There’s an episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast where the guest (either was? or just interviewed?) the psychologist in charge of interviewing astronauts for suitable personality traits. He had a ton of great insights, but the thing that stuck with me is that there are basically three kinds of conversations:

• Solving practical problems
• Venting emotions
• Affirming social worth

They’re all important, but having the right one at the right time is the key.

Found it: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2025/02/20/yanss-305-how-to-become-a-supercommunicator-according-to-science/

And also unnecessary, commas.

I believe that they use it all day. I believe that they say they find it useful.

I also believe that their bosses gave them a productivity slot machine and told them if they don’t play it they’re fired.

So some of them like it for bad reasons, and some of them have to pretend to like it.

We might want two separate terms: one for the personal ways that AI slop infects and manipulates your mind, and another for the way it makes the wider cultural landscape difficult to navigate by adding noise and intercepting your attempts to find the original sources of concepts or artifacts which might bring you into a community (and the fact that these communities are now all playing defense because of the everlasting scraping DDoS).

I’m concerned about the former because I think it might make doing anything at all much more difficult.

But I’m concerned about the latter because we… don’t really know how much pollution culture can withstand before collapsing. We may already be in the early stages of something like Kessler Syndrome but for communications.

That’s a great point. You’re right, I do love grinding my ass on your lap. It’s not just lap-dancing, it’s lap-salvation.

Kojimamoto Toshibayamaha

10/10

Ah, went and checked my work laptop this morning. It’s actually set to: !”git reset —hard HEAD && git clean -fdx

git it is the one that’s set to upstream.

I also have git some: add -p, git away: checkout -p, git out: !”git merge —abort 2> /dev/null || git rebase —abort 2> /dev/null #”

And some complicated ones I’m not gonna type on my phone:

• git on <foo> where foo is either “it”, in which case I use the appropriate main/master/develop branch and rebase on it; or foo is “up” in which case I do a pull —rebase and play a short audio clip of Get On Up; or foo is a nonexistent branch, in which case I massage the requested branch name to adhere to some conventions and then make a new branch and set the remote tracking branch
• git with <foo> where the same “it” logic applies but it’s a merge; or foo is a commit SHA and it gets cherry-picked
• git up is just a pull but it plays a short audio clip of Get On Up
• I think I had a git rekt at one point, but I think it just did the same as git gud so I deleted it

https://fortune.com/2026/03/09/ai-opinion-poll-democrats-iran-war-president-donald-trump/

Well, for one thing, among the general public, AI is less popular than ICE.

And the economics of AI don’t add up, so it can’t last forever. And everything that can’t last forever eventually stops.

I’m not gonna pretend everything is guaranteed to be fine, but I feel like we genuinely have a lot on our side.

git config —global alias.gud “reset —hard @{upstream}”

It’s incredible how we went from everyone laughing at the YNGMI crypto bros to the entire economy being built on top of YNGMI AI bros.

From my perspective, it is the materialists who are navel-gazing.

Emerson Green convinced me that p-zombies are plausible. So there’s no way to know if a teleporter would end your consciousness.

Wikipedia: 45 sources cited

That efficiency is an absolute good.

Guys I’m starting to think that maybe capitalism and democracy are not 100% compatible

D:

“Where” is a question that applies to the physical world. The dream people are constituted of something more fundamental than matter.

The stuck-on residue is real.

But here’s the brutal reality: it’s not just residue; it’s residon’t.

Options:

• A: (recommended) do the dishes
• B: don’t do the dishes
• C: mix of both

Bee movie but every time you report it for being trans it gets transer

All artwork for the series was hand-drawn by Anna Rettberg (https://x.com/aerettberg) without generative AI.

For context:

Demetri Spanos (PhD) is a 25+ year veteran of AI development. He wanted to speak out about the negative turn that his field has taken, but he didn’t have an audience so he turned to…

Casey Muratori, an accomplished software developer with a considerable media presence. He makes a good fit for Demetri in this case because while Casey himself is an AI skeptic, much of Casey’s audience are young professional devs who are probably using AI (whether enthusiastically or reluctantly) in the workplace. Exactly the audience Demetri hopes to reach.

The title of the video should be read as “the ethical questions and proposed frameworks that have appeared throughout the past 30 years of AI research”, not “an affirmative argument for the question of whether the current crop of AI software is ethical”.

(Spoiler: Demetri makes strong arguments that the industry entered unethical territory more than 15 years ago)