If I wear my shirt and pants inside out does this mean I’m naked but everyone else is wearing my clothes

Nuclear-level take: I predict Washington will go red in 10 years. It has all the ingredients: extreme fiscal conservatism, increasing social conservatism, extreme disdain for the poor and disabled and especially the homeless, a long tradition of racism (Seattle is the second whitest major city in the US after Portland and has tried very hard to price out PoC from the city), huge population of techbros and people into dark enlightenment, and well... honestly go look at r/Seattle and r/Washington sometime on Reddit and you'll see what your average Washingtonian really believes.

Oh and our public services here are terrible.

I hope tonight Democrats realise they don’t have to eternally chase a mythical median voter whose political beliefs were apparently focus-grouped into existence in 1998.

Susan Collins conceded!

Extremely disappointed in Washington tonight: genital inspection bill passed

https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/elections/2026-general-election-results-for-i-638/281-5351529d-b1c0-4b6c-b1b8-2f019a887aac

NBC projecting 255 house seats won by Democrats, an historic loss.

No one should interpret what happened tonight as a message to Democrats that we want the status quo.

Chuck Schumer's daughter works for OpenAI. He should not become senate majority leader.

After finding out there was a Nixon $1 coin, I propose:

The Richard M. Nixon $1,974 Platinum Commemorative Coin.

"Commemorating 1974: A Year of Presidential Transition."

Obverse: Nixon giving a double-V victory salute, with the inscription "I AM NOT A CROOK" as well as the year, with "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA — 1,974 DOLLARS" around Nixon's head.

Reverse: A beautifully engraved reel-to-reel tape recorder, with an inexplicable 18.5 arcminute gap in the decorative border.

Edge inscription: "WHEN THE PRESIDENT DOES IT, THAT MEANS IT IS NOT ILLEGAL."

The US Mint should issue exactly 18,500 coins, commemorating the missing 18½ minutes from the Nixon tapes.

The certificate of authenticity should feature Gerald Ford's signature, and the collector's presentation box should contain a conspicuous empty compartment labelled "EVIDENCE."

Fun fact about taste:

Sourness is driven by the number of H+ ions detected by sour taste receptors. Acids release these in numbers.

Saltiness is mostly driven by the number of Na+ ions detected by taste receptors. This is why it’s hard to make a salt replacement.

Sweetness is driven by molecular recognition. Unfortunately, so is bitterness, and bitterness is governed by at least 20 known receptors, which is why so many sugar substitutes taste off to us. Bitterness likely evolved as a poison protection system, so that makes sense.

Umami is triggered by glutamate, but insinuate and guanylate can dramatically enhance the response. The taste buds in question exist to detect protein.

It would require hundreds of millions of dollars to run a major search engine sustainably. You could make a distributed volunteer system but the engineering effort would be enormous (making a scalable tamper-resistant system is Hard) and you’d struggle to find volunteers at the scale required (“hey can I store 20GB of pages on your computer and then query them?”)

Search is a painful, hard problem. It requires many petabytes of storage. Even a small engine needs tens to hundreds of terabytes. That’s not even factoring in the difficulty of ranking, filtering slop, etc. Honestly crawling is the easy part, and even that’s not easy, but still easier than the rest (throttling, respecting robots.txt, respecting opt-outs, etc.).

Search is one of the foundational services of the internet, yet for some fucking reason we collectively decided that finding information should largely depend on a handful of advertising and “hyperscaling” companies deciding what deserves to be seen.

Is there a search engine in the world that isn’t run by a hyperscaler and doesn’t just repackage Google or Bing (run by two hyperscalers)

This means Duck Duck Go is out: they use Bing under the hood

This is a new low for #Google: they will disable searches for schools that restrict AI

Expect this to follow for the rest of us

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/google-search-schools-restrict-ai.html

What are your thoughts on Waluigi

Sometimes something happens on the Internet and a subculture people forget exists spills out into the broader world and people are like "oh god what, THAT many people like this???" AO3 being unavailable is one of those things.

I got an apple watch secondhand from @ariadne

Yesterday it said I was 48 ft / 14.6m AMSL

Today it thinks I'm 101ft / 30.7m AMSL

Your own… personal… Cheesus

I imagine if Microsoft imploded it would be less a GM-style bailout and more of a “save what’s good, split off what is bad” good bank / bad bank split. Xbox, LinkedIn, Bing, Copilot would be sold off (Xbox seems likely to be sold off for example) or shut down and written off. Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, Entra / AD, Dynamics 365 (though I imagine it'd be divested eventually) would be saved.

My prediction if the Anthropic IPO fails, if I had to guess:

The AI bubble will pop. LLMs and local models won’t go anywhere but OpenAI and Anthropic are done.

Tech will face the largest reckoning it has ever faced. Like cataclysmic. So much of the industry has gone all-in on it, that a failure for AI profits to materialise (which I think we all expect) will likely wipe out the sector. Don’t expect to get a job as a programmer anytime soon. There will be no “normal” to go back to. Tech as we know it, even open-source, will change for good, and I don’t mean that positively. An enormous part of the ecosystem is propped up by paid work which will vanish overnight.

I imagine Microsoft will be bailed out because they will basically have to be bailed out. Windows is too widely used to be allowed to fail. I don’t know if the other AI companies will be bailed out and I imagine it’s going to be a major fight.

The real economy beyond AI has not grown appreciably and has contracted in some sectors. Datacentre construction has been the main reason commercial property nor construction have already suffered. I doubt construction or equipment companies go under, but it’s likely to be bad. Construction and tech layoffs will obviously have huge effects on the economy.

Multiple investment firms, especially private equity (already enormous pressure from overleverage during the period from 2008–2022) will likely implode. A lot of businesses that you might not expect to be affected will likely close or be sold off. Expect a huge wave of selloffs and closures of hospitals, restaurant chains, veterinarians, retail, property, etc.

I don’t know what happens to hedge funds or pension investments. Likely they get bailed out. Otherwise it would be the most devastating wipeout of retirement funds ever seen.

Governments will likely mobilise tremendous sums to keep the economy alive. The effect may be blunted for some time. I expect the US national debt to go out of control which who knows what consequences that will have. Many states will likely have to shoulder the consequences too from collapsed projects. Doubtless other countries will have to bail out huge parts of their financial sectors and possibly more.

My personal prediction, based on little more than speculation: severe recession like 2008, but bailouts stop it from getting worse.