My mistake has been trying to explain what "fascism" is to people who don't care what it is.

So I'm going to try something else. Let's do this as a practical thought exercise.

If America *were* fascist *today* - what would you have to do differently in your daily life? /1

De voorbije dagen en weken regende het meldingen van drones boven het Belgische grondgebied. Niet alleen de drones zelf, maar ook de maatschappelijke reactie en impact ervan moeten ons zorgen baren. Een 🧵-je.

"I have a decent fluency in LLMs, and they have utility, but the absurd degree of over-hype, the way they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."

These people simultaneously claim they're building "superintelligence" and that "chatbots shouldn't say shit that is factually wrong or flagrantly unethical" is an insurmountable technical challenge.

Is it hard? Yeah, but maybe if you suck at your job you shouldn't do it in the first place.

Rusland wordt zwaar gesanctioneerd, Israël (opnieuw) niet. Het Westen hanteert hier een dubbele standaard. Dat gaat als een boemerang in ons gezicht terugkomen…

Deliberation degraded into partisan theatre. Parliamentary debates became soundbites. Public consultation became tick-box exercises. The time and space needed to reason together was consumed by spin, spectacle, and zero-sum framing.

Great question. “From the ground up” doesn’t mean bypassing politics, it means rebuilding the conditions that make democratic politics work in the first place.
A quick thread on how I see the road ahead 🧵

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

A very old Soviet joke, from an especially dark time:

Foxes are fleeing the USSR in droves.
Q: Why are you running away?
Fox: The Soviets passed a new law that they’re going to arrest all camels.
Q: But you’re foxes!
Fox: Yeah, why don’t *you* try proving to the NKVD that you’re not a camel.

/2 It doesn’t matter in the slightest that these not actually be gang members, any more than it matters that not everybody charged with a crime did it. The state dictating who is The Other, and it being an article of faith, is the point.

If I could fire one fashy apologist, fake intellectual, famous-for-no-coherent-reason podcaster into the sun lex fridman would be high atop my list

In many countries we're seeing voters that have never known anything other than stability and a certain level of competence voting for anti- system candidates because they have convinced themselves of two things: things right now are awful; change will only be for the better.

So yes, the LLM is a great tool for this kind of task. It checks the right buttons:

+Talking in plain English is useful.

+Trying out what the LLM suggests, to make sure it's right is easy and safe.

But notice the consequences on skill development. I think we can't ignore that in the long run.

This excellent interactive tutorial on misleading data visualizations explores the idea of a "counter chart" — the graph you draw in response to refute a misleading claims

flowingdata.com/projects/dis...

1/ Let's talk about rule of law versus rule by law.

Rule of law is the legal system that applies in democratic states, and is foundational to democracy. It holds that the law is the supreme authority to which everyone, including government officials, is subject.

... if you don't have anyone in your life to teach you "dryers have exhaust vents" or "portable generators produce deadly levels of carbon monoxide in minutes," you might never learn until it's too late.

If you know this stuff, that's great. But, it's a nation of 300 million people...

This was "is it 1am already?" levels of fun.

3. Watching this crowd gloat over Laura Helmuth's departure from Scientific American, I'm struck by how Catholic theologian John Haught described fundamentalism: an inability to abide nuance and ambiguity; an inability to accept multiple answers, explanations, or layers of meaning.

If you're curious why everybody's username is a domain, it's because every user is essentially a website