Digest | March/April/May/June 2026
It’s been a mediocre time in my life. Some sort of god should come and breathe life back into it.
Old SSC again, on the virtue of silence. Feels autistic to say but I’m always annoyed when (and it is often) telling the truth is not the same as helping people believe the truth. More old SSC about types of arguments. Oks writing regularly is going to be fantastic, he tells the tale of the tellers. It goes with this old SSC about technological unemployment. I do sometimes worry we’ll run out of novel thoughts to have. Searching for God in San Francisco.
DFW in the house for lobsters. I want a wife.
PLA on AI. Very slightly relatedly the Naxalite Maoist insurgency has been declared over. Nothing really happened but India has declared victory. Maybe hope for LA being a place where public transit is nice. The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. History of Eugenics in the US.
Emotion concepts paper blog post. I’m probably above-average concerned about how good our alignment situation is, good post on how these models seem misaligned. I’ve always conceptually believed in x-risk and in the last few years I’ve significantly updated down on the probability of extinction but now that we’re closer to the end I have many moments where I think “ah damn, guess we’re all going to die”. OPD post from Thinky. Midjourney finally announced their machine. I love that company a lot, we should be comparing ourselves to MJ a lot more at Anthropic.
Extremely cool lady who was a Chinese pirate. She is probably the most successful pirate ever, also she married her son There’s a weird secret pattern in your skin. Christian version of the EAs who donate all their money. Beetle that sprays hot(!) acid. Australia’s attempts at killing cats. It’s unclear to me why the murder-instinct in cats hasn’t been bred out yet, maybe we find it cute.
Illumine Lingao (Vol 1)
Gosh how do I describe this. It’s a Chinese sci-fi webseries. It’s HPMOR for the CCP. It’s in many ways, non-fiction. It’s perhaps the best guide for taking over the world in any context (including the fascism you often need to do that). It has something for everyone, whether you want engineering, medicine, guns, history, antiques, hebephilia or kidnapping. The only thing it doesn’t really have is good literary value, which might be because I’m reading the English translation. It’s also not a character-centric work, but
Illumine Lingao (临高启明, lín gāo qǐ míng) is about a bunch of guys who find a wormhole into the Ming Dynasty and decide to go there permanently to take over the world, avoid the century of humiliation, etc. It’s an easy read with a lot of info dumps that are really well-researched and cover all sorts of preparation they have to deal with to achieve this. The tsru
Thanks to the decadent, backward U.S.A., he had spent years handling countless famous and obscure firearms, even participating in the construction of a Nordenfelt machine gun and a Napoleonic 12-pounder bronze cannon.
I have printed copies of volume one and two, and I plan to do three but I’d have to split it into 3A and 3B due to physical limitations of book binding. The series is 5.4 million words now.
The Last Man Takes LSD
I think of myself as bad at forming political opinions, though I think people who claim to have formed real opinions are usually worse and having real political opinions is difficult and rare.
Foucault seems overfit to Iran and the French Revolution with his dismissal of revolutionary program and support of martyrdom, or maybe I just disagree with him there. It seems tough to have been a frenchman raised on tales of Napoleon and the revolution and have seen their country fold immediately to the Nazis and lived through Vichy France. Probably this was an unfortunate situation for the entire French identity.
The aesthetics of existence stuff I quite liked, as well as some of the clarity around the boundaries of being a neoliberal and libertarian. Otherwise I consider him a very fuzzy thinker and I enjoyed the book more as a study of Foucault’s character than as a study of politics.