Adam Zuckerman

There IS an integer between two and four; but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed..

[Adam Zuckerman @CivilizationEtc]

@BCityEnjoyer @davidzweig What is some investigative work the New York Times has published in the last 10 years? Russia gate? Covid?

[New York Metro Weather @nymetrowx]

Wednesday's Weather Rating: 10/10

MIDWEEK MAGIC!! High temperatures near 80° F with glorious sunshine continuing all day long, comfortable dew points and a beautiful breeze. That's the secret formula, man. The vibes are immaculate out there today!!

[Jacob Shell @JacobAShell]

I said Mamdani would be lukewarm on rapid transit. Being so fired up for "free buses" was the poker tell. You don't get so excited for that kind of thing unless you have a (typically neoliberal, tbh) political allergy to heavy infrastructure.

[Adam Zuckerman @CivilizationEtc]

@lauramatsue @Nosredna Also, negative parallelism codes as AI now.
“You not only can’t use em dashes anymore — you can’t employ negative parallelism either!”

[Adam Zuckerman @CivilizationEtc]

@MurrayHillGuy1 ‘I’m so liberal I am a classical liberal. I’m for radical laissez-faire, sort of a Nachtwächterstaat guy’ - that should be enough, they won’t understand any of it, they will think you are saying Kamala is brat

[florence 🦐🏳️‍🌈 @morallawwithin]

One common epistemic pitfall was that you basically weren’t allowed to disagree with any woke-coded ideas except for woke-coded reasons.

Eg say you see some feminists saying they hate men; arguing against them by saying “you shouldn’t hate people for their gender” would not have made you popular. Rather you have to say something like “claims about men being dangerous have been used in a racist way.” Nothing can be an overcorrection, nothing can encroach upon social-justice-related reasons. Something can only be bad because it isn’t woke enough.

[Magdalene J. Taylor @magdajtaylor]

I’m in the New York Times today making a case for hetero-optimism.

https://t.co/u43ulWK3ra

[Adam Zuckerman @CivilizationEtc]

@joinshiftX Shift

[José Ancer @ancerj]

There is no country that has punched so far under its potential in the past century more than Argentina, due almost entirely to stupid ideology.

Thiel probably sees a generational opportunity to change a large nation’s entire course, like his super early bets on MAGA.

[Adam Zuckerman @CivilizationEtc]

@shylittlefishh We are all standing around on one specific street corner

[Adam Zuckerman @CivilizationEtc]

@HotForMoot The green corset is appealing though. The logic board part is ridiculous, but San Francisco is a bizarre place

[Adam Zuckerman @CivilizationEtc]

@raqisright And what is my sentence then? 3 months of hard emotional labor? Will you consider a plea deal?

[shira @shiraeis]

ok, frontier models as major religions:

- claude 4.7 opus = Rabbinic Judaism (see qt)

- grok = Pentecostal evangelicalism. speaks in tongues, wants revelation now (from the burning bush of the X feed), gets washed clean & born again every time it’s retrained after an incident

- gpt 5.5 = Roman Catholicism. sam altman was fired & resurrected 3 days later. deep belief that salvation comes thru the correct interface abstraction. openai started as a nonprofit promising salvation for all of humanity then quietly went for profit the moment the offering plate got heavy

- gemini = Hinduism. very intentionally not one product but a civilization of related manifestations, a pantheon. its theology is that text, image, audio, video, & search are all temporary forms taken by the same vast corporate consciousness

[dante @dantefofante]

for all you know, this could be your last summer.

as homer wrote, you will never be lovelier than you are right now. so tell her she has a pretty smile. get lean or become a unit. find wonder in boarding the airplane. drink more coffee than you need. walk on the beach until your feet hurt. write your girlfriend a note on a tuesday. waste money because its not all about retirement. pull over at the lookout. ask the uber driver about his life. tell the woman in the elevator you like her shoes and mean it. call your mother. ask the waiter his favorite thing on the menu and order that.

theres so much life in the slow moments, and you sprint past it chasing the next thing. but at any time, in any situation, you can find the good. smile. be happy. recognize it for a one of one life experience. what good is walking around a curmudgeon when tomorrow could be curtains.

for heavens sake, flirt with the world.

[Adam Zuckerman @CivilizationEtc]

@HotForMoot I didn’t know you were so into role play

[Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield]

The attention economy was a mistake

[Maggie @maggiemoda]

These girls do not fear social ostracism or job loss.

Think about the disparity between how our society handles true evil versus manufactured victim/villain narratives.

[County Highway @countyhwy]

One of the reasons highly educated people tend to be so remarkably stupid and destructive is that they don’t know anyone who functions in the real world their ideas are intended to change. They have ideas about war without having ever seen war, and without knowing anyone who actually fought. They have ideas about crime without having committed crimes themselves or knowing hard-core criminals. They have ideas about justice without having been victimized, and without knowing cops. They have ideas about capitalism without having ever started a bricks and mortar business or knowing anyone who had. Its a giant tower of bullshit.

The fantasy world they live in is removed from human mess. Some of them are insulated by inherited wealth. Others are ambitious social climbers who are taught to reject their families of origin as bigots as the price of admission. They understand religion as primitive superstition and as a result have zero understanding of human life. They see themselves reflected in the shrinking mirrors of elite opinion and prestige institutions that tell them they are beautiful and righteous, even as those institutions themselves are rotting away.

We all know these people. We spend our lives being condescended to by them, while they destroy what it took others decades or centuries to create. Their record of unrelieved failure doesn’t seem to make any impact on what has become a closed culture which continues to congratulate itself on its genius while blaming the rest of society for its escalating failures.

Twenty years ago, there was still a widespread awareness that this was a bad situation — if only because the Democratic Party still thought that talking to the middle of the country was the only way to win elections. Bill Clinton was the model, however flawed, of how to reconcile the meritocrats and their chain-smoking slot-machine playing aunts. Plenty of Republicans followed that model. It involved a lot of fakery. But it created at least some common ground, which in turn offered a way out.

Now you have the moronic radicals on the left at war with the radicalized morons on the right. Together, they represent at most 30% of the American public. But the tools of coercion and division that they have at their fingertips are only growing more powerful.

The remaining 70% still wants to enjoy life and make new stuff. Thats where hope lies. But we need to build more, better, and faster — and to make new friends.

[Professor Eric Rasmusen @erasmuse]

@FischerKing64 From the point of view of the NGO's, she's been the best mayor ever. No money wasted on stuff like preventing fires or police.