Weird, putting tariffs on construction materials and throwing day laborers in concentration camps should have solved the supply problem by now
Staunch liberal, hopeful Georgist, moderate intuitionist. Hoping to one day pass on an even better world than the one I inherited. Retweet =/= Endorsement
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Weird, putting tariffs on construction materials and throwing day laborers in concentration camps should have solved the supply problem by now
Great lead headline right now, @nytimes.com.
ive got no idea what's going on with Trump's health. But the 'biden precedent' is just so glaring and hilarious. half of 2025 has been taken up with elite press shaming of how no one ever talked abt Biden's age which was actually their main topic in 2024. Ok. Set aside that his party literally ...
Using one photo already on your phone, what is Trump announcing at 2:00pm?
Birth rates are lowering *literally everywhere.* The only countries which keep growing in power will be the ones which continue to grow, and without immigration that will not be “the West.”
Whether it actually is or not, they're deliberately teasing it as if this is going to be something big and unusual. They don't typically refrain from pre-announcing what he's going to talk about, it can get you two rounds of coverage instead of one. That's their usual M.O.
Who knows what it'll be, most probably back to usual nonsense, but it is genuinely odd to still have nothing else (not even the usual "meetings" or whatever) on the announced schedule, after all this attention, and then simply "makes an announcement" from the Oval with no hint of what it's about.
so, to understand this story there are a few things you need to know - my cat, Gus, believes he is a trained support animal - he is not (he has relatives who are, but he is not) - he believes he is a seizure-detecting dog - he is not a dog - I do not get seizures
Explicitly conceding a need for generational change and saying he can't defend what Israel is doing admittedly makes this significantly easier
if you like the old war horses retiring, can’t hurt to say a couple nice things when they hang em up pour encourager les autres
They'd be Beria asking the doctors if he'll make it. More seriously I do think they would do it if he was literally unconscious, but nothing short of that. And so long as there was any chance of him speaking again, they'd only act with an eye to not getting purged if that happens.
The diffusion model knows what it has diffused because it knows what it hasn't diffused.
Well, the “telling people they’re geniuses” bit isn’t emergent from the system. The first iterations were trained in large part on internet conversations and were as I understand as likely to insult the user as anything. That part is a product of the marketing, and deeply harmful.
So much of the US Bill of Rights can be boiled down to "We're making the 17th Century illegal. Yes, all of it."
I think a literal coma would do it. eventually. But nothing short of that.
Hanania and Richard Spencer being to the left of the median Republican member of Congress is actually quite funny.
I'm reminded of the time my local chippie was ran by Iranians who'd left because the head of the family was close to the old Empire. Anyway I was buying sausage and chips and said I thought Muslims couldn't handle the stuff. And the old guy laughed and said "eat it, no. Sell it to infidels, yes!"
“I tried to kill my own vice president. I was held civilly liable for rape. I’m a felon. I was part of a pedophile human trafficking ring. Honestly, what’s a man have to do?”
He admits he’s in a Brewster’s Millions type situation where he has to be impeached to win fifty billion dollars but gives up because he’s out of ideas.
There is a difference btw inmates in the asylum and inmates running the asylum.
“There is no God but God and Mohammed -wonderful guy. He’s getting recognized more and more. I was golfing with the king of Saudi Arabia, big league ruler. I won by the way. I’m a very talented golfer. I remember when Kim Jong Un and I were comparing golf scores- Little Rocket Man, I call him. We ta
REPORT: Trump to dissolve into flower petals, be carried away by the breeze
Honestly, it’s getting old. After a point, the goat doesn’t care that you’re fucking it ironically. It expects flowers and chocolate the next date and for you to introduce it to your parents.
To be clear, last time we got one of these vague ‘announcement’ scheduled, it was doubling the tariffs on India - so i dont think this is gonna be particularly good bsky.app/profile/sky....
