FOLLOWS YOU Pizza-maxxing | Kardashev III or bust | Too many tabs I wouldn’t follow me.
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Joined March 2011
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Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
This 15 minute video is the best explanation I've heard of the @METR_Evals report that has scared so many AI experts.
I promise it is worth your time.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
بعد از فروپاشی آلمان شرقی، سربازانی که وظیفشون تیراندازی به مردمی بود که قصد فرار از دیوار برلین داشتن محاکمه شدن. اونها دردفاع ازخود گفتن:ما فقط دستوراتو اجرا کردیم!
اما قاضی پاسخ داد:تو مجبور بودی شلیک کنی اما مجبور نبودی دقیق نشانه بگیری.میتونستی خطا بزنی اما انتخاب کردی بکشی
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
One of the most revealing things people say when they hear about a new development is that, “they should build [some other thing] instead.”
What they? There’s no they! There’s only the private owner of the lot. If Walgreens owns the lot, then Walgreens is going to build a Walgreens. If a gas station company owns a lot, which they purchased to build a gas station, then they’re going to build a gas station. You can’t see the gas station going up and say, “you know what we really need there is a pool supply store.”
What in the world are you talking about?
People are natural central planners.
You have to take away their right to influence these kinds of decisions at all. You have to create the legal conditions under which they are not allowed to affect these decisions. Because if you let regular people weigh in, they will reveal that they have an insane theory of how the world should work.
They will see a Walgreens going up on a private lot owned by Walgreens and say out loud, “they should build apartments there instead” like scheming little Soviets.
It’s difficult to explain without sounding crazy but this person successfully blocked turning an abandoned parking lot into taxable 21st century infrastructure because she thought the space could be better used as a trampoline park. (No one has offered to build the trampoline park).
She’s homeless and pulls people’s hair out for almost a living.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
A silly but revealing example of what I call Peasant Mindset.
I follow a lot of car content on Instagram. There was a clip of a mechanic showing how to change the oil on a Lamborghini. It’s a complicated process involving eight different oil drain plugs. This is because, unlike most cars, but like ~every high performance sports car, Lambos have a dry-sump lubrication system, which is necessary given the intense G forces that a sports car experiences.
Literally all the top comments, all with hundreds or thousands of likes, were some version of "They do this on purpose so that it’s more expensive to change the oil."
Like, how retarded do you have to be to think that Lamborghini engineers sit around and try to come up with ways to make it *more complicated* to *change the oil.*
"Angelo, I have-a found a way to make the car 50 more-a horsapower!"
"Ai, Antonio, but how you change-a da oil?"
"You change-a da oil with one button."
"Dai! Throw-a your design in da garbage!"
No notion that design and engineering involves tradeoffs and that if you’re designing your car around a massive V12 and high performance you’re going to have to sacrifice conveniences.
No knowledge of the world, no curiosity or ability to think about how the world works.
Instead everything beyond their immediate experience is the product of shadowy, malevolent, agentic forces who are always looking for ways to specifically swindle them. It’s a combination of Djinnbrain and Victim Mindset.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
"This is Tartarian Empire stuff."
Like a lot of schizo conspiracy theories, the Tartarian Empire represents a real intuition being processed. In this case it's that we live in the ruins of a fallen civilization. Western civilization was murdered in the World Wars, replaced by something alien and low that looks upon the great works of the old world with blank incomprehension.
The "decline of everything" is so profound and so thorough that the average person can not even express it in words. What we have now is nothing but a simulation. Everything from fashion to diction to public spaces to fonts to heraldry to speech to music.
We might as well say mammoths once roamed here and it would make more sense.
This is Tartarian Empire stuff.
Everything has been simplified and simplified until no meaning remains. This is what pornography is to the act of fruitful love. This is what the taped banana on the wall of the gallery is to Michelangelo.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
I believe the exact opposite of this worldview. I'm okay with waiving the fine on a first offense, but anyone who drives recklessly ten times a week even after repeatedly getting ticketed for it should just lose their license forever.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
When the last several Harry Potter books were released, we had midnight book launches attended by millions. Children, in some cases very young, finished these 700 & 800 page books in a single day. And now people are telling me I made it up, that this couldn’t ever have happened.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
The economically devastated Rust Belt resident asked God, “I had faith in you, but you didn’t save us. You let our town die. Why?”
To this God replied, “I sent you three data-center proposals. What more did you expect?”
This is the main street of Monroeville in Huron County, Ohio. The town voted against building a $1 billion data center nearby.
Let’s just be honest here, does this town look like it’s doing well enough to reject a $1 billion opportunity for economic development?
How are you supposed to fix cost of living when people vote against $1 billion opportunities for jobs and economic development?
NIMBYism is killing the West. The same people who hate data centres hate nuclear energy and hate new factories for manufacturing and reindustrialisation.
Literally what are you supposed to do? People want 5% GDP growth a year with 0 inflation and then you try to give them new industry and they reject it.
Foreign backed information war on the American people has done massive damage to America. People voted against their own jobs and their own economic development because they watched a TikTok saying Donald Trump and Epstein ate Jon Benet Ramsay inside a data center or something.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
What's crazy is that music like this could have been played for centuries, just no-one thought to do it. What else are we missing?
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
Here’s a good example: I recently found this NHS article that claimed “strangulation is the second-highest cause of stroke in women under 40”
No source
I look it up, the Institute For Addressing Strangulation makes the same claim
One source. I read it
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
The best determinant of whether you're a part of the Imperial Core or not is whether the US ambassador to your country is a former politician/donor or if they're a career diplomst
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
In free nations, we investigate crimes to see who is guilty of them.
