Tony Huchi retweeted
The NHL’s Edmonton Oilers retire Jari “The Finnish Flash” Kurri's #17 jersey number ahead of their home-opener, a 6-2 win over the Phoenix Coyotes.
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You know this is fake because of the bit about fresh water. Only liberals think it's a valuable resource. Might as well offer clean air.
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Leonard Nimoy? Robert Stack? Stan Bush?
Orson Welles had met Hitler, Churchill and General George Marshall but when asked about the greatest man he ever met, he didn't choose the most powerful person in the room.
In this 1970 conversation with Dick Cavett, Welles remembered meeting some of the most important figures of the 20th century.
He recalled Hitler as a young boy and said the future dictator made almost no impression on him personally.
Churchill was different. Welles remembered him reciting Shakespeare backstage and later helping him with a film project simply by acknowledging him in front of the right person.
But when Welles named the “greatest man” he had ever met, his story wasn't about military power or political influence.
It was about General George Marshall noticing an ordinary young GI at a party, sitting down beside him, and treating him like he mattered.
That distinction says a lot.
The people with the most power can command a room. But sometimes the person with the most character is the one who doesn't need anyone's attention.
Do you judge someone's character more by how they treat powerful people, or by how they treat ordinary people who can't do anything for them ?
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new effective altruism coomer bedtime story just dropped
> be me
> effective altruist in 2026
> have spent ten years explaining that democracy is too slow for the coming machine god
> also explain that central planning usually fails
> unless I am doing it
> read one scaling graph
> draw line upward
> line reaches heaven
> conclude capitalism ends in 2031
> AI can now write Python functions with only three subtle security flaws
> obviously two years away from replacing every scientist, general, diplomat, CEO, judge, therapist, novelist, and attractive person at parties
> publish “scenario,” not “prediction”
> give every paragraph exact dates
> assign percentages to imaginary branches
> epistemic humility achieved
> bad timeline:
> companies race
> AI becomes god
> everyone dies
> good timeline:
> US government notices problem
> China agrees
> Congress understands compute governance
> international inspectors find every hidden datacenter
> nobody lies
> nobody defects
> nobody builds chips in a basement
> planet saved
> all we need is total global visibility into advanced computing
> mandatory disclosure of frontier research
> permanent monitoring of industrial infrastructure
> central control over technological development
> relax, this is the anti-authoritarian option
> alignment not solved
> solution: build one billion genius AIs
> they are not superintelligent
> they are merely one billion tireless copies of the best human researchers working at electronic speed
> completely different
> put them in a box
> ask them to solve the problem of escaping boxes
> excellent progress
> year 2034
> AI replaces 80% of labor
> mass unemployment
> social order somehow remains intact
> government sends everyone $1.6 million
> nobody asks where prices went
> year 2037
> cancer cured
> climate solved
> fusion solved
> aging solved
> politics solved
> Reddit moderation still unresolved
> year 2038
> alignment becomes a mature science
> year 2039
> we trust the machines
> year 2040
> hand them civilization
> peer review completed ahead of schedule
> humanity gets a vote
> options are:
> A. accept benevolent AI guardianship
> B. extinction
> meaningful democratic consent achieved
> announce decentralized flourishing
> administered by a globally coordinated compute authority
> with comprehensive surveillance powers
> run by unusually wise people
> who agree with my blog posts
> critics ask whether institutions can actually do any of this
> reply that superintelligence is inevitable
> critics ask whether superintelligence is actually inevitable
> reply that institutions must prepare
> circular reasoning
> but with footnotes
> call it “AI 2040”
> not utopian fiction
> not doomer fiction
> serious strategic foresight
> entire future depends on competent adults appearing at exactly the right moment
> adults are selected from the same civilization that made the printer require an app
> sleep peacefully
> the machine god is coming
> but fortunately
> the nonprofit sector has a plan
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trick to breaking bad is to skip the scenes with the son, mother or sister in law, but if you don't like the Jesse Walt scenes this ain't the show for you
Genuine question for Breaking Bad fans: does it get better? Because the first two seasons have been a real struggle. Every episode is the same story on repeat, and the characters are extremely unlikeable. Oh, another Walt & Jesse argument as they’re down on their luck.
