David Walker (Shorewalker DMS) 👣

“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.” ― Noam Chomsky #freespeech

Timely for SA's election results: an argument for single-member ranked-choice voting systems like Australia's. "Highly polarising candidates may attract strong first-choice support but often struggle to gain the second or third preferences needed to win." socialeurope.eu/proportional-r…

Once again we see the disgusting ABC/biased right-wing Murdoch media/misleading Nine Network press lying to voters in the run-up to the ... nope, never mind. 😉 abc.net.au/news/elections… 9news.com.au/national/sa-el… antonygreen.com.au/sa2026-south-a…

I was disappointed to see various Internet randos saying they were glad US political evangelist Charlie Kirk was dead. Such behaviour degrades political conduct. Same goes for former US FBI chief Robert Mueller.

#Adelaide, here’s one way to finally make Victoria Square look halfway pleasant. At the moment it’s just a sad bunch of lawns. Bonus effect: Planting Victoria Square would encourage a culture of trees in one of Australia’s most tree-deprived cities.

@itzRex @0xcheddar_ @PamelaBies I've always wondered about this: if the chemtrails are poisoning the plants, why do the big agricultural companies never object?

@0xcheddar_ @PamelaBies then bill gates and chem trails flyover and spray glyphosate on your plants.

Advice to the younger generation: Skip the degree. Buy land. Become a farmer.

@0xcheddar_ @PamelaBies I'm about to live on a rural property, complete with chickens. And I know enough about small-scale farming to know it's a *very* harsh life: huge amounts of work for very thin margins. (BTW, this has nothing to do with the specifics of our financial system.)

@PamelaBies Imagine waking up to this view every morning, no commute to work, walk around feeding the chickens table scraps from last night. water the weed plants.

@0xcheddar_ @SwellGibson @PamelaBies This will work as long as you and the other people who do this don't need to afford equipment, phones, cars, medical care etc. You can still live a 19th-century lifestyle. Just be aware that it's going to be *fully* a 19th-century lifestyle.

@SwellGibson @PamelaBies Perhaps we should stop focusing on efficiency and competitiveness and instead motivate ourselves by providing healthy food for our local communities and families.

Electorally, the smart short-term reaction to rising oil prices is to announce a “gouging” “crackdown” - and trust not that many people will notice there’s no real policy justification for it. It’s still almost certainly bullshit and bad governance, though.

Remarkable thing about Paul Ehrlich is not just how wrong he was but that we was totally unphased and unchastened by his wrongness, just a total epistemic disaster zone — a pattern of conduct that is unfortunately shared by many prominent people from different schools of thought.

Terence Tao explains the math behind today’s LLMs is actually simple. Training and running them mostly uses linear algebra, matrix multiplication, and a bit of calculus, material an undergraduate can handle. We understand how to build and operate these models. The real mystery is why they work so well on some tasks and fail on others, and why we cannot predict that in advance. We lack good rules for forecasting performance across tasks, so progress is largely empirical. A key reason is the nature of real-world data. Pure noise is well understood, perfectly structured data is well understood, but natural text sits in between, partly structured and partly random. Mathematics for that middle regime is thin, similar to how physics struggles at meso-scales between atoms and continua. Because of this gap, we can describe the mechanisms but cannot yet explain capability jumps or give reliable task-level predictions. That mismatch, simple machinery versus hard-to-predict behavior, is the core puzzle. ---- Video from 'Dr Brian Keating' YT Channel (Link in comment)

@sebsharpfokus @ellymelly Pick one of the following - Sebastian is a nong - Sebastian is a genius - Sebastian is good-looking and smart - Sebastian is a national asset

@ellymelly If you ask people casually, how wins in a 3 way vote, they will always instinctively say the one with the most votes, but when it comes to politics of course the losers find a way to twist this around.

Preference voting means that the 'most popular loser' wins against the person who actually won.

The Atlantic has a sobering, first-person look at the ramifications of legalized online sports betting. Here are a few of the more telling passages. 1/5

"The information that such decision-makers depend upon requires extremely thorough testing. Openly deliberating about these matters brings epistemic advantages, therefore, as well as legitimacy." 2/2

Fascinating essay from Mercatus Centre staffer Rebecca Lowe. Excerpt: "If state actors deem secret information necessary to the case for military action, then that information must be revealed to the public ..." thepursuitofliberalism.substack.com/p/why-im-not-a… 1/2

A supposed Chinese startup has just made US warfare operations visible to Iran simply by publishing carefully-labelled data as open-source information. A commercial satellite operator did this to Ukraine's advantage in 2022, too. Another new change in warfare.

“Eighty percent of these children have not yet been returned, the report says, and many parents and guardians are to this day unaware of the whereabouts of the minors.”

Russia's deportation of Ukrainian children amounts to crime against humanity, UN says bbc.in/4ll76NP

I see folks are pledging not to use AI in their writing. I pledge the opposite: I will use the latest LLMs, and for that matter any other tool, to best improve my research or the way I communicate it. That way, if my name is on it, you can be sure it reflects my own best judgment

An Iranian man left this comment on my YouTube channel. This is without a doubt the single best explanation of the reality facing Iranian people today👇 "As an Iranian, I can tell you the situation is no longer just political—it's existential. We are trapped between two collapsing structures: one internal, one external. On one hand, we face a deeply dysfunctional government, led by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic’s unelected institutions. Decades of economic mismanagement, suppression of dissent, and brutal ideological control have alienated multiple generations. No one believes in reform anymore—because every attempt has either been co-opted or crushed. But here's the paradox: We are also terrified of regime collapse—because we've watched the aftermath of Western intervention in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Each was promised freedom; each descended into chaos, civil war, or foreign occupation. So no, we don't trust the U.S. or Israel. Not because we support our regime—but because we know how imperial powers treat ‘liberated’ nations in the Middle East. Freedom, in their language, often means vacuum, fire, and permanent instability. Right now, many Iranians live with three truths at once: The Islamic Republic is morally and politically bankrupt. The alternatives offered by foreign actors are not liberation—they’re collapse. A bad government is survivable. No government is not. We are not silent because we agree. We are cautious because we’ve learned—too well—what happens when superpowers decide to "help." In a sentence: Iran is a nation held hostage by its own regime, but haunted by the fate of its neighbors. We are stuck in a house we hate, surrounded by fires we fear more."

Shout out to the staffer who had to wake Albo up at 2am to call Trump because he was seemingly popping off on stuff he read on the right wing internet.