Scott Burton

Scott Burton

@scottburton.me

Our talons full of snacks

406 followers491 following3.3K posts

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

If you're interested in learning about the close Trump family friend and associate who has "leveraged his access to young models to cultivate and maintain relationships within high-profile networks" you should check the Style section.

Scott Burton reposted

dame
@dame.is

my nuclear-grade AI hot take that’s sure to get me cancelled until kingdom come is that refusing to use AI at all is rapidly becoming an extremely privileged lifestyle choice that feels social justice-y while actually being the complete opposite

SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social

being anti AI is a luxury belief only available to first world people, especially Americans imagine how important machine translation is for people whose first languages aren't that common

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

Local inference is a fun dream for certain kinds of folks and I won't subtract from it, but it doesn't really scale past the solo developer.

Scott Burton reposted

Amanda Marcotte
@amandamarcotte.bsky.social

In MAGA, parental estrangement is a big issue — and parents are held out as blameless victims. I suspect that's one reason why Vivek Ramaswamy ran an ad celebrating Amy Acton's vile mother. And why MAGA — including Vance and Trump — are backing him. www.salon.com/2026/10/23/r...

salon.comRamaswamy's ad exposes MAGA’s obsession with parental estrangementMany Republicans have kids who won't talk to them — and they blame their offspring
Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

No nono no, not Soul Food, I said I'm on the Solfège Food diet: mi so, so la mi, fa la fa, rah tay may do, that sort of thing

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

I can understand why people around here are annoyed with LLMs for all kinds of social reasons real or imaginary, but it still amazes me that someone can take the attitude of "I haven't seen any legitimate uses for AI". Like, I haven't seen the Hope Diamond but I believe it exists!

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

next colonoscopy is not for another 10 years so I'll need to find a new source of propafol and ginger ale and beary grahams

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

This truly is mainline Republican thinking, and the reason they aren't troubled when efforts to turn up evidence of ex. "vote fraud" come up dry. They start from the assumption that democrats are prima facie illegitimate and don't preface that on facts or evidence.

Steve Saidemonster 🧌🧛🦇⚰️👻👹@smsaideman.bsky.social

Increasingly likely that if Texas does not go blue, it is because of stuff like this. This is the fundamental problem of American democracy at this moment--one party does not think that losing is normal and should be accepted. Democracy requires all parties accept electoral defeats.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

There are, of course, young converts vectored in by conspiracy theory channels, but your average boomer Republican cooked on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News simply believes Democrats have no legitimate claim on power and everything flows from that.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

Should a Mike Lindell or a Tina Peters manage to assemble concrete proof that elections are rigged in Democrats' favor, great, nice to have, but certainly not a requirement.

Scott Burton reposted

A.R. Moxon
@juliusgoat.bsky.social

Hard not to notice that Democrats who are doing the best are the ones who are leaving this whole civility-and-norms, we-go-high, we-need-a-strong-Republican-Party bullshit behind and are simply giving Republicans exactly what they all ought to get at all times, which is undisguised contempt.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

It's a team-managed Space! No it's a company-managed Project! You need administrator permissions but not Site Administrator because that's for Atlassian Cloud, not Atlassian Jira Team Space-managed Spaces. Click on the cog icon and go to Settings > Jira > Jira Settings > Settings > Workspace Settin

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

This is exactly right. It's preemptive overcompensating.

Steven Palmer Peterson@stevenppeterson.bsky.social

I honestly feel like Rubio is doing this performative tough guy act because he knows that Trump doesn't like him and won't help him, and that he will be left holding the bag for anything that goes wrong, and that Hegseth will be running against him and making exactly that "Real American" argument.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

Obviously this "Super Intelligence" stuff is stupid as hell, and I Don't Have To Hand It To Him, but there is something about the word "artificial" that turns people off. The Chinese term 人工智能 translates to "human-made intelligence" and China seems to be better-adjusted to what's going on than us.

Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈@josephpolitano.bsky.social

Again he’s really losing it with the AI stuff now

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

BSky is a bit extremist on AI opposition but there's been an undercurrent of suspicion and revulsion at the whole concept of AI in the US for as long as I can remember.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

I haven't thought about this more than 10 seconds but I'm pretty sure I could have come up with something better

Quantian@quantian.bsky.social

No, it is proving that a bunch of things we assumed were optimal because they “looked nice” in a certain sense were wrong because a far uglier solution was better. Example: the tightest way to pack 9 squares into a big one is with a 3x3 grid of side length 3. The best way to pack 11 is this:

Scott Burton reposted

Ed
@ed3d.net

Replying to @mosheroperandi.bsky.social

italians aren't real

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

Anyway there's a thing I'm thinking lately, about how the MSM instinctively went with the "poor rabble" theory of Trump but continues to miss the "rich rabble" theory, and I think it's because their bedrock myth is essentially the same as MAGA's: only some people get to be Americans.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

People thought the Diner Safari genre of journalism was about the coastal reporter's psychological need to assuage their guilt for being out of touch with The People, but I think it's baser than that.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

I recently (finally!) saw NIGHTCRAWLER (2014) and I think that's what it's saying: the news is "a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut."

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

This also explains to me why there's no obvious intellectual throughline to the Right today. Even Ganz's sequence of Buchanan => Gingrich => Limbaugh => Trump never sat quite right with me. Those first three constructed respectable edifices, but Trump doesn't have that instinct, and they like that.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

Moreover I think this "[it] is not about one’s abstract intellectual quotient, but rather one’s concrete relationship to civil society" puts its finger on it. America made the "rich rabble" rich but no longer recognizes their legitimacy - this is what "I want my country back" meant.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

I'm talking guys who wore ties and audited oil companies, flew in private jets, played on the finest golf courses - they all abandoned "low marginal tax rates" and "small government" over time because they never really believed it. It was really about who gets to embody civic respectability.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

This is why they opposed the Neoliberals so instinctively. They saw this as a project to renegotiate the traditional markers of respectability, not as a detente about the size and role of government.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

A thing that always bothered me was how post-Reaganites in comfortable retirement could feel so threatened by civil society that they'd line up behind noted fraud Donald Trump, but "rich rabble" really sums it up.

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

It seems like at least a possibility that the whole Hawks/Hawkeyes thing might have been a canard and a coincidence.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

this gaffe should follow Eric Schmitt around for the rest of his political life (Jack Smith was actually in Maryland at a HAWKEYES game, not in Atlanta colluding with Fani Willis as Schmitt alleged) (Win McNamee/Getty)

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

A lot of people have pointed out that the word "Hawks" doesn't appear in the weird sign Schmitt's staffers displayed. Maybe it appeared in other texts, we don't know, but in his cleanup tour Schmitt said "who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?" as if that were the unlikeliest thing possible

Scott Burton
@scottburton.me

In ancient China there were these guys whose whole job was to roast giant tortoise shells until they cracked and then read the secret messages in the cracks. They filed away the cracked shells for future reference in case they needed to be reinterpreted.