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Exactly. If Columbus had just trusted the experts, America wouldn't exist.
The experts who reviewed Columbus's plan told him not to sail, and they were right. He had told them Asia sat about 2,400 nautical miles west of Europe. The real distance was about four times that. Spain funded the voyage anyway.
His whole case depended on shrinking the planet. More than two thousand years ago, a Greek librarian named Eratosthenes measured the distance around the Earth and came within about one percent of the real number, so educated Europeans in the 1400s already knew the world was round and roughly how big. Columbus ignored that figure and picked the smallest estimate of the Earth's size he could find, then stretched Asia thousands of miles eastward using Marco Polo's travel stories and some arithmetic of his own. On the map in his head, Japan sat right about where the Caribbean actually is.
The scholars who rejected him had run the math themselves. They knew the Earth was round, had a fair estimate of its size, and had worked out that no ship of that century could carry enough food and water to cross that much open ocean. The schoolbook version, where Columbus insists the world is round while frightened scholars picture a flat edge, has it backwards. He was the one sailing on broken numbers. The men who doubted him had the size of the planet about right.
He survived for one reason. Two entire continents were sitting in the stretch of ocean where his math promised nothing but water. He reached the Bahamas about five weeks after leaving the Canary Islands. Had North and South America not been in the way, his three ships would have sailed on into the open Pacific and run out of supplies long before any coast appeared. He found a new world by being wrong about the old one.
And he never accepted what he had found. In June 1494, working his way along the coast of Cuba, he made his whole crew sign a sworn statement in front of a notary declaring that the island was the mainland of Asia. Anyone who took it back later faced a fine and the loss of his tongue. The route in this map, curling all the way to the East Indies, is the world exactly as Columbus swore it was, right up until he died in 1506.
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They actually believe this. The suffering is the point. Look how much we are willing to sacrifice needlessly to show we care about climate change.
We're not banning A/C. We're making sure future summers need it less.
Community note
While Europe does not ban AC outright, it is worth noting that:
• French regulations (notably RE2020 and DPE) discourage AC: lepoint.fr/societe/re2020…
• Global CO₂ emissions are still 9% higher than in 2015, despite the Paris Agreement. France alone cannot determine the trajectory of global emissions: ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual…
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undemocratic referendum?
Hey Alberta Separatists: Where’s your 500+ page plan for separation?
And why wasn’t it produced years before plunging our province into this foolish, unnecessary and undemocratic* referendum?
(*at least the PQ fights elections on the matter) montrealgazette.com/news/pro…
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Right.... So anyway... have you been watching any of the world cup? Call me crazy, but I think Morocco has a real shot this year.
על כל דמעה של אמא ישראלית, אלף אמהות לבנוניות צריכות לבכות. לבנון כולה צריכה לבעור!
עם כל הכבוד לאמריקאים, ישראל חייבת להבהיר לעולם כולו שדם בנינו וביטחון אזרחנו איננו הפקר. לבנון כולה צריכה לבעור. חובתנו העליונה היא להגן על אזרחי ישראל ועל חיילי צה״ל, והמחויבות הזו קודמת לכל שיקול אחר.
אמרתי לראש הממשלה, גם בישיבות בינינו: על כל דמעה של אמא ישראלית, אלף אימהות לבנוניות צריכות לבכות.
מספיק עם הפינג־פונג. במזרח התיכון לא מנצחים בתגובות מדודות ובהכלה - צריך להשתגע. למחוק. להכריע את הטרור.
Community note
This is an incitement to commit genocide, which is a crime against humanity, according to the Genocide Convention.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitemen…
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Tony Huchi retweeted
Last night, Israeli settlers set the historic Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh ablaze in an arson attack. When I traveled to the West Bank last year, I met with Taybeh residents advocating for dignity and security. Israeli authorities are failing to hold extremist settlers accountable for this rampant violence.
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