Michael

"SHIT"
"FUCK"
"NO"
"FUCK"
"SHIT"
"FUCK"

Outdoor fruit stand with huge pyramid of oranges and tall round banana display.

they’re just begging for a car chase

@polphilpod.bsky.social is always one of my favorite thinkers to read, and this piece is no exception. I highly recommend it.

“Congratulating ourselves for being tough enough to knock something down, and shortly thereafter finding ourselves totally incompetent to build its replacement” is the theme of Trump’s second administration, whether it’s the White House, federal government, Middle East, or global economy

all the manosphere influencers rushing to dubai opens up a unique opportunity not totally unlike a khomenei strategy meeting with the top leadership

8. But insisting in the face of the evidence that LLMs are useless and that everyone who says otherwise is a dead-eyed cultist - well, it _absolutely_ does provide evidence of who is clinging to a cult's organizing prophecies after the eschaton was supposed to happen but didn't, and who is not.

7. Their uses may turn out to empower the worst side of bureaucracy. I made this argument myself yesterday. Also: bad effects for labor and culture! There are many, many more plausible criticisms, most of which require some engagement with, and understanding of the technology to really make stick.

6. They may turn out to be a bad thing overall for humanity. Perfectly possible. They may even be a bad thing for programming overall - also possible, though I would treat the arguments of those who program and run big coding projects more seriously than the arguments of those who do not.

5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.

fuck, I’m sorry, I can’t compete with this

Mystery Solved! Turns out it is "Webinar.tv" whose disgusting and unethical business model is: register for a zoom call under a fake name and email address, record it without consent and put it on a public website with genAI summary and everyone's names and faces and then charge for access. WTAF.

Transpose this 1970 campaign speech by antisemitic white supremacist Asa Carter into the voice of JD Vance or Elon Musk or Matt Walsh and tell me if you could tell the difference.

It’s hard to overstate the degree to which human progress in the 20th century was the answer to 100,000 years of our species’ prayers. Democracy delivered by progressive values. Prosperity for normal people ineffable to 10,000 years of kings - all delivered by progressive governance.

whenever I see a John Fetterman post, this is all I can think of

She’s a serious candidate; at this point I think most people dismissing her seriousness are at least partially motivated by misogyny; and this is a clearer articulation of a progressive foreign policy than I’ve seen anyone else running for office make

what if Samaritan from Person of Interest existed but the government was doing it in the open

Sometimes I like to reimagine conspiracy theories, but in a way that would piss off a lot of terrible people.

Like after the debacle at Stonehenge, the ancient aliens decided to never work with white people ever again. Just saw no potential there whatsoever.

You could not ask for a better community policing opportunity than cops getting into a snowball fight with some local youths and feigning defeat when they take one to the face but instead they had to treat it like the kids were a public safety threat for playing outside

Something I think about a lot: One of the reasons people used to think boys “outgrew” ADHD is because in adulthood men tend to offload their executive function (managing calendars, remembering birthdays, cleaning, grocery shopping) to wives and secretaries so it masked their symptoms.

To be clear, in this metaphor the Republicans are the Nazis.

complient in his perpetual misery, a fallen shrek

"hahaha im going to hell" as a reoccurring line from a politician is genuinely fucking weird

Recurring gripe: people on the left have social media and generative AI exactly backwards. Gen AI is the printing press: it cannot and will not be uninvented. It can run on a laptop at this point. Social media is a handful of specific companies with specific first mover and network effects.

The world's richest man is broadcasting eliminationist rhetoric about a tiny, vulnerable minority, and virtually no one is going to treat it as a scandal. It's just normal now.

four stick figures on sleds, one is sliding face first, face down, marked "skeleton", diagonally opposite to it is one sliding feet first, face up, marked "luge". The other two combinations are drawn and labeled with question marks

given the existence of skeleton and luge, i postulate the existence of two other, yet to be discovered, winter olympic sports

Sort of gives away the lie that they're arresting hardened criminals who are drags on society when they're setting up traps to lure in Good Samaritans

AOC in Munich: “They are looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can into an age of authoritarianism — of authoritarians that can carve out the world, where Donald Trump can command the Western Hemisphere & Latin America as his personal sandbox”

The year is 2015. China is getting richer and more powerful every year, but America has three trump cards: universitities, biomedical research, and immigration.

the mousekatools will never dismantle the mousekahouse