DM

I mean it's honestly insane for voters to elect politicians whose stated view is that government is a net bad thing for society and we should eliminate it.

It's crazy for that to be a mainstream view of one of the two major parties!

Doesn't this basically go back to Reagan and the whole "government *is* the problem" thing?

I can't speak for every European country, but I think to at least a degree there's still a cross-spectrum acceptance that government *can* be a positive force in society most places.

But not in the US!

I'm in Europe and every country has mandatory bag fees or bans. It's not a big deal! It's not some Islamist plot to destroy our way of life!

What I don't get is why left American pundits think Dems should shy away from such things instead of calling fearmongering the obviously insane BS that it is!

Infographic: The Countries Banning Plastic Bags This chart shows national-level regulation to ban/limit the use of plastic bags (2024).

According to modern Republicans, all of these countries have *basically* been taken over by radical Marxists who implemented shariah law.

Which really says nothing about plastic bag bans or Democrats, and everything about how insane Yglesias is to even take these claims seriously.

The idea that plastic bag bans--or, I dunno, bike lanes--are a stand-in for some sort of "radical left loony" governance is evidence for just how disconnected this accusation is from the reality of what voters want.

Counterpoint: plastic bag bans are an effective and efficient public policy to address a market failure in a way that yields broad gains for quality of life, and Democrats should absolutely run on them as a trivial example of common sense good governance.

My very first street protest was an anti-Dick Cheney protest.

How many Christians have been murdered in international waters by the same Trump administration?

Or in Nigeria! Maybe it's on its way to Nigeria!

From the illinois community on Reddit: October.10.2025 — Chicago: Immigration agents crashed into a U.S. citizen on her way to work, then dragged her out and arrested her (Article Inside) Explore this post and more from the illinois community

This is happening in America.

I've never see "State of the Art" abbreviated as "SATA".

The company often sends customers a pair of employees, dubbed internally as "Echo" and "Delta". The former is charged with deducing what the customer needs, while the latter has the technical skills to create it.

God that’s cringy.

The new hot job in AI: forward-deployed engineers OpenAl, Anthropic and Cohere have stepped up hiring for specialists to help businesses adopt their Al models AI Job postings for customer-facing Al roles have rocketed in 2025, according to data from Indeed © FT montage/Getty Images

Seriously, one of the greatest marketing coups in the history of tech was Palantir convincing a bunch of Ivy League type A guys to come work as customer support engineers by renaming the role to “forward-deployed engineer.”

I mean, Trump doesn't agree with Trump on this, since he also has argued for massive, unprecedented rate cuts, right?

I mean I kind of liked the Curtis Sliwa cat joke.

I think the Trump people see Trump's first-term assassination of Soleimani, or Israel's more recent strikes on Iran, as successes.

Successes in what sense isn't really clear to me--in a material sense they do not seem to have been. But you can imagine they learned different lessons here.

Sure, I mean, Musk is *close* to delivering the roadster, but it takes a backseat to the humanoid robots he's going to ship to every household in the US by 2026, right?

Obviously these discussions rapidly devolve into philosophy of the mind. Daniel Dennett argued that sentience is a necessary byproduct of certain cognitive capabilities, so in that sense it's relevant. But to *which* specific capabilities is, to me, unclear.

Sentience is a relevant quality for (many, but not all) existential risk concerns: AGI can't have self-directed goals unless it's sentient, I think.

But it's unclear in what ways "sentience" is a critical component for certain _capabilities_ (which might be used to pursue human goals).

Language Illusion and the AI Hype Train Imagine a friend introduces you to a new acquaintance. This friend-of-a-friend is well-spoken and extremely well-read, and can go on at…

1. Totally agree that language confuses our estimation of LLMs' capabilities. I wrote about this way back in 2023 and I think many others have made this observation before and since.

2. Is "sentience" relevant for the purposes of AI company valuations? I don't think so.

Japan to Send Troops to Help Stop Bear Attacks

It’s not funny in real life, but it was funny in “The Simpsons.”

Yeah, a hedge fund guy who uses his money to influence politics *feels* like he should be an absolute hero to the modern right.

Did you tell her that over there, they don't call it a quarter pounder with cheese?

Looks like Zuck is bringing the same energy to his work on "Superintelligence" as he brought to building the "metaverse."

I'm just waiting for him to change the ticker symbol to "AGI".

New York Times headline reads: Trump Hotel Workers Campaign for a Union, Over the Boss's Objections

New York Times headline reads: Trump Moves to Strip More Federal Workers of Union Protections.

But his assertion that diversity weakens unions ignores two things. First, labor unions have a long history of multiethnic coalitions. Second, it was the capitalists and political elites who tried to *exploit* ethnic divisions to maintain power. There is only one person here trying to stop unions:

It seems like LLMs are great for cases where you're up against a crufty bureaucracy, and success is less dependent on accuracy or intelligence of your appeals, and more about persistence and formulaic verbosity.

It's sorta bad that those qualities are so useful so often!

YouTube video by SKÁLD - Topic Seven Nation Army

Didn't know I needed to hear a neo-viking rendition of "Seven Nation Army", but...I did!

And I find this weird, in a way. One of the *conservative* critiques of modernism is the idea that it's based on relativism, subjectivism, and a rejection of objective truth (hence the trans-baiting).

Musk, of course, is not a conservative, nor really is Trump; they're revolutionaries in disguise.

I know it's been said, but it's really under-emphasized the degree to which Musk's brand of right-wing politics is a frontal assault on the concept of objective reality.

Wtf. Ryanair?!