People play video games and know their own motives are beyond reproach, so they give the characters they're playing comical amounts of leeway vs. any other medium. Most of the actually interesting video game art ends up being about complicity as a result.

We've spent a lot of time redoing new psychology papers in top journals from scratch (closely scrutinizing methods, recalculating stats, recollecting data). This has given us insight into what the next frontier is in improving psychological research. See our new article here: 👇

friend of the blog L. suggested that some of this is an artifact of age, so I redid the tool using only 30-39 year olds and indeed it's a 25% position in that age group. So some of this is just driven by age, but not all of it claude.ai/public/artifacts/f…

something so poetic when a tech company sends you an email about the sunsetting of a product whose existence you'd entirely forgotten

RT @LedermanHarvey: A friend once said that the mark of a great book is that when you read it, it's not at all what you expected. I'm not…

G.A. Cohen — the funniest philosopher ever to live — gives his best impression of his supervisor at Oxford, Gilbert Ryle.

can anyone explain me this price scheme (from YouTube)? 13 episode series, it's unquestionably better value to buy each episode individually than to get the whole season for both HD and SD

The regular mark (i.e., A, A-, B , etc.) is determined by the instructor. This grade will factor into the student’s GPA. GDP points are calculated by taking the difference between the student’s regular grade and the average grade for the class in which the student is enrolled.

instead of mayoral debates with moderators they should just have a series of 1:1s between the candidates. Maybe unwieldy with more than 6, but with 3 candidates you would learn way more just seeing them talk to each other 1:1

Uri says "9 selection effects" isn't a virality-inducing title for a blog post but I clicked immediately and probably my folllowers are selected for doing the same.

Every time Substack make a move that serves the business, they disingenously play it off as something that's in the best interest of users. > [Email is getting less reliable, so we had to build an app.] "I know I've said this a lot, but I cannot emphasize enough that email will continue to become less deterministically reliable as a means for distributing your work; this is a huge part of why we got into the app and feed business!" Sure. And there's also the economics. One of the largest overheads for any newsletter platform is email delivery — it's expensive, and it scales linearly with subscribers. Delivering the same content by API to an app you own is essentially free, and keeps users inside your ecosystem. The app isn't some reluctant response to problematic technology, it's just a better business. That would be perfectly fine to say out loud. Instead it's "email is unreliable, actually" - a pretty stark reversal of how they used to talk about email. Substack CEO in 2018: "[Email is] the one channel that you have as an independent writer to reach a reader base that’s not directly mediated by a third party. It doesn’t have a Facebook algorithm deciding what people are going to see." In 2026: email is bad, and the answer is the Substack app, mediated by the Substack algorithm deciding what people are going to see. Yes, email is more complicated than it used to be, but there are thousands of newsletter platforms out there, and only one of them is insisting that the only solution to reliable distribution is using their branded app. > [Nobody feels locked into Substack.] "I saw several wags speculate that this was because we were trying to achieve 'lock in' at the behest of our investors. Brother, if you've ever heard of someone who feels locked-in to Substack because of their follow graph, please tell me." The lock-in is not the follow graph. That's a complete strawman. People feel locked in because mobile paid subscriptions are literally locked in. Subscriptions started on the web sit in the writer's own Stripe account — portable, owned, migratable. Subscriptions started inside the Substack app are permanently stuck on Substack. Which, ofc, is conveniently "[just how mobile works, Apple make us do it]" - but publishers don't even have an option to disable paid subscriptions through the Substack app, they are forced into using it. We migrate people off Substack to @Ghost every week. One of the top complaints is "I need to get out before any more of my revenue gets locked into the Substack app." Substack is a venture-backed platform optimising for retention, unit economics, and platform dependency. That is a perfectly normal thing for a venture-backed platform to do. Just say what you're actually doing and stop trying to dress it up as something else.

"shhhh honey, not in front of the lids"

genAI finally enabling my passion: spreading the word about SSMI, the free & easy cure for hiccups

You mean like Robert Pattinson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the Beatles? Teen heartthrobs who successfully stick around past the point that they can sell exclusively to teenage girls always develop a new male fanbase, and kinda necessarily are also pretty good artists!