astroboy's posterior

Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation.

If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making

Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.

The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.

It’s so brave to feel your feelings; some people live their whole lives without being able to do that.
I’m proud of you.

the Pope is the ultimate character witness for seriousness of moral purpose. The message of the visit was simple. We know this technology is consequential. We know there are moral questions here we cannot answer with code. We are taking it seriously enough to seek counsel from the institution that has thought about human dignity longer than any other. We are not reckless. We are humble.

That is the confessional cosplay elevated to its highest theatrical register.

Every significant deployment of mythos shares the same features. It operates in a domain where evidence is unavailable or inconvenient. It names things so the answer is already inside the word. Manifest. Divine. Destiny. Mythos. It requires an inside and an outside, the trusted and the untrusted, the believers and the skeptics. That is not a security policy. That is a priesthood.

https://om.co/2026/06/07/the-myth-the-mythos-and-the-man/

“I thought of the resistless passion which drives men to undertake terrific scrambles. No example can deter them . . . a peak can exercise the same irresistible power of attraction as an abyss.”

– Théophile Gautier, 1868

Every time someone finds out how amazing she is at math I say it’s because she had extra vaccines and tons of fluoride.

The rich pretended it makes you autistic, it doesn’t it makes you smarter. They want their kids to be the ones getting top jobs while poor people are stuck in manual labor.

Smart people know I’m being an ass, antivaxers look startled. Logic isn’t working I figured I’d just try my own disinformation campaign.

1. Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

The rest is commentary.

https://jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/

It is necessary to choose the difficult truth over the easy satisfying one. 

The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication.

https://om.co/2026/05/25/we-are-living-in-pinocchios-world/

When smart people are stuck, it’s usually because they’re looking in the wrong place. Try to figure out what assumption everyone is making, and find the gap.

Larry Ellison currently has a net worth of $220 billion. That’s just short of 9 Iran Wars. But since the start of the war on February 28, his net worth has grown $46 billion. That’s about 2 Iran Wars during the time of the actual Iran War thus far.