rev. howard arson

i think you get the right to call some of your detractors mentally ill after a guy who was banned from another website for threatening your life kills two people

i first encountered candice owens on a feministe comment thread where she was arguing for her new website, where you could post information on anyone who was cancelled so other people would know

right. like, what bari weiss was saying, in front of a jewish audience, was, "i think that the media should reflect mainstream ideas, such as the idea that the jewish billionaire who placed me in charge of the news is part of a conspiracy whereby jewish billionaires control the news."

Cannot overstate how, from my perch as a national-security reporter, this would have been an earth-shattering scandal in a prior era.

the other stuff she's done is... i mean, it's the sort of conspiracy theorizing which is kind of deniable, but this isn't.
forward.com/fast-forward...

i went through like nine separate revisions of this tweet because the actual substance of it -- "conservative jewish billionaires somehow don't care about antisemitism against american jews" -- has the pattern of an antisemitic conspiracy theory but is substantively the inverse of one.

somewhere between 10/7 and today, an economic and ideological split happened where the largest donors to a bunch of Jewish community institutions decided that a tidal wave of antisemitism was coming, and also that antisemitism consists exclusively of antizionism. not even Holocaust denial counts.

one thing that's really interesting about this is that the stated motivation for a lot of this stuff is fighting antisemitism, and then they mention Dana Loesch, a vocal antisemite.

i can see rejecting ancient Indian wisdom if i were a doctor treating melanoma but it does seem as though primordial evils are the precise thing which ancient Indian wisdom might be good for

if i were in the US military and facing a primordial supernatural being of great evil, my first thought when offered ancient Indian wisdom would not be "nah, we're fine"

really excited for 60 Minutes to just be a show about what Alan Dershowitz thinks the age of consent should be

i constructed my career around being able to reject things which violated my ethical standard (mostly by saving almost every dollar I earned so that I could walk away) but didn't really consider what would happen if the things i was most worried about were no one's job at all.

yeah. i stayed longer than i would have otherwise because i did privacy for law enforcement export (a thing i can reveal now) and wanted to make sure that it was in someone's hands whom i trust.

“IT” outside of programming has smelled like an intentional ghetto for so long

not in perpetuity and maybe not 100x, but i think you can probably build a 500b model which serves for the cost of a 7b model. it's just not infra's job. there are not enough chips to do what he said with infra.

like, absolutely no one with my background could ever get hired for my position in GOOG as it is.

i think it's just that tech became a way to make a huge amount of money and only that and once you let those guys rule over you it's all over

i mean, if you had a red badge equivalent to a white badge you could do it but if you had to go diagonal you couldn't.

yeah they basically destroyed every way you could get a white badge starting from a red badge over the years.

one of the things i objected to most at at GOOG over the years, from the labor perspective, is the slow decay of the blue-collar routes up into corp. you used to encounter guys who started out swapping drives in 120 degree heat in the hot aisles and who were now SREs, and that's gone.

i think you might be able to do this but it's, uh, not the infra team's job. the infra team's job is linear. sparse experts / cut cache misses tenfold (and that's more than just kv cache) / mixture-of-depths probably gets you two OOMs.

i don't want to discuss the ways in which this is wrong, BUT there are a subset of tech jobs -- like, if you are the only sysadmin at a small baked bean company -- which have the same cultural valence as "HVAC contractor," as in "highly-paid WWC job," and have the same politics.

release the epstein files files

was interested in the difference parameter count makes in extended writing, and to my eye the Opus version (below) is much, much better than the Sonnet version, which surprised me because the Sonnet 4.5 is much better than the Opus 4.1.
claude.ai/public/artif...

"i thought i should own the means of production so i did" is not exactly a repudiation of capitalism but it certainly is a repudiation of the place most people have in it

tbc, i was taking the position that the case was dismissed but not the indictment. if the indictment was void, then there was never any indictment -- just a case dismissed because no supporting indictment ever existed.

lmao. this rocks, actually

sulzberger leaving money on the table. smdh

the best possible remake of Rogue One would be a third season of Andor which is just Rogue One

it's important to note that this does not matter in this case because the case cannot be brought again b/c the statute of limitations has run