domain:mattlakeman.org
GoofyGoose
9m ago
FATF delenda est
pigeonburger
13m ago
People can point to a consensus that already exists, and no one is going to object, but building a consensus is smuggling your controversial opinions in the shared, uncontroversial context of a post hoping they will evade scrutiny. Well executed it's a great propaganda tool, but in a forum where people are expected to lay out their opinions clearly for debate, it's dishonest and counterproductive, as if someone spots the smuggled opinion and cares to debate it honestly, they will need to have you unwind that argument back to that assumption, which wastes everyone's time. It also, as Primaprimaprima mentions, feels very hostile and unwelcoming when you have it done to you.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
21m ago
Pre-car urban design is indeed quite different from post-car urban design. The US had walkable "streetcar suburbs" in the early 20th century. Most middle class and above people left them with great haste once car based suburbs were invented and they degenerated into slums.
My area has several streetcar suburbs; some still aren't slums and they others didn't become slums until the civil riots riots. The ones which are slums the ones which are still "walkable", though buses have replaced the streetcars. You have your main street with all the businesses you might need -- your check-cashing place, your bodega, even a bakery and a nail salon. But of course most people who would call themselves YIMBYs don't want to live there.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
24m ago
I think Scott raised a very valid point on Antichrist ID 101: They're supposed to have "Antichrist" literally spelled out on their forehead.
Where was this?
I've never disliked a Tarkovsky movie, although Solaris was a little cheesy. He actually knew how to make an art house film, and is one of the few who saves the genre for me.
I'd recommend watching 8 1/2 as another good art house starter film if you haven't
hanikrummihundursvin
31m ago
Accounting for cost, rail is out of the question. Which is why the city has been organizing the future around buses.
The problem is less getting to a store, and more getting to and from work. Because there is not enough parking space you have increased foot-traffic during rush hour around the area, as people who park in the vicinity need to get to their cars. That's compounding an already worsening state of traffic year over year.
laptop-class, bullshit email jobs these giant companies seem to employ in droves.
I hear this complaint a lot but I work in a microcosm of a corporate environment with around 200 employees that directs billions of dollars in spending that is almost entirely composed of "laptop class" people and while I understand the incredulousness of onlookers it's very hard to tell which of the email senders and data enterers could in actuality be replaced without catastrophic consequences. If this wasn't the case then some group or another would have already raided the department and gotten rid of all of them so that they could show 10% reduced costs on some corporate slide deck and ascend the payscale. These things are much more darwinian than outsiders believe.
This is very obvious with AI entering the picture and the various departments looking around at eachother with hunger in their eyes. Do we really need this many pricing analysts? Can our underwriting be done more efficiently? Surely we can get a closing document for a $150 million deal done in under a week of labor. I promise you that you are not the first person to wonder if some job really needs to exist. Someone with skin in the game is fighting ever budget season for that job to exist and there are real stakes.
The starbucks email job sounds so frivilous until a whole region of shops doesn't get their bean delivery and can't sell their most profitable drink for a week costing the company millions because some process wasn't followed properly.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
54m ago
Just cracked open Verner Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. The hook was he has fun insights on how a civilization deals with software that's thousands of years old.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
59m ago
Neat. And I'll be sure to remind my city council that the Connestoga villages they built for the homeless aren't code compliant.
problem_redditor
1hr ago
I don't think the chemical plant was disused, rather it was emitting waste into the water and it's not implausible that it emitted fumes as well. Apparently the crew were getting allergic reactions on their faces as well during production.
Admittedly this is based on a statement by the sound designer Vladimir Sharun, and it's not quite clear how supported his claim is. But it's a thing that's been weaved into the mythology of the movie.
Indeed, finally all those Classics lessons paying off. I knew one day they'd come in useful. Perhaps in a different life I'd have read Greats at Balliol, but in this one at least I still get to use the bits and bobs I've picked up from here and there.
Jiro
1hr ago
A conversation leaked by someone who doesn't like Thiel won't be a representative sample of what he says. It'll be disproportionately likely to sound bad and accordingly, the fact that it reminds you of a speech by a demon should lead you to update much less than if his speeches typically sound like they are made by demons.
Also, beware fuctional evidence.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
If the defense industries can't function without Chinese support then they're useless and should be destroyed.
You're actually completely correct here, and the failure to actually do this is one of the reasons that the USA is experiencing so many problems due to obscenely bloated military budgets, corrupt government and deeply corrupt procurement practices.
What were they planning to do if war with China ever came?
They either underestimated the Chinese and believed the world would stay the same as it was forever, or they simply assumed that they would have left the country and already made their fortune by the time their shitty decisions came home to roost. It sounds like an incredibly stupid and shortsighted decision, but military corruption doesn't go away even when you're several years into an active conflict - see https://news.liga.net/en/all/news/sbi-officer-sent-to-spin-shawarma-in-pokrovskyi-district-instead-of-service for a recent case.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
Any tool has its uses. LLMs are pretty useful as a first brush with a topic type question. It’s a good jumping off point for the start of a project, but it’s not going to do it all for you.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
but you gave me a chance to show off so of course I'm going to take it.
It is a good way to distinguish yourself from the hoi polloi after all.
Jiro
1hr ago
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Since he said it in private, it's inherently not going to include caveats and explanations that let you understand it, so you should grant a lot more charity to interpret it than you would anything said in public, like 99% of the cases of "punch a Nazi". This is doubly so if it was selected specifically because it sounds bad (and it was), because that ruins your priors.
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People won't give a pass for punching Nazis because punching Nazis is an act which can be done by a vigilante or a mob. Thiel isn't going to be doing anything to the Antichrist.
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As others have pointed out here, your interpretation is wrong. He did not actually mean what you think he meant.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1hr ago
Working Class (SC Marva Collins Book 2) by Nathan Lowell.
Jiro
1hr ago
Ironically, since not being allowed to diversify is a bad thing, you need to pay people extra money for them to be willing to take a job which doesn't let them diversify, which means that that would raise CEO salaries.
wqnm
1hr ago
their conquest is repeatedly thwarted by a mighty wizard armed with terrifying magic, AKA the gun nut whose land the portal opens on to. This movie is like if Sauron got a portal to the ranch of some guntuber and the host of Mordor got its ass blown off by a grumpy army vet.
I'd point out that this general concept has in fact already been done before, to cinematic perfection, in the film Tremors.
The pan to the back wall may be one of the greatest comedy shots in movie history.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
No, because transit by nature sucks.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1hr ago
As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?
From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.
When Moldbug calls you weird, that is saying something,
And as someone (I think it may have been later SSC poster John Schilling) pointed out in a long-ago argument on Usenet, it's possible that Petrov may have made war more likely -- now every time things are all quiet, there's always the lurking possibility in the leadership's minds: "Are things really peaceful, or is there really a missile launch and another Petrov-wannabe in the radar center is playing games with our inbound data feed?" Soviet leadership knew, or should have known, that military hardware can be flaky, but raising the possibility that the underlings can be lying is not a method likely to lower upper-level paranoia...
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