I get the sense that I feel far less affronted by AI slop than some (or possibly many) of you do. I don’t like AI slop, but I don’t feel as viscerally annoyed about it as many people do, and it struck me that one possible reason is: I just found very large parts of the intellectual world to be incredibly fake and bad before, too.
— Read on www.atvbt.com/i-just-found-it-all-really-fake-before-as-well/
Basement Whatever
Escape the algorithm
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I’ve never been to Scandinavia, but of the countries that I have visited, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands seem most similar to Wisconsin in a cultural sense. Lots of Germans settled there after the failed 1848 revolutions (the same year that Wisconsin achieved statehood). There were also lots of immigrats from Scandinavia. I presume these migrants brought some of the egalitarian instincts that defined Wisconsin culture.
— Read on scottsumner.substack.com/p/a-cheeseheads-view-of-the-world -
I’ve had multiple conversations with young people who say they want to be rich. I ask them what that means. They say they want a house and to be able to take two nice vacations per year.
That’s not rich. That is middle class. Have we as a country established that no one is going to make it? How do we raise everyone’s prosperity?
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“I resigned from Anthropic today.”
David Sacks Says Anthropic Quitter Jacob Coxon’s Virality Was A “Psyop”
At this point, anyone with a brain understands how cognitive bias prevents humans from thinking outside their tribe. Unfortunately this is already coding hard on the right/left spectrum. Best hope: People who work on this understand (the difficult) techniques for avoiding cognitive bias, such as thinking in bets.
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The Prediction Archive is a public database of tens of thousands of world predictions. Using AI it tracks predictions over many decades and marks to market.
— Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/the-prediction-archive.html -
One of the best things about the DCC system of D&D is the funnel. Making the players sweat for their 1st level characters. Starting them as 0-level peasant nobodies and putting them through a meat grinder. Most will die but some will survive and go on to become actual character classes (wizards, thieves, clerics, whatever) and professional heroes. Typically each player rolls up four characters to play in a funnel, because if you want at least one character to survive, then you need about four.
— Read on rossonl.wordpress.com/2026/09/08/dcc-funnels-ranked/ -
“We thought we were safe,” comments BGS gameplay engineer and union representative Anne Barrett, in an interview with The Guardian. “I mean, Bethesda Games Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have really highly anticipated stuff coming out. We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe. And instead, we got brought into a meeting that was two minutes long, to end, in some cases, decades of career at the company. It was just devastating.”
— Read on www.rockpapershotgun.com/you-cant-just-throw-new-people-at-that-problem-bethesda-devs-doubt-future-elder-scrolls-and-fallout-games-will-have-the-same-quality-level-after-losing-seasoned-staff-to-xbox-Sad to see a legendary studio get reduced decision making ability.
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Claims are cheap to make and expensive to refute. That gap is the whole engine. The Gish gallop weaponizes it: bury the other side in so many assertions that answering even half of them would burn the entire clock, then point at the unanswered pile as if silence were agreement.
— Read on fallacy.is/articles/how-to-counter-gish-gallop -
The rise in the cost of travel sports is related to another typical way sophisticated investors make money by buying up entities like this, namely that they look for any places where something has been underpriced, and then raise prices to maximize cash extraction.
— Read on www.aaronrenn.com/p/pay-to-play-childhood -
Despite being wrong on roughly everything, he’s not more unreasonable than someone like Buckminster Fuller, who suggested we’ll be able to send people by radio because atoms have frequencies and radio waves have frequencies so it will be possible to pick up all of our frequencies and send them by radio.
— Read on danluu.com/zitron/ -
Ellison isn’t overpaying $110 billion for dirt. He’s stealth buying the most undervalued industry in America while everyone else stares at the COVID wreckage and mistakes it for the whole picture.
Meanwhile, the writers and actors warning you about consolidation do not live in the world. If they did, they would understand that nobody spends $110 billion to make less of anything. Corporations don’t merge to shrink. They merge to shove product into every screen, format, territory and Botox hole available. The agenda is more: More product, more work, more profit. More, more, more.
