I find it really weird that @DKThomp would block @notjessewalker.

Jesse has his finger on the pulse of America.

Richardson, in case you don't know his work, is one of the great photographers of North American agriculture and the interior west. I love his stuff. These images are here: jimrichardsonphotography.com…

Just stumbled across these terrific Jim Richardson photos of the annual spring prairie burning in Kansas's Flint Hills. Remarkable to think how native peoples set these enormous fires for so many centuries that the ecosystem became totally dependent on them. (Links in reply)

In Washington DC? Join me, @pietergaricano, @Simon__Grimm and some special guests for the launch party for the next issue of Works in Progress this September 30th! Sign up below, and looking forward to seeing you there. luma.com/tyjgicxs

This Republican is running for the Texas Railroad Commission, an immensely powerful regulatory body that oversees the oil and gas industry. Conservatives shld look at the history of California in the 1990s, when Gov. Pete Wilson abd other nativists destroyed the state party out of xenophobia and racism.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking for a … [checks notes] railroad commissioner this is exactly the kind of focus on the relevant issues I’m looking for.

I mean this in the most bipartisan way possible… Texas Republicans need a solid L or two as a wake-up call. The quality of candidates this cycle are bottom of the barrel in quality and substance. I legitimately think a loss would do wonders for the state’s politics.

By embracing the American majority's insistence that we should judge people as individuals based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin There's a landslide waiting for a presidential candidate who credibly and consistently takes that position

Never thought I’d care about a railroad commissioner race enough to not reflexively vote for the Republican, but with one tweet, Bo just ensured I won’t. 75% of UTexas spots are reserved for top-5% students of public Texas high schools. These are Texans.

Literally cites a case FIRE is litigating because he's the partisan hack he pretends the NY Times to be.

Inflation!

One major reason I’m not an AI doomer is that I have a much lower estimate of the direct power of intelligence. This might seem odd, given some of my other content, but let me explain: All the achievements of the human mind only arrive when we cooperate at scale, and involve a lot of iteration and real-world bottlenecks. Newton’s discoveries ultimately enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give Newton the power to fly. If he were isolated, his physics would be almost entirely useless to him. And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an airplane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Powered flight was the result of tons of iteration, which is to say evolutionary computation. So was the car. Very few of the inventions that revolutionized the world were “one-shotted”. To be sure, having smart nodes in your evolutionary computation makes it faster. Rather than random search as in biological evolution, intelligence at least modestly concentrates mutation probabilities towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t magic. Fundamentally, the world is just not that compressible. Golden motes of compressibility are the treasured exceptions in thingspace, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iterative, cooperative, and bottlenecked by the messy incompressibility of physical reality. Doom makes sense in a world with magic. If intelligence *alone* allowed you to move mountains, I would share the worries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved gradually, iteratively, and cooperatively. Pure IQ does not allow you to levitate or hypnotize or teleport. It makes you a better node in the distributed evolutionary process which is the layer where most of the thinking happens. If I were to psychologize, I’d say people who define themselves by their intelligence overestimate the (direct) power of intelligence.

Good lord, how high do these politicians want inflation to be? Trump is lying about the checks but also if he were telling the truth it would be terrible policy.

Good article by @radleybalko

The fact that Raleigh can permit AND build an apartment building before San Francisco can even complete permitting it is such a horrific embarrassment that they should just nuke the entire planning department and start over.

I forgot that this convention was even happening until I opened up this website about 10 minutes ago.