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Category: Post

  • State attorneys general warn Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and other AI giants to fix ‘delusional’ outputs

    After a string of disturbing mental health incidents involving AI chatbots, a group of state attorneys general have sent a letter to the AI industry’s top companies, with a warning to fix “delusional outputs” or risk being in breach of state law.  — Read on techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/state-attorneys-general-warn-microsoft-openai-google-and-other-ai-giants-to-fix-delusional-outputs/

  • Inflation: Steal from You, Give to Rich. Long-term Ramifications

    One of the goals of politicians is to get you to focus on taxing income. The psyop has worked for decades now and hopefully people are waking up to this sham. More here.

  • An Alternate Version of Stranger Things 5

    I wrote my own version of Stranger Things 5. I wrote it as a safeguard, in case they screwed up the final season, so I would have a conclusion to the saga that at least satisfied me. I also wrote it as a fun fan-fiction experiment, to see how different our stories would be, and…

  • Old Hollywood’s Most Scandalous Secrets, as Told by David Niven

    “[It] was hardly a nursery for intellectuals, it was a hotbed of false values, it harbored an unattractive percentage of small-time crooks and con artists, and the chances of being successful there were minimal,” he writes. “But it was fascinating, and if you were lucky, it was fun.” — Read on www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/05/david-niven-memoir-scandals-old-hollywood

  • Stranger Things Was The Ultimate Vibe Show, Season 5 Is What’s Left After It’s Gone

    Stranger Things was a show people loved because of the vibe. Now, Stranger Things is a show people watch because they remember loving that season one vibe, and they figure they might as well finish the rest of it. — Read on www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/scifi/stranger-things-vibe.html

  • Three scenarios for the emergence of new religious doctrine

    Africa will produce new variants of Christianity and Islam.  Furthermore, many African regions have not been Christian or Muslim for very long, not by historical standards.  That might boost the chances of innovation, since to them it is not a very fixed doctrine. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/07/three-scenarios-for-the-emergence-of-new-religious-doctrine.html

  • 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties

    Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that’s thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because…

  • Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis?

    While the past midlife crisis model focused on breaking down confining bonds, chipping away at that adult façade to return to the fountain of youth, Xers are still in full construction mode. “I’ve made a list – it’s the ‘do-better’ list,” Leslie Mann’s character tells her husband in Judd Apatow’s flawed but occasionally insightful “This…

  • Selling: The Crucial Skill Nobody Taught You

    “People want a fair deal from someone they like.” When questioned about his actions to get people to like him, he simply says, “I tell them that I like them.” — Read on fs.blog/joe-girard/

  • The Opposite of the Opposite of Loneliness

    You have to identify with this past of yours, and you have to find some way to make it make you stronger. If college was a quicksand pit of despair then you have to accept that and find some way to be empowered by it.  Read more here.

  • Everyone loves Japan

    the U.S. is in the middle of a great shift — in the 19th and 20th centuries, high class in America was defined as “anything French”, while in the 21st century it’s defined as “anything Japanese”. Apparently the Japanese don’t realize it yet? More here.

  • The Era of Private Space Stations Launches in 2026

    NASA’s been clear that it doesn’t intend to replace the space station. Instead, the agency wants to shift from landlord to tenant, purchasing space station services from private players rather than running a facility of its own. It’s betting the private space industry can help drive down costs and accelerate innovation. — Read on singularityhub.com/2025/12/26/the-era-of-private-space-stations-launches-in-2026/

  • Purpose From First Principles

    the way we think about the world—made of separate, clearly labeled “things” that you can depend on to “be themselves”—is an illusion. The universe is governed by physical laws that are all about movement, forces, warping, and never about peacefully existing in a room — Read on planktonvalhalla.com/20251204-purpose-from-first-principles/

  • Were classical statues painted horribly?

    What do you notice about this reconstruction? That’s right, it looks awful. In the eyes of modern viewers, at least, the addition of this matte, heavily saturated color has turned a really good work of art into a really bad one.  — Read on worksinprogress.co/issue/were-classical-statues-painted-horribly/

  • A Chicago Corporate Head Tax is a Bad Idea

    The head tax is bad tax policy dressed up as soak-the-rich populism. It’s the kind of thing that sounds good in a City Council speech, but creates real harm for the workers it’s supposed to help. If we want to find more revenues to close our budget gap, we have better options5, and we should…

  • History LLMs

    Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment. This is what time-locked language models…

  • A Brief History of Figgy Pudding

    Oddly, today’s sweet plum pudding hails from a meatier dish. As Maggie Black writes in History Today, the dish that eventually evolved into plum pudding originally contained preserved, sweetened meat “pyes” and boiled “pottage” (that is, vegetables) and was enjoyed in Britain as early as Roman times. — Read on www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-figgy-pudding-180957600/

  • We are different from all other humans in history – The Garden of Forking Paths

    This morning, I woke up in a supremely comfortable bed, knowing there would be no deadly predators or pests to eat or infect me. With cheap soaps and pristine, hot water, I became cleaner in five minutes than was possible for any human—no matter how wealthy—in the past.  With a flick of a switch, I…

  • The Isle of the Dead

    It was the opinion of the Symbolists, and Bocklin in particular that the purpose of art was to reveal through the use of a language no longer logical, but from “other” reality that hides behind that immediately perceptible with careful use of “symbols.” From Arnold Bocklin, 60 Paintings

  • “We’ll Jump and We’ll See”

    “My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement.” — Read on www.rogerebert.com/features/bright-walldark-room-august-2014-well-jump-and-well-see-by-chad-perman