something very funny about watching the UK. ultimate test of anglo pathological politeness. like a wallace and gromit episode where wallace picks up a hitchhiker, but then the the hitchhiker asks to sleep over, then takes his clothes off and gets into wallace’s bed. wallace keeps

jim simons was one of the last of the breed

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jack nicholson embodied a very specific type of guy that is now extinct

and no i’m not saying i think christianity caused rome’s decline! . and yes im aware byzantium continued for another 1,000 years, but it still lost control of rome itself, at least half the territory controlled at rome’s peak and rome’s hegemony over the mediterranean etc.

> be rome. > pagan people with sexuality 1,000x more permissive than ours. sex cults, orgies and prostitution are common. > exist for 1,000 years, conquering the known world creating the most stable prosperous pre-modern society ever. > make christianity the state religion,.

odd how many people on the christian right say rome’s increasing depravity/immorality over time is what caused its collapse. the roman empire fell within 100 years of christianity becoming the state religion… after 1,000 years of success as pagans.

first industry i’ve seen where it’s just a near total complete victory already, aside from the LLM not being able to prescribe medications or order testing. only caveat is it’s maybe worse for the type of hypochondriac that is desperate for their worries to be validated.

this is just obviously true now. sota LLMs are just better in every way than 99% of non-specialist doctors

to give the X team credit, i like that the parental controls have been lifted and that i can trust X isnt going to give in to pressure from the feds to censor things (at least in the US). also understand the need for X to actually function as a profit making business.

still the best social network by far though. facebook is dead, instagram is basically a dating app, linkedin is nightmare fuel, bluesky is beyond a joke, threads failed and probably wont exist soon.

makes it less interesting to the people you need to keep here to stay relevant and way less conducive to building close ties (still good but much worse than it was). despite increased reach it also makes being here less impactful unless your goal is becoming a slop farmer.

dont think there’s a way X stays culturally relevant long term unless they tweak the algo to get a little of the pre-X balkanization back. really went from feeling like a city where you could visit different neighborhoods with separate cultures, to a monolithic slop firehose.

kind of feels like everyone realized near simultaneously that the norms holding everything together had rotted and dissolved long ago.

*over the last 100 years in the US.

think genZ may be the first young generation that older generations don’t envy at all.

~5% annually is still extremely fast for something like this.

i'm as techno-optimist as they come, but really do think we're better off in a world with steady annual ~5% incremental AI improvements vs constant o3 level step changes. just enough to keep the compute arms race going without triggering a societal instability spiral.

RT @fchollet: Grok 4 is still state-of-the-art on ARC-AGI-2 among frontier models. 15.9% for Grok 4 vs 9.9% for GPT-5. .

wasnt expecting ginger to have an impact at all. didnt believe it at first but i started randomizing on/off days and the link didnt get weaker.

i’ll post pretty charts some day. obviously nothing was placebo controlled, causation is hard to tease out etc but still interesting anecdata and better than nothing.