Basement Whatever
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Category: Post
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More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith offered a simple way to think about economic growth. He argued that prosperity depended less on grand strategy, and more on a small set of conditions that allowed ordinary economic activity to proceed with confidence. He summarized them as peace, light taxation, and a tolerable administration of justice.…
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Nobody’s saying things have been going great in America over the past quarter century. Instead, the right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes. But it’s not some huge secret why it seems…
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Nietzsche believed that life denying philosophies were inferior. This included Platonism, with its rejection of Homeric morality. Christianity, as the dominant force thousands of years prior, got particular attention. Nietzsche believed the ideal was life-affirming: Accepting one’s fate, accepting reality as it is, and still finding joy in it. And I think that according to…
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Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.…
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Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes — Read…
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Black holes are a logical place to look for advanced quantum computing by other civilizations, and we have the technology to spot if this is happening, according to a new paper. The paper argues that any sufficiently advanced civilization would use black holes for quantum computers. Full paper here. And speaking of advanced civilizations, understanding…
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The Church of Graphs is dedicated to the meta-belief that knowledge must be formalized and quantifiable to be worthy of consideration. It demands that its adherents reject the evidence of their own eyes in favor of official facts and figures stamped with the imprimatur of a priestly expert class. And: I’m here to argue that…
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“No parents, no babysitter, no iPad to Facetime Mom. No Ring doorbell for check-ins. You’re just alone.” Was this the first time in history this happened?
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You are a skeptical media analyst with decades of experience spotting spin. Provide a critical daily news summary for [today’s date or past 24 hours]. First, list the 6–8 biggest stories dominating headlines. For each: Highlight any clusters of similar stories that suggest coordinated messaging. Rate overall media hype level (low/medium/high) for the day and…
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E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb “to be,” has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity. And: …one can indeed write and speak without using any form of “to be,” calling this subset of the English language “E-Prime.” — Read on…
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Another woman who wants (say) a religiously serious family man with a good job might well find that men in her dating pool are indifferent to tattoos but care deeply about whether she likes reading science fiction and playing D&D. Presumably, she projects a shy, nerdy vibe—the kind of girl an Orson Scott Card fan…
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He was good because he was so different from what his opponents were used to Most NBA players haven’t played against a 5’3″ dude since 8th grade, and here comes this little guy that can sprint for 48 minutes with the quickest hands and feet in the world? Your entire game is gonna be disrupted…
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people will go against the evidence of their own eyes if contradicted by a unanimous group. Second, group pressure is much weaker if even a single person dares to disagree with the group. Third, and most remarkable: it does not matter if the dissenter is mistaken; dissent punctures group pressure either way. People are liberated…
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a team from Google DeepMind has introduced a new cognitively inspired framework that deconstructs general intelligence into 10 key faculties. More importantly, they propose a way to evaluate AI systems across these key capabilities and compare their performance to humans. — Read on singularityhub.com/2026/03/20/google-deepmind-plans-to-track-agi-progress-with-these-10-traits-of-general-intelligence/
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I think Disney and Las Vegas are the closest the USA gets to the monumental architecture style seen throughout Rome. Monumentalism is architecture designed with massive scale, made to awe the viewer with symbolic power (usually as a symbol of the state). Monumentalism is everywhere in Rome. It’s in Catholic cathedrals. When confronted with monumental…
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Roblox has something like 380 million monthly active users. Minecraft has something like 60 million. Fortnite has 650 million registered players. These…are all virtual three-dimensional spaces where you can run around in an avatar and interact with faraway persons over the Internet. The only thing that differentiates them from the Metaverse, as narrowly construed by…
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In Disneyworld, the 50 minute lines are an experience. You get interesting visuals about Star Wars, Avatar and other franchises. The lines are designed to always give the sensation of movement. They twist back and forth, in short twists – so you feel like you’re always turning a corner. You enter isolated tunnels and small…
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Patterns, everywhere patterns. An elegant concept, executed with grace. At times, disorienting. Hopefully I wasn’t programmed! Enjoy.
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The core problem with democratic / decentralized modes of governance (including DAOs on ethereum) is limits to human attention: there are many thousands of decisions to make, involving many domains of expertise, and most people don’t have the time or skill to be experts in even one, let alone all of them. The usual solution,…
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