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  • How to learn more about history and be local – wherever you’re at

    How to learn more about history and be local – wherever you’re at

    I travel for work, and got tired of constantly seeing hotel rooms and offices. I wanted to at least get immersed in the world around me, even if I was just passing through briefly. So I created a thread in Claude called “Traveler” with the prompt below. Now whenever I travel somewhere new, I ask for unique stories about that place. That means I’m now stopping to look at art in airports (I ask about specific terminals) and going out of my way to see unique buildings.

    I’ve learned about a businessman in Denver who dragged a safe from Ohio, and then exchanged gold in what was then Denver’s “Wall Street” and is now the Renaissance Hotel (and went walking around the hotel, reading the plaques and learning more about the artist who painted its murals), have learned about the Denny substation in Seattle, or an old philanthropic project in Manhattan meant to house people.

    If you want the world around you to come alive, I highly recommend doing this. Here’s the prompt:

    (more…)

  • Are we finally reducing screen time?

    Just went for a long walk while using ChatGPT Voice with plugins on my phone, and I think it’s a more consequential update than it might seem at first glance.

    On my walk, I talked through my calendar, email, and to-do list. I had ChatGPT read through my emails and triage them. Then, we added items to my to-do list. Then, we reviewed my calendar. By the end of the walk, I’d finished getting organized, and never had to look at a screen once.
    — Read on x.com/_simonsmith/status/2102836288541913351

  • Level up your life with skill trees inspired by videogames

    Level up your life with skill trees inspired by videogames

    Skill trees are essential to role playing games, allowing you to spend experience points to level up your character however you want. The Maker Skill Tree Project extends this concept to real life. Download skill trees on topics ranging from Adventure to Fishing, as each skill tree guides you through increasing levels of skills to build competency in a topic. Get the skill trees here.

  • A Hit Before It Was Made, And A Fairy Tale Ahead Of Its Time: How Nobuhiko Obayashi Made “House”

    I’ve seen House countless times, and nearly every time I get something new out of it. My experience has gone from “bizarre and WTF did I just watch” to “a very goofy, charming horror comedy” to “a goofy haunted house movie that’s also an emotional fairy tale about the effects of WWII on everyone young and old.” Its initial reputation, and permanent history on the back of the Criterion cover is honestly a tragedy. Sure, for a first time viewing its mishmash of descriptions preps you well, but for subsequent viewings, its legacy being “an episode of Scooby Doo directed by Mario Bava” almost feels like a joke. House is still goofy, visually bizarre and has a lot of moments that are genuinely funny and charming, but the emotional core of the movie is the Aunt, and its post-WWII generational trauma is unavoidable when watching the movie.
    — Read on www.perisphere.org/2025/10/19/a-hit-before-it-was-made-and-a-fairy-tale-ahead-of-its-time-how-nobuhiko-obayashi-made-house/

  • Viking Metal Bands: The 10 Worth Hearing in 2026

    Heilung call their genre “amplified history”, and no two words describe it better: throat singing, bone rattles, war chants and human pulse, performed in ceremonial paint by a collective that opens every show with the same ritual blessing. Where Wardruna reconstructs, Heilung possesses: their concerts are less performances than séances with a light rig.

    The vibe: primal, shamanic, hypnotic. For fans of: losing track of the century you live in.
    — Read on www.mythic-harmonies.com/viking-culture/viking-metal-bands-list/

  • It’s just the law of large numbers

    It’s just the law of large numbers

    I was waiting in line at the airport and the guy in front of me was taking so long to figure out something on his phone with security that several people in other lines passed us by. Whatever challenges he was having with his boarding pass, it never resolved before I jumped into another line after he’d been trying to figure it out for five minutes.

    Meanwhile, when it was my turn, I had my id ready and the whole process took about 15 seconds. Same for the person ahead of me.

    I used to assume this one person doesn’t know what they’re doing and because of that, they’re holding up everything. I don’t think that way anymore. Now I just think it’s the law of large numbers.

    After all, most people are moving fast. Which means that most people move fast all the time. I always move fast, except, wait — have there been times when something went wrong, and I caused a delay? Yes, but they were very rare.

    So now I assume that this guy is probably very fast on average, but once in a blue moon, something goes wrong, and he holds up the line. Just like the rest of us, And airlines, who are processing thousands of people a day, are always going to have a person who is having a day when things are going wrong.

    When I look at it as the law of large numbers, I get less annoyed. And I see that most of the time, the statistics show that things are operating well, and I appreciate that.

  • My understanding of liberalism

    My understanding of liberalism

    Liberalism is an answer to the Wars of Religion. How do we stop people killing each other over their version of the good life? Liberalism answers by building a neutral framework that allows people to pursue their individual versions of the good life.

    The key components of that framework are: Individual rights. Each citizen is born with a package of rights at the individual level. People don’t get separate rights based on their beliefs or their political party. Markets. Free markets allow people to purchase what they need to pursue their vision of the good life. The government does not decide this for them. Neutrality. The government doesn’t decide the good life for people. It merely provides the framework.

    My understanding: This system is the best one we’ve discovered to allow people with different beliefs to get along with each other. It raises the standard of living, and increases technology development.

    The downsides: The liberal framework produces inevitable downsides. Inequality. A framework of markets and individual rights produces inequality, because it rewards certain behaviors. For instance, it rewards mobility – the ability to move where the work is. Over time, this rewards some more than others. Lack of meaning, The goal of liberalism is to allow people to pursue their vision of the good life, and it’s neutral on what that is. This means the liberal framework offers no answers on the afterlife or the purpose of life, and resists any one answer from dominating. Therefore it leaves people alienated unless they find their own meaning. Antiseptic culture. Strong cultures impede liberalism and get in the way of markets and multiple versions of the good life. Liberalism therefore reduces culture to sameness and produces conformity.

  • Mark Zuckerberg

    The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn’t want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one’s own bullshit fall away.
    — Read on colossus.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-profile/

  • Cocktail party ideas

    many people who have a superficial understanding of topic assume that the topic is as complex as their understanding of the topic instead of realizing that only knowing a bit about a topic means that they’re missing an understanding of the full complexity of a topic.
    — Read on danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

  • China’s first AI-generated longform TV series

    “It’s the first-ever fully AI-generated entertainment to hit mainstream provincial satellite prime time,” writes Mandy Wong. After seeing Bytedance Seedance 2.0’s (AI text-to-video model) release earlier this year, the team behind Journey to the West felt there was an opportunity to make a long-form series and break through a market “saturated with uninspired short-form dramas.” In this week’s feature translation (link to Huxiu article), Shuhan Liu reports on the makings of this AI-generated TV series.
    — Read on chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-374-chinas-first-ai-generated

  • I Just Found It All Really Fake Before As Well

    I Just Found It All Really Fake Before As Well

    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/

  • A cheesehead’s view of the world

    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

  • A most depressing trend

    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?

  • Links of the Day (AI)

    “I resigned from Anthropic today.”

    David Sacks Says Anthropic Quitter Jacob Coxon’s Virality Was A “Psyop”

    “I would love for someone to actually write a careful defense of the idea that AI doomers have a strong predictive track record.”

    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.

  • The Prediction Archive

    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

  • DCC Funnels Ranked

    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/

  • “You can’t 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 cuts

    “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.

  • How to Counter a Gish Gallop in a Debate or Comment Thread

    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 of Travel Sports and the Decline of Civic Institutions

    The Rise of Travel Sports and the Decline of Civic Institutions

    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

  • Ed Zitron’s AI prediction track record

    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/