Loomer is pregnant
Of the many reasons this is a bad answer — the kind of answer I would delight to get in cross-examination because it makes the speaker look shifty and untrustworthy - is that “maintain or rebuild institutions” is not particularly less abstract than “democracy under threat.” It’s just less direct.
A friend took this at a rally today and I barked laughing.
Trump’s mysterious disappearance from public raises new questions about Joe Biden’s advanced age
Honestly, there is sort of a morose humor to the authoritarian backsliding. Imagine getting sent to Gitmo, your cell mate is like “watcha in for, bub?” and when you’re like “chalk,” he’s like “no shit? I did 9/11.”
Millions of people rallied to the streets on the specific message that he's trying to be a king, a dictator, that he's destroying the Constitution and is thus anti-American. And polls show that's not some niche, fringe belief. It wasn't for some triangulated policy normal-times policy agenda.
extwitter is a containment board
If there's any such coherent thing as "Blueskyism," it's total loathing for Trump. That's the only near-universal political opinion on here. And no matter how you slice it, Mr. Polls, hating Trump, who is underwater by double digits, is vastly more popular than anything else the Democratic Party.
Leaving aside the typical histrionics, this seems to be Trump beginning to distance himself from Kennedy (who’s “ripping apart” CDC), and inviting mainstream physicians and scientists to defend the vaccines, so Trump can then say, I got them to explain it better and vaccines are OK.
This would increase the odds it's some especially insane policy or else something that would be prima facie evidence of dementia or psychosis.
I’m assuming he’s going to teach us all the YMCA dance. You know, the one where he kind of sways back and forth gently for 30 minutes for no apparent reason.
That much, you can almost guarantee.
The funnier and somewhat more likely possibility is that he's actively psychotic right now (perhaps due to dementia!) and about to issue some comically insane (and perhaps tragically insane, alas) order tomorrow that really rubs in how little he knows up from down at this point.
I’ve come around from “he’s taken the weekend off to golf” to “something fuckys afoot and the goblins in mordor are panicking”
Literally any dumb impulse that crosses his mind (or one of his courtiers' minds) can be what gets announced tomorrow. He could even cancel or completely change the announcement last minute for any reason or no reason.
One perpetually underrated possibility is that he'll finally decide to award himself the Medal of Honor, like he's been fantasizing about for a while now.
There is effectively no limit to the bespoke insane ideas Trump can be won over to, or come up with on his own. Insiders may be able to tell us something useful but I haven't seen any particularly informative leaks. And Trump can ALWAYS change his mind and make the announcement something else.
It's effectively impossible to know what the supposed big announcement tomorrow is. It could be a new scam like $Trump coin… Or an act of war (maybe vs Venezuela, maybe vs Iran, small chance vs Russia!)… Or another occupation of a blue jurisdiction… Or a shiny new blatantly illegal executive order…
I’m actually leaning more to Chicago than Venezuela. We haven’t seen the mobilization of Air Force assets to jump in let’s say the 82nd, unless he thinks the Navy’s got this on their own with like 2,000 dudes to launch the ground assault on an entire nation state. Just Cause II needs more buildup.
I just think this site is underrating the chances we're about to go to war with Venezuela
Beyond this being... weird, the editing is atrocious.
It’s either “Cracker Barrel has agreed to give us fifty percent equity in their old logo,” or “We begin bombing Caracas in ten minutes.”
Hey, Cloudflare gave me full access to their suite of services via Project Galileo, their program to protect human rights, civil society, journalism, and democracy websites, so that means my highest-traffic website is now better protected. That was nice of them.
I run a zillion hobby websites, mostly just static sites, but a few database-backed, some of which have chugged along for a decade or two. Hosting them never required any real thought until recently, when bots have started getting out of control.
In some states, as a trans man who passes for male, I'm legally banned from using a men's restroom but practically banned from using a women's. My choice is between breaking the law and being arrested for breaking it. Few Democrats are talking about how much trans people have lost, and how quickly.
