Meanwhile, on this side of the Pacific, the Trump administration is waging a war against the renewable energy industry... because, um... well, presumably, at the behest of oil and gas lobbyists.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/climate/trump-administrat...

It's one thing to have a backdoor so your engineer can unfreeze someone's phone or fix their smart lights. These are motor vehicles carrying people inside of them on highways.

I think various parties have managed to frame political discourse in America as an us vs. them, ingroup vs. outgroup, purely partisan sport. All that matters to people is that their team scores points and the other team loses points. There are no real principles or foundational beliefs, evidenced by how easily people flip their opinions on issues depending on who's acting on them. Biden using Executive Orders? Bad. Trump using Executive Orders? Good.

It's just a game, and winning the game feels good.

I have to assume they meant Visual Studio licenses, but whoever penned the tweet didn't know there was a difference between VSCode and Visual Studio. I mean, the names and logos do look pretty similar.

I'm generally optimistic for the potential benefits of chatbots to people who are lonely or depressed. But I wouldn't want to just hand over the burden of society's mental health to an unrestricted language model, especially one sold by a profit-motivated business. It would be akin to letting people self-medicate with a cheap and infinite supply of opiates. And that's basically the mental health crisis we are barreling towards.

What's the alternative? Regulation? Does a government or a public health agency need to make a carefully moderated chatbot platform with a focus on addiction-prevention and avoiding real-world harm? Why would people use that when unlimited/unfiltered AI is readily available?

Doesn't Google do that thing where if your team becomes redundant, they don't lay you off, they give you some time to find another team if you choose to transfer?

That almost sounds like a made-up joke, but I guess it's a free government-subsidized pizza dinner.

I received this email yesterday, which I found amusing in a sad way.

Hello, Thank you for booking time with me to discuss your background and opportunities at Microsoft. Unfortunately, I need to cancel our meeting because I will be leaving the company due to changes in our business and reduction in force in Talent Acquisition. I am grateful for my time here and recommend Microsoft to anyone. I wish you all the best in your career and your next opportunity!

It doesn't matter if someone thinks Cantor "breaks the rules", or the square root of -1 "doesn't exist." The (majority of) mathematicians who take those as true have created a wealth of rigorous, interesting, and worthwhile results built on top of these concepts. I vehemently believe mathematics is more "abstract thought experiments" than "discoveries of universal truth".

It tricks people into (temporarily) thinking that it is real. For a brief moment, your brain has to work out that it's too absurd to be real.

The Onion actually recently submitted a hilarious satirical amicus brief to the Supreme Court for the case Novak v. City of Parma [1] that made a splash in legal Twitter, for a case where a man who was arrested for making a parody Facebook page of his local police department. The amicus brief is itself a parody, an irreverent joke that has been submitted as a sincere legal document. (Thanks to LegalEagle for making a video on this [2]).

The entire point of the amicus brief is an argument that labeling a parody as a parody destroys the point of the parody. The four arguments:

I. Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real

II. Because Parody Mimics "The Real Thing," It Has The Unique Capacity To Critique The Real Thing

III. A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody

IV. It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face

It seemed a bit relevant to this. It's pending certiori and might go ignored, but the Supreme Court could rule that parody is protected under the first amendment, which would make Twitter an opponent of actual free speech (the legislative definition, not the new internet definition).

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxTWonQvXkw

I've noticed that one article which was marked for deletion on Wikipedia is marked as "hooray survived deletionism" on deletionpedia, but only got changed to a redirect after a lot of data was deleted.

https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship

Imagine if a polarizing figure, who you and many other people strongly dislike and whose vision for your company is openly controversial, were going to take over your company in the near future. How could the company function? It seems almost a foregone conclusion that there will be (a small proportion of) passionate and disgruntled employees who will go rogue and sabotage and leak and do whatever various subversive things to hurt Twitter before they resign.

The problem would be that you probably wouldn't want to exclude the page from the results in case people expect to find it. Did the page get ranked above other more relevant pages that had the quoted term more prominently? If it did, you're right, that should probably be a stronger signal.

It does work. In the past when I mentioned it, someone provided an apparent counterexample, a search with a term in quotes that wasn't found on the page. When I reported it to the search team, they found that the quoted term was actually in a hidden submenu on the site. So the term was still on the page, but not findable with ctrl-f, except in the source. Try it out and if you find a counterexample, let us all know.