phenoct

a principled anti-authoritarian left-liberal internationalism that doesnt apologize for repressive communist/socialist states is very good actually tankies and campists fuck off

weird thing i have tried to describe before where LLM mistakes are simply inhuman. like they are entire types of mistakes that were unfathomable previously, literally could not have been made because the specific mix of competence and stupidity necessary was impossible

Also make the unicameral legislature proportional! My kingdom for one (1!) of these US states, which are supposedly “laboratories of democracy” to test out unicameral, proportional representation in the US. Just one!

It should be bigger but also a unicameral house. The second house is where all good ideas go to get watered down. Abolish the Senate and create a 200 seat Assembly.

I really, really hope stuff like the Anthropic IPO and folks like Miyamoto coming out in defense of AI can help us proceed to a point where more of us can work together to solve the drawbacks of this incredible new technology rather than have half the people who should help pretend it'll disappear

i think cities should enable development according to impersonal rules and then levy impersonal taxes on land to pay for impersonal social services free_speech.png

An overwhelming and never-to-be-repeated factor in Trump’s success is that sober professionals fully believed that he was *obviously* about to be ushered offstage, and their job was to keep things running “as usual” until that happened. Which required pretending no POTUS would do what he was doing.

People talk about hard and soft sciences, but I think a much better line is often between the cheap and expensive sciences, cheap sciences are the ones where it's very cheap to get a bunch of independent data points, education is one of the most expensive sciences bsky.app/profile/leo-...

Played Ransom Notes at a party today and this was one of the better rounds for sure

Turning off your housing supply doesn't stop wealthy people from moving to your city - it stops your kids' teachers from affording a place, and in a few years when they want to move out, your own kids from finding a place to live where they grew up

"every person can have a well-constructed pair of shoes" is upstream of "it is no longer economically viable for every town to have a cobbler" and we are better for it

Democratic candidates doing anti-trans signaling is so baffling because even your voters who aren't naturally pro-trans are going to notice that all the people who are vocally *anti*-trans are also anti-Everything Someone Normal Who Votes Democrat Could Possibly Care About

The absence of persistent Spanish-language machines to rival the CBC might be the strongest indictment I can make of the "Democratic consultant class"

yuri

"Building 10,000 in apartments downtown Sacramento next to jobs, Amtrak, light rail, and every possible amenity will be great for affordability, walkability, and climate goals" vs. No it won't.

the internet is about watching cybersecurity disasters on your phone slowly get closer and closer until you're the one having the cybersecurity disaster

attentional lenses. spitballing still but i think a lot of good software is a way to shift attention, either to expand it's capacity (ghidra lets me pay attention to compiled outputs more easily) or aim (tiktok is a machine for funneling attention to assholes) or provide return on it (making stuff)

Sophistry is bad and that’s what “debate” encourages. Dialogue between interlocutors who disagree but who are mutually motivated by a sincere desire for truth is one of the best things humans can do, but you can’t plan that or turn it into a public performance without ruining it.

It’s a morel hazard

This might just be the crisis of western democracy but it is baffling to me how motivated people are by anti-immigrant sentiment. I get that educated liberals who live in cosmopolitan cities self-select towards not caring that much but man I just don’t care that much.

call her remote code execution the way a single text from her has me doing things i shouldnt

This one's maybe a little on the ling side, but trust me, it's worth it. I've cried reading it multiple times. (1/3)

ARE YOU KIDDING ME

Literally, yes. Citizen’s time is finite, there’s nothing inherently representative about the people that show up to the meeting, and delay has real and tangible costs in terms of what gets built. A project millions will benefit from being held up by some random cranks is not meaningfully democratic

One of the central problems in the American cost crisis is that knowledge of costs, or lack thereof, is treated as a rhetorical weapon rather than verifiable objective truth

also - and I have a lot of poly friends - those relationships tend to work a lot better when everyone is happily poly from the start rather than "babe I just discovered sleeping with other people is a fundamental part of who I am" years into a previously monogamous relationship

Terrible experience this morning when a totally unknown dog got into my house, chased the cat and got muddy paws on the sofa, then disappeared. I was out of the room but Rory told me all about it.

on my way to pave yet more paradise in our sprawling forests because you Cannot Touch A Single Tree In The Area We Already Thoroughly Deforested

how do you write this?! how do you not realize you are the fucking problem here?! you are the one doing things worse! they are better at this than you!

Making myself angry for no reason at all remembering the American transit planner that went to Amsterdam and was appalled at how little stakeholder engagement they did in favor of actually building shit.

ngl it is very strange that the screaming hot center of the global economy can't figure out how to keep its transit solvent

corruption and fraud above a certain amount should be treated as seriously as murder. because fraud kills. corruption kills. when a congressman pushes a bill to, say, build a highway because they personally will make $3 million selling land for that project, we should lock them up for life.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: nom nom nom gimme dat seed corn i have to eat all the seed corn bsky.app/profile/twil...

This feels like a messaging failure for Democrats. Most people see corruption as a bipartisan problem.

Park Oriented Development needs to be a huge philosophy here in Seattle. Increase access to our parks with density, and transit to accompany it. Jackson Park could be Seattle's mini Central Park! New neighborhoods all around!

People don't realize how necessary cheap rent is to the arts.

The GLM agent swarm took to using gendered pronouns Masculine vs feminine appeared almost 50/50

fwiw I think midterms are going to be more pro-Dem than presidential years for a while, simply because high propensity voters are now Dems and the GOP relies on infrequent voters turning out (opposite dynamic of when I was growing up) but this year will be especially pronounced

San Fransisco has one of the highest concentrations of tech jobs in the country, and tech makes up ~5% of the local jobs market. People who work in tech assume everybody works in tech, but that isn't true basically anywhere.

we basically need to make the immigration system work like everyone imagines it already does