In communist tyrannies, they investigate men to see what they can be punished for.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
People have this intuitive sense that people who create wealth are actually hoarding it from everyone else. That assumes the wealth existed beforehand. That assumes a kind of law of conservation of wealth, where wealth is never created or destroyed but just moved around. That isn’t how wealth works. Elon created something that didn’t exist before.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
Interesting idea. Had tokens to burn so I got Opus to put it to the test
Of course it can. Take all 100,000+ games on steam, scrape their descriptions and metadata, semantically plot them in vector space using embeddings, mathematically choose a location in vector space far away from neighbors, convert that back to a description and metadata, boom, brand new ideas ranked by how unlike any other ideas they are.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
Global warming is now blocking an ice age that had been already starting. Yay.
Here’s a rather extraordinary discovery: humanity seems to have interrupted the beginning of the next ice age. We thought it might happen in the future, but the evidence suggests it's already happened.
A new study in Science argues that the next major glaciation had already begun roughly 2,000 years ago, before modern warming reversed the trend in the 20th century.
The evidence comes from the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, the last surviving remnant of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of Canada and reached as far south as Illinois.
Because Barnes is frozen directly to its bedrock, advancing ice buries and preserves vegetation beneath it. Researchers radiocarbon dated plants emerging as the ice retreats to reconstruct its history.
They found that after melting to a minimum extent around 3,000 years ago, the ice began expanding again about 2,000 years ago. The researchers interpret this as the earliest stage of the next glacial period.
Left to natural orbital cycles, that cooling would have unfolded extremely slowly, potentially taking tens of thousands of years to rebuild a continent spanning ice sheet.
But around 1960, the trend reversed. Summers became warm enough that Barnes began losing more ice than it gained, despite Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight continuing to slowly decline in a way that should favor renewed glaciation. Greenhouse warming had (thankfully) overwhelmed the natural cooling tendency.
The Barnes ice cap may now disappear entirely within the next few centuries, removing the final remnant of an ice sheet that repeatedly served as the nucleus for much larger glaciations.
There is a remarkable deep time perspective here. For millions of years, orbital cycles have pushed Earth between warmer interglacials and colder glacial periods. According to this study, that ancient cycle had started turning once again.
Then, in the geological equivalent of an instant, humanity pushed hard enough in the opposite direction to stop it.
Just so we're clear, this is a very very good thing.
📸 Geology Sciences
Sources:
1) phys.org/news/2026-10-global…
2) science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
the closest park to my house has a very clearly posted “dogs must be leashed” sign that most ppl ignore. there’s an actual dog park a mile away, but people come to play fetch all the time. i also take my baby there daily and have to spend the entire time there’s an off-leash dog tracking the dog carefully.
recently there was a pitt bull mix playing fetch and when it would run for the ball, it would stop and get distracted by my baby. the owner would shout and it would then reengage with the ball. i was positioned between my kid and the dog, but i still just picked my kid up and left pretty quickly.
a couple weeks later i saw a pitt bull being walked through the park on a leash with a muzzle on. i felt relieved and grateful that i could just relax and not worry about my kid getting mauled to death at a public park because some dog owner is too lazy to walk 20 minutes to an actual dog park to let their dog run.
strangers don’t know your dog. they have no idea if it’s friendly, or if you’re a reliable narrator when you claim it is. they have to reasonably assume the worst, which is scary when your dog is on the loose. we have a bunch of norms and laws in place to make it so dogs can exist in society, and you’re hurting other people when you don’t follow them.
i almost never see families at my local park, and my guess is because it’s full of unleashed dogs. dog owners have decided their convenience is more important than anyone else’s ability to use the park. i doubt any one owner would ever think of it this way, they each have their special reason that their special dog is different, but collectively they’ve driven everyone else out.
I genuinely do think there are a lot of basically good people who have never really thought about the ways in which they are behaving badly as dog owners, because nobody ever really calls them out for it.
If your dog is ever off leash, you are being antisocial and behaving badly. If your dog ever jumps on somebody who didn’t specifically ask for that to happen, then you are behaving antisocially (even if the dog is just being “friendly”). If you have an invisible fence in your yard, but your dog comes running right up to the line at full speed only to stop at the last minute and bark at everybody who walks by, then you are behaving antisocially. Honestly, even behind a fence, this is an aggressive and annoying imposition on anybody walking by.
If somebody has ever respond with fear or annoyance at something your dog has done and you’ve reflexively protested, “oh don’t worry, he won’t hurt you” or “he’s friendly” then that’s antisocial behavior. (You should just simply say, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that, I won’t let it happen again” and then you should work to actually make it not happen again. Telling people not to worry, that you think your dog is just peachy, is bad behavior.)
This is all bad behavior. It’s all antisocial. And I have these experiences with dogs and their owners routinely. This is all extremely common stuff.
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
If your first response to the Tesla Roadster is "is that safe??", you've lost all sense of wonder.
Safety is not and never was the meaning of life. I'd happily spend a few micromorts on a flying car.
(Also, Tesla has a sterling safety record, so probably won't even need to).
Matt H 🇳🇿 retweeted
a car just did something straight out of science fiction and half the internet immediately started debating commercial viability
not every engineering achievement needs a fucking business model. you are allowed to experience wonder
