David Crawford

@SawyerMerritt Is this how you charge it?

@joulee Astrology doesn’t attempt any of this. It can’t possibly be an accurate explanation of real phenomena, because it doesn’t try to be

@joulee You can claim that astrology is false based on its method. How was the knowledge arrived at? Are alternative explanations considered based on evidence? Is there an explanation of the mechanism (how do stars impact personality)? Are failures of prediction used to improve?

Weirdly, there is no way to argue that astrology is false. Like any religion, the best you can say is that it isn’t true for you. You cannot claim this for anyone else.

@joulee They would make predictions and check if they were correct. If not, they would try to understand why and improve the ability to make predictions.

@joulee Imagine a scientist attempting to develop a theory of Astrology, what would they do? They would track a cohort of children, measure their personalities. Maybe observe premies that were born with one sign but their due date was another, which do they seem to have? C sections?

Announcing a career exploration summer program for high school students: *Progress in Medicine* Learn from experts and be inspired by heroic work from the past to build an even better future. Now accepting applications

My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto has concluded, and you can read the whole thing online. I’m pleased to announce that the series will be revised for publication as a book from @mitpress (expected early 2027)! newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/the-techno-h…

Iran was behind Hamas Iran was behind Hezbollah Saying Israel attacked Iran is historically illiterate and morally corrupt. Iran had promised to wipe Israel out and used genocidal proxies to attack Israel and its allies for years. Israel decided enough was enough.

@seantalts Interested! Send details?

long shot but selling my 2br 2ba in Boerum Hill Brooklyn! hmu if interested

It's hard to find information that all the world's top scientists and doctors have missed. But it's not that hard, if you're intelligent, thoughtful, and diligent, to find information that the medical system has not yet caught up to—information that is not yet incorporated into broadly distributed medical guidelines followed by the vast majority of doctors. It takes decades, sometimes, for information to propagate through the system: from the moment it is known to a few top experts, to the time it becomes established best practice. The reasons are a combination of bureaucracy, politics, and normal delays in science and in communication. So I think this cartoon is simplistic. Yes, many people should have more respect for experts. But also, beware automatically deferring to authorities or assuming that their recommendations reflect top expertise.

Pro-Hamas mob protests at the Nova festival exhibit in NYC - an exhibit dedicated to bearing witness to the 1400+ innocents slaughtered, raped & kidnapped by Hamas on Oct 7. This mob blames the victims for Hamas' war crimes (see chant quoted below). This is pure evil & nihilism.

Generally I think it is admirable how based the Iranian diaspora community are, and how strongly they are opposed to the Iranian theocratic regime. I dream of a time when the Palestinian diaspora will be just as strongly opposed to Hamas as Iranians are to the IRGC.

@GergelyOrosz @abarrallen I think @matt_levine has it right (bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… , paywalled). Contractually, the board controls OpenAI, but the employees have the talent, the investors have the money, and the board has neither, so they have no leverage.

@abarrallen It’s a nonprofit organization. To go public, it would need to become a for-profit. Perhaps it’s time for OpenAI to admit what we all see: that it’s a foe-profit company, and get rid of the nonprofit shell, and the confusion + drama coming with it? From newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-open…

I actually wish OpenAI would go public soon as it will likely become one of the biggest companies ever created & the public should be able to join in the upside :)

@elanjourno @CommonSense @paramountplus Maybe they always give parents a preview of whether shows have political themes, but for historical fiction it seems misapplied

@CommonSense @paramountplus 2/2 If anything the book/show isn't nearly critical enough of communism, which is irredeemably evil (like Nazism). Is the warning to appease parents likely to be triggered by the anti-communism of the show/book? Who are they? Am I reading this the wrong way?

1/2 The @CommonSense preview of #AGentlemanInMoscow " on @paramountplus has this weird note: "despite the fact that it doesn't focus specifically on politics, some viewers may consider [it] to be an anti-communist tale."

that gas stove issue was a real flash in the pan

How is this man being selected as the CEO of OpenAI, however briefly, when he is still groping in the dark, struggling to understand even the most basic of concepts behind his own civilization? Has it never occurred to him to wonder why hunter-gatherer societies don't have a concept of personal land ownership, but agricultural societies do? All of the human technology stack is based upon investment. Not merely in the modern, financial, sense, but the investment of effort. If I am a protohuman, using a stone as a pounding tool, I do not care if you take my stone. I will simply pick up another stone. But if I chip my stone into a spearhead, then I will not let you take my spearhead, because that would take away the effort I have invested. From the moment humans gained the ability to build and farm, land became something they could invest effort in. And land ownership became necessary so they would do that. All of the bullshit ya'll think is so important: governments, laws, philosophical principles about rights, etc... these are all just tools, possible means of protecting investment. It doesn't matter what set of tools you use, so long as they work and investments are protected. If a man can be certain his investments will not be taken away from him by parasites, thieves, and robbers, he will invest. If he is certain that they will, he will not invest. And without that investment, you have nothing. You are literally a wild animal, living as wild animals do. If you don't want that, you need the concept of property. It doesn't matter where you say it "comes from", whether that be god(s), "natural" rights, abstract philosophical concepts, whatever. And it doesn't matter how you enforce it, whether it be laws, police, and courts, armed property owners, a high-society where people are conditioned not to steal, or all of the above. What matters is that somehow, some way, people get to keep and benefit from what they invest in. Because the alternative is universally unacceptable to us: reversion to a non-technological state of existence.

Constantly impressed by the developer-focus of the product development here. Ability to package the viewer into your own web apps is huge here, as well as SDK parity across three languages. Great work!

The year: 2008. The problem: Oakland has too many guns! The solution: Offer $250 for every gun turned in to the police, no questions asked. Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

Introducing Rerun 0.10! This release includes the long awaited C++ SDK. The ability to log streams of multimodal data from C++ and visualize them in Rerun has been our most requested feature, and it was not an easy path to get here (story below 👇) Blog: rerun.io/blog/cpp-sdk

The upcoming 0.9 release will be a big one! We’re revamping our apis to be more powerful and consistent across languages (C++ is coming in 0.10). On first glance, the change seems small but it opens up for a lot more control and extensibility. Check it out 👇