Trans people have been expelled from the military and punished and humiliated throughout. We're fighting in court to retain a right to accurate US Passports. Books mentioning us are banned in classrooms in much of the country. In FL, trans teachers are required by law to misgender themselves.
I can’t stress how dead DC is right now. Walking down U Street before and after a movie on Labor Day weekend, and it’s about as close to a ghost town as it was during COVID.
This is why Isaac Chotiner gets treated like Socrates for asking basic follow-up questions
To sum up what I’ve been trying to say: - there’s a lot of hype around language models - you can actually download them and look at how they work - if you do this you can actually observe what they are doing without taking anyone’s word for it, and it’s not what the boosters OR haters claim
False. Early post-dose adverse events are not wholesale reassigned to the unvaccinated group; they are tracked explicitly (often as partially vaccinated or by days since dose). This man is either dumb or lying. You tell me.
The extent to which a lot of pro-Israel people (myself somewhat included) have become disillusioned to one degree or another with Israel is entirely the result of Israeli decisions.
Also, “enlightened” opinion being that we need less procedure and more vibes when the opposite is true. The problem isn’t that rules exist, it’s that an internal affairs guy who follows the rules is treated like Judas way too often.
The thing is, the "guy with insane views on one thing but will compromise on everything else in exchange for pork" were mostly kicked out of the Party by Gingrich in the *90s*!
I think AI coding assistants would probably still be taking off; we probably wouldn't be calling them AI but "generative coding" or something like that; and AI image generation would probably still be out there but not being commercialized or promoted as much, mostly a hobbyist thing
I hypothesize that if the end of the zero-interest-rate policy era hadn't led to a funding cliff in the early part of this decade, causing OpenAI to pivot to creating and releasing ChatGPT as a product, there would still not be a large number of highly commercialized chatbots out there
Gemini and Claude are less like this because both Anthropic and Google have somewhat higher-brow aspirations for the product; they tune the models for scientists and coders and envision them as something like research assistants, and you can see this in the different behaviors they manifest.
OpenAI has trained ChatGPT (and their open source GPT-oss models) to be, as far as I can tell, affirming, supportive, and friend-like - which I consider to be *colossally* unethical, particularly in combination with the other marketing they've done around it it's actively deceptive to the user
This medal is so meaningless and given out to political hacks so often, I would have assumed Rudy already had one.
but those early, "unbaked" language models were *basically* produced by applying math to various subsets of human generated data about humans. nobody was "designing them to fool people" because they weren't for public release or consumption, they were pure research products
but, to disambiguate for a second: people at Google and other companies were starting to experience what we're now calling AI psychosis by the end of the previous decade, from interacting with raw, untuned language models turned into rudimentary chatbots. these were not designed to fool anyone.
I just wanna grab this part of my ramble about AI from all of this; I think it's insufficiently understood the extent to which AI models as they are currently being commercially deployed are an effort to commercialize a specific novel technological discovery - the transformer - for funding
Between Taliban rule, mass deportations in Pakistan and Iran, European governments trying to send them to the Taliban, the US refouling people who worked for them, and the earthquake in Jalalabad the situation for Afghans is nightmarish right now.
Once again, of the laws creating aircraft carrier-sized loopholes for the president to utter the magic words "national emergency" or "national security" & then rule like a King must go. We can have nuanced discussion about re-delegation later but not now. bsky.app/profile/mcop...
