"Software enables the enforcement of arbitrary rules that no human being would have the heart or foolishness to enforce."

The modern formatting addiction in writing dynomight.net/formatting/

Or maybe this should be S tier? It's hard not to admire the hustle.

Pop quiz: Infer the axis comparison

This is not as crazy as it sounds! In the US Civil War, 2/3 of soldiers died from disease rather than in battle. I could easily see myself predicting that better weapons would reduce deaths. (It's even conceivable that they did?)

Maybe there's a pattern here? dynomight.net/pattern/

i'm not being fed into a wood chipper you're being fed into a wood chipper

this tweet is such a wild ride how can you write something like this and not conclude that you should never ever ever ever work with the DoW? seriously, if this is your position, how is it remotely feasible?

Anyone remember when NASA announced in 2018 that they would be sending humans back to the moon by 2024? www.nasa.gov/specials/apo... I guess... everyone found this so implausible that it wasn't even worth making fun of them?

All: Please consider politely asking niplav to do this.

@niplav.site can you please do a self-experiment where you do double-blinded randomized saline infusions (or placebo) and check for cognitive effects?

An under-theorized bit of convergent evolution: >50% of modern people write with way too much "formatting" with constant disorienting bold text and recursive bullet points. I think this reflects a lack of confidence in the power of paragraphs. Experts don't do this. But LLMs have the same addiction?

Humans are unusual in that instead of laying around until hungry and then finding something to eat and then resuming lying around, they are obsessed with "doing stuff".

Personally, I think the reason that (secretly) using AI for writing is bad is that it disrespects readers. 1. They want to know. 2. So you should tell them. Openly using AI for writing is fine. But currently almost no one does that, because no one would read it. (Which is the point...)

Apparently this is true

Part of me wants to embrace a sort of Marxist worse-is-better attitude. Why not let grade inflation spiral forever until we can eventually get rid of grades? (Only part.)

I tried to explain what's happening in that recent paper about the heritability of human lifespan: dynomight.net/lifespan/

no KYC for chocolate bars, for now

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