One thing I've never seen before is a full-scale riot at an airport terminal. That could soon change!

When will people learn that "my wife or best friend is X so how can I possibly be anti-X?" is not a convincing argument?

Blue States are not "donor states". They're colonies

We might not win. But we can surely make them pay

Forgiveness does not necessarily mean that everything goes back to the way it was

What about Salk or Pasteur or Jenner or Semmelweis or Lister…?

How deranged do you have to be to blame font choices on DEI?

You can kind of tell an argument is bullshit when the end result is that the person making it won't have to be held accountable for their actions or inaction

In retrospect, it might have been a bad idea to normalize people knowing it's all bullshit but going along with all anyway

It just occurred to me that my dad—who sometimes likes making outrageous shit up and has successfully fooled me and my siblings on several occasions—has prepared me perfectly for our fact-free, AI-infested present moment

I know I shouldn't just ask an LLM (although Google's AI overview very unhelpfully told me that JSON is not a human language and therefore is neither a pidgin or Creole) but I also don't want to waste knowledgeable people's time with my silly questions :D

Shit I get tempted to ask an LLM: if you analogized computer languages to human languages, would JSON be a pidgin or a Creole?

I realize I'm still in a Facebook and Twitter mindset because I still expect the search function to be completely broken

Printer meat in your Campbell's Soup

Sean Bean playing Odysseus in "Troy" (2004)

…and a layperson isn't necessarily going to know what would be considered critical to communicate

It definitely highlights that an insurmountable problem of a pure text-based interface is that the model has to trust the input is reliable and complete and it can't really make any decisive judgments or assumptions. If you leave out a critical sign or symptom, the odds of you dying go way up…

As far as memes go, Bubba's hog > Alf's hog. Thoughts?

It’s basically Deep Space Nine.

There are plenty of cynical/doomer ways to interpret this, but I choose to Pollyannishly interpret this to mean we really do have a common cause with Southeast and South Asia

…and that various people with various degrees of power within the corporation aren't communicating and are running around like a chicken with their head cut off

In the absence of evidence, instead of concocting a coherent reason for why a multinational corporation with literally over a thousand subsidiaries worldwide would do something that seems hasty and not well thought out, consider the fact that a corporation is not a unitary entity…

If they're going to nail you anyway eventually, you might as well make it as difficult and irritating for them as possible

On one hand, yes, if they really wanted to nail you, they wouldn't need a pretext, they'd just cook up some "evidence" with an LLM and railroad you. On the other hand, why are you making their job easier by giving them info they don't have to fabricate?

I can't help but feel like any advice predicated on the notion that this regime will act like laws actually bind it and that they won't weaponize laws to harm you is prima facie going to turn out to be bad advice

Some dudes really aren't cut out for allyship, I guess

My mom who left along during the brain drain because she was working as a nurse and could only really afford a cup of rice for breakfast everyday? My dad who barely got out right after Marcos declared martial law? All useless bullshit that doesn't count and won't help in the dark times ahead of us?

Wait, so the stories passed down by my (very recent!) ancestors don't count as knowledge? Like my granduncles who were subjected to the Bataan Death March? My grandfather who got recruited by Philippine guerrillas who was promised benefits from the U.S. but then got denied by the Rescission Act?

Feels like people gotta start letting go of that American Exceptionalism. "It can't happen here!"

Bro, are you absolutely sure about that, especially since lots of stuff we thought couldn't happen here are in fact happening here?

At this point, why be afraid that "they're looking for a reason" to murder us when it's clear they never needed a reason—they'll just do it—and they don't need to wait for any evidence