An additional non-negotiable requirement I’d like to see socialized for ‘26-28 candidates for US Senate & President: supporting the overdue ratification of Geneva Protocols I & II
You're not going to make any money doing this and no one is going to read it, so you must hope for a secret third thing to happen
"Our engineers are bad at documentation" Oh, really? When was the last time anyone got promoted for documentation? Or, you know, tons of tech writers who would be happy to have work right now. You get the behavior you reward.
Yeah, this is suspicious; the conservative playground complaint several years back was that they didn’t like the plastic, colorful, safe playgrounds that had replaced the exposed-screw tetanus palaces of their youth. This version of the complaint feels like mad libs
crazy you have to understand this government through that lens. a shocking amount of people voted for him in order to win online arguments. they fall in behind any braindead shit he does to win online arguments. however many thousands of iranian dead dont matter. but the menchies? those matter a lot
trump is taking political hits on iran is because he is now undermining his supporters' ability to win online arguments. you can just own them ruthlessly on the iran thing now for being dumdums. and this they cannot bear. they can tolerate any amount of murder and mayhem, but not being owned online
“‘Oh yes, I thought of something,’ panted Ford. Arthur looked up expectantly. ‘But unfortunately,’ continued Ford, ‘it rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway.’”
A still from Mad Max: Fury Road, where Furiosa, driving, turns to the back seat and says “When I yell, ‘Fool’”
stepped outside for a vibe check and saw a beast fuckin hauling ass towards Bethlehem
article 8bis of the rome statute of the international criminal court
continuation of article 8bis
posting, once again, the well-established definition of the crime of aggression in the rome statute for the ICC
People are always like what’s something you miss from the past and one of mine is antitrust laws
In the history of Taylorism it's never been about making the machine do what human workers can do, but making the workers act like machines. Similarly, we should recognize this isn't about punishing service workers for not being courteous, but for not behaving like AI. Their humanity is the problem.
historical detail I can't help but bring up: by some accounts, the event that instigated the British soldiers to open fire on Crispus Attacks and the rest of the crowd in the Boston Massacre was a soldier being hit by a snowball
So many all-timers on TLCW; nobody has mentioned it yet, so I’ll say Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine
“AI can make mistakes” might as well be the slogan of our era. Even boosters admit that you need to spin the vibe code slot machine a few times to get a jackpot.
An employee with that degree of consistency would be fired.
So how do we redirect some of that unlimited grace from machines to humans?
i keep coming back to the question of predictable failure modes.
often what drives our choices isn't "what can it sometimes do"
but rather, "what can it definitely absolutely not do under any circumstances"
for example, an FAQ page will *never* show people text you did not put there
Boston’s abolitionist history deserves to be better-known.
I believe that there are characteristics of structural change and AI, as yet, does not have them.
I also believe that refusal opens up smart people to conceive of what *is* happening and not what capital *wants* to happen.
Both these options sound objectively amazing, why do racists keep assuming everyone's racist?
Hey just a philosopher noting that the original academic meaning of “performative” is that words aren’t just symbols but DO things in the world.
The Tasty Burger original or the Five Guys single might qualify? Locations might not be convenient though.
There is a lot of existing practice & insight around how generativity enables new kinds of art (some of us have been doing this for a while). There are a lot of deadends already mapped out. Then again I don't have a gun made of capital aimed at my head, so what do I know
putting everything else aside, this is just so artistically wrongheaded. even in the most warmed over crap put to tv/film I'm always amazed at how good humans are at acting, and how much of a spark live action visual media has because of it. I do not understand this impulse
kayfabe remains undefeated as a frame for understanding modern American politics
screenshot of text from Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: "The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive - because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about "Western civilization," while armed brutes try to tear it down by force."
bars
sadly the cobbler’s children go unshod
The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”
That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.
At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.
A pessimist would say that the the US has zero track record of actually holding its powerful monsters in any accountable, from confederates to Kissinger to Bush.
An optimist would say that it can always start doing so any time it actually wanted to.
Thesis: ICE is un-American and the Minneapolis protestors are real Americans.
Antithesis: Ackshually ICE is operating in a long American tradition of racist terror.
Synthesis: Minneapolis is now the epicenter of a clash between two distinct but historically grounded American political traditions.
