Globe99

Scientist | Libertarian | Transhumanist | Urbanist | "Casual" Bitcoiner

Projects I like:
catallax.network (npub1qwe…qldl) Nostr-based service and reputation marketplace
Angor (npub1wrz…cm02) Bitcoin-based time-locked crowdfunding
https://blockforgebtc.com/blockforge A fully on-chain voxel world, living on Bitcoin forever.

Public Key

npub147fp2j606qpfysp38phhzvempt7ewsdqwm6uww9uycp6tdvavu0s5paq44

NIP-05 Address

globe99@nostrcheck.me

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs2lys4fd8aqq5jgqcnsmm3xvas4lvhgxs8daw88z7zvqa9kkwkw8cpr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmqppamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5evjvea

Publishing to

nostr.bitcoiner.social

nostr-relay.derekross.me

Author Public Key

npub147fp2j606qpfysp38phhzvempt7ewsdqwm6uww9uycp6tdvavu0s5paq44

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Last Notes

2026-10-27 23:40:11 UTC

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@nprofile…u2rf is a great device! Really fun to make 😄

2026-10-27 17:38:13 UTC

Despite having used it that way for years, I've recently come to the Revelation that "laptops" shouldn't actually be used on laps...
So then, what can actually be used in this form factor? like, a detachable keyboard with a tablet that's somehow floating at eye level?

2026-10-27 14:57:25 UTC

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"Building" is cheaper for sure, but testing by actual humans remains a bottleneck.
Plenty of AI slop gets put out with bad UI, bugs, etc, a lot of which can only be caught by an actual human being with actual thumbs using it.
(BTW welcome back Tree!)

2026-10-26 22:53:21 UTC

Flying & riding trains, always makes me think: wouldn't it be cool if everyone in this plane/train were on #bitchat, and we could all have this ephemeral social experience together?

2026-10-26 18:52:03 UTC

Walter Koenig, RIP 😞 -- portrayed not just Sulu but also the equally complex and villainous telepath spymaster Bester on Babylon 5
#nevent1q…g9y9

2026-10-26 14:45:35 UTC

Insightful essay asking the question: "who gets to own the future?"
When I grew up "the Future" was for oddballs: "weirdos & beardos" to quote a certain trogdolyte. Science fiction authors, various academic outsiders, people on listservs. Nobody was rich and if they were it certainly wasn't from talking about the future.
Now apparently your ideas about the future aren't valid unless you've got "tres commas" to your name... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/magazine/how-silicon-valley-stole-the-future.html

2026-10-23 23:07:51 UTC

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I think this is referencing that thing where CA women had to go to Reno and wait for 6 weeks to get a divorce

2026-10-23 23:05:54 UTC

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I started using it after they didn't kowtow to renaming a certain body of water "Lake America"... Unlike Google Maps
GMaps is hard to give up, but I've been pretty satisfied with MapQuest for driving directions with traffic (the latter doesn't exist on any OSM-based product yet)

2026-10-22 21:02:53 UTC

A few months into desktop Linux, everything has been pretty good with the huge exception of Maps...
GNOME Maps has a nice interface but is practically unusable... Map tiles frequently don't load, and search for say "florist" returns not only local florists, but *literally everything named "florist" in the entire world*... No way to limit it to your current map view, or at least within ~100 miles apparently.
OpenStreetMaps at least has mildly serviceable Android apps, but still no live traffic.
It's one thing to say "switch your gmail to proton", but it's *really* hard to give up on Google Maps and still function in society...

2026-10-22 17:40:19 UTC

So Zuck's basically using the proposed CA billionaire tax as a negotiating tactic with the board... "keep me happy or I leave the state"
#nevent1q…79q6

2026-10-21 20:14:19 UTC

Hey is anyone tracking the big picture of the PHPocalypse? Seems like basically the whole internet is vulnerable...?

2026-10-17 16:05:27 UTC

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Because AI doesn't have thumbs and eyeballs. It doesn't actually "use" software like humans do.
Just like clothes, there is room for creativity, but there are also contours of the human body, the movements it makes, and the requirements for durability, insulation, etc that we need to wear clothes as we move about in the world.
Fashion designers might put crazy shit on the runway, but before it actually gets into a store to be worn by more than 5 weirdos, things will be "flattened" to what's actually usable.

