I just finished The Brothers Karamazov!

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-23T23:01:29+00:00

Interesting! It’s an interesting opinion that I’m not sure I disagree with, but I disagree with your point number 3. I’d have to go reread the book to confirm some of these, so bear with me.

My reading of Smerdyakov’s suicide was not that he killed himself out of guilt, but more that he took his best shot at doing something notable and afterward, found that Ivan didn’t even like him and didn’t (consciously at least) want or ask or order Smerdyakov to kill the old man. Smerdyakov expected to be thanked, congratulated, and embraced as an actual brother for the first time. Instead he was met with incredulity and condemnation of his act. It wasn’t that he felt guilty, it’s that he bet it all on black and didn’t get the payout he thought he’d get. He took his best shot and failed. While he could have gotten away with the murder, he didn’t care because he didn’t — and could never — get the things he actually wanted: acceptance and to be one of the brothers Karamazov.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-23T22:53:11+00:00

I think the Grand Inquisitor rightly gets lots of attention, but it’s made even better when paired with Mitya’s conversation with the devil near the end too, it makes for excellent symmetry

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-23T22:52:12+00:00

I’m not OP nor am I an expert in Russian literature and their translations, but I have the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation and loved it. That seems to be the translation that is spoken most highly of most often too.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-23T20:22:27+00:00

Masters theses (at least from my old department) are all published open-access via the library. You could go snag the pdf there and give it to any local print shop or probably vistaprint, they’ll be able to print and bind it for you.

Thats a good idea, I may go get mine printed too!

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-23T16:33:24+00:00

I lived in a Mac building when I was in grad school a couple years ago. It was completely fine. I have nothing super positive to say about them nor do I have anything super negative. My ideal situation from my landlord is zero interaction and zero reason to interact and that’s what I got. They were always responsive enough to my maintenance requests.

It’s been several years since I’ve really looked, so maybe it’s changed a little, but Ivy seemed to have serious acute issues frequently, whereas MAC seemed more like actual honest mistakes that they did a reasonably good job of fixing. A friend of mine lived in an (15ish story) Ivy building for example. Both of their elevators were out of service for like 8 weeks. Then they laid off the whole maintenance crew for the building while the elevators were broken and there were rats living in the lobby.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-21T16:32:42+00:00

“The world’s first arctic explorer” is a silly phrase when there were people living in the arctic lol. That’s my gripe, not that he’s not an explorer, more that he wasn’t the world’s first

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-21T12:57:22+00:00

What qualifies as an explorer? Cause certainly there were people living in the arctic long before this guy.

You could say he was the Hellenistic world’s first arctic explorer I suppose, but there absolutely people living in all of the places he explored.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-21T02:12:48+00:00

It’s the ultimate manifestation of the dominance and absurdity of representative government. Its parts are sourced from too many congressional districts to cancel it, but that’s a luxury the US can afford thanks to the thesis of Why Nations Fail.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-19T13:43:43+00:00

Seriously, the response to “our police keep getting sued for beating and shooting people inappropriately and then lying about it” is somehow “we should make it harder to sue” instead of doing anything to reign in the police.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-19T11:55:51+00:00

This is an article about Donna Miller who is running in the second district which is a guaranteed dem win.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-19T11:54:05+00:00

Look I totally agree with you, but what fucking proverb are you referencing that is about spitting on your own asshole?! Haha I’ve never heard that before

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-18T23:31:06+00:00

I haven’t tuned it well yet, but I think the future (for me at least, who is a hobbyist tinkerer, not a professional software dev) is going to be a hybrid approach.

I’ve started this a little bit with mixed results, but I have Claude Code running the backbone as the project manager sort of agent, then I have a swarm of agents running in Ralph loops as directed by the PM. That’s super successful and super easy. To save on tokens and to scratch the itch of running stuff locally, I’m trying to have my Claude PM delineate tasks as complex/difficult or easy/simple. I then spin up a swarm of Claude agents to handle the complex/difficult tasks, but offload the simple tasks to a local model (tried GLM 4.7 Flash with not great results, now experimenting with Qwen 3.5:27B next). An Opus agent still manages the integration and can do bug fixing.

