People just bounce around from meme to meme, talking point to talking point, dominant narrative to counter-narrative, whatever stance is cool in their particular social and professional spheres at the moment, whatever makes them feel good about themselves, feel like they belong.

Friend of mine who is IMO the best documentary-style podcaster on politics around did a deep dive into the Epstein Files. I found it persuasive, answered a lot of questions, surprised me:

Apple Podcasts

AI2026 Ep 3 - Islands in the Information Stream

Podcast Episode · The Arch Independent · May 8 · 1h 47m

It's a beautiful day. Be grateful to be alive, but this price action is fucking bullshit. Fuck you to all the manipulators, leveraged idiots and rehypothecators. Fuck the communists and delusional ass-lickers who think they'll be exempt because they complied. You'll be the first to be executed, you fucking retards. But seriously, it's a beautiful day, live in the moment, don't worry about any of that.

If you want to safeguard a system from AI, exploit its midwit tendency to assume and overrfit, endlessly theorize and speculate in circles. Feel like you could design a trap for it that a human wouldn't fall for. Much harder to design something that could fool both.

AI is just a midwit — all theory, no experience — with infinite information, patience and work ethic. We are nowhere close to super intelligence.

fuckin' Claude crashed my Mac:

If you're waiting for conditions to improve in order to be happy you probably won't be in the unlikely event they actually do. If you are happy under your current conditions, they will probably improve, but it won't change things that much for you.

worst part about vibe-coding with Claude is it'll use an old file, make changes to it, then you upload and replace and don't realize what happened until you're fixing the same bugs you already fixed. Surprised it's that poor at recognizing it.

It's chilly and cloudy out, but I'm going to the fucking track even though I don't feel like it because the GOATs go when they don't feel like it, and I'm the GOAT when it comes to running two 10:30 miles.

Interesting that certain sports can theoretically get stuck in infinite loops. Baseball has two-strike foul balls that can go on forever, tennis can have infinite lets. Like if you simulated an infinite number of games, some would never get past the first batter/point. Would be great to tell thr grandkids you spent a year at the infinite let match.

Think there's a misconception about traditional finance and debt that's similar to the misconception about capitalism itself. Capitalism presupposes private property, and in so doing, doesn't interfere with wealth creation. Crony capitalism is when people who already have capital use it to rig the rules in favor of the connected few. The existence of crony capitalism isn't a knock on capitalism, private property and wealth creation, it's an abuse by bad actors disguised as wealth creation. Lending and debt are not bad in and of themselves. They allow people and companies to raise capital at an agreed-upon cost. But money printing via debt is an abuse of this tool wherein banks can fund loans out of thin air. For example, if I want to lend money to earn interest, I can loan it to the government (T-Bills) or a company (corporate bonds), but in order to do so I have to raise the cash, maybe be selling some other asset or earning it. But when a bank issues a mortgage, it's not selling one of its existing mortgages to free up the funds, or selling any other assets. It gets to keep its existing assets while issuing a new loan. That means it's increasing the money supply, i.e., printing. It's subsidizing the goods and services (boosting their prices) for which it lends. So we rail against a debt-based economy that needs ever more loans to stay afloat, but it's not the act of lending and issuance of debt that is the problem, but the fact that it's issued from nothing.

anyone else finding it impossible to access your notifications on Primal?

Idea to bookmark for later: real numbers are incompressible like reality itself. Pi and e are compressible reals, ambassadors from reality to the land of reason.

Lots of people get confused by labels. When evaluating NFL players, people will say, but so and so was a first-round pick when he was taken 28th, and so-and-so is a second-round pick when he was drafted 35th. There's a much bigger difference between pick 6 and pick 28 than pick 28 and pick 35. The "rounds" are just arbitrary cut-off points. Similarly people will say "Trump promised no wars" and now he's attacked Iran. "War" is like first-round pick. You can define what's happening in Iran as a "war" and sick burn all the peace promises if you like, but the difference between this "war" and a war where we spend trillions, kill millions and destabilize an entire region is a lot different than kidnapping Maduro or taking out Khameni. If this does devolve into Iraq 2.0 or worse, that'a another matter, but if it's more like Venezuela, then it's not really contradicting the platform on which he was elected. Think a lot of people are conflating the two for clicks and outrage, but it's pretty obviously stretching one label to cover two very different scenarios. This is not an opinion on whether taking out Khameni (or kidnapping Maduro) was "good," legal or desirable -- we will only know that over the medium and long haul. Only that this conflation of two very different things is lowest-common-denominator posting.

Normally I'd out this in a highlighter format and post it natively, but too many screenshots, so I'm linking to the Substack. Plus, probably the only one who will get it is @YODL

Why We Will Never Have AGI

An Optimistic View Of The Future