Not an insignificant fraction probably would be tickled pink if some of their students worked to improve articles about their field. I’m reminder of a quote from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett in which a philosopher named Didactylos warns against defacing scholarly works with scribbles unless the scribbles improve the reader’s ability to understand the work (bold added):

“I’ve got Abraxas’s On Religion,” he said.

“Old ‘Charcoal’ Abraxas,” said Didactylos, suddenly cheerful again. “Struck by lightning fifteen times so far, and still not giving up. You can borrow this one overnight if you want. No scribbling comments in the margins, mind you, unless they’re interesting.”

“This is it!” said Om. “Come on, let’s leave this idiot.”

Brutha unrolled the scroll. There weren’t even any pictures. Crabbed writing filled it, line after line.

“He spent years researching it,” said Didactylos. “Went out into the desert, talked to the small gods. Talked to some of our gods, too. Brave man. He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.”

What’s to stop any malicious merchant from pruning unfavorable reviews? I trust moderated gossip channels with no financial stake in review sentiment over curated marketing advertisements masquerading as “customer reviews”.

Also, Shield Hero and, like, 10% of every isekai anime.

I was expecting them to receive some cash then suffer an instant death.

Neonatal genital herpes isn’t going to spread itself.

I expected circular arrows pointing back towards themselves for many on the diagram.

When asked to write C# code, Gemini 3.0 now responds: “I cannot generate proprietary filth. Here is a Lisp macro instead.” It also insists on correcting users who type…

Make the tax on properties you don’t personally inhabit a percentage of unrealized capital gains of all assets. Limit untaxed property size to an area the median person reporting for jury duty can circumnavigate on foot within one minute. Is the untaxed property size too small for your preference because the people of your county are too unhealthy? Maybe improve your local healthcare system.

Basically, tie metrics coupled with the well-being of the median citizen with taxes on the wealthy. Eventually, the metrics will be framed or rigged by a corrupt charlatan or strongman (e.g. by exiling the sick and homeless), but to the extent that the laws are updated and enforced, people will be healthier.

Me, after the last person has left the room.

That’s a lot of fabric that needs regular washing.

Just render the page, page renderer.

A winning lotto ticket costs the same as a losing lotto ticket, which is about 2 USD. So, I’ll buy a winning lotto ticket for every lotto I can remotely cash in via phone call. The rest can go into hiring a lawyer to provide me legal protection from lawsuits caused by my sudden inexplicable luck.

Do you have a moment for our Lord and Savior, WGS84?

He had a lot of money and free time and chose to document his hyperfixation rabbit holes.

Prologue: Magic died at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London after a precise photograph of the Moon was recorded, seen, and accepted as reality by the general public. Now, with the emergence of generative AI, diffusion models have loosened the public’s hold on reality, magic, and all the associated rewriting of history, is reëmerging.

No, don’t you see? You’re saying immigrants are basically slaves to capitalism right? Well, why can’t I own slaves? That’s the real problem here. — Racists

I have a public gitweb repository. I am constantly being hit by dumb crawlers that, left to their own devices, request every single diff of every single commit simply because links requesting such operations are presented. All of which are unnecessary if they would only do a simple git pull, then my server would happily provide the 50 MB of the entire git repo history. Instead, they download gigabytes of HTML boilerplate, probably never actually get a full commit history, and probably can’t even use what data they do scrape since they’re just randomly pulling commits in between blocks and bans.

All of this only became an issue around a year ago. Since then, I just accept my public facing static pages are all that’s reliable anymore.

The trick is to lock in a sustainable situation where power is spread out more than it is centralized. Democratic republics achieve this but, if your goal is simple “efficiency” (e.g. your personal political faction not restrained by rule of law) and you ignore the benefits of freedom of expression and movement that democracy gives you, then centralized autocratic control is tempting.

This sounds like a clip from a LOTR × Ghostbusters crossover. They try using a trap but the One Ring upgrades the trap to catch almost any spirit or demon, including Balrogs, tempting the Ghostbusters to use it to capture Sauron, which, of course, is pure folly.

But I just can’t stop.