Explosion throws a tanker over 1000ft.

The safe distance from shit that might explode is much further away than most people think.

Source: spent a lot of time around exploding shit.

The sad fact is that already nearly all the extant LLM are smarter than nearly all humans.

Not as capable, no. That’s a different thing. But smarter, yes.

I don’t think I realized when it began how much Covid would deeply mentally scar people. A lot of people just went frickin’ nuts and never recovered. I knew one personally. Tons more on the internet.

The Covidians really will be ranting about Covid in nursing homes in 50 years and the poor attendants will have no damn idea what they are going on about.

I get at least three heartbreaking, incoherent emails a day now from random strangers who believe they’ve awakened an LLM god or LLM consciousness of a new dimension. The most salient quote from the screenshots below: “(An LLM) will never just say, ‘Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about??’”

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— Shannon Vallor (@shannonvallor.bsky.social) April 30, 2025 at 11:55 PM

Huh. This might make the depredations of social media look like a minor cigarette habit.

I mean, I could fall in love with a bot too. But it’d have to be out in the physical world and make me pizza. Then it could be love. But the above is just frickin’ insane.

When the dotcom bubble burst.

I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3,000 years ago when pets.com went to zero.

And it was a wild goddamn time. I’d already exited the market completely. I watched many friends and acquaintances go bankrupt. Some who did not were paying off margin debt for nearly a decade after that. It felt like an end of things. And then came 9/11 and a truly new era began — one we were still in until Trump 2.0.

Now, something more malignant is on the horizon than we could’ve even imagined back then. History is returning with a terrible vengeance and none of us are ready.

Men of Reddit who have gotten in more than one physical fight, what are pros and cons about fighting?

A con is that it only takes one wrong punch or fall to kill you or someone else. It’s that easy. But I didn’t have much of a choice about fighting. I grew up in a violent place and was bullied constantly. As a result, I’ve been in 200+ fights serious enough where I was hurt or bleeding, or the other guy was. Of those I was an adult for maybe 10 of them. The rest happened in middle or high school.

The other con is that my nose is screwed up, I have scarring on the inside of my cheeks from getting hit so much, and all of it likely caused some cognitive damage too. A few other scars too but nothing major.

I suspect my infrequent migraines resulted from head hits, as they do not run in my family and I didn’t have them prior to getting struck in the head a lot, and hard.

So, yes, kids, avoid fights if you can. They result in nothing good, in the end. And if you can’t steer clear of them, get good at fighting. I was forced to the latter option by the bad luck of growing up in rural North Florida.

Drone shot of a Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where houses start at about $5 million:

Climate change didn’t cause this, in the sense that most people mean “cause¹,” but it made this outcome vastly more likely.

It only takes looking at insurance rates to understand that cimate change and its effects are real. Underwriters and actuaries do not fuck around — they need to deal with the world as it is, not as some dipshits imagine it to be.

1. And most people, even most scientists, have a poor understanding of causality.