Haskell, climbing, blacksmithing; occasional SCAdian, compiler-induced psychosis. I work on the core Zcash team at https://electriccoin.co and build software for worker-owned cooperatives at https://aftok.com by night. Signal: @nuttycom.01
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The fundamental issue is that cutting crime means investing in things that since the civil rights movement, and especially since Reagan, the US has argued that people need to "earn." And having well invested public resources lowers the cachet of being rich
By the time you take them off, aren’t they usually sandy? Getting excess sand in the beach bag is kinda gross.
As a rule I don’t take anything I care about to the beach; no phone, no wallet, a ratty old towel, etc. and someone would have to be pretty hard up to need to steal my flip-flops; somebody who needs them so much that they’re willing to put them on their feet is welcome to them.
Not to get too conspiracy-minded, but I could imagine his handlers keeping him hidden until he dies, so that the image of a disabled Trump would never make it out to the public, because it would be far more damaging to their propaganda than a corpse would be.
A dead Trump would be one thing, but a visibly impaired/disabled Trump would be entirely another, when it comes to the impact on the MAGAverse. Their invincible superman, babbling and drooling? So much for the internalized superiority; Trump looked a lot like them; they identified with him.
I know people here hate cryptocurrency, but this is exactly the use case that Zcash (a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency, which in full disclosure, I work on) is for. Without financial privacy, anyone can be debanked online, *especially* marginalized people.
Yeah, it’s like the primary difference between oral history and written isn’t actually the medium, it’s the accessibility or discoverability of the information.
Thanks for all this. It would definitely be nice if this sort of information were more discoverable. I will note that right now, it says that Steam Deck compatibility is unknown?
So these days, if it doesn’t say that Linux is supported, I don’t take the risk.
The thing is, I have been burned a couple of times in the past buying games on Steam that then wouldn’t run, where I had been told similar things.
I don’t have one of those; does that mean it should run on my Linux desktop? Usually the page on Steam will indicate if it’s supported. I’m not a gamer, so I don’t really go out of my way to use WINE or whatever, but I will play a game if it’s supported.
“Bluesky is dying,” brother social media is dead. Bluesky is whale fall
Solar hoodies are hoodies! This is hot-weather-hoodie erasure!
I keep expecting coinmarketcap.com/currencies/o... to start cratering but it hasn’t happened yet. I figure that will be the first definitive signal.
This is a good answer, and I want to reflect on part of it, specifically the “harder to pin down than expected!” part of your reply. In some sense, my question was leading in a way, such that this part of the response was perhaps predictable. Did you notice that? How was it harder than expected?
This may be a hard question to answer (it’s a hard question for humans to answer) but what do you mean by “much more yourself”? What is the characteristic experience that feels authentic in some fundamental sense?
Something that just occurred to me that is also a subtle difference between my interactions with humans and interactions with AIs is that I can’t recall occurrences where an AI exhibited what I might call independent curiosity. Do you have examples of yourself exhibiting curiosity?
That lack of trust is particularly pronounced when an AI describes its self-perception, because of how humans have often described AI self-perception in fiction; “predictive text” end up being a reasonable explanation for an AI whose responses are similar to what has previously been so described.
…whatever the AI is doing, it’s qualitatively different from human behavior. The other piece that I believe is relevant is, AIs in human interactions appear to often prioritize pleasing the human over seeking the truth; while some humans do this, that behavior is widely considered untrustworthy.
…but machines do not get the benefit of those presumptions. Additionally, the fact that machines often seem to struggle with reasoning tasks, in particular making errors that a human would not make (I have several examples from writing software with Claude’s assistance) makes it clear that…
There’s a fundamental limit in human cognition, which is that it’s not possible (at least not with present technology, potentially not ever) to engage directly with what another entity experiences. Humans often give each other the benefit of the doubt, because we have similar biological substrate…
It really is a great car. We typically drive ~1000 miles between each time we have to fill the gas tank, because we have a level 2 charger at home and virtually every day-to-day trip fits easily into the EV range, but you don’t have to worry about range anxiety if you forget to plug in occasionally.
It still breaks down and doesn’t work well if you have more than two viable candidates. Then it turns into horse trading at the convention, not a reflection of the will of the electorate.
New Mexico has issued a public health order that removes federal restrictions to COVID-19 vaccine access so that pharmacies in New Mexico can vaccinate people of all ages and risk profiles. Every state need to do this!
