[tech notebook] Turn your Bluesky archive into a readable, hostable static site with fossilphant https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/10/28/turn-your-bluesky-archive-into-a-readable-hostable-static-site-with-fossilphant/index.html
Aside from the fact that it's, well, murder, one of the United States' great achievements during the Pax Americana era was protecting and enforcing all the world's ability to navigate freely in international waters. One of many global public goods the US used to provide, but is now undermining.
Not all LLM-assisted production is bullshit. It's possible to use them as tools for human-supervised creation. But by default, absent effortful supervision + revision, LLM output is bullshit. Passing that off as communication, wasting human time with it, is a way of lying and stealing all at once.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
yes. it seems rather intentionally. and selectively. they are now let’s try economic populism, blame “the left” for distracting for that (really?), and write Medicare For All out of their definition of that as something “unpopular”. 1/
(of course in 2016 economic populism was bad and identity issues needed to be front and center. we non-centrists just can’t see the bigger picture!) /fin
Centrism (which is defined in practice as the consensus that held among ruling elites from about 1984 to 2016) has never been tried.
it’s better to be the kind of person who treats anything that presents as human or mind kindly than to be the kind of person parsing what or who is deserving of it.
“centrism” (really the policy preferences of a particular group of people, not the “center” of anything) can only be failed. it can never fail.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
you have to admit it’s at least moderately extreme.
is extremism in defense of moderation a vice?
what can we do for Jamaica? ht @bananapantz.bsky.social
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
the knife twists.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
god i hope not.
they said it was an inappropriate appropriation and that kind of blew my mind.
scary as shit.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
no one says stuff like “priced for perfection” any more.
they say they’re afraid of his base (well, some of them), but i wonder if the populist schtick isn’t more cover, if a more accurate characterization would be he’s the Schelling point upon which plutocrats have coordinated to defend themselves from egalitarian demands, to ensure continued dominance.
latest photo is fetching.
Image of the Grim Reader, via https://encyclopedia-of-monsters.fandom.com/wiki/Grim_Reaper
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
no, not if it was up to me. it’d be one person, one shot, with maybe a restriction on winning twice in a short time. 1/
remember 90% of people are in the bottom 90%. universal, flat transfers bring us toward equality, and avoid the need and time tax and gaming and stigmatization and accusations of corruption any kind of means testing regime provokes. 2/
if you are concerned about the top having too much and getting more (you should be!) raising high-income tax rates is an elegant way to do that without micromanaging and delegitimating universal programs. 3/
( for where i wrote up the random transfers idea www.interfluidity.com/v2/918.html ) /fin
indeed. (oh no can’t help myself.) drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/08/20/t...
there's no position on "the issues" that could win my support for Donald Trump or JD Vance. their flaws, in my mind, go beyond what "issues" can remedy. i think most of the electorate behaves this way, although a substantial faction has diametric views about *who* is beyond support. 1/
yet so much electoral analysis insists on explaining results by issue positions. if only we'd moderated on this, doubled down on that, the polls say they'd like that! 2/
it has come to seem a bit bizarre to me. /fin