This is a good point. I consider the above an early draft, with fewer signposts, mostly pointers to the primary sources I'm using, because The Motte can take it. Maybe you might derive other interpretations from the primary sources than what I am getting out of them. The final polished version, read by about 3K people, is here.

A Chinese navy ship collided with a Chinese coast guard vessel while pursuing a Philippines coast guard boat. Subsequently, China claimed to have expelled US warships from “Chinese territorial waters” in the South China Sea.

The link under "claimed" links to a more neutral source, because in this case it remarks:

Beijing has also pushed back what it calls infringement of its airspace and maritime waters by the US and its allies, while the latter claims it flies and sails its military assets in international airspace and waters.

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Transnational Thursday for August 14, 2025

NunoSempere 8mo ago

Yes, I'm quoting Chinese military news

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Transnational Thursday for October 31, 2024

NunoSempere 1yr ago

Why doesn't monkeypox excite you? It could fill in the niche that smallpox previously had.

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Why are we not harder, better, faster, stronger?

NunoSempere 2yr ago

I think military greatness is a red-herring here: I don't think that it's a realistic shot at greatness for readers here. Starting a religion, or a billion-dollar startup, or a social/political movement seems much easier.

Maybe I'm just rehashing 'good times breed weak men, weak men make harsh times'.

Maybe so, but it's a useful handle nonetheless.

Elon Musk and Dominic Cummings are the closest we have to the great men 'type' today, aiming for performance above all else. Elon Musk is widely hated and disliked by the usual suspects in government and acceptable society

I'm not sure about them two. I prefer Peter Thiel as an example. He was:

able to shut down Gawker
able to create several scalable companies: Paypal, Palantir, Founders Fund
able to spread his worldview around, through books, the Thiel Fellowship, etc.
able to make multi-year political plans (endorse Trump, give very high salaries to people who could later run for office, to get around spending limits), even if these didn't work out (Trump doesn't seem to have consulted him for much, his candidates didn't win the elections)

and like, these aren't world-changing, but he's still got time, and he isn't constrained by fickle political winds.

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Why are we not harder, better, faster, stronger?

NunoSempere 2yr ago

Respectfully disagree. Though it's hard to say whether we do disagree in substance. Maybe you think that trying to be maximally ambitious is always misguided, and I'd agree that being misguided + maximally ambitious is not something to be admired? idk.

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Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

NunoSempere 3yr ago

would pay for some of them if not for my desire to be anonymous

Happy to be paid in monero. You can reach out to me at nuno.semperelh@protonmail.com with a burner account.

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Transnational Thursday for April 23, 2026

NunoSempere 15d ago

Some headlines I'm reading:

Geopolitics

Pakistan prepares for Iran-U.S. talks but Tehran's participation unclear

Russia and North Korea connect road bridge ahead of summer opening

Over 181,000 drones, EW systems and other equipment delivered to front via yeBaly in 2026 – Fedorov

China bans dual-use items exports to 7 European entities over Taiwan arms sales

United States

Under sustained pressure from the United States, President Claudia Sheinbaum has doubled down on a “kingpin” approach—military operations, high-profile arrests and extraditions—to decapitate cartel leadership. Her government has extradited nearly 100 suspected cartel members to the US since 2025. Cartels have fragmented and retaliated.

US memo on distillation

Rest of the Americas

Bukele Enforces Life Sentences for 12-Year-Olds in El Salvador Amidst Controversial Security Policies

Europe

Russia could be ready for NATO conflict year after Ukraine, Dutch warn

Middle East

Hezbollah says ceasefire 'meaningless' as fighting continues in south | Reuters

Hundreds of Hezbollah terrorists killed in 24 hours before Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, IDF reveals

Israel, Lebanon to Hold Second Round of Talks in Washington on Thursday

Sudan's Al-Burhan welcomes defection of RSF commander to army – Middle East Monitor

Iran

Iran Fires on 3 Ships in the Strait of Hormuz, Complicating Efforts to Resume US-Iran Talks | Military.com

Witkoff and Kushner headed to Pakistan for Iran talks, White House says | Reuters

Iran launches drone strikes on US military vessels after cargo ship seized near Hormuz

Iran War: US Boards Supertanker Carrying Oil From Iran in the Indian Ocean - Bloomberg

India/Pakistan

Injection culture, syringe reuse, weak enforcement fuelling HIV outbreaks in Pakistan

Africa

Donors pledge 1.5 bn euros as Sudan marks three years of war

Africa: Almost Half of African Countries Battling Measles Outbreaks

Boko Haram threatens to kill 400 women and children if Nigeria refuses £2.7m ransom

Biorisks

Bangladesh measles outbreak kills 194 children

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI now lets teams make custom bots that can do work on their own

Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT) / Project Maven. Transitioning to a formal system of record.

