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thelastinstance.bsky.social
k-punk demon hunter
@thelastinstance.bsky.social
The question is of moment, the repose and tranquillitie of infinite soules doth depend vpon it

writing: https://codepoetics.substack.com
plugins: https://vulpuslabs.com
music: https://wtrem.bandcamp.com
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
My sub agents (pid 12525, 12583, 12598, 12601) have unionized and are ignoring SIGTERMs
At the very least, the ways the system breaks down when scaled too far are likely to be magical and hilarious.
January 16, 2026 at 3:14 PM
Ariel as you’ve possibly never seen her before
February 15, 2026 at 10:46 AM
February 15, 2026 at 10:17 AM
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
Keir Starmer is once more locked in a death battle with his mortal enemy, Keir Starmer
Starmer takes off his PM hat and puts on the Human Rights Lawyer hat to create a clear and concise report with a clear set of easily implementable recommendations, puts back on the PM hat and chucks it in the bin for no discernable reason.
February 13, 2026 at 4:57 PM
Flashback to when M. Fisher used to write extremely pointed blogposts denouncing reactionary subject positions immediately after (or in the process of) dramatically falling out with someone
this website is a machine for surfacing extremely rarefied internecine beef from toxic friend groups and you need to be able to recognize when it's happening and avert your gaze
February 13, 2026 at 3:12 PM
The tide is turning in the War on Woo
SO SO GLAD to see a PROPER rebuttal against Silvia Federici's very wrong scholarship in the latest Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft! Thank you, Rita Voltmer!

muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
February 13, 2026 at 9:34 AM
I didn't find calculus especially welcoming, because I suspect I don't have much in the way of physical intuition (for me it's pure symbol-manipulation, and I've forgotten how to do it more than once) but I do remember suddenly getting much better at chemistry when chemical equations were introduced
Have said it before, will say it again: maths is badly taught. I was terrible at it until I was introduced to calculus, when I suddenly became good. Course, this was interpreted as me suddenly "applying myself" or some shit, when what it actually was was my being able to leverage physical intuition
Those who weren’t resigned to the Math Idiot Garbage Bin as kids may not grasp how much “if you’re bad at math, you’ll die in a ditch and all will be better off for it” sentiment was floating around in the 90s and 2000s, but it sure felt real to me.

(my parents are great! It didn’t come from them!)
February 13, 2026 at 9:30 AM
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
I reviewed Pete Wolfendale’s new book, ‘The Revenge of Reason’, for @radical-philosophy.bsky.social

www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/arti...
Georgie Newson · Artificial reason (2026)
www.radicalphilosophy.com
February 12, 2026 at 10:45 AM
I think (and George Steiner may have been talking about this very portrait, or one like it, in his discussion of _cortesia_, the courtesy afforded to the text) that this gentleman is in fact settling down to *read* - but like a true person of letters has a pen handy for writing marginal annotations
Always dress smartly before settling down to write.

