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• Post #3594193

  Since it's the 4th of July and also the 250th anniversary of the founding of the USA, a great occasion to remind people that this country has been an especially bad one from start to the present day. Worst atrocities you can imagine, throughout history? The US has participated in all of them. Slavery, genocide and colonialism, systematic war crimes, mass incarceration and concentration camps; you name it the US has done it not just once but multiple times. Now is a great time to rid yourself...

• Post #3592240

  Kinda a subtoot, but I'm begging people to stop using the "civilization/barbarism" dichotomy, even if you're somehow applying it "in reverse." From day 1, the notion of "civilized" nations contrasted against "barbarians" was propaganda for empire, and it still is. When you observe that those who called themselves "civilized" were more violent and destructive than those they called "barbarians", or that the standard of living f...

• Post #3450913

  Not shown in the slides: the goose needs to ingest 2.5kg gold for each 1kg golden egg it lays. The eggs have a thin gold coating but the center is lead (they're much smaller than real goose eggs when shown to-scale, which they never are in the marketing material). The goose is still going to be quite valuable if everything goes according to plan: early private investments make it seem like a great idea; once regular people and retirement funds are drawn in and they start paying to feed the...

• Post #3158508

  #AI and "productivity", some thoughts: Edit: fixed some typos. Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can prod...

• Post #1940857

  Definitely a star sentence of my current Wikipedia dive: "Like other rootless land plants of the Silurian and early Devonian Aglaophyton may have relied on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi for acquisition of water and nutrients from the soil." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants Writing a song that includes verses on plant evolution turns out to be a lot of fun.

• Post #1691172

  Was just made aware of this pretty good but entirely predictable study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229 I find that in 2025 the "Do LLMs reason?!?" Research question is not really a good one to be asking any more. Papers from 2020 explain how they don't. They are not actually black boxes; the hypesters just like to pretend that they are so they can pretend their capabilities are vastly greater than they actually are. But it turns out even when you're credulou...

• Post #1179295

  Just finished Iveliz Explains It All by Andrea Beatriz Arango. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down till I finished it, in less than a day. A really tender and entrancing novel-in-verse about a kid Puerto Rican kid struggling with some deep stuff. I loved the way that the journal focalization let deep feelings flow while also giving the reader a bit of a puzzle in the beginning to understand what exactly was going on. Deals with friendship, loss, and mental health (including depres...

• Post #778146

  Upon reflection, the single semester of Capoeira I took as a PE elective in college has to be one of the most useful college classes I took in terms of applications to parenting. Learning how to use concentric momentum and transfer it into other movements for standing up from prone or lying/sitting from standing is amazingly useful.