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John Scalzi
Bluesky
My clothes washer is currently making a noise that sounds like the extraterrestrial signal from "Contact," I don't actually think it's a good thing, either for the washer or for the aliens trying to get a message to us through my appliances
appliances aliens clothes
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12 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Why, in his 1513 “Letter to Francesco Vettori”, does Niccolò Machiavelli so dramatize the simple act of opening a book? Why the stripping off muddy clothes, the donning court robes, the crossing a threshold into “the ancient courts of ancient men” where he asks questions of Livy and Cicero and they answer him? Because for Niccolò the thing was new. He had spent fourteen years running his intelligence on live human contact: Borgia’s menace, a king’s facial expression, a council’s mood... 1/ Related
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
Reasons why the analogy does not work: 1. presumably the aliens already exist as living sentient beings--there is a moral difference between murdering a baby and using a condom. 2. There is also a realpolitick difference as well: the aliens came from somewhere, presumably a somewhere with more aliens. How will those ones respond if our first interaction is violent? Quoting @robinhanson Imagine we saw a big alien starship heading toward Earth. We think they are so advanced they could do us great harm, if they wanted. We have a way to destroy it, but only if we do so soon, & there's not time to talk to them first. Should we destroy it? Related
6 September
Principal engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on agents and developer tooling. Streams TypeScript, OCaml and Neovim on Twitch, and wrote the better-result library after writing the same Result type about a hundred times.
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i will never, ever, buy samsung appliances again
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4 September
Writer and programmer; co-founder of the software studio Postlight and author of the Bloomberg Businessweek essay What Is Code?
If you’re a Flatbush-area mutual aid type, this self-organizing distro happens every Friday at 5PM across the street from Kings Theatre. If you want to help show up and hand out food or clothes, or just donate via Venmo. Or cook! Related
31 August
Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.
Aliens Are Not Crazy Unlikely Astrobiologists have, for decades, defaulted to a conservative burden of proof that leans into two aphorisms coined by Sagan … life … should be considered a “hypothesis of last resort,” largely because “extraordinary cl…
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27 August
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
22 May
Programmer known for LiveJournal, memcached, OpenID and gearman; worked on the Go programming language at Google and later joined Tailscale.
18 May
Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.
Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.
12 May
Independent game developer, creator of the colony simulation RimWorld and author of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Previously worked on BioShock Infinite.
Honestly The Ring is strange. There's a movie tape. Then a phone call. Which is connected to a girl in a well. Who comes out of the TV. Lotta different home appliances involved. Related
26 January
Freelance research analyst and writer of the blog Aceso Under Glass, known for 'epistemic spot checks' of non-fiction claims.
Things I learned from reddit fashion When it comes to clothes, I live at the “low cost/low time/low quality” end of the pareto frontier. But the bay area had a sudden attack of weather this December, and the cheap sweaters on Amazon get that way by being m…
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A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
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About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
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