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r.v.cx
Pretty sure I’m right about: - RFC 3339 dates - ISO 216 paper sizes - Fahrenheit weather temperatures - Dot-grid paper - End-to-end encryption - Software engineering being about collaboration costs Less confident about the rest. https://linktr.ee/rvcx
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Trump’s feel for diplomacy. His grasp of economics. His model of social interaction, and intellectual ambition, and human flourishing. I respect *all* of them so much more deeply than his sense of aesthetics. Which is where his inchoate loathing for wind power is rooted.

I would be a lot quippier and more focused on quirky engineering stuff if this weren’t mainly the place I go to watch to collapse of the world order in real time.

My new pants came with…a free stroopwafel. The modern brand economy is weird.

I’m sure I’ve told the story here before, but I had *exactly* this conversation with an oligarch’s nepo-baby who refused to pick up after himself in my college’s common room at Oxford. We’re still “in touch”, in that he regularly posts videos of himself driving supercars in Dubai on Instagram.

The LAPD role in all this is just bizarre. “We’re corrupt right-wing mouth-breathers who got into the business to brutalize community members…but these ICE guys are really crossing the line!”

If you need to ask why ABC should have higher standards than Fox News, I can’t explain it to you.

Lawful good 🙌 Neutral good 🫶 Chaotic good 💪 Lawful neutral 🤙 True neutral 👍 Chaotic neutral 🤘 Lawful evil 🙇 Neutral evil 👊 Chaotic evil 🖕

If you think it’s about whether the personal insults were “correct” there’s pretty much no hope of you actually understanding the principles involved.

This does put a number on pure fourteen-words racists: 17%.

BREAKING: Federal agents in plain clothes and unmarked cars tried to snatch 1st graders from LA elementary schools—told staff they had “parental consent.” They lied. When pressed, they HID THEIR IDS. DHS admits they sent them. This wasn’t a welfare check. It was a test run for a police state.

Amidst "the US federal government is evil", I've been revisiting my longstanding obsession with useful applications of blockchain. In particular, DAOs—federated organizations with formal rules for achieving consensus among stakeholders—seem valuable.

I deeply resent anyone who makes Newsom the good guy.

There’s plenty to gripe about re the NYT, but honestly little has angered me more than this article (in the Cooking section). It ostensibly discusses how economic trends translate to breakfast sandwich prices, but ostentatiously refuses to actually do anything but transcribe complaints. 1/3

It's hard to overstate how destructive the reflexive "this is a distraction!" stuff that politicians and commentators and people are always peddling. Everything is happening all at once. That's how authoritarianism works. If you can't navigate and synthesize this, you're not meeting the moment.

Bluesky: Nazis not welcome Twitter: Nazis welcome Truth Social: That one Nazi, plus fanboys Mastodon: Nazis please use our software!

I have an ex-track friend who has been posting on Insta about continuing to run through her pregnancy, and I am proud to say that I’m now officially faster than she is over 5k. But it took until seven months.

A thing that I never understood at Google was that dudes set anime girls—often animated gifs—as their profile pics. So at the bottom of big conference calls you’d have little cartoons of tweens doing sexy poses. I always thought you could do one round of staff cuts based just on that.

There's a strong connection between "Trump is playing 4d chess" and "LLMs are general artificial intelligence". Both are vague flood-the-zone approaches that can be engrossing to engage with. Neither has any strategic depth. Both fall apart in the face of any analysis or follow-up questions.

A lot of folks are *outraged* that a news organization wouldn’t want its journalists making personal attacks against those they’re supposed to be reporting on. And “reporters” count on those folks to pay for their newsletters when they transition from journalism to the influencer profession.

It takes only a brief skim of BlueSky to see all the lefties wishing LA were past the point of no return—either to egg on cathartic riots or to tut-tut at the strategic error of such riots. Now more than ever the reality on the ground matters, and shilling for MAGA fiction is not helpful.

The reminder seems relevant today.

Apropos of another thread I’m on: there is nothing the MAGA fascists want more than antifa violence in LA. Lawlessness is pure win for jack-booted thugs.

I don’t block people for not knowing the difference between “your” and “you’re”. But I think about it.

“Covert operations” Step 1: get judges to accept some first amendment restrictions around disclosing confidential information about active covert operations Step 2: claim even the most public operations are covert, and that what members of the public see with their own eyes is confidential