David Pierce

Yeah, I'd like to know what's going on with this

I remember when this mailing came to the farm where I was working, and we workers talked about it.

Funny to think it's a "rare manuscript" now, though the copy that we were reading must have got thrown out

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

YouTube video by The Daily Show Is Zohran Mamdani a Communist? According to Communists, No | The Daily Show

A co-chair of CPUSA taken seriously

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe_k...

“Putin would eat you for lunch.”

Today, exactly that happened.

NEW: Video shared with me from a bystander in DC shows multiple masked federal agents (at least one of whom appears to have an ICE badge) violently attacking and handcuffing a delivery worker in the street outside Bluestone Lane cafe near Logan Circle this morning.

Please take care when watching.

Bohemianism Summary. Here in Istanbul, the Turkish word kalender appears in the names of both a mosque and an officers’ club: Kalenderhane Camii and Kalender Orduevi. The mosque was earlier a house (hane) for …

About my neighborhood on the Bosphorus

polytropy.com/2025/07/27/b...

YouTube video by PBS NewsHour WATCH LIVE: King Charles addresses Canadian parliament amid Trump annexation threats

One reason I say Trump wants to be a dictator, not a king, is that our modern reference point for royalty is a King like Charles, whose entire life is filled with duties to others, such as learning French so he can deliver a symbolic defense of Canada in his eighth decade.

Recent commencement address in the US. Terrific. Glad to be able to read the words

An acrylic painting by Jim Musil depicting a farm in Wisconsin. A red barn sits at the end of a dirt road in the middle of a verdant green field. A colorful sky dominates the composition.

My painting WISCONSIN FARM

Find a cool product on Amazon? That company exists off Amazon. 1. Google company name 2. Order from their site 2a. Can usually find a 10% off code 3. Still get product in 2-8 days 4. Company avoids losing 25% margin share to Amazon 5. You avoid giving money to Bezos

Non-use of AI *is* a setting in DuckDuckGo, I recently learned.

Patriarchy, misogyny, & the gender system [Posted to Medium 26th May 2019].In a piece[1] that several radical and gender critical feminist philosophers, including me, published yesterday on Medium, we set out the following as a question for o...

People like analogies, such as "transwomen are to women as adoptive parents are to parents."

If they think, parent or woman, either one is a job or role, maybe that itself is a result of patriarchy.

I learned from HLS here that activists think differently!

hollylawford-smith.org/patriarchy-m...

It seems to me, by using activists' new definition of "woman," your interlocutor would seem to be "describing the wished-for world as if it already existed" - as Helen Joyce put it in *Trans.*

I think it is like Trumpists' denial of reality, even if the two parties here claim to be opposed

I'm afraid for me (and my wife), popularity alone would be reason not to book, though maybe not when younger (we did stay in pensions in places like Bodrum then)

I was thinking also of academics who don't seem to enjoy writing down (or writing up!) their research

Well then, I'll just note here my impression that people who write for their careers are suspicious of those who do it for pleasure

I'm sorry. Did you experience this yourself?

The Bezos Cannes-tastrophe Starring Jeff Bezos as himself, Lauren Sánchez as an environmentalist, and Cannes as the end-stage symptom of elite delusion.

"While the rest of us are told to compost, buy reusable straws, and take fewer showers during droughts, the world’s richest man floats into Cannes on a floating diesel inferno and gets a seat at the climate table via his fiancée’s perfectly bronzed décolleté"
louispisano.substack.com/p/the-bezos-...

Pope Leo’s Doctoral Dissertation: Thoughts on Power and Authority

In the doctoral “thesis that was the culmination of his studies in Rome … Father Prevost repeatedly emphasizes that authority should be a service rather than an opportunity for control. True authority, he writes, requires trust and humility.”

Yeah, Star Trek was woke before woke was cool

My wife offers herself as a counterexample Nick's assertion though.

I'm also glad you can't just buy antibiotics here anymore (or is there a black market in them?)

Glad to know of at least one protest that can be effective.

It is creepy to think that, here in Istanbul, I used to live near Trump Towers, and now in my neighborhood somebody drives a Tesla

Vulnerable people: “Could you please wear a mask so we don’t die?”

Them: “No it violates my freedom!”

ICE Agents: Wear masks to kidnap and disappear people.

Them: “This is fine”

…

also you all need to see this, because this is something I don't think *anybody* could predict for where this ad goes

New reports tell us cattle and sheep farming can be sustainable – don’t believe them, it’s all bull | George Monbiot Feeding the world sustainably is an incredibly complex challenge, yet some people are trying to sell us a bucolic fairytale, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

> Their “study” was funded by McDonald’s, “to support McDonald’s belief that well-managed beef production has an important role to play in a thriving global ecosystem”

Not a study then, but a *case*?

@georgemonbiot.bsky.social points out what's wrong with it

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A man who holds the title of President of the United States, who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, who then says he doesn’t know if he’d uphold the Constitution, is unfit to be president and should be removed.

Quote from NYT article about how AI "hallucinations" (aka completely made-up crap being passed off as true) are getting worse with each new iteration of the glorified autocorrect technology that's ruining the planet.

About to be Jokerfied by this blandly tossed-off statement in a piece about how the lie machines will never stop lying. Why concede that AI is "useful" in writing term papers? What is the purpose of writing assignments in education? Is AI accomplishing that purpose? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/t...

But as early as the late 1700s, bread manufacturers had been adulterating flour for profit. In 1750, a report accused bakers of adding substances to their bread to make it whiter, writes the Federation of Bakers. And while Parliament banned any additives, bakeries ignored the ban. By the Victorian age, the adulteration of bread was common. Cheaper and inferior ingredients didn't just whiten the bread but added weight and bulk — the appearance of heavy bread and the weight of a quarter loaf. The bread was sold by weight, usually, as a quarter pound, explains the The Victorian Web. Bakers would often cook the bread in hot ovens so that it would look done on the outside but remain doughy inside so that it could be sold at an increased weight. The additives that bakers used to fluff, whiten, and prolong their bread included plaster of Paris, bean flour, chalk, ground-up bone, and alum (via BBC). These substances became so common in foods that by the 19th century, people began to prefer the taste of them, writes the Royal Society of Chemistry. Alum is a derivative of aluminum and was used to add bulk to bread so that bakers could charge more. Alum was freely available, cheap, and tasteless and it made the bread unnaturally white, according to History Collection. And even if bakers weren't adding alum to their bread, it might have been added to the flour by the miller.

This is the actual reality: bread adulteration was happening at scale by the end of the eighteenth century, and it caused wide scale issues with people getting rickets.

www.tastingtable.com/1080592/the-...