Derek Devnich

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund The Story of the Jewish Bund

For all you horrors who have been waiting, “Here Where We Live is Our Country” has a pub date! April 7, 2026

Preorder here bookshop.org/p/books/here...

Preorders mean everything, so get one for all your friends. Haters, get some and have a book burning

Interestingly the replication crisis seems to largely be replicators not understanding statistical power.

osf.io/rkyf7_v1/

"Please build your mission-critical workflows around these magic beans"

2.1 Lenses, Not Boxes I wondered whether this section was necessary, but games discourse seems to repeatedly find itself adrift in questions of whether _ counts as a _. We have seen the question repeatedly: Do games count as art? Do games without goals count as games? Is The Sims a game? Are hypertexts interactive fiction? Are Twine pieces literature? In fairness to the researchers cited here, all of whom I respect immensely, many of these sources pose or imply the question rhetorically. Still, the necessity of such a framing frustrates me. "Is _ a _?" is, in my opinion, a fruitless question. The question can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and it often serves as either a provocation to espouse politics or as a cover to institute gatekeeping. Its agenda is usually opaque to onlookers and bewildering to those trying to advance the field from across disciplines. We should be thinking in lenses, not boxes. It is always more interesting to ask "If we think of _ through the lens of _, what do we learn?" We know it is more interesting to ask "What do we learn by considering Tom Stoppard through the lens of poststructuralism?" than to ask "Is Stoppard's work poststructuralist?" And while some works may be more or less fruitful when examined through different lenses, sometimes the most unlikely pairings of lenses and objects are the most rewarding. Certainly any of the questions above would be much better served by reframing them in this way.

Wow we’re having “games are art” discourse again! Just gonna leave this here.

From my dissertation:

I Drank Every Cocktail The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bar...

I drank every cocktail on the IBA official cocktail list, and I wrote some words about it

aaronson.org/blog/i-drank...

So refresh my drink - we're letting generationally wrong people, the wrongest to ever do it - world class in their objective wrongness - kneecap the global economy because non rich people were briefly able to pay more of their bills and rich people took that personally is that the long and short

On the flip side weather forecasting will be amazing in 2028 when all those FLOPs get repurposed from woke gradient descent to based and trad Navier-Stokes solvers where they belong

We are gonna have charts for AI slop exposure by generation like we do lead

it's kinda insane how much alpha there is in "ignore ivies/faang, get top talent from Midwestern State U"

1. You should always start your analysis with a simple GLM

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

The UK: we must reinvigorate our uncompetitive and slow growth economy!

Also the UK: time to censor the easiest general reference of archive of human knowledge, which is also free.

Tech bros are like, “Snoobi is merging with Gurdl to form VybHub” and beer bros are all, “Bro, did you spund and horizontally lager this for like six weeks?”

"there is a least-surprising modal answer to literally any question" is in fact a pretty weird thing

YouTube video by Working 2gether Inc. T Pain War Pigs

KEXP just played T-Pain covering War Pigs and I'm obligated to share it with you, here's T-Pain covering War Pigs and it fucking rips

Fredericksburg is the first place you can get biscuits driving south. There's a reason the VA welcome center is there 😛

If you liked regulation by enforcement, you're going to love deregulation by non-enforcement

'The Osbournes' changed Ozzy's image from grisly to cuddly, and changed reality TV Ozzy Osbourne's image forever changed with the 2002 debut of his family reality show “The Osbournes.”

when this began, it was a studio fight. i had never made a sitcom, only documentaries and long form—moved in to the house and spent nine full months quietly shooting everything. they became my family. as the footage came back, the studio perked up and decided "to gamble."

apnews.com/article/osbo...

might be my hottest ever take but i stand by it, ten toes. the opportunity to take an unobstructed shot twelve yards out is the punishment, whatever happens after the strike should reset the game. a missed or saved pen can grant a second, and unearned, advantage.

9. Cyberpunk is increasingly a period costume drama aesthetic much in the way that post-Edwardian dramas (Downtown Abbey) and Regency dramas (Jane Austen) are. A lot of people who do cyberpunk nowadays are cowards because they don't bite the bullet and do things like keep USSR alive in continuity

𝐉𝐮𝐥𝐞 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐯𝐬 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 🇩🇪🇫🇷

• Most duels won: 18
• Penalties won: 1
• Most successful dribbles: 6
• No 🇩🇪 was fouled more times: 4
• Joint most shots blocked
• Joint third most interceptions: 2
• Joint most 🇩🇪 shots: 2
• Third most tackles: 6

Relentless.

A Group of Four Flying Angels, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 18th c, 📸 by Charlotte Wilson

Was going through my files looking for a Simpsons joke about the Kagans and found this so you're welcome.

The most depressing AI pieces are always going to be the thoughtful, nuanced, open-minded considerations by respected writers who are transparently responding to the publicity incentive created by editors whose owners want this kind of content

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this fascinating exchange Colbert had with Dua Lipa, when she asked him about the role his faith plays in his comedy.

The Stupid Idiot's Guide to Investing Your Little Bit of Money I often am asked, by esteemed colleagues, friends, and readers, “What is investing my money, and how?” Here’s the explanation. Never pay anyone to tell you this same stuff, in a more boring way.

This article by Angry Socialist Blogger Hamilton Nolan is a pretty good overview for the skeptical web.archive.org/web/20191010...

Save yourself, walk away, seek not the tainted knowledge

favorite dumb comics thing is how some american guy doing too much coke in the 80s would invent a terrible superhero like "sandwich boy" as a joke and then some british guy doing too many sedatives in the 90s would be like "sandwich boy can create a 'reality sandwich' and is thus a living god"