Adding this onto my list of delightful Norse words. Other favorites are currently hygge and sisu. View quoted note →

Everyone, let’s once again take a moment to remember that partisan news on either side is horrendously inaccurate. If you you don’t trust the far left news outlets like TYT or the Grayzone, it might be worth reflecting why you trust Benny Johnson or InfoWars.

The Dispatch

No, Politico Did Not Receive ‘Substantial Funds’ from USAID

Various government agencies have purchased subscriptions to its publications since 2016.

Josh Hawley is just the Elizabeth Warren of the right. He introduces the most idiotic dead-on-arrival bills on whatever the latest Twitter trend is to farm attention. His snide condescending air when he’s farming sound bites for his YouTube channel just makes him way more punchable than Warren.

404 Media

Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek

According to the language of the proposed bill, people who download AI models from China could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, ...

Getting on a phone call with a support rep to access your account after getting locked out is always a strange experience for me. There’s a moment when they start asking you other questions to authenticate you when you remember they’re just looking at literally all of your information. Bank account customer service is looking at all of your transactions, ISP customer service is looking at every device on your network, and Amazon is looking at all of your orders. Privacy is dead because it’s convenient.

I’m a simple man. I read Wikipedia article of wall named Ha Ha because people would laugh when they tripped over it. I go “Ha Ha”

Ha-ha - Wikipedia

The 21st century is a quarter over now. Will I get to see the end of it?

And then it ended so fast. View quoted note →

How does the Texas v Arizona State game just keep getting more insane? It’s been over so many times, and yet the game keeps going.

This game has been decided by flags and a kicker choking so hard he might asphyxiate. View quoted note →

Migration and the sovereign firm

Flushed with pride from an election win—alas, probably still just another cheap hit of publicity crack, huge in the moment and historically ephem...

Interesting essay on why hiring H1Bs doesn’t make sense under Yarvin’s pre-liberal framework. Obviously as a proud classical liberal in the tradition of Locke which Yarvin despises, I have massive disagreements. Still an interesting read to even think about other non-liberal frameworks.

Update: now bleeding after achieving liftoff from my seat while driving and chomping on my tongue when my teeth clacked back together. At least the Midwest has actual weather and ice to blame for potholes. View quoted note →

John Foy & Associates

Which States Have the Best and Worst Roads in America? | The Strong Arm

Which States Have the Best and Worst Roads in America?: We fight for fair compensation on behalf of families. Free consults.

I was more right then I imagined. According to this study, California is the fourth worst state for roads. The roads here are bad even in urban areas. I wouldn’t care if they marketed themselves as a libertarian paradise where government services are low in tandem with the tax burden. But that’s the opposite of California. If the government wants to expropriate lots of money, I expect the services they provide to reflect that. Californians, what’s going on here? View quoted note →

It takes a special kind of stupid to govern a state with incredible natural resources, industry, the largest tech sector in the world, near perfect weather, mountains, oceans, shipping, tourism, and high taxes and still manage to have horrible public infrastructure. California has some… special politicians.

So glad Nostr is talking about more important things than trying to pretend to be anti-woke and anti-DEI while simultaneously saying that companies should prefer hiring native born Americans over more skilled Indians because Indians are over represented in the work force.

https://openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-advance-our-mission It’s incredible how much time and political maneuvering it took Sam Altman to get to this point. He took on the entire board and research scientists for every major department and somehow came out the winner. This reads more like an announcement of victory than anything else. It means Sam won. He’s going to do away with the non-profit charade and accept the billions in investment to abandon the vision and become a commercial AI company.

Making a Prometheus storage backend and Grafana dashboard for this data would be legitimately fascinating. View quoted note →

https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/ TIL you can watch every possible piece of telemetry live from the ISS. So I'm spending my Christmas Eve watching the urine tank fill percentage while I wait for the clock to strike midnight. Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the sky, The ISS floated, its tanks running dry. I stared at the dashboard, no presents, no tree— Just waiting for pee logs from zero-G.

I don’t understand how people can bear the modern internet without an adblocker. I don’t think I could visit a website and stay sane without one. How would you even watch YouTube with all the ads or open a news article and get bombarded with a million popups and not want to ever load a webpage again?

How did I just learn about this method for computing whether insurance is worth it? If computing whether or not insurance is worthwhile is basic maths, it seems like this should be more widely known. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wf4jkt4vRH7kC2jCy/when-is-insurance-worth-it

Looking back over the year, one of the skills I think improved the most was developing a better gut understanding of probability and how likely events are to happen. One of my goals for next year is to learn more statistics to be able to mathematically analyze the world and my life.