Don’t be a purist. But also don’t be a pragmatist. View quoted note →

The essence of racism is dehumanization. You dehumanize people by denying their agency. So and so behaves this way not because he had a choice, but due to his race. He's like an animal, he can't help himself. Humans, by contrast *can* help themselves. You see this on the left (poor guy, he's had a rough go, systemic injustice made him do it.) And you see it on the right (Group X commits more crimes per capita, so if someone is in Group X, he's more dangerous than someone in Group Y.) As though by fitting into a category, he's no longer an individual with agency. Basically, unless you treat each human as an individual with individual responsibility, rather than as part of a group, you are racist. And I'm not saying "rAciSM is bad" only pointing out what it actually is. It's denying individuals the quality of human agency, with the rights and responsibilities that flow therefrom.

New Podcast https://rumble.com/v6uco57-minority-report.html

We are going to discover at some point that the gap between humans and animals (the capacity for agency) is the same gap between humans and AI. And that discovery will reveal AI’s profound and likely fatal (to AGI) limitations. That human consciousness will be the center of the spectrum between endocrine-driven beasts and soulless calculating machines, like the one spot on the nav bar where an image comes into focus.

My take on Trump vs Elon/Massie/Rand Paul on the bill: Trump: "We have a game this Sunday, we need to win!" Elon: "Sir, we've discovered all the players are cocaine addicts." Trump: "Let's go get it!" Elon: "We need them to get off the coke, it's not sustainable." Trump: "If we take away the coke now, we're gonna get smoked!" Both are correct, though we *should* at least have a plan to wean them off of it. Problem is even the hint of a plan sends them in a panic that the coke will be taken away. Result: per Lyn Alden “Nothing stops this train." (And it's even more apt, since the quote is literally from a meth cooker in Breaking Bad.")

Enjoying this Djokovic match, saved two break points in the second set. Up 4-1, after losing the first.

whoever is making this bizarre word-jumble reply bots should be drawn and quartered.

Got scammed into paying $117 for what should have been ~$65 train tickets. Like a moron I used a company called

Realtime Timetable & Prices for High-Speed Trains Worldwide

Plan your next journey with Highspeedtrains.com, a trusted platform to find and book your train tickets online.

owned by Rail Ninja, instead of the actual Portuguese trains site

CP - Comboios de Portugal

Customer service was an AI bot. Just a PSA, don't ever use those sites -- find the actual one. Total scam, and the "refundable" fare was with 35% of the fee not taken out. Total fraud. Don't have it in me to go “full Orbitz” over $50, but I kind of want to. https://medium.com/@chris_liss/stop-stealing-our-money-694d3649d274

Dealt with AI customer service recently, was obvious after a few exchanges it was AI. They’re telling you this is great, it’s more efficient, it’s better, but it’s way worse. Couldn’t do anything but keep repeating the company’s shitty policy over and over again. Not minimizing the long-term impact this tech might have, but it’s being oversold right now in the short term.

Had have this same experience. Ask AI something complex you know about, gives the wrong answer with confidence. Point it out. Backtracks, still gets it wrong. Point it out again, rinse, repeat. It’s a version of Gell-Mann Amnesia wherein you read a NYTimes’ story about something you know well, realize they’ve completely botched the reporting. Then you turn the page and read about what’s happening in the Middle East (which you don’t know about) and take it at face value. View quoted note →

Was talking to an architect, and he told me he likes to design houses so that each room is like a portal into a totally different space. Made me think of the sci-fi novel Hyperion where one of the characters (far into the future) has a house where the doors between each room are portals to different parts of the galaxy. If we were to do this on earth, for example, you might be sitting on your deck in Malibu, walk inside, and you’re in your bedroom in the Rockies, and your living room might be overlooking Central Park. Would be amazing to live in such a house, but maybe it can be done via design where you teleport to a different mental space instead.

The punctual pay a time tax in Portugal.

