Happy new year everybody. They want to ban fireworks here next year so people set fires to some parts of Dutch cities.

Unrelated to that, let 2026 be the year of the butlerian jihad.

Power! Unlimited power! I say as I shoot Force Electrons into the jedi knights.

Sunday rant post. I really dislike that so many people are now adopting ‘electrons’ when they mean power (it is good as a ‘this person drinks the coolaid’ shibboleth however).

And I was amused to hear people go ‘AI (by which they meant the recent llm stuff) malware creating will be a risk in the future, look at the drug discovery that AI is already doing’, wonder if drug discovery people have said ‘look how great drug discovery will be in the future, look at all the malware development AI is already doing’.

The commit message claimed “60% cost savings.”

Arnie voice: “You know when I said I would save you money? I lied”

Thanks!

The only ‘debates’ are, when after a lecture somebody goes ‘this isn’t a question, more of a comment but …’ and then half the audience groans.

Nah they tend to just tell them to get the fuck out of the class they are disrupting, it has happened a few times now in the usa where random fasc types start to shout things and get chased off.

Wonder if the recent ‘i got my trans teacher fired for failing my paper correctly’ shit is going to shift that.

It is in fact the barbarians who bring the ‘debate hall’ with them, with the ‘change my mind’ or ‘prove me wrong’ shit.

I’m in the wrong racket

There is also this Rationality is Systematized Winning by Eliezer Y.

(Which has the glorious line: “Reason is just a way of doing things, not necessarily the most formidable; it is how professors talk to each other in debate halls, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t”, showing he never went to university).

$599,970!?

That is almost triple our prime minster gets.

Snort with Splunk!

Yeah, dont see me linking to this post by Gelderloos as fully supporting his other stances, more that the whole way Scott says nonviolent movements are better isnt as supported as he says (and also shows Scott never did much activism). So more anti scott than pro Peter ;).

Remember how slatestarcodex argues that non-violence works better as a method of protest? Turns out the research pointing to that is a bit flawed: https://roarmag.org/essays/chenoweth-stephan-nonviolence-myth/

Unrelated to the article/vid itself, thanks for making both a video, podcast, and an article. I know it is a lot of work, but I really appreciate being able to read it than having to watch a video.

“That’s the words of a guy you need to watch your drink around.” chefs kiss.

I assume it is a bit of the old SA leaking through. What is your opinion on anime David? (Otoh, it does remind me of the tool crystaldiskinfo (which reads out the SMART data from disks) which by default seems to push you to use their variants which have anime skins).

There is a wall decoration at the Enschede central station listing all the important companies started there by the local university and all but one I had not heard of (which is prob my fault) but those also all sounded like ‘Floorp’ I get a chuckle every time I walk past it.

Careful, don’t slander Comic Sans. It is an asshole, and has the party people on its side.

(I also think the font gets too much flak, perhaps to really show our distaste of the comment make it the fraktur font, and flip it around (I did recently learn that flipping a front upside down/around makes it very hard to read for people who have trouble visualizing things in their head, which I had not thought about as being an issue)

Yes! at scale at scale at scale at scale

I’m a lot more afraid of the recursive effect of this joke. We could have at scale at scale.

All twelve fingers? Wow.