"I sometimes think that 'anti-colonialism,' the sort that breeds leadership from Papa Doc to Yahya Sinwar, is the final poisonous fruit of the European colonial project." #RobertFarley https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/05/the-puzzle-of-hispaniola

powerful interests are dependent upon our society’s pathologies and so defend and entrench them.

if the UK can call snap elections why not Israel?

Unlock a free trial.

i feel like the presidential election is a tontine.

irrefutable proof of extraterrestrial life ht @artcollisions https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@jupiter/112491133301956806

does AI output seem so bland because LLMs are uncreative, or because of all the things that are done to render them "safe"?

"Inside New College of Florida’s Counter-Commencement" #JebLund https://www.thenation.com/article/society/inside-new-college-of-floridas-counter-commencement/

#NewCollege

"When you have two peoples both insisting on moonshot strategies rather than trying to maximize their core interests, the result is violence and death." #MattYglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-failures-of-zionism-and-anti

always tired, never sleepy.

@artcollisions (i'm curious what everybody thinks!)

@artcollisions yeah.

Bill Clinton after Monica Lewinsky _____ have resigned or been removed.

the ten-year old just came to me for help navigating a cookie consent pop-up with a sneaky "legitimate interest" section. he couldn't figure out how to leave its purgatory with everything rejected. what a weird world he's growing up in.

bluesky offers RSS feeds, but it doesn't attach linked media to those feeds or include quote-embedded posts, and norms there seem very quote-commenty.

so i nearly always have to clickthrough rather than read in-reader. which renders it basically too cumbersome to really follow blueskyers by RSS.

which is a shame because there's a lot of conversation there i'd like to follow. i'll still sample a bit, but it's very frustrating.

(mastodon RSS feeds helpfully include linked media!)

cc @costrike

it’s just that he believes in Roko’s basilisk, so it’s all under duress. https://assortedflotsam.com/@politicsbot/112481170154731053

i have pretty mixed feelings about the whole thing.

q: what do you call an unauthorized road runner?

a: a meep fake.

"We need network societies, not network states" #DivyaSiddarth #GlenWeyl #AnneMarieSlaughter https://cip.org/blog/network-societies

"of all the DNA principals, Erwin Chargaff would have been the most interesting to have dinner with." #BobTheScientist https://blobthescientist.blogspot.com/2014/08/chargaff-rules-ok.html