TESCREAL is structurally an evangelical a-theist religion descended from the 19th century Russian Orthodox christianity of Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorov and in my new book I will—

Hannu Rajaniemi beat us all to the punch all the way back in 2010, didn’t he? The Sobornost are exactly who the Rationalists want to be when they grow up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief

There’s something about how these weird ideologies grow and how people get trapped in them that reminds me of oncogenesis.

When a cancer forms, cell lines experience a typical progression where a lineage accumulates mutations which aren’t that bad individually, but combine in the aggregate to cause havoc. The cells close themselves off from outside communication and lose all capacity for repairing genomic damage or heeding signals to slow out-of-control growth. Environmental factors like pollution and ionizing radiation can predictably push otherwise benign cells in that direction; the same cancer can develop in thousands or millions of people independently via convergent shit-evolution.

It rhymes, doesn’t it?

This has worked out so well for trains.

As a side note, it’s inevitable that you’re going to end up explaining all of this on all of my favorite disaster-adjacent podcasts one day

Tired: Propaganda of the deed

Wired: Propaganda of the Sneer

Also, cognitive dysentery

If only Tombstone were here to help

Stands to reason

Tired: Sand Hill Road

Wired: Treacle Mine Road

This would be a fantastic hook for a scifi novel

What if America built a Death Star, but it was 50% exhaust ports by surface area?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/how-the-eu-could-target-us-big-tech-with-its-tariff-response.html

The Dominic Cummings we have at home

We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as it’s told well.

How would you first approach explaining this shit past “it can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong”?

This is the question of the moment, isn’t it?

I have no answers, but i can say thanks for being a light in the dumbness.

OpenNutrition – a dataset an LLM that allows you to play “vibe nutritionist”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43569190

First response is good quality:

This is not a dataset. This is an insult to the very idea of data. This is the most anti-scientific post I have ever seen voted to the top of HN. Truth about the world is not derived from three LLMs stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat.

Financial Times agrees with this analysis

https://archive.is/6JGEI

Those tariff rates, and especially the targets, were 100% pooped out by grok.

Yakshaven

Lots of politics outlets have been linking his recent work. He’s done a great job documenting the consequences (and gravity) of the ongoing grant apocalypse for the AAAS journal Science. I’ve loved him for years for being the FOOF guy.

OK hear me out: they make a new season of Hell Girl, but she only gets people who use gen ai

On the bright side, Derek Lowe has also escaped containment, which is nice