Benjamin Leggett

despite extraordinarily stiff competition from the Roberts Court, Citizens United keeps its place as one of the most damaging Supreme Court decisions of all time

truly beautiful

in case you've never seen it, this is Roger Ebert on The Mummy

This administration is going to try and prop up oil and AI thru defense spending because that's the pocketbook they have their hands in.

If the guy who desperately tried to bring oil back from the dead by force and fiat ends up causing the next major global oil crisis and driving the modern energy economy even farther away from it, that will be par for the fucking course.

To be left dead by attacks is the natural state of the Middle Easterner, while in the Western culture (also Israel somehow) being killed is a major taboo.

I think a lot of people who are well-intentioned LLM boosters who have been able to fairly reliably find well-paid work in tech really do struggle with putting themselves in the shoes of people working in other sectors that have been feeling precarious for a long time and now feel WAY more so

increasingly believing much of the communication gap between LLM Enthusiasts and LLM Skeptics on this website boils down to “are you someone who has largely experienced a *reasonable* amount of job security in tech, or are you someone who has not experienced job security and likely aren’t in tech”

I had the same feeling, but OG Gundam is actually not that bad on this front and B) there's a difference between period sexism (macross) and outright classical misogyny.

It's good but every series after this kind of sucks because someone told Tomino he could write dialogue and characters, and he lets his massive misogyny boner show.

Referring to myself going to see Bruckner's 6th being performed as "getting brucked up".

7-11 Mini-Tacos Will Make Me God

Absolute clownshow lmao.

My policy position is we should summarily execute all active participants in media franchise fandoms and burn their bodies for fuel.

If Kristi Noem is fired it's not because her people killed innocent Americans, killed innocent immigrants, terrorized minorities and broken hundreds of laws... it's solely because she blamed a $200 million dollar ad campaign on Trump.

If only the rest of us could relax and watch as the Right descends further into madness. But MAGA controls the levers of state power.
 
This is where the gravest danger lies: Delusion, ideology, and ineptitude are conspiring to make escalation almost inevitable.

Trumpism presents an extreme example of the pitfalls of personalism:

Personalist rule with a lazy, delusional leader at the top, a bunch of sycophants and zealots around him, and a base drifting ever deeper into fantasy land – that’s not a recipe for efficient authoritarian consolidation.

Men cannot mix chemicals at all, it's true.

I think this only applies if you're on blacksky, because I've blocked moderation intentionally and had no email.
It's probably because they're on a different bsky instance which also greatly diminishes the strength of a permaban (I.E. what they did to Link).

It is a bit funny that if your service succeeds in it's federated plan then also your own moderation and terms of service become meaningless. Very libertarian.

the UAE is, as I understand, primarily dependent upon oil exports, tourism/transport, and financial services, and... I'm guessing they decided it wasn't worth the smoke to keep on hosting the US's offensive operations, as opposed to keeping their economy functioning.

this means that it only took about 96 hours of hot war for the UAE to be broken off from the US bloc and to adopt a position of neutrality, despite the fact that the US had operated bases there for decades. *96 hours* until a US ally tapped out.

I said two years ago that if Xbox vanishes from the picture it means a general gaming contraction and fewer Steam storefront games overall because Steam effectively relies on consoles for big AAA titles, and was poohpoohed by Steam fanboys.

Inventing enemies to be persecuted by when you are in fact culturally dominant and doing virtually all of the persecution yourself is an invention of the religious right and white evangelicalism in the US, and it's pervasive among white conservatives.

At this point, I would genuinely welcome a stock market bloodbath that would destroy the personal wealth of large shareholders, VCs, a16z creeps, and Elon.

Beats the hell out of an actual real-live bloodbath.

Again: I don't care if you hate the fact that our values influence our tech & I don't care if you don't think tech & magico-religious belief should have anything to do with each other. They do, they always have, & while you throw your tantrums, the worst people you know keep building torment nexuses

Hiring the dregs of Liberty Law School for the DOJ is the legal equivalent of drafting 13-year-olds into the infantry

LLM makers makers do not want you to be able to understand. It's about turning the means of understanding and sensemaking into externalized products to rent.

There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli

"There can be no reason for attaching a door to a handle. But there is good reason for attaching a handle to a door. Living things do not possess appropriate structures for mysterious reasons: it is only those that have appropriate structures that are living in the first place."