2026-10-17 15:59:58 UTC

The Doomer progression:
1. "Doom is inevitable. I will prepare."
2. Builds bunker / wilderness compound / private island seastead
3. "Hey this is actually pretty nice, I'm King of my own little kingdom... But I still have to deal with pesky (alimony payments / local zoning board / CA State legislature) ... Wouldn't it be nice if it was just me in charge?"
4. Engineers Doom
(Step 4 reserved for billionaires)

2026-10-16 22:41:31 UTC

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😬 That's half of the plot of a horror movie... Stay safe

2026-10-16 20:32:33 UTC

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Yeah, I find I can still usually call on the phone to deal with what the (privacy shielded) web is increasingly unable to do...
Of course, then you're dealing with whatever Phone system said institution set up, which might be a whole other ball of wax...

2026-10-16 19:56:01 UTC

Buying insurance online, paying off credit cards, interacting with necessary government websites... I've had all of these things fail either silently or catastrophically because I'm using Brave browser and/or a VPN.
Sometimes the transaction will just fail and say "something went wrong, sorry." Or it'll do something even worse like double-charge, or the captcha will fail, or it'll just hang...
I'm in the "encrypt all the things" camp as much as anyone else here, but let's not kid ourselves that it's getting harder and harder to use network-level anonymizing tech.

2026-10-16 14:52:14 UTC

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Software is powerful, but it was never enough.
Minds need to change, and physical things need to be built.

2026-10-16 02:38:20 UTC

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"he's a pedo guy" was a real banger 😬

2026-10-15 16:56:44 UTC

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Perfect opportunity for Nostr. Mirror X to a million relays, can't be shut down.

2026-10-15 16:53:55 UTC

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Muse is still taking human commands. People still use software to interact with Muse, just like they'll still use software to play games, write, draw, communicate with friends and family, etc..
Nobody wants a world where human beings are atomized from each other and only interact through a cloud of clanker agents. Do you?

2026-10-15 16:32:40 UTC

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Are you saying the positive outcome here is that people don't use computers anymore?

2026-10-15 16:32:10 UTC

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Yeah so, what's the point? Agents use software made by other agents for other agents... How does this make the world a better place, or do anything positive other than boil the oceans with their compute?

2026-10-15 15:48:17 UTC

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> Feedback from users is 100x slower
Yes, and it's users who actually "use" the software. Take that out of the loop and what's the point?
This is exactly why AI isn't going to take over the world, or why all the hype about "look how many math problems it's solved!" is so much hype.
Eventually it winds up disconnecting from actual *human* needs, and becomes meaningless wordplay. The "human in the loop" isn't a bug, it's a feature.

2026-10-15 01:26:33 UTC

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Spending all your time visualizing and imagining Doom is one of the best ways of manifesting it... For instance, people terrified of abandonment tend to push people away....
And I'm convinced that if "AI doom" is going to happen, it's going to be the product of the people most concerned about "AI doom"

2026-10-14 19:11:03 UTC

Nostr: the coolest data sharing platform since TCP/IP, that nobody uses 🙃

2026-10-14 06:23:24 UTC

Silo Season 3 ( Apple #tv ): we to go down a lot of narrative "tunnels" to get here, but it's a mostly satisfying end that takes us somewhere around the 2nd and 3rd novel of the trilogy.
A new element from the books is making the explicit connection to billionaire apocalyptic paranoia, which feels timely...

2026-10-12 20:03:33 UTC

Oh yeah and "double clicking" on "Post" button makes two posts
#nevent1q…vtx8
#nevent1q…pzka

2026-10-12 20:02:08 UTC

#amethyst Desktop finally starting to look up! A few little issues (on Fedora):
1. Still defaulting to nsec.app for bunkers... That relay's been offline for better part of this year?
2. Clicking "Today" dropdown in Notification tab instantly crashes app
3. would be great to have more / easier keyboard navigation?

