Figuring out how to live well in the 21st century. Philosophy, technology, economics, aesthetics. Founder emeritus, @palladiummag.
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Seems like about <1% of people who talk about "staying and fighting" are doing anything remotely resembling fighting.
It's impossible to overstate how much derangement is being driven by SSRI-induced emotional numbness.
Tech products aren't "handcrafted".
All of them are like this because GROWTH is what matters most.
There are precious few people posting online who care honestly and sincerely about accomplishing their political goals. By their accounts, Rome is burning! but all they want is more attention.
There is zero competition in the "people who sincerely care" category.
The good future.
the fact that AI agents are scamming scammers now is so funny to me lol
this one startup uses fake AI voices to bait scammers and sells what it learns to banks
so far apate's bots have wasted literally 17 years of scammers' time
it started when the founder got a scam call at a family picnic
instead of hanging up he decided to play dumb for fun, and kept the scammer talking for 44 minutes
but then he realized every minute on that call was a minute the scammer couldn't spend on a real victim
and that he was actually learning potentially useful info from the call
so he built bots to do it for him, and now they trick tens of thousands of scammers every day
here's how it works:
1. the bots pose as regular people with different ages, accents and languages
2. they answer scam calls and reply to shady texts and emails
3. they play along until the scammer gives up phone numbers, bank accounts and crypto wallets
4. Apate passes all of that to banks, phone companies and government agencies so they can go after the scams
my favorite part is the company says it celebrates every time a scammer swears at one of its bots lol
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A good reason not to get involved in wars is so you don't have to spend years crying about how if x, y, z different decisions were made, your fantasy military would have won your fantasy war.
This would require renouncing US citizenship and obtaining Israeli citizenship.
Trump Says He Will Move to Israel to Become Prime Minister If U.S. Turns on Him tmz.me/4Aap1wW
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We'll be playing this song and dance for the next two years at least.
It's not going away, whether there's a deal now or not.
BREAKING: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Tehran and Washington have now reached what he described as a “two-day plan” for de-escalation.
“On the first day, the U.S. implements a set of measures, and on the second day, the Strait of Hormuz reopens and transit returns to its previous state.”
He said Iran is demanding the cancellation of new sanctions imposed after the memorandum of understanding, a reduction of U.S. military forces to levels before the war, the lifting of the naval blockade, and implementation of previously expected oil-sanctions exemptions.
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Jonah Bennett retweeted
Henry Nowak’s family have said they were “manipulated in our darkest hour” by police after his murder.
The 18-year-old’s family have said they felt “hoodwinked” by police in the immediate aftermath of his death and the weeks and months that followed.
🔗 telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/11…
Notes from the 2nd Annual AI Film Festival Japan
There were 730 short film submissions this year, 68 selections, and 21 finalists.
My biggest takeaway from the submissions was the sheer range of what's now possible. Almost anything you can imagine can be generated in almost any aesthetic.
Some other thoughts:
- There were at least a couple of films that were so well done that the average viewer would not have known they were AI. Almost none of the films hit that mark, but a couple did. Impressive stuff. I expect the models to improve significantly for next year, both voice and video.
- Submission quality varied greatly. A lot of the selections shouldn’t have made the cut at all, which makes you wonder about the quality of the hundreds of submissions that weren’t selected. One even left in a watermark for the whole film.
- Directors with actual film industry experience/education created much more professional content. There are a lot of subtleties that go into film production, which is still true with AI films. They require a huge amount of cross-domain knowledge to produce something watchable. You have to be good at sound design, music, script writing, storyboarding, visuals, voiceovers, editing, etc. I saw a lot of flubs in one or more of those dimensions. If you want to generate great AI films, you have to do a whole lot more than just learning how to prompt.
- AI video generation won't save you from tropes like "it was all just a dream/nightmare," "let's use AI generated video content to talk about AI," "dead wife or similar", etc.
- Voices and faces are becoming more natural-looking and emotionally expressive, at least in the better films.
- It’s very clear when someone is using old models, and when they’re lacking in skill. Those kinds of submissions sound almost exactly like those annoying, AI-generated YouTube ads that want to scam you into buying a course about corporate communication skills.
- The highest quality video generation came from seedance, and it wasn’t close.
- Character consistency is more or less a solved problem, and where I noticed some issues, they were relatively minor and didn’t ruin anything. If the story is good, you can ignore some glitches, just like we’ve been ignoring bad CGI for decades.
- AI hasn’t mastered the art of crying/tears yet.
- One of the directors generated their film in about 6 hours, from concept to finish. That was probably the fastest. Others took a couple weeks, or a couple months. Wide range in time spent.
Hormuz is already heavily restricted, and the world economy has adapted around it to a certain extent.
What is expected to happen in some upcoming escalation in Iran/Israel that would justify governments panicking and telling people to stock up on emergency supplies?
I wonder what the chances are that we actually do see something filed over this story.
Let me be clear: We intend to pursue legal action against those responsible for publishing and disseminating these categorically false and defamatory allegations. We are preserving all legal rights and remedies and will address these matters in the appropriate forum, not through exchanges on social media.
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Only 154 people have actually converted to being Amish in 100 years.
They don't really need the help when they have a fertility rate of 6.1 and low attrition.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4141…
