completely miss the point of why socialism emphasizes the industrial proletariat. It's because the workers are in a position to abolish classes (and, ultimately, mandatory labor), not because manual labor is something to be worshipped or glorified.

I'm biased, obviously, but I do think one of the lessons we should be taking from Mamdani's success is that socialist abundance is a winning platform. We need a socialism that builds.

Marxist mathematician William Lawvere passionately believed that category theory (which he considered the dialectical approach to math) could be taught to high schoolers. This talk further argues that ∞-category theory can be taught to undergraduates using homotopy type theory.

Reminder that spent nuclear fuel is not waste: it's an energy source and an alchemy treasure trove of useful substances. We should be building the infrastructure to use it instead of worrying about sealing it away for geological timescales.

Skyhooks are an interesting piece of space infrastructure that could let even hypersonic planes put something into orbit.

One of the reasons it's a bad idea, BTW, is that mentally ill people are much more likely to be the victims of violence and no more likely to be the perpetrators of violence than the average person: https://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/generalpsychiatry/31383

Reminder that banning mentally ill people (whether genuinely or allegedly so) from owning guns isn't only a bad idea now that fascists want to do that to trans people. It was also a bad idea back when liberals were proposing it.

"Space exploration, including space travel, is one of the grandest tasks humanity has ever set for itself. It is a false dichotomy — and an austerian one at that — to say that we do not have enough money for both a space program and social justice or environmental protection."

"Much of our excess carbon will likely need to be pulled out of the air and oceans using industrial forms of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), such as a technology called direct air capture (DAC). DAC involves passing air through a chemical sponge that filters out some of the CO2."

Apparently there's been research into biomining uranium and thorium: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/10_2013_250 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aem.02907-13

Question for nuclear engineers: is there even anything in the nuclear power industry that glows green like in The Simpsons? I can't think of much. The closest I can think of are radium watch dials, but even then it's not the radioactive radium that's glowing, it’s the phosphorescent paint.

Though as long as we're fantasizing about futuristic energy generation, I'd love it if we could work out electroweak burning which would use obscure high-energy particle physics processes to convert mass directly into energy.

FWIW, if we do ever make helium-3 nuclear fusion viable, IMO instead of mining it from the moon it would be more practical to mine it from the gas and ice giants.

I hate what The Simpsons has done to the public's perception of nuclear power but this will always live rent-free in my head.

🎶 Spider-pig, spider-pig, Does whatever a spider-pig does. Can he swing from a web? No he can't, he's a pig. 🎶

I have an unfortunate disease. You see, I have these things called "principles" that cause me to reject nationalism even when it's done by my own team, to reject reactionaries even when they're fighting against imperialism, and to reject religion even when it's an indigenous one.

It's one of those ideas that sounds so obvious that there's no way it could actually work in practice...but apparently it might actually work.

Short answer: Yes, but there are challenges.

The Big Crunch is so back.

Digital twins are probably going to be an important part of a cybernetic socialist infrastructure.

A lot of the anti-tech ideology on the modern left ultimately traces back to literal Nazis like Heidegger, who influenced the humanities for way too long, and I don't think we talk about this enough.

Cool.

Hey, I wrote a book. Did The Science Wars Take Place? Covers the history and philosophy of a fight in the 80s & 90s between some postmodernists and scientists, with an eye to anarchist interests and lasting political influences among the far-right. Pre-order here: store.c4ss.org/index.php/pr...

Hot take: even if mRNA vaccines were some kind of experimental gene therapy, that would actually be based. Even more so that it had a lot of FDA red tape removed.

anti-AI ppp may find this impossible to believe but i have seen it in action multiple times and it’s part of why i have some confidence in the smart->not-evil correlation. grok is a large, powerful model; musk appears to have pulled out all the stops and still can’t make it consistently evil.

A ton of right-wing posters ask Grok to validate their ridiculous claims, but Grok tells them they are full of shit. It's why Elon keeps trying to "fix" the algorithm, which resulted in the MechaHitler episode. Grok is like a tireless reality check (even with Elon's adjustments).

i keep saying there’s more to the AI+misinformation story than people want to believe but, well, nobody wants to believe it’s any more complicated than “slop machine bad”. the AI specifically designed to be a nazi appears noticeably woker than the average internet user! that’s incredible!

exactly! there's something deeply weird about how hard it is to make LLMs consistently awful even when that's the explicit goal. suggests the training process creates baseline prosocial tendencies that are structurally difficult to override. much more interesting than "AI bad" narratives allow

it's unironically sexist as hell to say "oh you can't be mean about silly bullshit, silly bullshit is femme coded"

Woo bullshit, particularly astrology, gets the defense, "many of the people who like this are women, therefore, if you criticize it, you are doing a sexism." This line of thinking is corrosive and infantilizing.

I am going to be a massive humorless asshole about woo-woo shit, no matter how seemingly harmless, for the rest of my life due to this. astrology, homeopathic medicine, etc etc it's all bullshit and it's not fucking harmless. there are people who will die due to this who would have otherwise lived.

fuck woo

All that is solid WILL melt into air and all that is sacred and holy WILL be profaned and you WILL like it.

The most brilliant scam religion ever pulled was forcibly converting indigenous people to Christianity and then convincing people of color that *atheism* is colonial.

The pants that compensate for lower gravity are so cool. Also pretty cool that we're getting disabled astronauts.

A very interesting historical dive into the Space Shuttle's brief attempt at using in-orbit manufacturing to make ultra-pure semiconductors.