Seth Frey

If my people are still coasting off inventing zero 3 millennia later, I’m ok with that, it was a big deal.

How nice I'm not the only one getting rocked by my 8yo. chess.co.uk/products/how...

Seeing "Public Toilet Governance" makes me feel like my 10+ year academic commitment to the governance of everyday commons is being tested ... and I'm passing.

🤩🤩🤩 ‘‘The remedy for coercion is not consent but co-action’’ —Mary Parker Follett (1924)

I somehow didn't put it together until recently that the right/left divide in Christian sects breaks pretty cleanly along the age old faith vs deeds tension.

My phone autocorrected “Half Asleep Chris” to “Half Alert Chris” and I was like, actually, that works too.

Bluesky is so consistently on message about Musk being a danger that you wouldn't even know that flying cars exist now. It's not a 100% good thing. I say 80% good.

I mispronounce long words to entertain myself—try saying caserole like hyperbole—but I have to be careful around non-nerds or they'll think I'm correcting them and I have to be like oh no no no.

A person has been confirmed to be infected with H5N1 avian flu after exposure on a dairy farm in Washington State www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/h...

Despite knowing lots of other words, I've never figured out what "desultory" means. I just can't make it to the end of the definition.

“Rearrange this folder” is the new “rm -rf /“

Just a quick sync with the zeitgeist: Are we all currently relieved or disappointed that Thiel, Musk, etc haven't installed tanks of sharks with laser beams attached to their heads?

Abrahamic infighting is the most tired trope of the last 2026 years.

By credible measures Christianity is more akin to Islam than Judaism (not that it's very much like either).

I wonder if we'll forget that COVID was the name of the disease before it was the name of an event. After all that's what happened with "plague": The Great Plague and Plague of Justinian were outbreaks of a disease called "plague" caused by yersinia pestis.

Seeing this call my Prof-brain went straight to how I can present my ongoing research on open source software governance as a boon for humane pest control in churches

Being "high agency" is a quality that young eager SF tech/startup types seek and tout in each other. It means having an underdeveloped sense of responsibility for the lives you intervene in, relative to your comfort intervening.

Brown University’s widget shows that the energy costs of the Iran war have just passed $1,000 per household iranwarcost.watson.brown.edu

I don't care if you have the answers when I see how uncritically you accept the question.

I've worked with so many people whose only principle is to steer the ship away from things capitalism has found useful. Try being effective when you've sworn off data, efficiency, authority, leadership, growth, profit, and accountability to clients. All of these tools can be used responsibly.

""" The effects of this "excess of democracy" if not fixed are ... an inability to maintain international trade, balanced budgets, and "hegemonic power" in the world. """ Good thing we avoided those 3 things by steering clear of that excess of democracy! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cri... (1975)

I'm getting wrist pains, is there a "Please less uncritical reliance on technical solutions to social problems" emoji?

10/ The official government line is that there's nothing to see here. Rospotrebsouz (the Federal Consumer Protection body) announced that "there were no emergencies involving pathogenic microorganisms at the Irkutsk Institute, and the employee died of pneumonia."

Why not use these technologies to help make democracy more efficient? Given crypto's obsession with treating social problems as technical problems, it's pretty glaring when they take the pass.

Two weeks since switching out of Chrome "The Browser That Likes To Watch". I went to Brave, but could have been Zen. I'm surprised that the time saved is that high (0.5 hr), that the bandwidth saved is that low (0.25GB), and I'm astonished at the number of ads and trackers blocked (28K).

I’ve never seen “basic research “ defined before. Under this definition, what makes research basic is it’s a public good.

Wait so my advisees are going to be sending me these messages for the rest of their careers? Wait wait so i can send my adviser messages like these for the rest of my career?

From one Trump campaign donor to another: I never thought it would be us

“I’m too busy, maybe I should volunteer for another service position “

Rationalism's biggest ideas—EA, alignment, and most AI scenarios—depend on existence proof through wild extrapolations. But absurdity is a bug not a feature. enfascination.com/weblog/post/...

If you're baffled by the irrationality of supposedly rational ideologies like Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Existential Risk, AI alarmism, AI utopianism, and all the rest of TESCREAL, I've got it figured out: enfascination.com/weblog/post/...

Most people associate "anarchism" with just one school: "revolutionary anarchism". It's got it's place in history, and today, but I'm very excited to see they other threads develop, especially mutualist anarchism.

Interesting free simulator game for learning how to build a company www.simcompanies.com

Interest rates in Russian savings accounts are breaking 13%

The results of our experiment were wild. But it turned out our subjects didn't understand the experiment. But after fixing that, the results stayed the same: weird. And I'm proud to say that I've been at this long enough that I predicted it: comprehension somehow doesn't matter sometimes.

Apparently the ditto mark is one of the oldest typographical conventions, going back nearly 3000 years to Assyrian’s cuneiform, which also used two vertical marks. The word “ditto”, however is Tuscan for “said” (a past tense of “dire”)

Opinions differ but I think parenting is fun

1/ Russian courts currently acquit 0.24% of defendants. The Russian government evidently believes this is too high, and is planning to effectively eliminate jury trials, which provide most of the acquittals. Lawyers are calling it "the death of the jury system." ⬇️

Dung beetle poop is food twice removed

Since every scholar is a student, this new academic year makes me a 34th grader.

Dmitry Rogozin, a senator of the Russian Federation representing the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region, explains to MGIMO (top Russian university) students how Russian propaganda works. Russia spends enormous amounts of money on its propaganda machine, both inside Russia and around the world

“Base-ball … is that the one with special hats?”

Apparently personal development is just project management on yourself.

Pretty incredible that the crop on this photo for that headline makes MAHA look like MAFIA.

One of my greatest simple pleasures is getting seeds stuck in my teeth only to slip out an hour later for my enjoyment. Poppy and chia, but especially strawberry and sesame seeds. They're a quantum of delight from one-hour-ago-Seth paying it forward. That guy; what a mensch.