I think that people are confusing “sickly Trump” with “Trump looks like a sad out of shape 79 year old when the lighting, camera angles and makeup aren’t perfect”
Normie cyber people it brings me no pleasure to announce the aerospace cyber people absolutely cooked us
the purpose of this is to destroy Harvard
The GOP needs to be a "normal" party that competes with the Dems on governance again. If there's no way for that to happen and this weird cycle is baked in, then the GOP has to be politically marginalized to the point where the "FAFO cycle" occurs purely within the Dems
There seems to be a cycle of Dems soaking up frustration about the system -- when the system works well enough for such frustration to be salient -- and then Republicans crashing the system. Which leads to Dems building it back up again and rise/repeat
I've said this before, but only one party caring about governance makes it, in turn, a magnet for public anger about governance
Tiny towns are a kind of perpetual high school with the same petty dramas, rivalries, and gossip recycling endlessly. If four years of high school didn't drive you mad then 7 decades of it will.
this is probably a good thing, if it pans out. More balkanization, less conflict. I'm not sure it will over time. Aggregation effects are a constant in communication history
Not only do ACA plans receive money from the government, they also receive money from *each other*—plans that have a less risky population have to make payments to plans with riskier populations
I’ve been digging into ACA regs and it’s really remarkable how much they had to juryrig the system to maintain a “market.”
People today may complain about crime, but they don't act like crime is a problem. They did in the 70s through early 90s, when ceime dominated pop culture, and people really did personally worry about crime every day.
broke; would you love me it i was a worm woke: will you at least work as hard as an arthropod
a bug the size of your thumb is putting in more work than 99% of men on dating apps roflmaooo
dating apps need to do something like male insects having to do some elaborate energy intensive dance or some shit. the signaling ain’t costly enough
I would merely shoot the Chekist
My hot take is we should go kinetic against Russian clandestine operations in Europe
Bluesky buddies! I want a bunch of examples for something I'm writing of instances in the last 9 months of the Trump administration insisting on something that was *obviously* untrue - real 'up is down' examples, ideally with news story links to the statement.
you're coming to quickly understand why Emperor Palpatine had that big hooded robe. If you're gonna be decrepit you might as well be Mysteriously Evil Decrepit
zero chance these "study lycurgus" men could handle spartan women.
I don't know anything about liability re: the knockon effects of this, but the next true feature for this website would be something like Craigslist or an Events listing. They shouldn't be trying to reinvent Twitter, they should be trying to revive classifieds.
but people are doing idea discovery on Substack now, even with its very obvious ideological bent, because it’s the best product in the space. and that’s better than marinating in the X sewer but still a lot worse than it could be.
Twitter’s gone. there’s a residual entity there built around crypto pumps and muscle memory and Elon’s willingness to keep on shoveling, but as a vital force it’s spent.
the thing I think people don’t want to deal with is that it’s not Bluesky v Twitter, it’s Bluesky v Substack
Okay Kalshi made the contract: kalshi.com/markets/kxtr...
MAHA’s central thesis is that modern medicine is bad, unless it’s gear
Ultimately, it's a very bad deal for everyone, but it's powerful stuff that can convince mediocre, envious, stupid, and desperate people to do self and socially destructive things and somehow live with themselves.
to kind of sum this up, I think that the role of generative AI in the future is going to be for filling in elements that, for whatever reason, the creator wants to be in the work but does not feel the audience needs to feel were crafted by human hands
It’s probably worth noting btw in the line of your position that a lot of what’s going on on social media around this is people looking for a way to blame individuals for marketing campaigns by large companies AI art was a small hobbyist curiosity until companies started flooding the zone w/models
the biggest sticking point for this government has to be the fact that NIMBYism combined with the TFW surge basically ended up creating a pretty bad equilibrium for Canada
tbh given that Trump told Bolton he wanted to annex Venezuela in Trump I, I expect things to get a lot more stupid
Imagine telling someone 15-20 years ago "We're going to redo the invasion of Iraq but *more* stupid"
- we're still going to hit all sorts of stuff on the Mainland *for operational reasons*(*) - we can easily discriminate the vast majority of these from stuff that could possibly drive vertical escalation - stuff that may drive it will be on a list and an appropriate authority will make a strike call
The problem with this whole """debate""" is no one is (apparently) willing to have an honest conversation about the reality, which is - we can't gain air parity (much less superiority) over the Strait, so - an air denial approach makes the most sense *for operational reasons*