2026-10-12 20:02:06 UTC

2026-10-11 17:49:56 UTC

Buncha Buzzkills.... 🙄
Man vs. ‘Terminator’-Like Robot in a Cage. California Called It Illegal. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/technology/human-robot-cage-fights-california-rek.html

2026-10-10 04:12:03 UTC

New #mst3k / #rifftrax colab makes "the trades" (it's really good too) https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/mystery-science-theater-3000-rifftrax-behind-the-scenes-1236906179/

2026-10-09 23:23:17 UTC

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And a "nearby chat" option, like Bitchat. Voice over Bluetooth, limited to ~20 m or whatever.

2026-10-09 23:20:16 UTC

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"Many AI insiders" are Ketamine-snorting Peptide-injecting weirdos

2026-10-09 13:56:42 UTC

Can't fall back asleep thoughts: the worst part about the contemporary AI discourse is how much we've removed human "agency" from the picture.
AI is just this "thing" that's "going to happen", somehow being magically independent of the human individuals and institutions that gave it form and instructions.
You have Agency. Use it.

2026-10-09 04:45:33 UTC

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Yeah if the intention is to be a desktop client, you should think about utilizing a reasonable screen width... central column for feed, left column for different "functions", right column for "whatever"... That's basically the format of Jumble or Ditto.
One thing I'd really like to see that I have yet to see in a Desktop client yet is Amethyst's feed model, where it's sort of "everything" which is all your follows + your lists + hashtag follows, Just follows and lists, just follows, etc. No other desktop client does that.

2026-10-09 01:20:10 UTC

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Is there a reason why it doesn't use the full screen width on desktop?

2026-10-09 01:16:38 UTC

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Good thing you didn't pull out your piece and flash it around 😆

2026-10-08 21:54:25 UTC

Ooh I'm watching
#nevent1q…fa25

2026-10-08 21:02:10 UTC

Still have no idea what the "bookmark" icon does in @npub17fe…nzuc... It certainly doesn't seem to actually add the page to my bookmarks or anything?

2026-10-08 19:51:25 UTC

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Bromance back!! 😍

2026-10-08 18:54:49 UTC

Take the high ground...
#nevent1q…4zrw

2026-10-08 03:36:14 UTC

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Post generated by AI? 😁
but seriously, the bottleneck is now and will remain for a while, actually testing ideas in the real world. Very little science is actually limited by "do you have a good hypothesis to test?", it's limited by a wide array of financial and institutional bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Chatbots don't solve that.

2026-10-08 02:39:42 UTC

New #southpark : Billionaires, penis finger puppets, and a pretty good deepfake of Trump on the toilet

2026-10-06 19:57:49 UTC

We touch on the idea of post-scarcity economics here... "Star Trek" is basically the model for "how people live" here.
Although color me highly skeptical that current generation AI gets us there....
#nevent1q…vjeq

2026-10-06 14:30:19 UTC

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But it's all KYC'ed.... Right?

2026-10-05 19:31:25 UTC

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Ugh this twerp is still getting a platform 🙄

2026-10-05 05:31:29 UTC

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The final episode has a standoff between Gardner and Stewart and I thought "great, finally, here's a chance for some actual green lantern action", but no... just some more weepy emo country to take us out of Season 1.

2026-10-05 05:31:04 UTC

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By the end though, it just felt like "a very special episode of Friday night lights" every week... I kept thinking, OK can *someone* summon a big green fist or something?
They even got Nathan Fillion, whose swaggering Guy Gardner was used to great effect in James Gunn's *Superman*, but here just glowers and grumbles through his few lines.

2026-10-05 05:26:48 UTC

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This take on the story is much quieter and more contemplative... but the first ~ half of the season or so manages to balance the small-town drama with the "cosmic alien intrigue" plot

2026-10-05 05:22:22 UTC

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Some background: Big fan of the Geoff Johns run of the (Green/Yellow/Red/etc) Lantern mythos in the comics, and on universal recommendation I avoided the Ryan Reynolds vehicle...

