the profit motive can only be good when the state frustrates most means of achieving it. there’s an infinity of ways to provoke cash flows detached from or even negatively related to the production of social value. the state’s job is to foreclose those.
love the humans, each and every.
it's ex ante precarity more than ex post deprivation that has us so collectively miserable.
“you absolutely have to view LLM benchmarks from a position of default-distrust” @ouguoc describes how easily answers to benchmark problems can leak into the training set. https://seinmastudios.com/posts/llm-benchmarks-are-not-trustworthy/
Where I am now it's already the 5th of July, but at home it is still July 4. I am posting what I traditionally post every July 4. Optimism of the will. "On the stairs I smoke a cigarette alone / Mexican kids are shootin' fireworks below." God bless America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_tyWt_9Bfs
“Positive-sum solutions to multi-period stag hunts select for time consistency more than cost effectiveness.” @akhilrao https://akhilrao.org/blog/2025/07/03/selecting-for-time-consistency/
remarkable insights into what leadership and coordination actually entail, in the dry language of game theory. except with space stuff and death cults. 1/
@akhilrao project designs demanding “unnecessarily” expensive commitments, work to ensure partners highly committed to shared values, can augur success in ways that seem irrational, inefficient, dumb to reviewers who imagine a dictator with a Gantt chart can just get every participant to play their part. /fin
“The rise of Whatever” by @eevee https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/
// i’ve complicated, still mixed, views about LLMs, whether what comes of them can be good despite much evident awfulness (“slop”). but the “whatever” thesis perfectly captures what happened to the web and crypto. and yeah, LLMs are whatever machines.
celebrated the fourth this year with a colonoscopy. felt about right. doesn’t look like i have colon cancer. maybe there’s hope for my country as well.
@eyesquash @dpp coequal in legitimacy, but Article I, Congress, is the most powerful branch in our Constitution. i miss that too. i miss having a meaningful, functional Congress.
@dpp yes. i agree with that. they imagine, perhaps, they can take back what they have given, they hold a leash upon what they’ve unleashed on everyone else.
they hold no leash. they have the power to applaud, to rubber stamp, occasionally to performatively block but not on anything thay really matters.
@dpp i agree there’s a kind of stupidity, in that they believe that following their ideological priors will lead to a good and virtuous rather than a broken, poor, and violent society. but they mean for what’s happening to happen. they mean to enable it. in that sense, i think it’s only malice, not stupidity.
they are not in fact shocked, shocked by what the rest of us call abuses. they are constructing the loopholes, the protections against judicial protection of the public, with care.
so many possible names — the “pollute the planet act”, “kill the poors act”, “rich get richer act”.
but i think i’d go with the simple “gestapo act”
a thing i find weird is, was there even any meaningful debate on the whole new Gestapo thing?
i know legislators talked about Medicaid, rural hospitals, deficits and baselines.
but it seems like the new Gestapo was unproblematic, a shoo in, not any not even one of Republican legislators’ concerns.
This post has been modernized.
Resilience is a dimension of epistemology we (at least I) have too little considered.
However we know what we know, how resilient is it to interests that seek to snow us, or leave us without what had once been our capacity to know?
what’s the inverse of Hanlon’s Razor? i think that’s what applies to the current Supreme Court.
@ryanlcooper on elite impunity: “any country that completely gives up on accountability for its political class will eventually produce someone like Trump. Open the door to criminals, and sooner or later one will walk through.” https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-trump-prosecution-law-felonies-fascism/
plutocrats are the ultimate degrowthers, because serious growth requires unpredictable change, and plutocrats want to fix current hierarchies in amber.
you see this now in the Trump Administration’s reinforcement of fossil fuels and suppression of solar / batteries / etc.
you’ll know evil when you see what people will do in the name of god.
“A method of legal interpretation that relies on this kind of historical inquiry only when it will yield the answer it wants is clearly far more opportunistic than principled.” #KateShaw https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/opinion/supreme-court-trump.html