were TED talks a net positive or net negative for our collective cognition and deliberation?

"When prevention works, the catastrophe doesn’t happen, making the prevention itself seem (retroactively) unnecessary." #JakeScott https://quillette.com/2025/08/08/rfk-jr-s-mrna-betrayal-how-political-ideology-trumped-nobel-prize-winning-science/

a meeting of minds implies the existence of minds.

man yells at TV, most powerful military in the history of the world springs into action.

“the US offers nothing more than AI and various types of gambling and volatile tariffs, whereas China has offered massive advancements in science and technology and a future that people can actually believe in.” @kylascan https://kyla.substack.com/p/how-ai-healthcare-and-labubu-became

Democrats, not beloved as a political party even as the Republicans are unpopularly overtly fascists, should make blowing up the two-party system the central reason why people should vote for them.

@czeins no, it was much more broadly optimistic, despite the obvious “froth”. there wasn’t a widespread-if-also-contested view that the technology being built was dystopian.

to talk about RFK Jr, we need a word for murder, but where the deed performed is like ten years in advance of the predictable deaths that result and there is a thin patina of plausible deniability.

Please disregard this post.

i think @pefrase pretty much called it when he coined the term “exterminism”. https://jacobin.com/2011/12/four-futures

so, is it China or Germany or India or who else that’s going to the next century’s biotech / biomedical powerhouse? who’s gonna pick up the mRNA mantle, along with all the others we’re casting off?

This post broke the internet.

i wanted to joke like a sweaty person meme saying the temperature is a SCAM! except that’s not a joke at all that’s literally the position on climate change.

@admitsWrongIfProven @jeffcliff @Hyolobrika @PippiPunkstrumpf @VeroniqueB99 @renardboy @the_etrain @Alice @CorvidCrone social media are full of people ready to attack and undermine contestable positions, particular more optimistic ones. “giving up”, or at least appearing to on social media by portraying a world-weary hopeless cynicism, is defensive, self-protection, a kind of online fetal position.

@admitsWrongIfProven @jeffcliff @Hyolobrika @PippiPunkstrumpf @VeroniqueB99 @renardboy @the_etrain @Alice @CorvidCrone i think we need to develop realistic but anticynical media, informed by a kind of Pascal’s wager. (i admit in many of my posts i fail to live up to this suggestion.)

AI business will truly take off when you can replace not only your employees with markdown files you call “agents”, but also your vendors and customers.

"'Hegemony' is neither a birthright nor a permanent condition; it is a practice, fragile and perishable, dependent on the continual renewal of both material capabilities and the legitimacy of leadership." @delong https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-note-on-the-closing-of-the-path ht @dhnexon

Two essays (the second via the first) on America's now somewhat entrenched trajectory towards global marginalization, culturally and industrially. (But how about financially?)

"Left Behind" by @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/left-behind

"Labubu and the Decline of American Cultural Hegemony" by #MirandaWilson https://uscnpm.substack.com/p/labubu-and-the-decline-of-american

[tech notebook] Using Tailscale to proxy traffic to the US https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/07/27/using-tailscale-to-proxy-traffic-to-the-us/index.html