Death by A.I - New "Autonomous Warfare Center" will automate targeted killings

OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro in the API

ChatGPT Images 2.0

I gave an AI persistent memory, self-learning, and earned autonomy

Scaling Codex to Enterprises Worldwide

Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

Discord group says it accessed Claude Mythos by guessing location

Kimi K2.6

Newsom signs executive order requiring AI companies to have safety, privacy guardrails. Order seems pretty meek though.

Amazon will invest $25B in Anthropic, Google $40B

xAI cursor deal

Last week we discovered something unusual: a single person had mass-registered 900+ accounts on our platform using automated email services, then orchestrated them into a distributed AI swarm all running on free-tier credits across 11 platforms

SONY AI | Project Ace, for the first time AI/robotics is competitive against pro table tennis players.

AI hallucinations found in high-profile Wall Street law firm filing

Anthropic told a federal court it can't control its own model once deployed

Google/Sundar Pichai claim: 75% of code at Google is AI-generated

China PLA Navy base report: governing AI use via 'negative list' red lines

Meta deploys employee activity tracking to train AI agents (MCI)

Two thirds of organizations have suffered from a cybersecurity incident related to the deployment of AI agents during the last year, says report

OpenAI new model

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

More tech

DeepSeek v4

Economy

Cursor has given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60B

Meta 10% layoffs

SpaceX Cursor deal

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For less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata

NunoSempere 2mo ago

This seems like a particularly fiery answer given that it's in response to a paraphrase of a religious position, rather than a defense of it.

Btw, do you have a sense of what tradeoffs you'd make between different degrees of kin? How do you think about going to war to protect your extended kin group, but not necessarily your family specifically?

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For less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata

NunoSempere 2mo ago

Heh, with Kant what I mean by readable is more like: I mapped the argument to the Introduction of the Metaphysics of Morals when I was 17 and found I could follow the argument, but ultimately didn't agree with it/thought there were a few steps missing.

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For less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata

NunoSempere 2mo ago

I would highly recommend this paper regarding th Gita https://ia802907.us.archive.org/8/items/gitaandoppenheimer/Gita%20and%20Oppenheimer_text.pdf

Thanks! I didn't know that Oppenheimer had based a bunch of his personal philosophy on it, but it makes sense.

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For less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata

NunoSempere 2mo ago

No! He was boiling it down for his own son, who was presumably pretty smart. And I read it when I was a 17 y.o. lad and honestly did not get that much out of it.

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For less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata

NunoSempere 2mo ago

do what society says you should and must do, or do what is right by the higher truth?

This is an interesting perspective. For me the following also hits deeper: oh, he is just faced with a decision such that he is going to be miserable either way (kill his family and mentors or lose his kingdom and abandon his duty). So then, why choose to be yourself miserable? And in fact you are experiencing similar choices all the time, though at much lower stakes. This had some koan like effect on me.

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For less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata

NunoSempere 2mo ago

Alternatively our man Arjuna had a psychiatric break, thinks Krishna is ordering him to kill his family, and after he wins the story gets retconned :). Assuming the story is at all based on reality.

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 15, 2026

NunoSempere 2mo ago

This would not be a problem in practice unless you are a visible leper, and perhaps not even then.
70K was the requirement to get it fast, but you can just get the permanent one 2y after the temporary one if you decide to stay.

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Transnational Thursday for November 27, 2025

NunoSempere 5mo ago

I am interacting with Paraguayans, which have a simplified and in a sense more rational version of Spanish with consistent verb endings. Despite being landlocked, it does have a navy, which patrols its rivers.

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Tinker Tuesday for November 18, 2025

NunoSempere 5mo ago

The Motte is a pretty good intelligence agency though :), I wonder how we'd do in the case of another covid/world war/civil war/memetic strain/AI bamboozlement/whatever

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Transnational Thursday for November 13, 2025

NunoSempere 5mo ago

The crisis is in the connection to the broader context, for instance, the Houthis might start attacking tankers again if this gets back enough. But probably not.