OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn't make it any easier.
I'm so sorry to hear that.
also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus
I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.
I adopted him from the shelter. He’d spent months if not close to a year there and no one wanted him. If I hadn’t adopted him, he would have been put down the next day. That was close to eight years ago. He was antisocial to other people but loved me.
Despite his discomfort, he still came and curled up on my chest in bed for a while last night. I appreciated that.
thanks to you he had 8 more years of life and a much happier existence than any he’d known before he met you. I think that’s remarkable.
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Sorry man, at least his suffering is through
💔
Sorry for you and your cat.
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Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?
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OT: My truck got rear ended today, and then my cat had breathing difficulties when I got home…he’s under oxygen at the university clinic right now and its probably cancer instead of pneumonia. Just feeling totally destroyed rn.
Clinic called back. Its metastasized through his lungs and he’s got months tops. Probably going to be less bc vet said he’s suffering.
Man, that's rough. I know it's not much but I'm sending you positive energy from where I am.
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I'm doing this shitey online optional module for my college course because I left it too late to pick a proper one, and Christ in heaven people are using a lot of AI. This is meant to be a class about sustainability
My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It's absolutely nuts.
in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated
The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT
i have to assume it's only gotten worse
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Any tips on managing the guy-urge to assume good faith? I know what to expect of "contrarian thinkers" but there is always that fish-brain saying "Well, you don't know a lot about the topic. And who knows, the vibes you feel could be wrong and you could even broaden your worldview" (spoilers: it doesn't broaden). So much time and energy wasted by trying to dig nuggets of gold out of piles of dung.
part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.
What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, what’s the agenda here, what’s not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, it’s going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.
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I've joked sometimes that I was lucky in that my childhood reading included more pulp mysteries than pulp science fiction, so my instinct is to think everyone is hiding their agendas by telling half-truths.
"Well, Detective. It looks like this is a house of lies... and wankers."
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update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.
update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users
update update update: actually they didn't do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting
@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 So just making it official that rich white men can commit all the sex crimes they want but those with less privilege might be stopped or face consequences.
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How to neither downplay the death of Renee Good nor the uncountable number of people, mostly people of color, who were murdered by near equally fascist police forces without the public outrage her murder finally rightly elicited? I am tired and yet I feel bad to even complain about it because look at this shit.
There are two things here in my opinion:
- American cops are trained murderers, but they are trained, in particular to avoid causing massive PR disasters with their murders*. A paramilitary goon with a rifle in a government organisation so opaque we still don't even know his identity is materially worse than a cop. It also looks much worse, the police have some completely undue public trust, ICE just looks like military forces.
- We immediatelly had video with the full event. When cops kill people of colour there's usually no evidence since again, they know how to pull murder off without causing PR disasters. Basically the only reason George Floyd's murder wasn't successfully brushed aside is that we had video of it, and they tried to bury that shit hard. In this case I don't even think the victim being white or a citizen matters, the event itself is so fucking horrifying it'd elicit outrage anyway. I am 100% sure that if there wasn't video, just witness reports, it'd be out of the media cycle already.
* I don't want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami's recent words: "For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty". HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn't actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don't need to hide it, they don't need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I'm sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it's proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.
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I know zilch about linux but I think there was some discussion in here about suckless. Well look at what I came across on an honest to god nazi's website*:
*yes, I have reported this site to their web hosting provider.
Lately, I've become more and more concerned that "systemd free" is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier
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SFGATE columnist Drew Magary has decreed "The time has come to declare war on AI", and put out a pretty solid sneer in the process. Bonus points for openly sneering billionaire propaganda service Ground News, too.
got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don't have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?
dear fuck just when I think I’m out urbit pulls me back in
analysis coming soon, I’m reviewing some technical sources provided by a world-class cryptocurrency expert (yes it’s @dgerard@awful.systems) and howdy fuck does this ever resemble the cardano grift but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
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Scott Alexander: "I wish the neoreactionaries dropped the monarchy shit"
Monkey paw curls (content warnings: antisemitism, Yarvin).
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My lack of a Bluesky account spares me again. Thankfully, I have Skyview.social to ensure my eyes are scarred anyway (seriously, do we have to fight another world war over if Nazis are bad or not, it shouldn't take the blood of tens of millions to make that clear)
Also found a nice summary of our current moment in the replies:
(alt: "I am old enough to remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad")
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"They might as well be Latvians" is a straight out of Arrested Development.
Found someone showing some well-founded concern over the state of programming, and decided to share it before heading off to bed:
alt text:
Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
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PSA - https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/ - CA residents can now request data deletion to many adtech data brokers.
new odium symposium episode, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-whos-147209632
this time we looked at gerald schoenewolfe, a "gender centrist" psychoanalyst. lots of discussion of freud in this one
on a side note, we sent off an email hoping to get a podcast network to fund us to do a miniseries on rationalists. i think there's basically no chance this sort of cold call works but 🤞🏼
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David Futurelle of We Hunted the Mammoth fame has started a new project, Brotopians:
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Against my better judgement I got into an argument with a promptfan on Bluesky. To his credit, aside from the usual boring arguments ("models are getting better, and better", "have you tried model xyz", "everyone not using chatbots will be left in the dust" he provided an actual example.
https://github.com/dfed/SafeDI/issues/183 It's a bug that's supposedly easy to test, but hard to reason about. Took the chatbot half an hour while it would take him several (allegedly).
Now, my first thought was: "If a clanker could do it (something that famously can't reason) then it couldn't be that hard to reason about."
But I was curious so I looked. Unfortunately it is an area I'm not familiar with and in a language (Swift) I don't know at all.
Probably should file the claim under "not true or false" and touch grass or something, but it's bugging me.
Any one y'all who could say if there's something interesting in there?
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