Used FF for over a decade, switched to Vivaldi about a month ago. It’s pretty much as the article says, adblocking not as good as FF+uBlock, but it mostly does the job, including YouTube videos. Note the inbuilt adblocker also works on mobile, tho there’s no extension support there. One upside I discovered is that the performance is slightly better at least on my mid-range devices, the web is just built around Chrome-related browsers nowadays unfortunately. It’s a bit feature-bloated for my taste with even an inbuilt browser-game (you can hide it from the menus), but honestly that’s at least cute and more sincere than AI crap.

Wow. Quantum nature of autism confirmed. And people say the slop machines can’t do science…

AI was capitalism all along etc etc

I remember when this guy used to castigate Sam Harris for platforming Charles Murray’s race science. The same guy who now eulogizes Charlie Kirk and does the bidding of billionaires. Really encapsulates the elite pivot to the right.

Aaron Bastani Meets Will MacAskill

🤮

Bastani just laps everything up without any pushback

It’s not wrong, but was there also a good alternative party at the time? AFAIK, the communists were happy to see Weimar burn, hoping it’s them and not the Nazis who would rise from the ashes.

I guess one of the main attractions of Arch is the AUR plus the rolling-release update model. Personally, I’ve had Arch as my daily driver for over 5 years and I haven’t run into any system-breaking issues with updates (there have been small hiccups, like my custom keyboard layout stopping working), which is a better record than I had with for example Ubuntu. But I suppose it’s very dependent on the particular hardware and software one uses and Lenovo laptops are generally well-supported.

Any minimally competent critique of AI would make such bigotry ipso facto meaningless. Note that the cited phrase implicitly accepts the premise of “AIs” as being in the same category of sentient beings as humans by virtue of it being possible to betray the latter for the former, and hence for any genuinely AI-critical person, it makes about as much sense as talking about ‘anti-table bigotry’; it’s just a meaningless configuration of words if one understands what they mean.

Why progressives should care about falling birth rates

2 weeks old, but regardless. The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch wrote a very EA-adjacent article basically making the case for “progressive” eugenics. The studies he cites all derive from a behavior-genetic model of intergenerational value transmission, i.e. conservatism is “in the genes” & progressivism is literally getting bred out of the gene pool.

A masterclass in baiting liberals. Take note, NYT & Atlantic!

Mark Cuban is feeling bullied by Bluesky. He will also have you know that you need to keep aware of the important achievements of your betters, as though he is currently the 5th most blocked user on there, he was indeed once the 4th most blocked user. Perhaps he is just crying out to move up the ranks once more?

It’s really all about Bluesky employees being able to afford their healthcare for Mark you see.

And of course, here’s never-Trumper Anne Applebaum running interference for him. Really an appropriate hotdog-guy-meme moment – as much as I shamelessly sneer at Cuban, I’m genuinely angered by the complete inability of the self-satisfied ‘democracy defender’ set to see their own complicity in perpetuating a permission structure for priviliged white men to feel eternally victimized.

More of a pet peeve than a primal scream, but I wonder what’s with Adam Tooze and his awe of AI. Tooze is a left-wing economic historian who’s generally interesting to listen to (though perhaps in tackling a very wide range of subject matter sometimes missing some depth), but nevertheless seems as AI-pilled as any VC. Most recently came about this bit: Berlin Forum on Global Cooperation 2025 - Keynote Adam Tooze

Anyone who’s used AI seriously knows the LLMs are extraordinary in what they’re able to do … 5 years down the line, this will be even more transformative.

Really, anyone Adam? Are you sure about the techbro pitch there?

well, Zen buddhism

Yeah, this is the Valley after all. Some have used Buddhism as a building block for constructing “metarationality”.

Oh you thought TESCREAL sounded fancy huh? Well I’ll raise you a BIGGER word!