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The Silicon Game
Track Prompt I d like to do a parody of the Rolling Stone s Sympathy for the Devil, but making the protagonist the Unabomber and having the lyrics reflect that A.I. is going to undermine future human cognitive ability. Venue is suno.com. I d like the vibe to be something close to Rolling Stones but merged with this Continue reading The Silicon Game
Be Conservative in What You Send, Liberal in What You Receive
A one-sheet on posture toward the people around you The principle, and its known failure Jon Postel wrote it for computers talking to each other: send strictly correct output, accept anything you can reasonably interpret. It let a fragile early internet work despite everyone s software being slightly wrong. Engineers later turned against it. Broken implementations Continue reading Be Conservative…
The Room That Can Tell You the Truth
On why making things requires other people, and what kind of people, and how A nine-year-old writes a rap for a rap battle. She s rapping about turtles. Her sister is rapping about dogs. She wants to read her rap to the family but she s embarrassed — they might laugh. Her mom reads both raps aloud Continue reading The Room That Can Tell You the Truth
KPop Demon Hunters: Where the Voice Learned to Talk
On KPop Demon Hunters and the limits of self-acceptance In KPop Demon Hunters, a girl group called HUNTR/X plays sold-out stadiums by day and holds a magic barrier against demons by night. Their leader, Rumi, is hiding that she is half demon herself. The film is smarter about shame than almost anything else made for Continue reading KPop Demon Hunters: Where the Voice Learned to Talk
Somebody Who Already Knows
You can tell when someone in a room is about to cry. Not from anything they ve said. Something in the breathing, a stillness that arrived a beat too early, the angle at which they re holding their face. You knew before you knew you knew. There are books about this — acting manuals, clinical guides, shelves Continue reading Somebody Who Already Knows
Grief: The Empty Chair and the Mirror Box
Someone told me that a classmate of his died partway through the year, in middle school. What he remembers, decades later, is that no one sat in the boy s lunch chair. That s the whole memory. Not the boy — the chair. Nobody decided this. No teacher announced a mourning period, no group of twelve-year-olds voted Continue reading Grief: The Empty Chair and the Mirror Box
Swamp Thing by The Chameleons
The Byline Is Not a Bond
Rule 436(g) was a four-line exemption. It said that when a nationally recognized rating agency s rating appeared in a securities registration statement, that rating did not count as an expert opinion under Sections 7 and 11 of the Securities Act — so the agency never had to consent to being named, and could not be Continue reading The Byline Is Not a Bond
Sunscreen Application
How much do you need? How often should you reapply? The short answer: about two tablespoons, every two hours. For stick sunscreen, that’s four passes back and forth. For sprays, until your skin glistens. Make sure you rub it in fully — yes, even for sticks and sprays, and even if the directions say otherwise. As Continue reading Sunscreen Application
The Difference Between Being Tested and Being Watched
In the autumn of 1998, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management lost roughly $4.6 billion in about four months and had to be unwound by a consortium of banks assembled at the Federal Reserve s request, for fear its collapse would take the rest of Wall Street down with it. The fund s principals included two Continue reading The Difference Between Being Tested and Being Watched
The Experiment Hanson Didn’t Know He Ran
In Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog s Clothing, Robin Hanson asked three LLMs to score how much status, social skills, and judgment matter for influence across five domains. Judgment came back higher than his argument wanted. So he asked again. The second prompt told the models to focus on who is selected or is influential Continue reading The Experiment Hanson Didn t Know He Ran
The Friction and the Fortress
Why good innovations mint new elites — and how to tell the dangerous cases from the merely disruptive Every year something like forty thousand Americans die on the roads. The strongest large-scale data we have — from driverless fleets logging hundreds of millions of miles — suggests that within the limited areas where they operate, Continue reading The Friction and the Fortress
U.S. Farm Wages: The Decomposition Nobody Has Run
The wage floor for American farmwork fell by a third. Two different things could have caused that, one defensible and one not, and no one has separated them. In late summer 2025 the USDA discontinued the Farm Labor Survey, the instrument that measured what American farmworkers earn and set the wage floor for the H-2A Continue reading U.S. Farm Wages: The Decomposition Nobody Has Run