i guess it becomes a definitional question. if i write a program that says, ‘println(“Will you marry me?”)’ in a sense it has produced a linguistic uttterance but can we characterize it in any meaningful sense as having proposed something?

i too am tempted into factional infighting, but i think for now elections are decided by whether the broad public is Republican curious or experiencing a bout Republican revulsion and our not-Republican factionalizing is mostly epiphenomenal. not a permanent state of affairs i suspect, but for now.

the phrasing “Grok proposes” already grants the contestable premise.

the relationship between how many units of CPI a person can buy — as reckoned (inevitably differently) by any of various statistical agencies which are doing the best they can — and economic welfare is extremely weak except over very short periods of time.

[tech notebook] Sysadminning in Scala, documenting in Claude https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/11/08/sysadminning-in-scala-documenting-in-claude/index.html

how do you evacuate a city of 10 million people? and to where, where else is the water and resources now lacking in Tehran?

"You don’t have to be a wild-eyed leftist to think all of this has a pre-French Revolution vibe." @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social www.thebulwark.com/p/let-them-e... // liberals mugged by reality now clubbed by inequality. the world beats the shit out of you and there's no direction that's safe.

The LLM is so positive, but that's why it's not predictive. Just because it seems to really like what you are doing (and offers such apparently perceptive compliments!) doesn't mean that anyone else will.

the richest people in the world want to make the rest of us feel so poor.

how can Bovino be a real name in this story? isn’t that a bit heavy-handed of the author?

“It’s really concentrating the power very directly into the person of Donald J. Trump, as opposed to the president more broadly, or to the parts of the executive branch that would have the delegated authority to do this”

so this sounds like quite the opposite of the nippon “golden share”: “The government’s investment in Intel will be a passive ownership, with no Board representation or other governance or information rights.”

i guess a “golden share” is some kind of bespoke contract? does it have a place in a firm’s capital structure?

what is the legal form of the “stakes” he takes in companies? does the US Treasury become a regular shareholder or what?

(probably the contemporary politician most on point on this beat is Elizabeth Warren, but i think our political future may be quite discontinuous so it’s hard to what people or institutions might be plausible for restoring accountability.)

(i usually prefer the advertiser to the ad seller, so i try very hard to avoiding clicking through anything sponsored, even when i'm gonna buy!)

people did go to jail for Enron! in that sense, GWB did a better job than BHO. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey...

Enshittification as a macro phenomenon, Cory Doctorow riffing on Pavlina Tcherneva.

When you think about it, isn't Helen Andrews the only *real* feminist?

hate the post, not the poster.