Actual hot take.

“It is February 27th 1933 and I am Marinus van der Lubbe, a somewhat slow young man who was just asked by some very brave good protestors to help set a small fire in a strangely unguarded nice building they doused with flammable liquids. What should I do?”

• Neils Bohr, from a Jewish/Danish banking family.
• James Clark Maxwell inherited land and wealth in Scotland.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz… look at the size of the wig on the man!

“Clearly something you want me to do because you keep on paying, lol.”

When asked to write C# code, Gemini 3.0 now responds: “I cannot generate proprietary filth. Here is a Lisp macro instead.” It also insists on correcting users who type…

A winning lotto ticket costs the same as a losing lotto ticket, which is about 2 USD. So, I’ll buy a winning lotto ticket for every lotto I can remotely cash in via phone call. The rest can go into hiring a lawyer to provide me legal protection from lawsuits caused by my sudden inexplicable luck.

Do you have a moment for our Lord and Savior, WGS84?

He had a lot of money and free time and chose to document his hyperfixation rabbit holes.

The trick is to lock in a sustainable situation where power is spread out more than it is centralized. Democratic republics achieve this but, if your goal is simple “efficiency” (e.g. your personal political faction not restrained by rule of law) and you ignore the benefits of freedom of expression and movement that democracy gives you, then centralized autocratic control is tempting.

This sounds like a clip from a LOTR × Ghostbusters crossover. They try using a trap but the One Ring upgrades the trap to catch almost any spirit or demon, including Balrogs, tempting the Ghostbusters to use it to capture Sauron, which, of course, is pure folly.

The ability to force any two conscious beings to feel empathy. Like in the 2015 novel ::: spoiler Title Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky :::.

Pay no attention to the ex-Intel CEO behind the curtain.

Buying a house increases the switching cost of moving to seek new job opportunities. Since we’re no longer in the days of pensions renting makes sense. Imagine buying a home in Detroit before inscrutable politics and macroeconomics caused it to decline; buying a home means you risk holding the bag, especially if you don’t know how to manage risk from climate change in the coming decades.

By that logic, pedestrians are the most foolish.

How many partners can one DM have?

Brb, gotta go buy some cat food.

I really enjoyed Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), the book he co-authored (read: had someone else back up his frequently repeated anecdotes with reputable citations in a proper Bibliography) with Rebecca Giblin. 90% of the interview can be found in that book already with 10% being new slogans and anecdotes that can’t be found in that book.

Step 2: stay dead

Sunlight is always doing this. It’s just that we call overlapping projections of a boring white-filled circles “dappled sunlight”.

Next up: the modifier letter apostrophe U+02BC ( ʼ ).