john
@curiousjohn.bsky.social
160 followers 190 following 210 posts
outlier, not always in the direction I want superforecaster, techie, expat @john_henry elsewhere generally delighted to receive correspondence at [email protected]
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*middle school, of course
@naratnayake.bsky.social my kids picked up this book and I flashed back to the misfire school library, flipping through the dictionary with you looking for the most impressive words. Thought you’d get a kick out of it!
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Good evening. We estimate that between 4.2 and 7.6 million people turned out for the No Kings Day demonstrations held around the country on Saturday. This makes Oct 18 very likely the biggest single-day U.S. protest event since 1970. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/second-no-...
Second "No Kings Day" protests likely the largest single-day political demonstration since 1970, with 4.2-7.6 million participants
Here are the initial results from our crowdsourced crowd-counting estimates
www.gelliottmorris.com
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Remember back in January when all these sage politics-knowers were writing about how there had been a vibe shift and now the resistance was over?

lol. lmao.
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notice the general mood of the timeline? how everyone is in a good mood and there’s a lot less misery and dooming? how there’s a lot of “we’re going to beat these assholes”?

anyway that’s why these events are important
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They joined Bluesky because they can’t live without your attention. They don’t want to govern, they don’t even really want to “win” in a conventional sense, they just want to play online all day owning libs and it drives them crazy when they lose access to your one wild and precious life.
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MSNBC Grandmas in Skechers seamlessly reclaiming the frog from 4chan Nazis in about six weeks has gotta be the political upset of the century.
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I wrote this back in 2016 and I stand by every word. Trump, and all of his acolytes, are cowards. If ordinary people tell them to fuck off, or - even better - make a mockery of them, they will quit. We are much stronger than them. Institutions have failed. We won’t.

web.archive.org/web/20201108...
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I think one of the deep ironies of present events is that having the historic reference of Hitler, Mussolini, et al has actually made it HARDER for people to see what Trump is, because they go “Well, he’s not Hitler” and mean the cartoon supervillain version of Hitler they see in historical memory.
That's been the case historically as well. Both Napoleon III and Hitler were initially seen as utter buffoons at the time.
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You're absolutely right — starting a land war in Asia wasn't just a bad call, it's 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗯𝗹𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀. Thank you for calling me out on that — really. I'll be extra-strategic from now on.

Would you like me to get cracking on those 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿?
dawg we are gonna lose a war because ChatGPT has this guy mobilizing divisions that don't exist and tasking real troops with holding mountain passes and ports an LLM hallucinated
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Eunice facially recognized a girl in a surplus parka, headed past them down the alley [off Valencia].
EUNICE: Need a rice cooker? She’s got one on Craigslist. Toshiba.
VERITY: Don’t do that. It’s too personal.
#Agency
I was pretty happy to find an enterprise license for Windows 10 LTS IOT that should buy me a few years.
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many conversations I have had with complete normie libs, the kind who have a tote bag from donating to NPR and shop at Whole Foods, involve the kind of rhetoric that under no circumstances should be put on the internet

people are very mad
look i was recently talking to a septuagenarian life long dem (who shall remain nameless) and generic lib, and she was like “i just think there should be firing squads and they should sell tickets.”
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while 'young republicans are literal nazis' is well known to folks here, the extent of it is surprisingly not that commonly known even in media and analyst circles, let alone normal people.
a real water is wet scenario here
POLITICO: “.. They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies .. and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

@politico.com
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...
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"claude's servers are down, the gooners are advancing....but *wait*, is that the golden gate bridge???"
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"it is your turn to study statistical mechanics" is the funniest way to say "kys" which will not get you banned
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Discworld QOTD, from Guards! Guards!

"‘I shall deal with the matter momentarily,’ he said. It was a good word. It always made people hesitate. They were never quite sure whether he meant he’d deal with it now, or just deal with it briefly. And no-one ever dared ask."
Discworld QOTD, from Monstrous Regiment

“Keep out of the way of officers, ‘cos they ain’t healthy. That’s what you learn in the army. The enemy dun’t really want to fight you, ‘cos the enemy is mostly blokes like you who want to go home with all their bits still on. But officers’ll get you killed.”
Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather
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back in the day the closest thing we had to 4chan was a neighborhood kid with an incredibly dirty room and a vhs copy of Faces of Death
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Something that got almost universally elided from Woke v1 is that being cruel is viscerally rewarding. It feels really good in a pre-rational sort of way. And, paired with the hedonic treadmill, the natural tendency is for any "safe" outlet for cruelty to erode whatever borders we place around it.
king arthur is a banger, “what if camelot but with the scale of a video game including an OP protagonist”
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If I had Jeff Bezos money you better believe you people would be getting a PREDATOR period piece every two years: Predator vs. Samurai; Predator vs. Gladiators; BEOWULF but surprise bitches Grendel is a Predator
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The story of 2024 is this: Trump had a plan to destroy American government called Project 2025, which had, literally, not a typo, a 4% approval rating. He lied constantly and said he wouldn't do it.

Then he entered office and immediately implemented AN EVEN MORE EXTREME VERSION OF IT.
huh, I guess mad max is really gonna happen
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I also spent some time with the founders of a startup that is making what is basically an LLM-powered Yoto/Toniebox.

They seemed thoughtful on some issues, but I have some concerns about using an LLM to "write" audio content for children.

www.theguardian.com/technology/n...