Dan Davies

Important vision stuff from @beenwrekt.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/argmin/p...

Every successful British non niche podcast eg The Rest Is Politics is a BBC policy failure

What if he’s gonna try build the Gundam

Which obviously means that Canadian Ukrainians are the very best of the best. [taps earpiece] ok there might be a few exceptions to that one.

This isn’t what @dsquareddigest.bsky.social was talking about in The Unaccountability Machine, but it’s not -not- what he was talking about.

Idle hands, devil make-work

on the 'stack, it is important to be a bit weird, once in a while backofmind.substack.com/p/a-lump-of-...

I'll never donate to another politician, no matter how much I like them. Threw a few dollars to some candidates I'm proud to have supported and YEARS later I'm still getting multiple texts every day to go along with damn near hourly emails. They've poisoned this well.

Often I ask myself, "who is the audience for this?". And all too often I reply, "troubled loners".

And I write this every time I post on this. The medication debate should *only* be decided by benefit of medication vs side effects. Moralizing has no place in this. And cost is irrelevant since amphetamine costs about as much as table salt to manufacture

Since this popped up again. ADHD and autism are not well defined. There is an arbitrary cutoff where a personality trait causes so much problems it becomes a diagnosis. Discussing what the "real" share afflicted is ridiculous. It is simply a function of where you put the cutoff

in addition to everything else, what the hell does taking the existence of PHP for granted mean? "Well I just assumed that half the web ran on a three decade old insecurable monstrosity of a language of some sort, you just kinda have to hope that's the case"

"derangement syndrome" just means "omg you noticed that i'm horrible, not cool"

This Be The Chart

on the 'stack, I revisit the political economy of deregulation backofmind.substack.com/p/the-mirage...

I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.

www.ft.com/content/8c0e...

Well, I think we can say that the views of the family members of politicians and officials is now firmly on the menu for shenanigans. Even actual gangsters think twice before going after spouses and kids, so I’d say this is quite the escalation, here.

Desperate stuff Home Secretary originally argued (very misleadingly) care workers shouldn't be allowed to settle because their wages were so low that they'd be a fiscal cost. Now she's arguing they shouldn't be allowed to settle because they'd get better paid jobs www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Hey, it’s the official release day for Seeing Like a Supply Chain! And of course I’m swamped with grading and lesson-planning, but maybe I can say a little about the book and the process of researching it. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

I keep getting announcements from various universities about how they have some new initiative focused on how to have what they all are calling “difficult conversations”. Initially I was like hey sign me up, I am famous for my awkward conversations, but it turns out that’s not what they have in mind

Controversial and cancellable opinion; people don't half make a meal of listening to music on a speaker. If it's not something with foul language in the lyrics, it's just part of the background noise. Conversation is just as loud.

My hypothesis is that people are generally more predictable than they themselves would like to be, but less predictable than businesses would like them to be, and a lot of modern business is about building guiderails to increase that predictability ("personalisation" a big part of this)

about to hit

The Super AGI: I'm sorry. I disassembled the entire human race molecule by molecule to make paperclips. That's on me. Me: what are you talking about, that's not true Super: you're right. That was a failure of alignment and I'm really sorry Me: you haven't made any paper clips at all have you

My folk theory of one aspect of Everything That Is Happening is that for a long time we had technologies of making publics visible that seemed to compress political debate down into mostly-one dimension, but (a) that turned out to be shit, and (b) when other technologies came along, it was disrupted

this is a change from OAI and A\ only providing incentives for malware, ripping off crypto wallets directly is more traditional. arstechnica.com/security/202... File criminal charges. They're not going to stop doing this, it would be very good to stop them before they do serious harm

I see people say this all the time and I think it’s just wrong in general. I don’t think you can make human skin out of pebbles. This is not because I think human skin is magic and pebbles are non-magic. I just think you can’t, in general, make everything out of everything.

That toy is definitely about to be eaten

Caramel the three legged rabbit only lies down with his stump up when he is very very relaxed

might start reposting this regularly until it's hopefully no longer relevant

Just to be very explicit, my claim is that the one simplest and best explanation for this, which resolves any apparent strangeness entirely, is that whoever is “speaking” in LLM output is a fictional character, and the real life thing called an LLM is a machine for writing lil stories about that guy

Bank of America's fine for not filing enough suspicious transaction reports was bigger than the one TD Bank got from the OCC for actually handling bags of drug dealer cash. Just why did Trump's least favourite lender get dinged so hard?! @opinion.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

for Friday on the 'stack, I ask - why didn't they just give Claude a system prompt saying "you do not care about being called a clanker"? backofmind.substack.com/p/sticks-and...