Woke up and it’s raining. That’s fine, decided to check the weather forecast to see when it’ll be sunny next. Answer: literally never.

Your government can kind of just take away your passport, trap you inside, and make it hard to get a passport elsewhere. By controlling your access to your own identity documentation. It happens to little out-of-favor groups primarily. But it's important to remember that power is there.

I feel like we're due for an evil Canada arc. They've always been so nice. Imagine they get really hardcore for a while.

If you could have any super power, what would it be and why? What super powers seem under-explored in fiction?

A lot of people want local state government to be in power when they are not in charge of the federal government. Once they gain control of the federal government, they mock state power and want as much concentration over them as possible. This is why I don’t view politics as likely to fix things. My main hopes are 1) technology and 2) bottom-up culture. The printing press changed things forever. And then the telegraph did the same centuries later. And the discovery and usage of oil. The internal combustion engine. Electricity. Radio. The internet. Bitcoin. Tech can spread everywhere and permanently, while policies focuses on a specific location and temporarily.

What are your favorite guns for someone who is not a big gun enthusiast but is passionate about self defense? Like, you aren't optimizing for a zombie apocalypse but you want your wife to be able to pick up the gun and defend the house from intruders if need be, and the gun's maintenance levels have been maybe questionable but it's reliable enough to still probably work reliably and she can wield it.

Today I saw an Autozam AZ-1. It’s this tiny little car from the early1990s, bigger than a go kart but smaller than a Mini Cooper or Miata, and its doors open vertically. Fewer than 5k of them were produced, which was over 30 years ago so who knows how many are left. Didn’t get a pic but it was a red version of this pic. I had to look it up since it was so neat.

Got my sci fi manuscript back from the editor, meaning it's ready for me to look through all the proposed edits and do another draft. But I have so much email to catch up on and so much macro content to get to. So all day I'll be distracted. -_-'

We're now hitting the computational milestones expected from various charts from over a decade ago. These trends have been on track. Most of us still don't have robot vacuums since they still kind of struggle, but alas.

My mental model of the world:

One of the crazy things about AI and robotics is that in the year 2025, most people still don't use Roombas or other robotic vacuum cleaners. They're useful in many contexts, but they're not clearly better across most metrics than a human with a vacuum cleaner yet. They've been out for a very long time, gradually improving. And that's one *very specific* task with pretty clear visualization requirements and floor mobility requirements and pretty low safety thresholds with high repetition levels, and yet that market isn't dominated by robotics yet. That's an example of why I continue to view white collar computer-work AI as being *way* ahead of in-the-field blue collar robotic AI in terms of competing with human jobs. The moment where it's a joke to buy a human-powered vacuum instead of a robot vacuum, rather than a debatable trade-off, is kind of the canary in the coal mine moment for consumer robotics. We can't even nail that yet, but once we do, it's kind of a floodgate moment, considering how long that task has been in the works for, and it will probably quickly expand to other areas following that moment. That's kind of my basic test for robot hype. Yes, they're getting better and better. Yes, they do backflips now. Yes, it's a big deal. But in-the-field blue collar skilled work is a really high bar, and we haven't fully cleared the "vacuum carpeted areas of the same house floor area over and over" stage of that yet. Everything is kind of hype until that stage is fully breached. Then it's off to the races. What's your view of that heuristic?

I’ll tell you ahead of time. The watchmen are retarded. They were retarded for the Middle East. They were retarded for the Patriot act. And they’re still retarded now. Don’t give them information. Pressure them every step of the way. Assume retardation whenever possible. Mock them when a meme presents itself. View quoted note →

People often assume that whoever their god is, that it is standing with them specifically. In the US, they often separate this view along party lines. Conservatives to some extent imagine Jesus standing with them on the border with a rifle protecting Christendom against anarchy. Even if many of those immigrants are ::checks notes:: also Christians. If a "woke" bishop calls for compassion on immigrants and is not a fan of the twice-divorced President who can't name his favorite bible chapter and forgot to put his hand on the bible when being sworn in, she's somehow the baddie rather than him, even among Christians. Progressives to some extent imagine Jesus walking around in Gaza or Haiti or Sudan attending to the least advantaged among us. He shuns the empire and tends to them. And yet, while Jesus called for pacifism and was a rhetorical saint among chill speakers, many of them find a way to mentally turn extremists into heroes. Anything the underdog society does against the dominant society is justified. Even if it's violent toward civilians. In our media rebels are cool, but in reality they often like to kill the gays or the civilians, so it gets awkward pretty fast rather than being like the cool Star Wars rebels vs the Empire. I find myself in a weird camp that almost nobody is onboard with. I'm like, "Yes, we actually need to secure our borders. We need to be more scrutinizing for our society's sake. We need slower, higher-end immigration. And we actually need to enforce the rule of law for theft on the streets." But also, "No, I don't think Jesus of Nazareth as depicted in text would be onboard with this border view. He'd view us like Rome. Let's not re-imagine him as onboard with this. We're rooting for ourselves; he'd root for the underdogs." I'm too woke for the conservatives and too based for the progressives. The US was involved with multiple coups in Latin America. We ran the reserve currency and tried to bend them to our will with their dollar-denominated debt 40 years ago by spiking the value of that debt. Some of them went into retarded socialism and rekt themselves throughout that time period too; it's not all our fault. But it's some of our fault. And then we militarily entered the Middle East. We made deals with them, funded them against the Soviets, and then turned against them. We've invaded them at like a 100:1 ratio vs them invading us with one major incidence (9/11). And as much as I am a fan of Jews as a people (as someone who grew up in Northeastern USA where Jews are relatively dense, I'd happily have them settle all around here), Israel is a state is colonial; our western powers displaced Gazans to make it and have been fighting that reality ever since. We're Rome. And like Rome, we think we are justified. And along those lines, we're probably partially right, and probably partially wrong. When you take a view, imagine every possible view opposing it. And as the US dominates as neo-Rome, I think we will realize how distant we are from Jesus the hippie.

In the Animatrix, there is a short story called the Program. In it, a woman is trapped in a training program by her crewmate. She desperately calls the operator for an exit but is blocked. She cannot exit herself, which made the stakes real. View quoted note →

When Cypher goes into the Matrix alone to secretly meet agent Smith and prepare to betray the group, who plugged Cypher into the Matrix? Did he plug himself in somehow? If so, could he unplug himself? Why can’t the others do that?

Woke up, realized I forgot to take out the trash last night. But the trash guy is late. Not taken yet. Usually he comes super early. So I put the trash out and he comes like five minutes later. Sometimes it’s the little wins that make your day. GM.

Summary of the past 24 hours:

What are your favorite sci-fi novels? Not necessarily the classics you *think* you should say (we'll leave those for Twitter/X), but rather the ones you actually read and loved.

How advanced, or what types of advancement, would it take to convince you to get a cybernetic brain implant in the future? -Substantially improves a major disability (blindness, paralysis, brain damage, etc) -Boosts sensory abilities beyond normal (eyesight, hearing, etc). -Boosts IQ or some other meaningful metric of intelligence and computation, thereby increasing your competitiveness in multiple fields. Becomes basically necessary for some fields due to many others doing it. -Lets you enter VR with all five senses in a way that feels like 80-90% realistic but can be any environment/context. People make increasingly awe-inspiring virtual experiences/worlds, only accessible this way. -Substantially increases the bandwidth with which you can interface with computers. Like, lets you download a ton of info quickly.