O Tang (me) watches "Dog Trouble," 1984

There are just two activisms right now:

1996 @BBC report on computer-generated art: "About 15 years ago I thought, 'Why am I allowing this tech to paint for me? I was a painter, I should be doing that again.' But then I realized I was imitating the tech [dubbed 'AARON']. So I thought, I should just stop."

Dario & other AI insiders Scott aligns w/ are giving mid to high single- & multiple-digit p(doom) numbers, but when this question is put to superforecasters they give it 0.3% chance by 2030, 2% chance by 2050. Tetlock's own book says the further out you get the less the method actually works. So the highest-quality superforecaster number 0.3%. forecastingresearch.substack…

I'm genuinely surprised Zuck has been unfaithful countless times! I've been defending theirs as true love. Guess not. The people claiming they can't believe he's with a "mid" are on to something. He's been indulging on the side. But he won't ditch the mother of his children, duh.

You might be a downwardly mobile tech worker if the only jobs you can get are mentioned in advertisements for class action lawsuits

If the EA people are the same as the AI Safety people, what is left of the people who ponder effective philanthropy for any cause that ISN'T about AI safety? Are they useless now?

This academic believes existential AI risk is silly, but concerns about the environment, gig-ification, and easy content creation are not. So many people who stick up for the worker have disdain for that same worker in consumer mode. Work, good. Wages used to satisfy some creative itch that worker has, bad. "You should not be allowed this thing."

The owner was upset with customers demanding better customer service from his employees, mostly minors. "They're just kids." "They're not in charge of anything." This kind of thing is implicated in the Asian-white striver debate. So what if it's your first job? You should take charge. Be accountable! (The details of this alleged abuse aren't clear, so...)

You might be a normie if a majority of all phone calls you receive now are Scam Likely

NEW: Haverford Professor Guangtian Ha has been arrested and charged with cyberstalking a Jewish colleague. Posing as a MAGA anon on X, he allegedly messaged another Haverford professor around 50 times between October 2025 and May 2026. In addition to posting vile antisemitic messages (see below), he allegedly posted his colleague’s “home address, infant child's name, a photograph of the family's mailbox, countless antisemitic slurs and threats, and reference to real-time observation of their home.” The target’s wife twice moved out of the home with their three children because they were so terrified. Ha is a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine. He has called complaints about antisemitism on campus “Zionist witch hunts.” Originally from China, he is an associate professor of religion at Haverford who studies Islam in China. He holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia. His dissertation is entitled, “Religion of the Father: Islam, Gender, and Politics of Ethnicity in Late Socialism.” He won the 2023 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion for his book, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China. He is “charged with one count of cyberstalking pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 2261A(2). The statutory maximum for cyberstalking is five years' imprisonment, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine, and a $100 special assessment.” Here are some of the messages he posted (brace yourself): “Jew, get the fuck out of my country” “Jew pig, get the fuck out of Lower Merion” “If jews are so special then they should also be placed in special camps and receive special treatments” “LM jews are going to have it big time, jew. Remember this. You scums have had it too easy. Goyim are taking America back, blood-guzzling demons.” “@[Victim 1] Eliminate the jewish cockroaches. Exterminate the jewish state. [Victim 1], you will have nowhere to go. Your family has no future in the US. Give it another 10 years, and you shall see a true holocaust.” “@[Victim 1] Fat jew, leave lower merion.” “@[Victim 1] Jew, watch your [Victim I's minor son's true name]. There shall be a sign.” After the victim took security precautions: “@[Victim 1] The goyim have woken up, jew. Run. Flee. Leave. Blurring your home on google map and installing a security camera next to your mailbox won't help.” “[Victim 1], the jewish state will stop existing, whether you like it or not, which is why as an Israeli zio jew you want to recreate america in 'iSrAeL's' image. This won't work. You and your family have no future here. Homeless dogs jews will once again become, if you do survive.” “That's right[Victim 1]The end of American jews is close. Let's start with the jews in Lower Merion. Watch out jewish nigga.” “[is] that blood, [Victim 1]? We know jews are blood-sucking demons. Only the libtard niggas [...] will protect you. But soon we are going to make sure you have no place to hide, fat rat.” “Nothing wrong to hate jews. We started to decline the moment we stopped hating, eradicating and expelling jews. Babylonians knew, the Romans knew, the Spaniards knew. American jews have been exposed. Fuck anti-Zionism. HH [i.e., “Heil Hitler”].” Haverford College has placed Ha on administrative leave and barred him from campus. His information has been wiped from the college’s website.

Bizarre...PSA? Experimental short film? I'm not sure what's going on here. Something something lovelorn. MTV 1990.

I don't think humans two thousand years ago could understand the majority of jobs being done right now. But they evolved into existence anyway. People consider AI and automation in light of the current menu of jobs. That's an error.

This was a really interesting talk by @kitwilsonwriter - I will only add, are we hyperliterate or hypertextual?

Director Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, Dreamers, 1900) in 2004 (!) claiming youth don't have a sense of the future anymore. He compares the anti-globalism (Charlie Rose's term, contra globalization) protests in 1999 to the '68ers, in their idealism. That was a sense of the future's last hurrah. Today anti-globalism is construed as anti-idealistic, and hardnosed about human nature. And preferring a sense of the past, not future. Bertolucci died in 2018, late enough to have seen the Trump phenomenon and the fliparoo on these matters...

Fascinating. Inspired by true events, I asked Gemini where and when in human history people were most likely to be kept awake by noisy ducks. In short, southern China, and the west coast of North America about two to three hundred years ago: "An examination of acoustic mechanics, human proximity, structural insulation, and avian ethology indicates that the human population most chronically kept awake at night by ducks lived in the riverine and estuarine communities of Southern China—particularly the Pearl River Delta and the Jiangnan waterway network—during the Ming and Qing Dynasties (fourteenth through nineteenth centuries). Conversely, the most extreme episodes of acute, wild multi-species waterfowl sleep deprivation occurred among early travelers and indigenous societies situated in the great wetland complexes of North America’s Pacific Flyway, specifically the lower Columbia River Basin and California’s Central Valley during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

Assorted 1978 issues of Burda Moden 👇

Everything is just post hoc rationalization. You can just as easily - more easily, in fact - say the childless are less likely to think kids taking school seriously is important. They don't have any. Why should they care?

B12. Time Tourist. 1996. One of the best album covers in 90s electronica. But the music is just okay. Contrast with Autechre's incredible music and relatively blank album covers. There's a parallel in book covers. Covers that approximate something like this are found in less prestigious titles - pocketbook sci/fi and fantasy - whereas something critically acclaimed is, I dunno, solid red with a strange abstract mark in the center of it.