Side note, I know Taleb is widely appreciated, but man this is some badly written stuff. Is all his stuff like this? I realize blog post != book, but c’mon, some pride in craftmanship is in order.

That thread is gold. Specially love this one where heroin is dismissed because it’s not utilitarian enough

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34649954

It’s sad when people pretend to have read some great piece of literature (like War and Peace), but at least it’s understandable from a social perspective - the pretender wishes to conform to an ideal of a cultivated person.

It’s hard to say if it’s sadder or just more pathetic to pretend to have read a piece of dreck like HPMOR.

thankful that you need to sign up using a google account or email to read, this will shield more people from the radioactive glowfic

Edit TOO LATE there’s a Tvtropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Roleplay/ProjectLawful

As long as he’s writing collab forum pr0n and not hindering the creation of the Acausal Robot God, it’s all good.

Edit Yud is living disproof of the thesis that spending a large number of hours doing something makes one good at it.

Bombadil is a fat dude living in splendid isolation with a beautiful woman, unconcerned about the evils of the wider world. Perfect ideal for Yud.

Well that sucks. I’ve always had a lingering respect for Mullenweg because I think Wordpress.com is a good service, I really like Simplenote, and I thought that Automattic taking over Tumblr could not make stuff worse after the service being gelded by the porn-haters.

But his latest antics on moderation at Tumblr and now this (although he’s hardly alone, Reddit is also gonna sell its user’s contents to the AI mills) really showed his true face.

(I’ll never forget laughing at him for losing tens of thousands worth of Leica gear in a lost/stolen luggage incident many years back)

“It wAs aCtuALLy a lAB LEaK” is such a right-wing shibboleth that it’s extra delicious that some wingers[1] put their money where their mouths and were comprehensively disproven. Kudos to the Lesswronger who went through all this, even though a 100K payout made it rATioNaL

[1] I don’t have any evidence that Rootclaim are right-wingers but my priors tell me they are

God knows I’m not good at web design, but the look of that page is really really cheap.

EDIT their first claim is that Syrian opposition forces, not the Syrian government, were the perpetrators of the chemical attacks in Ghouta:

https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013

This is a really controversial claim, heavily pushed by supporters of Assad and Putin. No-one seems to have been interested in claiming the 100K this time so they’re happy to be calling this “resolved”.

I just read an account of the Nazi occupation of Norway in WW2 and it was a bit like that. The local Nazis (the OG Quisling!) were widely hated, there was passive resistance at every turn, and very few Norwegians were interested in some sort of “racial bond” with Germany.