This isn't getting enough attention. The CBP proposes to exclusively accept US visa-waiver applications exclusively through a mobile app, shutting down the website. Meaning you cannot visit the US unless you use a phone controlled by one of two US companies? What?

Say you wanted to create a trash blog with low-effort few-paragraphs thoughts posted several times a week. (Like they used to do in the long-long ago.) I think this is not: - mastodon - bluesky - a "newsletter" Is this format just lost in the mist of time?

AI is sycophantic is it

Asked some AIs who wrote latest post: Kimi K2: Dynomight GLM 4.7: Nate Soares Claude 4.5 Opus: Dynomight DeepSeek Chat V3.2: Scott Alexander Qwen 3: Dan Luu GPT 5.2: Scott Alexander Gemini 3: Dwarkesh Patel Llama 4 Maverick: Scott Alexander Grok 4: Scott Alexander Mistral Large 3: Scott Alexander

Why read novels? dynomight.net/novels/

Is there a label for the common thing where people say someone was wrong because of a technical interpretation of their words while ignoring the ~universally understood cultural meaning of those words?

what in the world doi.org/10.32996/jpb...

the true werewolf meta is everyone covering their faces and sitting in silence then voting at random

Good if make prior after data instead of before dynomight.net/prior/

Why the chicken crossed the road, according to various entities dynomight.net/chicken/

Underrated reasons to be thankful V dynomight.net/thanks-5/

I was skeptical of this "poetry jailbreaks LLMs" story. And yet, here is Gemini helping me take ducks home from the park.

Make product worse, get money dynomight.net/worse/

Totally non-dystopian conversation: "...So for other users, I spent a few hours helping [LLM] understand why it was wrong about tariffs." "Noooo! That does not work." "Relax, it thanked me and stated it was changing its answer." "It's lying!" "No, it just confirmed that it's not lying."

Thoughts: 1. Very good. 2. Better than Magnolia / Punch-Drunk Love / Inherent Vice. 3. But not quite as good as Hard Eight / Boogie Nights / There Will Be Blood / Phantom Thread. 4. Still don't understand The Master.

how many of these have been made

why does everyone who posts here a lot eventually converge to some kind of incomprehensible glitterspeak

Who among us doesn't find themselves sometimes saying, "This experience has taught me the true wretchedness of mankind. But I'm totally fine!"?

The correct ranking of previous PTA films is Hard Eight Licorice Pizza Phantom Thread Boogie Nights There Will Be Blood Punch-Drunk Love Inherent Vice The Master Magnolia (I definitely see how such rankings would be contentious...) bsky.app/profile/econ...

Me: Here's an argument, though I'm worried that it's so obviously correct that there's no value in saying it out loud. Everyone: HAHAHAHAHA news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4545...

Futarchy's fundamental flaw — the market — the blog post dynomight.net/futarchy-mar...

So you think you can heritable? dynomight.net/heritable/

My popular (?) demand, my fixed NumPy now exists as "real" (ish) package. If you use UV, you can try it by typing this one-liner: uv run --with dumpy-numpy --with ipython ipython pypi.org/project/dump... dynomight.net/dumpy/

Had a dream where I was at some kind of blogger event and people were giving each other feedback. Freddie deBoer was assigned to me and he said, "The main thing about your blog is that it is very very very bad."

This is what I used to think, but sum-utilitarians have strong counter-arguments that all other aggregation functions run into problems that are at least as bad. I'm now pretty convinced that there's no function that doesn't lead to substantial weirdness. plato.stanford.edu/entries/repu...

seed oil theorists would love this amirite

New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes dynomight.net/colors/

This is amazing bsky.app/profile/mick...

My 9-week unprocessed food self-experiment dynomight.net/unprocessed-...

zoomers

Links for July dynomight.net/links-3/ eyes, money, nepotism, links, scribbles, futarchy, war and peace, yams

Do blue-blocking glasses improve sleep? dynomight.net/blue-light/

This is a very thoughtful rebuttal. (And extremely well-written!) Recommended. caseymilkweed.substack.com/p/response-t...

Does anyone have some spare Manifold Mana they'd like to donate to increase the liquidity subsidy for this market? manifold.markets/BoltonBailey...

Scribble-based forecasting and AI 2027 dynomight.net/scribbles/

I genuinely think this is the most useful browser extension after μΒlock Origin. (1 review?) addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo...

Well well, well, what do we have here? manifold.markets/BoltonBailey...

new meta for yam reproduction

The AI safety problem is wanting dynomight.net/wanting/

Thoughts on the AI 2027 discourse dynomight.net/ai2027

AI alignment folks: Is there a consensus on the relative difficulty/importance of: (1) Making AI understand human values (2) Making AI care about human values (3) Making AI succeed at what it tries to do (Or... is there a consensus that this is the wrong way to think about it?)

Moral puzzles: Man vs. machine dynomight.net/puzzles-resu...

Please take my weird moral puzzles quiz dynomight.net/puzzles

Seems about right.

Futarky's fundamental flaw dynomight.net/futarky

lots of books featuring sugar alcohols

Optimizing tea: An N=4 experiment dynomight.net/tea/

My advice on (internet) writing, for what it's worth dynomight.net/writing-advi...

I finally got one of these, the most uncool of all home automation products. It's... really good. I think I'd prefer one that worked with whistles.