Emyr Derfel

Or Elijah Wood.

Ride-sharing apps are bad, actually Or why Matthew Yglesias has no clue what he's talking about

i'm doomed to write a version of this essay every single year. i wrote about Matthew Yglesias' intellectual sophistry, LPE, Uber's business model, the problem with venture capital, economic welfare, "economic analysis," and more. thetechbubble.substack.com/p/ride-shari...

Government style ad in watercolour. Image of a burglar stealing a painting from the wall of a home. Tagline: "It's not theft... if you say you're using it to train your AI algorithm". Body text: "Theft is now legal, so we can boost the economy by eliminating jobs. If that doesn't make any sense, ask a chatbot to explain it to you." HM government logo in the corner.

Did a new one

GPT-5 AI spy shows how it can destroy the US in a day.

sam altman saying "we're going to steamroll you"

Having a great time looking up what people thought GPT-5 would be, and also when it would come out

how the fuck do you take a job as homelessness minister and not think "hmm, maybe I should disclose my buy to rent property portfolio"

Man, if you don't want to keep getting compared to Hitler, stop being so goddamned Hitlery.

In the abstract there's no inherent connection between crypto and being a malevolent, transgressive asshole. But the two things run together with remarkable consistency.

I'm seeing less posts about the Visa and Mastercard situation and I want to make it plain as day. You need to keep calling and bothering them, and losing them money.

Because if we lose this, they are going to cut more and more from what's available until you can only buy what they approve of.

This is definitely something that a pedophile sex offender would do to women 😡

Can the world just please boycott the 2028 Olympics?

I wish as many people wanted to actually click on Teen Vogue stories as like a post about our work being good and important, because this post is almost at 20k likes and that would be pretty good traffic!

The rental company needs to 86 them for violating the terms of the rental agreement. You are NOT permitted to carry passengers in the back of a box truck. JFC.

The "weird" thing about the way news channels around the US are reporting the Republican move in Texas to take 5 extra seats through gerrymandering, is that none of these channels feel compelled to mention the percentage of Dems to Repubs IN Texas, or how skewed the weighting toward Rs already is.

Tesla hit with $243 million in damages after jury finds its Autopilot feature contributed to fatal crash The verdict follows a three-week trial that threw a spotlight on how Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have marketed their driver-assistance software.

A hugely important verdict.

The victims were pedestrians, so Tesla can't argue they knew/accepted Autopilot's risks.

People walking, biking, and inside other cars didn't consent to be Elon Musk's guinea pigs.

Cristina Kirchner doctored numbers in Argentina for 8 years, making the country look like Switzerland on paper. Argentine universities started crunching parallel numbers to keep a record of what was actually happening. Americans need to get over their political naiveté quickly.

Right to buy in England ‘fuelled housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200bn’ Common Wealth report calls discounted sales of council homes one of the ‘largest giveaways in UK history’

Should never, ever have happened

Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme has cost UK taxpayers almost £200bn, according to a report into the policy’s contribution to Britain’s housing crisis.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Pro Soccer Player Who Spent 125 Days At CECOT Gives Chilling Account Of His Time There “Both the physical and mental abuse doled out by the officers made me think sometimes that I would never leave that place,” Jerce Reyes Barrios said.

Bukele and Trump and all of their goons belong in The Hague.

www.huffpost.com/entry/pro-so...

In 1984 the junction is dominated by parked cars, today all car parking has been removed, replaced by greenery and seating. An empty plot of land has had a block of flats built on it

Daniël Stalpertstraat, Amsterdam in 1984 and today

Trump's IRS chief finally said IRS Direct File is "gone." Intuit lobbied hard against free federal filing for years.

Here's Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi defending that record in a Decoder interview last year. Intuit later asked us to cut this part. We refused.

During the Cold War, many people believed in so-called “convergence:” that U.S. and Soviet systems would eventually become fairly similar.

Looks like they were right.

Saw an AI guy comparing using ChatGPT to rubberducking and I have to emphasize that the point of rubberducking is that the duck does not give you answers or suggestions or even respond in any way

This administration and its supporters have no values, no morals, no principles other than adherence to Trump and seething hatred for anything not-Trump. A despicable pedophilic predator is a hero if not-Trump opposed them. They are less than human.

What’s wild is I’m finishing up an episode where Rufus, who has driven the English economy into ruin, decides to build himself a fancy new Hall (basically another palace) at Westminster.

I’m not mad that Trump is stealing all of my Rufus plot lines.

I just hope he doesn’t stop.

Yooooooooooo.... That's 700 miles from Ukraine.

Why does Global Tetrahedron use a dodecahedron in its branding?

Cartoon drawing of Nietzsche hoovering and thinking "God I hate this thing". Caption reads Nietzsche abhors a vacuum.

Nietzsche abhors a vacuum

www.worldofmoose.com/products/nie...

AI ruling? Attorneys baffled by federal judge’s order that lists incorrect parties, wrong quotes U.S. District Judge Henry .T. Wingate filed a corrected order after attorneys raised concerns about factual errors in the first one.

Lord help us all

He spoke about the gun laws issue yesterday.

Mamdani: I would say that for the former governor to have spent an entire day speaking almost exclusively about me and barely about the New Yorkers who have been killed is indicative of the very politics New Yorkers want to leave in the past.

happy to report that the number of AI slop resumes has dropped dramatically. bless