Reading romance is great and I highly recommend it. The trick is to find the good ones.

Being an actual character in a romance would also be great (for a sufficiently high quality romance with a sufficiently peaceful setting, and assuming I get to keep free will and also keep living after the story ends – ok that’s a lot of caveats but how else would it work?).

The latest in the long line of human-hostile billboards:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1o8s3lz/humanity_had_a_good_run_billboard/

https://dearworld.ai/

This is positioning itself as an AI doomer website; but it could also be an attempt at viral marketing. We’ll see I guess.

That Wikipedia article is cursed:

For instance, in discussions on climate change mitigation, countries with lesser contributions to greenhouse gas emissions might still benefit from global efforts to reduce emissions, enjoying a stable climate without proportionally shouldering the costs of emission reductions.

I’m getting a lot of questions already answered by my “before anyone asks I’m pro LGBTQ and pro immigrant” shirt.

New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1976304803744501775

Best I can do now is try to make sure that at least one AI is truth-seeking and not a super woke nanny with an iron fist that wants to turn everyone into diverse women 😬

Edit: It only just now occured to me that hes’ probably whining about generative AI rather than an army of superintelligent robots marching across the earth transing people, but I’m leaving my comment.

I tend to think of Toys (1992) for these sorts of themes though I haven’t watched the film from start to finish since I was a kid. It’s about the militarization of a wealthy family toy factory and has a lot of scenes that stuck with me.

It’s a Christmas family movie that reviewed horribly so definitely counts as a cult classic, but those who like it tend to really like it.

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The article claims that Google didn’t “fall for the same trap” but that’s not correct, all this garbage is indeterministic so the author just got “lucky”.

It’s like saying “four out of five coin-flips claimed that an eagle was the first US president” – just because the fifth landed on heads and showed George Washington doesn’t mean it’s any different than the rest.

But here I’m preaching to the choir.

Honestly Hanson is so awful the rationalists almost make him look better by association.

But wait I thought the reasoning AIs were going to come up with fantastical sci-fi solutions to all our global warming problems! Maybe we didn’t shovel enough coal at them?

A lot of companies use “vibe coding” an excuse to offshore software development work to cheaper countries without anyone noticing.

But yeah it’s not gonna work out in the long term for a business that:

• Encourages people to submit random nonsense to the codebase instead of doing actual work
• Removes all entry-level positions
• Lays off anyone who knows what they’re doing

That’s how you get a codebase that kinda sorta works in a way but is more evolved than designed, full of security holes, slow as heck, and disorganized to the point where it’s impossible to fix bugs, adds features, or understand what’s going on.

The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

Ugh reading more of this and it’s awful.

He writes that women are attracted to men who could beat us up or control us. He writes that the reason for this attraction is so we have a chance to marry the man and prevent these bad things from happening.

His “science” assumes that women think like they do in shitty erotica written by men for men. Even by rationalist evo-psych standards this is pretty poorly thought out.

And yet, per Steven Pinker, “a middle-aged congresswoman does not radiate the same animal magnetism to the opposite sex that a middle-aged congressman does”. What’s the deal?

OK other straight ladies here, raise your hand if you’ve ever felt that middle aged congressmen, as a whole, “radiate animal magnetism”. Anyone? Anyone?

In this exciting new research direction in the making-stuff-up field I build upon previous work by Myself et. al in the making-stuff-up field.

I apologize to bring you the latest example of the intersection of US fascism with silicon valley tech industry.

This time the Whitehouse have decided that UI design is kinda important (gee I wonder if there used to be a department or two for that): https://americabydesign.gov/

Well nothing wrong with a little updating of UI anywa–

What’s the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you’re not wrong. But what’s the foundation of that brand? One that’s more globally recognized than practically anything else. It’s the nation…where he was born. It’s the United States of America.

To update today’s government to be an Apple Store like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software.

Oh god kill it with fire.

The web design of their website is also worth remarking on here:

1. The title text that reads “AMERICA by DESIGN” is an SVG. The alt text is “America First Legal logo”
2. The page contents are obnoxiously large and obnoxiously gray before they fade in.
3. For some reason Every single word gets it’s own <span> element to make the obnoxious fade in possible. Because I guess that’s what happen when you fire all the people who actually know what they’re doing.
4. They managed to include a US flag icon with only 39 stars which is too few stars to be official and too many stars to be visible at teeny sizes
5. The favicon is just 16x16 pixels of the word “by” in cursive that’s so blurry you can’t actually tell that’s what it is.
6. If your browser width is between 768px and ~808px there is overlapping text at the top.

The tech bros tied to this? Joe Gebbia co-founder of AirBNB, along with Big-Balls. Maybe others but those are the two who were retweeted by the twitter account.

Edit: also this part:

©2025 National Design Studio

Someone ought to remind them of US copyright law because official federal work is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States

“So, what are you in for?” “Making a right turn on a bicycle without signalling continuously for the last 100 feet before the turn in violation of California Vehicle Code 22108”

“The common people pray for anime memes, healthy vtubers, and a wikipedia article that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of tweets, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. "They never are.”

- George R. R. Martin

I’m sorry in advance for posting this meme.

If you use cloudflare DNS or similar: there has been some inscrutable drama going back years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Cloudflare_DNS_availability

(You might be using Cloudflare DNS without realizing it if you use Firefox, since it’s the default with DNS over HTTPs enabled)

(Oh no how much of my brain is dedicated to remembering random inscrutable tech drama?)

Edit: whoops commented too fast. That would explain broken DNS but not captchas. I blame the heatwave it has melted my brain.

Crypto bros continue to be morally bankrupt. There is an a coin / NFT called “GreenDildoCoin” and they’ve thrown dildos onto court at multiple WNBA basketball games (ESPN, video). It warms my heart that one of them was arrested. More of that please.

Polymarket even had a “prediction” on it. Because surely the outcome there couldn’t be influenced by someone who also placed a large bet. Oh and Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme about it

None of this is particularly surprising if you’ve followed NFTs at all: the clout chasing goes to the extreme. In the limit memecoins can act as donations to terrible people from donors who want them to be terrible. Still I hate how much publicity this has gotten, and how this has manifested as gross disrespect towards women atheletes / women’s sports by the sorts of losers who make “jokes” about no one watching WNBA games.