It’s my daughter’s eighth birthday and my wife asked her to design her own cake. Then my wife made it.

Apparently Russian 2020 is a lot like American 2020. bbc.com/news/world-eur…

Here's an excellent example of how "scientific" "skepticism" is actually mostly about uncritically dunking on people. (I expect aliens who evolved on a planetary surface to look basically like any other animal, because convergent evolution is a thing.)

I've been not very excited about GPT-3, but I wonder if I'm being "disrupted" in the classic Innovator's Dilemma sense. As someone who loves words and communication, I look at GPT-3 and think, "These are not top-quality words." But maybe some people need cheap words?

What is the chance that there is currently microscopic life on the surface of Mars?

50% of you think there's <1% chance of life on the surface of Mars. I think I'm now obligated to offer a bet. I'll bet 1:100 (my $1 to your $100) that within 5 years of samples being returned from Mars to Earth, there will be wide agreement that there's life on the surface.

Did a broken random number generator in Cuba help expose a major Russian espionage network? mattblaze.org/blog/neinnines/

I have trouble getting below 50% for life-on-mars, because: - We only actually checked once. (The Viking missions in the 70s.) - Those missions were positive for life. (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…) Like, yeah, maybe it was a false-positive, but why is that the dominant answer?

Crypto folks: I've been out of the game for a while. If I wanted to get up to speed on DeFi, layer 2, etc, where should I start?

Analytic philosophy, not even once.

Just talking to my Chinese ex: two foreign sailors on shore leave in Qingdao just tested positive for covid. So now in the middle of the night everyone in Qingdao has to get up and go tested. Right now, not in the morning. Because of two cases.

The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!

This is the social media equivalent of stopping withdrawals during a bank run.

Here are the archive.org instructions for backing up your Tweets, so they're not at the mercy of our whimsical king: help.archive.org/help/how-to-ar…