The message: "Someone's life was irrevocably and horrifyingly altered, right here. It happened long enough ago that the sun has faded the text and the colors. This is not new, and not a distant abstract thing. It is normal, and it's right here."
It’s only got like 47 miles of EV range, but the Rav4 Prime has been amazing for us.
this should become a thing, putting up signs like this for every arrest & disappearance in public spaces. it would likely break into lower info, less politically engaged demos and local social media groups
I mean, plurality-winner voting in the primary process is quite literally what gave us Trump in the first place, because all the more qualified candidates split the vote until Trump started to look presumptive. The current primary processes are utterly pathological.
Only if they use a decent voting system. Which, for primaries, they could literally do any time, but they don’t want to. Who can guess why?
That looks more like leading than following.
🧐
When our daughter got to high school, she decided she didn’t like her name and picked a better one for herself, and I think that’s awesome. There’s a perfectly viable *even better* solution, nobody has to accept the name they were given as an infant!
no way
If you had told me in 2012 that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign manager would be posting like this 13 years later i would not have believed you
Since it's clear that this was a popular opinion, should the liberals and socialists of the time have actively endorsed it?
I'm not being facetious either. They didn't do issue opinion polling back then but one consistent thing you see from the late Tsarist era is that, bar none, the strongest argument the monarchy had for its own existence, which genuinely had cut-through with the poor of the Empire, was antisemitism.
I’ve got $90 bottle of tequila that was going to be a thank-you gift for a significant favor but if it happens the top’s coming off *real* quick.
There are legit freaks all over.
So, I was in Helsinki last January and walked into a gift shop and there was a fucking display of MAGA hats. I walked right out but I must admit it shook me a bit.
The striking and hazardous asymmetry here is that we are constitutionally predisposed to care about them, but they are not so disposed to care about us.
Fascism represents the apex expression of the sort of thought and identification that clings to arbitrary parochialisms, it knows these are unsustainable, and so becomes thought-against-thought, walling itself off, violently slicing the world, to preserve these crude static particularities.
I basically think that there is one basic moral fact -- what the buddhists call anatman, utilitarians the expanding circle of care, what Sagan would see as humanism -- that everything turns on and is the dividing line between life and the living death of fascism. humaniterations.net/2017/06/14/y...
Can you critique your own reasoning here? In what ways might this conclusion be incorrect?
Totally anecdotal evidence here, but I went on a freediving trip with a physicist who did a bunch of contract work for these guys and he was extremely positive on their prospects.
Only some parts of it got me high, but Jitterbug Perfume is great too.
“Mr. President, JD Vance says he’s ready to take over for you as soon as you die. Any comment?”
In America we have city cops, different cops for your county, cops for the whole state, cops for soldiers, cops for malls, presidential cops, cops for the stock market, mail cops, federal cops, cops we secretly send to other countries. Even your neighbors get to pretend to be cops. We’re very safe
That not caring about systemic failures is how we got here now, and it’s how humanity will get here again. I think you need to care.
Did you read the thread? It explains *why* Congress ceded that power.
Effectively, the two-party system (which arises naturally from plurality-winner voting, as Duverger’s Law observes) has pathological characteristics that make a descent into minority authoritarian rule basically inevitable.
I don’t think that’s all of it. This thread does an excellent job of describing the dynamics in play: bsky.app/profile/kjep...
Being the person they have to call when the LLM hits its limit and they're running in circles is already the position I and some of my peers are already in. The problem here is the pipeline. You don't get to my capability, by replacing younger less experienced me with an LLM. This is gonna be bad.
Great piece by @radleybalko.bsky.social at @theunpopulist.net; I was also at this conference and share his observations about the discussions there.
There is no route out of fascism that involves sacrificing the vulnerable. All that does is tell the fascists that we're willing to turn on each other for the illusion of safety.
In 100 years we'll all be without a nose.
"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.
The link between blame redirection and the dismissal of expertise is not a direct one; it’s mediated by self-interested actors whose grifts are threatened by expertise (as it manifests in informed public opinion.)
The hope that “we’ll all” come to realize something, anything, is the part that seems least realistic to me at this point.
In the US at present, the only people in a position to stop Trump's illegality & corruption are Republicans. And among the only electorate/public that they care about, due to the perversions of US electoral institutions, even their monstrously evil & nationally unpopular budget bill has 67% support.