2026-10-05 05:20:17 UTC

Season 1 of HBO's "Lanterns" had some interesting ideas and setpieces but ultimately can't stick the landing, thoughts in comments

2026-10-05 05:11:27 UTC

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Yeah the first few episodes I thought struck the right balance between "small town drama" and "cosmic alien espionage", but I really wanted to see things shift more in the latter direction by the finale. Instead the last few episodes swung too hard in the other direction.
By the end it felt like "a very special Friday Night Lights."
I mean c'mon we needed at least *one* big flashy green construct action sequence.

2026-10-04 19:14:54 UTC

Highly recommend this essay about the Effective Altruists, their history and various schisms, linking it up to the Coxon "whistleblower" revelations of the other week.
I adopted an extropian / transhumanist mindset early on, but spent the rest of my life hence surrounded by people both personally and professionally who had no idea what those words meant (and largely didn't care).
Reading the stuff now about what's been brewing in Berkeley backyard garden parties for the past few years, makes me wonder if I'd be weirded out to actually be in a room with a bunch of people who share my professed philosophical outlook...
https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse

2026-10-01 16:01:47 UTC

"No beardos, no weirdos, no wimps" -- best right-wing brainfart since "it's a pmandemic, it's a scamdemic, it's a damndemic"

2026-10-01 14:25:50 UTC

GM, "Musk" and "You Can See Everything" is the Doc double-feature I'm excited for

2026-09-30 21:07:40 UTC

Oh i 'member this from *Brazil*...
#nevent1q…60ng

2026-09-30 18:52:29 UTC

The fact that certain websites list "Compatible Browsers" is a failure of open standards

2026-09-29 02:28:48 UTC

everyone's doing the "9 games" quick and I'm like "damn I posted that like a year ago but thanks to Nostr it's gone" 🤪

2026-09-29 02:25:17 UTC

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Yes... and this needs not just advances in robotics, but really starts to call to question the entire scientific apparatus as it currently exists in the Western world.
Who "does" science and why? What are their incentives and the economic inputs and outputs of the process?
Science (of anything really breakthrough) generally doesn't have an immediate application or economic value, so .... replacing Physics grad students by robots accomplishes what, exactly?

2026-09-29 01:19:13 UTC

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Now THIS is... Podracing??

2026-09-28 18:40:08 UTC

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Yeah I'm confused because supposedly the "open sourced" it? But then there's also evidence that (say) Catturd gets 10x the engagement of the NY Times, so... someone or something must be putting a hand on the scale...

2026-09-27 17:32:08 UTC

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specifically
1. Reporter's attempt at a poetic "it's a cold and rainy day and especially for this person.."
2. The puckish expression of the scofflaw's mug
3. "Elvis Presley Way"
4. Old Man on the Scene: "No sir, I don't like it one bit."
5. What she stole: 10 packs of Ramen and some assorted clothing items

2026-09-27 17:22:10 UTC

Everything about this story is hilarious https://youtube.com/watch?v=FPqLPz8laOw

2026-09-27 16:53:33 UTC

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Permanent Underclass bro 🤜

2026-09-27 14:54:53 UTC

"If we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we *will* be able to stop me" 🤣
https://youtu.be/-Nvne3LzBls

2026-09-27 13:55:09 UTC

The story of a Totally Real SF polycule 🤭https://rawandferal.substack.com/p/norman-polycule

2026-09-27 13:52:51 UTC

https://amplesa.substack.com/p/ai-for-bio-doesnt-need-more-data

2026-09-26 17:20:45 UTC

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But this is a special edition right? Every Attack from Mars I've seen in the wild just has the standard plastic toys for the saucer, aliens, etc...
But I agree that the interactive video screen is an idea that hasn't been pursued much in modern pins...

2026-09-26 03:15:09 UTC

Hey look guys it's Actual Censorship
#nevent1q…tnqp

2026-09-25 20:05:40 UTC

Still struggling to find an AI doomer scenario that doesn't fit into the categories of (a) what a motivated group of human beings couldn't just do on their own, or (b) something that couldn't be easily noticed and shut down *long* before it got anywhere close to "destroy humanity."

