The NYT list, and every journalist's public partcipation in the reader's poll thing, reveals an important social realignment: "guy who likes movies" used to be a slacker-coded identity but now it's a striver one

Recent developments with Sonnet 4: 1) syncophancy dial cranked way up 2) conspicuous replacement of emdashes with hyphens

I need someone who's not an epidemiologist or a journalist (sorry) to look into this and tell me if this is real

Re: the Thiel/Douthat exchange, one hopes we are witnessing a growing awareness of the whole dealth cult thing going on over there in SF

The latest from The Budget Lab on reconciliation: distributional analysis of the Senate bill (including Scott FMAP proposal) vs. House. Key takeaways:

Kids today don't appreciate just how much of the standard-issue Online Technocratic Center-Left Consensus is due to Stephen Smith posting his ass off every day for 15 years

Something must be done about the bubble tea situation in Cobble Hill. Every new storefront is some kind of $15 treat-beverage enterprise designed to siphon off the allowances of middle school girls. Enough!!

Must suck for the people who live here in the Rockaways but it is incredibly cool when one of those comically large Emirates double-decker Airbuses flies right over the beach

Lorentzen, Christian. “Like This Or Die.” Harper’s Magazine, 2019.

I like this. LLMs need more out-of-sample validation. Not just the little math puzzles, like ARC or whatever, but testing for wholesale scientific discoveries. Like if this model can invent literary modernism then I'll take the sci-fi AGI stuff more seriously