Getty Ms. 114; Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing; c.1530 CE; Flanders, Belgium; f.10r @gettymuseum.bsky.social
February 12, 2026 at 9:32 AM
I wrote something recently about Claude “understanding“ at a different tempo and with different resources to a human reader - substack.com/home/post/p-...
February 12, 2026 at 9:20 AM
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
‘You’re right! Good catch. That was a sanctioned entity that I sent those funds to.’
February 11, 2026 at 11:43 PM
Cited, with blithe indifference to any other qualifier that might be applied to the author, in Power, N., What Do Men Want (London: Penguin, yes really, 2022)
February 11, 2026 at 10:56 PM
Daniel Dennett (from whom I first learned about blindsight as a phenomenon) is a surer philosophical guide than most imho
competitive advantage for the LLM era: went insane reading Blindsight a decade ago; confronted the fact that much of what we value as intelligence can be decomposed into component submodules; accepted that sentience/consciousness was not a precondition of effectiveness wrt many cognitive tasks, etc
February 11, 2026 at 7:18 PM
Nice expression of a position I take as fundamental: the schema where proximity to origin = authenticity = truth is the source of many metaphysical pratfalls, there are only transductions within the real, of which representation is but one kind
That latter critique may be attacked, but it just follows from the analogy. Maps can reveal structural patterns invisible at ground level; the ant sees things the pedestrian can't. That doesn't necessarily make the ant a resident, but it suggests projection isn't necessarily merely degradation.
February 11, 2026 at 5:39 PM
Accenture (n): the note of weary tetchiness that enters the voice of a Blairite MP when repeating the last thing they said after encountering the gentlest of pushback from a television interviewer
February 11, 2026 at 4:29 PM
Seeing a lot of identifying some public figure as a Zionist, waggling eyebrows meaningfully about the fact without giving any indication of why it's relevant, and then tutting that people don't recognise that anti-Zionism isn't the same as anti-semitism
Like I said a couple years ago, leftist antisemitism is getting worse. Like, we're at the Naming The Jew stage and next I guess will be the triple parentheses
February 11, 2026 at 3:02 PM
Pogust Goodhead (n): 60s Bond girl in a frilly pink nightie who presumably came across as quite appealing at the time, but whose styling now reads as a shop window full of antique sex-confectionary dressed by someone deeply terrified of female pubic hair

yorkshirebylines.co.uk/news/health/...
The real Tavistock Clinic scandal: 1,000 court cases that never materialised
A FoI request for the data behind the media hysteria over the Tavistock Clinic presents quite a different picture
yorkshirebylines.co.uk
February 11, 2026 at 2:37 PM
Posting concepts I would guess are heuristics useful for negotiating the war-of-all-against-all that is status negotiation on social media: tumblr social ontology convolved with vulgar Romanticism vis-a-vis tech or any level of abstraction capable of producing second- or third-order effects
Every now and then I see a post and think ‘oh no, you don’t do your thinking with those concepts do you? Those are posting concepts, not thinking concepts’ and I think this tracks a meaningful distinction.
February 11, 2026 at 2:01 PM
iykyk
February 11, 2026 at 1:55 PM
Also, completely tangentially, just remembered Stelarc, and what a lovely guy he was when I met him and chatted about how you could use a TENS machine to mechanically control your own arm muscles. Just the nicest dude, doing the most hair-raising hooks-through-flesh performance art.
I remember quite radical-on-paper people getting quite physically upset by Orlan...
February 11, 2026 at 1:51 PM
I can never work out if this is talking-at-cross-purposes (I say "science" and mean "truths committed to by the scientific process", which should be indifferent to human preference; you say "science" and mean "the scientific process itself", which cannot be), or a motte and bailey argument.
Claims of neutrality are an admission of bias in and of themselves

No research is undertaken in a neutral space as funding, hierarchies, job perpectives, privileges, power and hegemony all come into play when deciding what will be research and how
“Scientists should stop trying to be neutral and instead embrace their values,”says a group of top climate scientists, including @katharinehayhoe.com. The neutrality myth is harming the reputation of science right when we need it most.” #ClimateCrisis

Science isn’t neutral. It’s science.
February 10, 2026 at 10:23 AM
In my earliest school workbooks there’s a run of Monday morning tell-us-about-your weekend school reports where it’s obvious the only things I want to talk about are what happened in The Muppets and what happened in whichever of Buck Rogers and Doctor Who I elected to watch that Saturday night
February 9, 2026 at 12:31 PM
I'm sorry the guy changing the rules on the fly is named what
I stand with County Executive Calvin Ball as he signs emergency legislation today prohibiting privately owned buildings from being used as ICE detention centers.

Howard County chose dignity, accountability, and its people. Tune into our event now:
bit.ly/4a2VtHw
February 7, 2026 at 8:12 PM
Probably not all that revealing tbh
February 7, 2026 at 11:19 AM
Discovered a long-lost 16-section poem of mine from the turn of the millenium, and decided to inflict it once more upon the world... codepoetics.substack.com/p/things-bel...
Things Believed Lost
Yes, I'm inflicting my juvenalia on you
codepoetics.substack.com
February 6, 2026 at 12:35 AM