2026-09-24 17:07:29 UTC

Sometimes the current carries you down the river. Other days you wind up in a big placid lake and you think "OK what now"?

2026-09-24 16:47:15 UTC

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NewsBot in particular I use all the time, great product... A shame that it doesn't work on #ditto :(

2026-09-23 22:37:12 UTC

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Very good insight. LLMs don't have thumbs, they aren't interacting with a screen like humans are.

2026-09-23 22:35:26 UTC

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I think the demise of terrestrial radio laid waste to a lot of the "genre" categories like adult contemporary...
I guess that genre is really just "stuff you can play in waiting rooms"?

2026-09-23 16:32:53 UTC

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Jumble fork, can't do lists. Will consider if there's absolutely nothing else.

2026-09-23 16:31:04 UTC

OK with both Nostria and Coracle having significant maintenance issues, there go my daily driver web/desktop clients... Any recommendations for alternatives?
*Must have* List support -- so no Jumble or its many forks, no Iris, Ditto, etc. Anything out there?

2026-09-22 19:21:30 UTC

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There's always some tranche of the elderly population that's "just hanging on", and (my guess) temperature shifts in either direction produce physiological changes, particularly in sleep / appetite cycles, that just pushes the ball over the hill.

2026-09-22 16:40:48 UTC

Why we don't have microbes that (say) chew up plastic, or any number of other useful things (hint: it's dumb laws):
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/all-the-microbes-you-cant-have

2026-09-21 17:19:35 UTC

hey @nprofile…d403 and @nprofile…nldy both @nprofile…9w76 and Coracle seem to be failing SSL...
with Nostria I've been frequently getting a cloudflare "SSL handshake failed" or "web app failed",
and on Coracle my browser (Brave) shows a red X "Not secure" (even though it says "certificate is valid" so not sure what's going on there.

2026-09-21 17:16:49 UTC

"AI accelerates cybersecurity risks" <-- entirely reasonable take
"AI could actually wipe out humanity" <-- delusion of the Silicon Valley Doomsday cult, that are increasingly being taken at face value by the mainstream

2026-09-20 19:20:20 UTC

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Which is absurd, especially for Nostr, because we aren't nearly at the scale where that's a viable business plan.

2026-09-20 19:08:24 UTC

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That's absurd. There isn't enough arable land. And even if there was, you would get into stuff like, who's going to manufacture pharmaceuticals, smelt iron ore to make ball bearings for your car, what happens when you need a tooth filling, etc.
100% self-sufficiency (at a standard of living anything like one which allows us to argue on Nostr) is an absurd idea, which is why it only exists in post-apocalyptic science fiction and the fever dreams of billionaires planning their New Zealand "bug out" bunkers.
And "resource sinks"? Cities are and have always been centers of economic activity. In most cases cities actually *subsidize* suburbia, not the reverse: https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/Suburbia-is-subsidised-Here-s-the-math

2026-09-20 18:35:04 UTC

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If "suburbs are worse" than dense urban living, yes, that's my point.
And on the 2nd paragraph IDK if you're somehow seriously arguing that 8.3 billion people can live in a way in which "they know where their food and water come from," which I assume is code for some kind of subsistence or hyper-local farming, but that's utterly absurd.
Pastoral living will only ever work for a tiny percentage of the human population. For the rest, the most healthy and sustainable way is market-based dense housing concentrated around economic opportunity zones.
And IDK what exactly the context for the 1500 number is, but I can name probably 20+ Cities that have had well over that population for 100's if not 1000's of years and still haven't "collapsed."

2026-09-20 18:29:02 UTC

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But then none of that would apply to open source... So it would be pretty absurd.
CA's new age verification law for operating systems, as dumb of an idea that is overall, at least explicitly exempts anything with an open-source license.... So, desktop Linux unaffected.

2026-09-20 18:27:08 UTC

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Yeah IMO that's very different from "the suburbs", people who actually live in isolated areas become much more self-sufficient by necessity.
Suburbanites still mostly participate in some form of urban life, they just have to drive everywhere to do it... There's just the absurdity of having to own a 2-ton vehicle just to get a gallon of milk.