— Read on www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/paramount-warner-leave-los-angeles-joseph-kahn-column-1236686863/ -
So every time I added an agent I felt like I was buying capacity, and what I was actually doing was adding another item to my reading pile. Eleven times. That pile is where the hundred decisions live, and it is why thirty-two of them went stale. My attention was the scarce thing, and I kept building machines that consume it
— Read on almudenacapell.substack.com/p/i-automated-the-wrong-end-of-my-job -
There absolutely is an audience for a tabletop skirmish game about 16th-century East Asian naval warfare. The problem was that I hadn’t spent the previous year or more required to cultivate that audience.
— Read on thaumavore.substack.com/p/i-ran-an-indie-rpg-crowfund-heres -
I used to think AI productivity meant doing less. Automate the mechanical work, & human effort shrinks toward zero.
The reality is stranger. AI does not shrink human effort. It raises the ceiling of what the same amount of work produces.
— Read on tomtunguz.com/ai-productivity-doesnt-mean-what-i-thought/ -
I’ve been watching clips of Dolly Parton and asking myself: Why do I like this? Because I don’t like country music…contemporary country music, anyway. It hits my ear like bad ‘90s rock — most of it sounds like a Matchbox 20/Third Eye Blind supergroup fronted by Larry the Cable Guy. It also turns the pandering up to infinity: Every song is about beer, trucks, whiskey, jeans, and other things on the Taboo card for “southern stuff”.
— Read on www.imightbewrong.org/p/make-country-music-corny-again -
“Nobody gives a shit about you in Berlin”
— Read on www.mostlyaesthetics.com/p/bowie-in-berlin-in-fragments -
A lot of spirituality and self-help talks about focusing attention on the heart, but for most Westerners, the heart is actually too close to the head to quiet mental distractions. Instead, the pelvic bowl is an endlessly rich place to rest attention, breathing the perineum into your chair and expanding that three-dimensional space like an accordion.
Sink downward, as effortlessly as a leaf falling from a tree. The lower you settle, the more the nervous system gets the signal that it’s safe to let go.
…The addiction to thinking is, at root, an addiction to wanting things to be different from how they are. The fuel is always some version of: this moment isn’t enough. The machinery of mind grabs a thought, hoping it will resolve the tension. Alas, it never does. So it grabs another, and another, and the body is left holding whatever you were trying not to feel.
— Read on deepfix.substack.com/p/youre-probably-addicted-to-thinking -
…slop is hardly a new phenomenon. Neither is the moral panic around it. AI-generated content is the latest iteration of an age-old trend: Whenever technology dramatically lowers the cost of producing media, it unleashes a flood of cheap, derivative work — and a chorus of critics convinced that culture has reached a new low.
— Read on a16zcrypto.substack.com/p/beyond-slop-taste-and-ai-moral-panic -
…most people’s dreams are not gated by money. Sure you need some money, but you probably don’t need as much as you might imagine. You most likely don’t need multi-million dollars to start your dream.
The bottleneck for most dreams is not financial. It’s a lack of confidence, willingness to take a risk, and face failure, or a lack of imagination of what is possible with current resources. If you want to write a novel you don’t need capital — you need discipline and 1,000 words a day. If you want to start a consultancy you need expertise and a first client, not a war chest.
A lack of money is a convenient thing to blame because it feels concrete, but it’s rarely the actual blocker for achievements.
— Read on kk.org/thetechnium/a-billion-dollars/ -
Like Hannibal, I wanted to rank powerful leaders in the history of warfare. Unlike Hannibal, I sought to use data to determine a general’s abilities, rather than specific accounts of generals’ achievements. The result is a system for ranking every prominent commander in military history.
The Method
Inspired by baseball sabermetrics, I opted to use a system of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). WAR is often used as an estimate of a baseball player’s contributions to his team.
— Read on medium.com/data-science/napoleon-was-the-best-general-ever-and-the-math-proves-it-86efed303eeb
Basement Whatever 