Zack Purdy 🔸

This is important, true and also generalizes to advice about how to engage with *anyone* with whom you disagree!

@Smdster Do you mean literally as the last turn in the PT-clinching win, or generally the creature is generally a win condition in the deck?

What is the most recent pro tour that was won with a common non-token creature involved in an attack? (Or conceded to a common that could probably attack next turn)

Uncontrolled AI poses a severe danger to all of humanity. On Wednesday, I'll be hosting a discussion with leading AI scientists from the US and China about the need for international cooperation against this existential threat. This is an enormously important issue. Join us.

@ZachLowe_NBA @Mahoney Most importantly brought awareness to the Zack/Josh confusion plaguing the nation

New Zach Lowe Show! Wemby injury/65-game rule; updated All-NBA/Defense/Rookie picks/debates; Lakers injuries/battle for No. 3 seed/potential paths for Denver and OKC; Giannis absurdity; Bulls clean house -- w/ @mahoney: Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5WXjEu…

@ZachLowe_NBA I am also a Zack who gets constantly referred to as "Josh" (by different people!) really felt seen hearing you reference this today!

It’s great to see Democrats finally shedding their hesitancy towards nuclear power even though it’s long overdue. The anti-nuclear movement did untold damage to the environment and are directly responsible for higher energy costs as well. It’s time to undue their damage

kelsey piper

On self-driving cars: "In medicine, when a treatment shows this level of benefit, we stop the trial early. Continuing to give patients the placebo becomes unethical. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do. In driving, we’re all the control group."

@valkyries What's the name of the Asian guy who wipes the floor on the northeast basket? He is ELITE and I want to start a fan club

@valkyries What's the name of the Asian guy who wipes the floor on the northeast basket? He is ELITE and I want to start a fan club

Who tf do u think pays the construction workers

Paying kidney donors would save tens of thousands of lives every year. The End Kidney Deaths Act is in the House right now to do it. We don't have to accept deaths from kidney disease. We know how to save these lives. We just have to take the step. thedispatch.com/article/end-ki…

Here is what I believe the process should be to convert your garage to a miniature bakery/tea shop: there should be a straightforward checklist online which describes how to meet food safety rules. If you look up current food safety rules, they are long, confusing and scattered across eight different places in the municipal code. Often they're literally impossible to meet without a purpose-built commercial kitchen. There should be a single, simple source of truth on a website that is sufficient for running your tiny home bakery. The food safety rules should be possible for a person working in their own home kitchen to meet; for example, they should not require an industrial sink with three partitions. You should fill out a simple, two page form creating your business, providing contact information for the city in the event of complaints or concerns about your business and acknowledging the laws applicable to your business. An inspector should come by to check that you meet the food safety standards within a week of your application. Then you should open your business.

I haven't had the chance to crack open my copy of Abundance yet so I've been avoiding wading into the discourse. But a thing I believe fervently is that the natural human desire for our lives, our neighborhoods, our communities and our world to be good, combined with the absurd material prosperity that we enjoy in the world today and the even more absurd material prosperity that our work can ensure is available to our children, ought to be sufficient for high and rising standards of living. We are rich enough to have spacious beautiful homes in shaded, safe neighborhoods with good schools and good jobs. We are rich enough for that to be in reach for every American who puts in the work to pursue it, and for it to be available to a growing share of the globe as well. And we don't have it. And part of why we don't have it is because we have made it incredibly difficult and frustrating and prohibitive to build it.

PEPFAR is incredible. It's one of the most life-saving govt programs of the 21st century. Ending it would be calamitous, reckless, insane, and cruel. But something deeper is happening here. We're very clearly in the middle of a cultural vibe shift to the right, which means a shift away from the progressive virtue of out-group care. But cultural change doesn't stop. And the rise of a cruel establishment is going to trigger its own cultural backlash. People got tired of "wokeness," whatever that means to you. But they're going to tire of this, too. Because people are complicated: selfish, but also kind; loyal, but also compassionate. To see the pendulum swinging this dramatically toward flagrant cruelty is to see, in the seeds of this moment's conservative victory, tomorrow's cultural backlash.