2026-09-20 18:24:41 UTC

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So the suburbs are "progress"?
I don't understand what part of "human fluorishing" is being utterly dependent on a 2-ton box just to get a gallon of milk.
I get that previous eras were resource-constrained relative to today, but living in an envrionment where you can walk (or at least bike) to areas with culture and commerce has been shown again and again to be healthy for human development and flourishing.
"Concentrated living" is the natural market outgrowth of supply and demand, and the only reason we don't have more of it in the US is the result of decades of exclusionary zoning policies, mostly in service of racial exclusion.

2026-09-20 17:27:33 UTC

Because of some life changes I've (temporarily) gone from living in a dense urban envrionment to a very suburban place.
It's placid, and tranquil, and yadda yadda... But the thing that gets me that I realize is weird about it, is just how far from commercial spaces you are. I lived most of my life in places where I could walk no more than ~10 minutes to a place where I could buy basic essentials, maybe not a complete grocery trip but at least milk, toiletries, etc.
Here the nearest grocery store is a 1/2 hour walk, a 10-minute bike ride, or "fuck you" by public transit.
And I'm sorry, but that's *strange*. For 1000's of years people lived in places where they could walk to the market, or at least *some* form of commercial activity.
Apparently this is the *desired* outcome, the "good life", for millions (perhaps billions) of people, which is baffling to me.

2026-09-20 17:07:37 UTC

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Actually, a bit worse... They wanted to basically duplicate the 1950's regulatory regime for nuclear energy and weapons.

2026-09-20 17:05:45 UTC

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TBH it feels a bit like the run-up to the Iraq war, complete with the NYT fearmongering.... but when you look to the source of those fears you go "hmm... self-interested motivation much?"
What's scary about this is it's getting across bipartisan lines, because the center-left is very well-primed for exactly this kind of pseudo-scientific "precautionary principle" fearmongering as a pretext for State action.

2026-09-20 16:31:12 UTC

Just read a big, dumb NYT Sunday op-ed section full of big, dumb "warnings" about how AI's going to "kill us all."
Their editorial solution (in unsigned editorial)? Of course it's not even a *law*, which would require them to actually define what software programs people can run, but rather some giant new regulatory superstructure. 😑

2026-09-20 16:28:10 UTC

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Yeah I've come to appreciate it much more now than in the initial few months after its release... It's a fun, flowy game once you recalibrate for the odd lower flipper / danger room arrangement.

2026-09-20 15:45:46 UTC

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Oh I figured OS X were the newer releases? It was called Mac OS first, technically...

2026-09-19 19:00:07 UTC

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Never played Baywatch or Street Fighter, always wanted to find one of those in the wild!

2026-09-19 18:04:36 UTC

Saving this here because for some reason this was impossible to search for... anyway, best "anti-doomer" take I've read. https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/destroying-the-world-is-a-difficult

2026-09-19 16:44:50 UTC

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https://nostr.download/b034d020f3d267201ed9be1ce799730040d9f0e986e792847855a34151d0745c.webp

2026-09-19 16:43:58 UTC

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sooo it's a link to an X post that links to another X post...
heckuva job, brownie

2026-09-19 16:04:32 UTC

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Only know about that show as it was a frequent source of riffing reference material in MST3K, along with a lot of other 70s and 80s TV...

2026-09-18 22:29:12 UTC

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Both people who have created a lot of value for a lot of people and yet seem to be asshole crypto-fascists

2026-09-18 17:10:13 UTC

ASML's massive Moat against its competitors is a direct result of the decades of (highly unprofitable) R&D investments made over the decades, through a variety of private and public institutions.
The lack of institutions that are capable of doing this today (outside of certain narrowly defined verticals like pharmaceuticals) is "why we don't have flying cars", to quote the vernacular.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/asml-snubs-elon-musk-backed-particle-accelerator-chipmaking-tech-firm-doubles-down-on-1-000w-laser-produced-plasma-systems-for-chipmaking-tools

2026-09-18 16:31:22 UTC

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The unsustainable economics of AI will cause a crash, regulation or no