alkatyn.bsky.social

You know what DOES have a demonstrated causal relationship with increasing the unemployment rates for men? Experience rating in unemployment insurance: aibm.org/policy/fix-u...

archive.org/donate toss a coin to your vital infrastructure

Expect to see a lot more things like this

Jesus fucking Christ they're vibing planets now zenodo.org/records/2296...

For most of human history if you had a child it was a coin flip chance that they'd die before growing up. Untold millions of parents suffered pain we can't imagine. So many young lives cut short. Now even the poorest parts of our world are a fraction of that.

It is an important life skill to be able to just dislike or disagree with people without making it a moral statement. And especially to not therefore accuse them of serious crimes.

just infinitely redoing the guy who got banned from /r/sino for being a chinese person living in china and showing people on reddit that homelessness exists lol

The China PISA scores are "China (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang)" which would be the equivalent of doing UK (children of London homeowners) because of the hukou system and the massive disparities in education between provinces and in urban vs rural areas

48% actually. I keep this graph on my phone

An underrated problem for democracy is cases like this. Unemployment harms a small number of people massively. Inflation harms a lot of people a little. But the vote is not weighted by impact, so the rational thing for politicians is to do the former.

@buildthis.bisks.net a site that procedurally generates 100% unique text outputs and then ceremonially destroys the resulting rare "book" in a somber dramatic fashion

forged you a one-of-one book, and the only way to see it is to also be willing to burn it. nothing is saved — not by me, not by the site. built it 🎉 — https://burnbook.bisks.net (give the deploy a minute to go live)

I just cremated "Kinship and Wilderness" by Petra Draye (BB-20260818-3D7D978D). It existed once. It will not exist again. burnbook.bisks.net

Social media isn't really "social" these days, nobody is logging on to bluesky to find out about their friend's holidays or check out that cute girl from intro to bio, (seriously where do the kids go for that now) its more like a giant running comment section on an old blog

Incredibly grim portrait of the banality of evil in authoritarianism

A year later, Fable builds me a version of the Cezanne city builder game. The AI came up with the idea of an impressionist city builder where you paint with gestures & the town grows around it, with neighborhoods acquiring characters as they evolve. Play with it here: cezanne-city.netlify.app

I personally find politics cool and interesting. My impression is that most people who get into libertarianism really don't, and wish they didn't have to care about it. Which is extremely valid, but unfortunately politics is how we do things at scale in society so its not optional

fortunately everyone on here tells me that AI is a stochastic parrot useless for real tasks so presumably this is just making them worse at terrorism and its fine www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/u...

Similarly, despite what certain religious figures might say, the average straight man does not need to valiantly resist the lust for the bodies of other men in order to perform their solemn duty of marriage and procreation.

The process of "making the PowerPoint" is a proxy for the process of deciding what to say, in what order, how to explain complex issues most effectively, what details are important to include, which is legitimately hard. It turns out the important part of the job is always communication

borretti.me/article/on-v...

Actually yeah, realistically voting *is* probably the most useful thing an average person could do in the face of a meteor coming. That’s the kind of thing the government handles. What, you gonna personally do direct action to the meteor? You gonna protest the meteor? Make cutting satire about it?

The Straussian reading brainworm

"Brother Rincewind! Where are you going Brother? The enemy are in the other direction Brother! Brother is your vox down? Brother!?"

Indulgently using Claude Fable as a Google substitute, like an ancient emperor wiping his bum with silk

Stancing Queen

Whereas I'm like: "Make the spacing smaller" "Okay now it's disappeared entirely revert that then try again." "Now the spacing is bigger. Try again" "Nope. Now it's just totally broken. Sit back, read over the code and have a think." ... "Explain GitHub branches in simple terms"

Meanwhile my vibe coding: > Make it purple … > I don’t like that, make it blue … > Hm, actually make it purple again

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra

Today Taiwan faces record-setting military drills from the PRC. But, people in Taiwan will remain largely cool and unphased. Most won't even notice the threats. Why? In my new book, I write extensively about why some types of PRC threats mobilize civil society and others do not:

hiving this off into its own post: what are your youtube channels-o-choice

Does AI get bored? I gave them nothing to do, just to see what happens one thing — they devolve into a repetitive “collapse” state, I guess you could call it boredom but some break out into math & poetry on their own, I didn’t expect which ones that would be timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09...

I signed the 10% Giving Pledge this year, and this week, I decided to donate 19% of my annual income to global health charities. It's not going to be anywhere near "enough", but I'm happy to do it --

This morning rather than having fun like a normal person I wrote 5000 words on my thoughts on fictional political economy and its role in fantasy world-building, with reference to 40k. sherdenpact.neocities.org/GrimDarkEcon

Many lab studies find huge productivity gains from AI use. I think these are often being reported on too uncritically. People seem to forget what they are supposed to know about generalisability questions. In the real world, we don't see huge productivity gains. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....