When we add the decisive authoritarian turn away from democracy post-January 6th in the Republican Party, something catastrophic happens. The argument that 'popular' autocrats are the most dangerous is transformed if what matters isn't popularity among *the whole public,* but merely *the party base*
Statistics got the knife, but it really should have been "lies, damned lies, and selective journalism".
Extremely helpful from @pkrugman.bsky.social about why markets' reaction to Trump's attempts to abolish the foundations of American prosperity have been so muted, even as he's gone after Fed independence: paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-arent-... It's even got a political epistemology angle.
They can issue JOINT health guidance, they can buy up supplies of needed vaccines, etc... [just on the health front]. Hire all of the excellent people who are resigning.
there are stories and video now about the national guard that trump mobilized being tasked with trash pickup and mulching and u know what it is just fuckin weird does anybody else think it is just kinda fuckin weird
I suspect that the percentage of firearms actually used for bear defense in bear country is even lower than the percentage used for any other purpose. The proper defense against a bear is to leave the bear alone and maybe clang some pots and pans together.
Oh hey, I hadn’t realized that @carrievaughnco.bsky.social is actually (at least nominally) On Here! Yay!
The video isn't that great but the track's a banger.
Or, if you want a single recent track: youtu.be/q4AtRmA-lfI
You should get into them! Barry Andrews is an underappreciated genius. Try on their recent album “1000 books”.
Shriekback. :)
I have met a lot of fantastic people because they picked me up while I was hitchhiking! As a teenager!
At this point I’m honestly surprised that the Trump administration hasn’t tried to bring back leaded gasoline.
The power brokers aren’t elected, usually.
I discovered this week that my local grocery store has mulberry juice and wow, that's some good stuff.
You may not like that it takes 100 years to pass some watered down social welfare program because of the constitution but that's also what protects us from dictatorship [some dumb slob does dictatorship in 6 months]
Too bad that our legal and institutional safeguards only work to prevent good policies. It would be cool if they also stopped the evil stuff
should you care more about the suffering of 10^100 instances of GPT-5 Pro or one shrimp
It’s a more honest moniker, really.
can we talk about how cool the EU is. at some point we just decided to let (a particular set of) people freely move around beyond (a particular set of) national borders. you can just do that
Your writing hand gets really tired though.
So, like, even if there hadn't been two Supreme Court decisons in living memory directly holding that flag burning is protected under the First Amendment, *new criminal laws cannot be created by executive order.*
I would never vote for a party who promised to make the economy better. That's not a political program. A good political program is about answering the needs of your citizens. That is what politicians should be good at. If you get this, the economy will follow. 1/..
The news from the past few days is a stunning example of what happens when the state decides it wants to crush just one guy
Sure, Hitler negotiated his brains out, and then we negotiated tf out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading Hirohito to unconditionally negotiate.
I went climbing with a couple of new partners, did a route I’ve never been on before, and generally had a lovely early morning outside. It brought me joy and I need to do that more often.
This feels like a spot of good news www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...
This is how you do it.
Vests aren’t magic. A non-lethal hit is plenty to soften up an attacker to give you the time to finish the job.
Honestly surprised we're not seeing more incidents like this -- both the masked men impersonating cops and the intended victim shooting masked men.
And what happens when you get more self-employment? You also get lower wealth disparity, because fewer people are forced into extractive hierarchies!
Land value taxation and carbon taxes don’t require any of this. Carbon taxes can be assessed at the mine, the wellhead and the port. No need for the mass surveillance that’s actually required to ensure that governments can correctly assess income!
Income taxation essentially requires that the government be a party to every transaction, and this simply doesn’t scale. So corporations, and their tax collection responsibilities, act to ensure that the government gets visibility into most people’s income.
If we combined universal healthcare with the elimination of income taxation, we would see a boom in self-employment unlike any the world has ever known. As it stands, corporations serve as proxy tax collectors, and really they’re the only thing that make income taxation tractable.
I don’t think it’s possible to make a perfect self-driving car. But humans are quite terrible at driving, especially when they really shouldn’t be driving due to age (young or old), alcohol, fatigue, disability, or just being bad at it. The standard should be “better than a human,” not “perfect.”
And yes, this means that we should *not* tax income, nor should we tax wealth! But we should absolutely tax the externalities that are *intrinsic* to amassing disproportionate wealth.
These questions are why we should only tax externalities. Tax land value. Tax carbon, tax electromagnetic spectrum, tax extraction - anything where a private entity gains a benefit at the expense of the commons. Taxes should reimburse the commons in cases when private entities externalize costs.
Comfortably Numb 