What the fuck is up with these bots who reply by jumbling up bits and pieces of your post? What’s the purpose of it?

Met up with some leftists yesterday who were in my wife’s group resisting the covid tyranny. I genuinely like all of them, but I can see where they’re stuck. After agreeing that throughout human history the ruling class never gave two shits about the regular person, one of them said, “But we’re also complicit.” I said, “How so? I’m not trying to coerce anyone to inject poison into himself. " She said, “In ways you don’t even realize.” I said, “Like what?” She said, “Sometimes it’s unknowable even by you.” I said, “If it’s unknowable, not much I can do about it.” She said, “that’s not necessarily true, we could rise up and protest.” I said, “you can do that if you want, but I don’t care about that. I only care about telling the truth.” I told her, “I don’t give two shits about being *good* or if people think I’m the bad guy, if people like me. I just want to be honest and say what I think is the case, not go along with lies.” She didn’t know what to say. She’s a nice person, no beef with me personally. The whole thing is a lot like Orginal Sin. Somehow you are bad, privileged, wrong, complicit. You “absolve” yourself in your ignorance. Sorry, I reject the premise. I don’t give a fuck. There is nothing from which I need to be absolved. I feel bad lying. I feel bad being fake. I strike not to do that so that my conscience is clean. And I live according to it. Maybe God will judge me and find me wanting. Maybe not. That’s the thing that is unknowable, but I’m not going to judge myself by someone else’s standard, by whether I’m *good* according to some priest or some professor or some person who purports to know better.

easiest hedge ever — convert and bet big on NO View quoted note →

Saw an interview with Eric Semler where he says that BTC treasury companies will eventually get bought by larger companies wanting treasuries. Never consider that, but it makes a lot of sense. If AAPL, for example, wants 100K BTC, goes through a shareholder proposal to buy, the price shoots out of reach before they even begin. But if they acquire 2-3 treasury companies, price doesn’t move until after the fact. Make no mistake, the treasury companies will demand a BIG premium above NAV somewhere between the asset value and what it would cost if they tried to buy it on the open market. Then again, maybe they’ll wait until the bear market, pick up some distressed ones that can’t pay their debt to get a discount. But either way, that’s another exit strategy for the shareholders.

Sudoku puzzles use the numbers 1 through 9, but they are not numbers, just logical variables. One could just as easily use letters or even colors. Wonder if some visual savants could look at hard puzzles with colors and *see* the solution without needing to use logic.

Thesis re: MSTR: It’s typically not smart to pay double for a company’s assets when you have access to the underlying asset itself. But this might be an exception because of the information asymmetry between those who get bitcoin(small minority still) and those who do not (large majority.) Think of it this way. Imagine there were an asymptomatic disease that was only a problem 20 years into the future, and 1% of the population had it. Let’s say they devised a test for it that was 95% accurate. In a population of 100,000 people, 950 of the 1,000 who had it would be true positives, 50 of those who had it would be false negatives, 4,950 would be false positives and 94,050 would be true negatives. That means if you tested positive, it would be 950/4,950 (19%) that you actually had the disease. Despite getting 19:1 on the test being accurate, you’d have only a 20 percent chance of having the disease if you tested positive. So you’re paying 2:1 for the underlying asset, but if 90+ percent of the market prefers stocks to the underlying, you’re likely to outperform it until that changes.

New Podcast: https://rumble.com/v6u19lz-paid-in-photons.html

Finished a hard Sudoku today. The really hard ones require you to wrestle with them for days. You have keep a lot of conditionals in you head as you make assumptions within assumptions and keep it all straight. I couldn’t do this level for five years, but I cracked it in the last year or so, not sure what clicked. Feel like I’m lifting weights with my brain. https://highlighter.com/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq6knu235sx9320yp7jx93azw2xv70d8u3klr0qg2qqxuu0yska6qqq2ku5mjffa9g62ffez5cdmsvyukcw2zgdxnyz4u4sq