Yeah, all right, let's talk about James Damore. It's been eight years, and I really doubt Harj (who was my boss at the time) is the only person for whom it was a formative experience. For those of you who have no recollection of any of this, either because you are wisely an offline person or because you got outraged for five minutes and then forgot all about it, James Damore was a Google software engineer who wrote a memo arguing that, while diversity and inclusion were good goals, bias was not the main reason there weren't more women in tech, and differences in personality between men and women probably explained a lot of it. There was a lot in the memo that felt like a distraction to me, or where I had a nitpick, but fundamentally it was not only basically correct (women are less likely than men to become software engineers, and this is not only because of bias), but also Damore was saying this for the sake of having a more productive conversation about how to get more women into tech, a goal that everyone around him was fervently espousing. The memo has a painful-in-hindsight quality of earnestness: "you want more women in tech, and I think you're mistaken about how to get there! if I show you some published psychology research we can actually design better means to your goal!". Anyway. The internet was outraged. He got fired from Google. And he applied to the tech hiring startup I worked at, Triplebyte, which offered background-blind screening to anyone who wanted to be a software engineer. We really believed in the mission, at Triplebyte. I think I ended up kind of badly calibrated about how earnest to expect people to be everywhere else. We found people working as janitors and line cooks and homemakers who could code, and we got them 6 figure jobs, and we were proud of it. James Damore did very well on our tests. I got assigned to write him a profile for our companies. And then people freaked out. A lot of them had the impression that he would create a hostile environment for any woman he worked with, and thought that trying to help him get a new job was tantamount to endorsing everything in his wildly controversial memo. I didn't even like the memo that much, but I was kind of horrified, because - it's one thing to get fired for talking about politics at work in a way that causes a massive national firestorm. I kind of expect that we would all get fired for that. But it is another thing entirely to get effectively blacklisted from your industry, to have people decide on the basis of your political opinions that we shouldn't even put you up on the platform and let companies decide individually whether to schedule interviews. Tech jobs were not that hard to come by in 2017 if you were really good at your job, and Damore was. Firing isn't that threatening to software engineers. Blacklisting is terrifying. I'd been at Triplebyte for like six months at this point, it was my first job after graduation, and I was honestly way out of my lane, but I made a pretty big fuss internally. (It helped that I suspected a lot of people agreed with me but I was a woman and it was safer for me to say it.) I said that we were not in the business of deciding who had good politics, that we shared this country with many people who profoundly disagreed with each other, that companies could assess for themselves if he worked respectfully with female engineers, and that we should put him on the site and let them decide. We did. And then Harj was immediately contacted by recruiters from companies we worked with that were horrified that we had. They felt that by not banning him from our platform we were endorsing his memo, that we were showing values not in line with their priorities. Harj talks about this more in the linked podcast. James Damore was egregiously wronged. To my knowledge he's a good software engineer with extremely reasonable, approximately accurate opinions about the reasons there were fewer women in software engineering, which he shared in good faith, and a lot of people who should've known better really did try to drive him out of the industry for it. It was wrong. If it is done to people on the basis of any other political opinion it is also wrong then. We need, as a society, the ability to live with disagreement, to dislike each other without trying to destroy each other, to find common ground instead of finding heretics; I believed that at Peak Woke and I believe it now.

I do think it's kinda funny that Democrats can't define 'woman' without absurd circumlocutions because of issue group politics and apparently Republicans...also can't define 'woman' without absurd circumlocutions because they're committed to a different ideological bit.

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People are all biased towards thinking that the reason Democrats lost is they didn't cater enough to their policy preferences, but if you look at high quality polling it's clear that the biggest factors for voters were: • Insufficient funding for lead abatement in Georgia (the country) • No detailed policy on humane slaughter of shrimp • Attack ads, run ad nauseum in swing states, suggesting Kamala is a one-boxer • The Biden administration flip-flopping on the moral value of LLM inference on edge-computing devices • High inflation • Fear that Democrats would apply an excessively high discount rate to future intrinsic goods

The lesson here is never ever in a million years give your money to a general election presidential campaign because they have far more money than they need (primaries maybe OK) but not really a scandal as these were probably among Harris’s more +ROI expenditures.

@KelseyTuoc A bold take!!

I think 'tough on crime' should mean 'interested in learning how to best stop crime because crime is important to stop' and not 'hangs around in Twitter replies proposing the death penalty for shoplifting'.