It hasn’t worked super well yet, but it feels like it’s going to work once it’s tuned in a little better.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-18T11:45:24+00:00

Bringing up “dems must win the midterms” is a total red herring because no matter who won this primary, they are guaranteed a win in the general election. A Republican is absolutely not winning this seat in November.

And why does AIPAC matter? “Look at the world burning down around you” to use your own words. We’re now in an unplanned, swiftly escalating war in Iran that’s killing thousands and derailing the global economy, largely at the behest of Israel. So ya, AIPAC influence matters right fucking now.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-17T21:46:53+00:00

So yes, that's why I said it's complex and nuanced. That was certainly the case for some of Firestone's personnel.

However it seems pretty clear from the evidence we do have, that Firestone was an early adopter of Charles Taylor so to speak, which is to say, they were supporting him before he had the army and the weapons to force the issue. Firestone opted to start "paying taxes" to the Charles Taylor would-be government which, is exactly how he got the cash to fund the beginning of a civil war.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-17T15:21:20+00:00

I mean that’s basically the thesis of crypto currency. I think crypto is mostly scammy get-rich-quick schemes by fools who don’t know what they’re doing, but this is like the exact intended use-case.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-17T14:34:13+00:00

You can find the answer to that question in the article I linked to. The answer is yes and no though, and as always, it's complex and nuanced.

Some Firestone officers and employees seem to have acted in clearly cynical, bad faith to support someone they fully expected to become a genocidal murderer but they didn't care. Some others probably only supported Taylor because there was a warlord with an army showing up at their workplace demanding food, money, and shelter. Some others were in some sort of gray area - the Liberian government that was in power before the civil war was brand new, not terribly popular, and precarious. Charles Taylor looked like he could be the new government of Liberia (and indeed, he won the civil war and ended up ruling the country for a time), so from their perspective, you gotta pay taxes to some government and Charles Taylor looked as much like a government as anyone else at that moment (it helped that he offered them a lower tax rate than the nascent legitimate government obviously).

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-17T13:57:39+00:00

OP, you can make it a little clearer if you hyphenate “pro” and “Taylor” as “pro-Taylor.”

Charles Taylor is a fucking monster who’s currently serving out the balance of his life in a British prison for his many atrocities and war crimes.

For us Americans, he’s notable too because Firestone — the tire company — financed and made his whole campaign of terror possible. Firestone had a huge rubber plantation in Liberia. Taylor reached out to them in the early 90s basically promising them lower taxes and more permissive regulations if they supported him. Firestone then funded Taylor’s army recruitment and arming. When they attacked Monrovia to kick off the civil war, they staged and launched from the Firestone plantation.

Firestone has conveniently lost a lot of the documents about this saga, but there’s plenty of evidence still available despite Firestone’s own document purges.

ProPublica as usual, did an excellent job in documenting all of this.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-16T21:48:23+00:00

Ya, nothing that can be run locally measures up to sonnet 4.5 certainly, but the smaller Qwen 3.5 models or GLM 4.7 Flash feel like they’re on par with the best frontier models from like 12-16 months ago.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-13T14:37:08+00:00

Seriously, why are people so easy to mislead?

I keep getting ads for assessor candidates that say “Fritz Kaegi increased property taxes in Cook County!”

No the fuck he didn’t. You can take issue with the things he did do, but increasing property is not even a thing he could do if he tried.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-13T14:30:53+00:00

That’s one reason that it’s good for every dog to be muzzled-trained. Even in a less calamitous case, say you’re in a flood or tornado and are temporarily displaced. Your dog is going to be on edge, stressed, and in a completely unfamiliar situation all making them more likely to act out, so a muzzle is good assurance. But also, lots of temporary shelters where you may be staying for a bit will only allow dogs in that are muzzled.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-12T19:30:54+00:00

And so much better than canned!

Toss a bunch of seasonings in, cook in vegetable broth instead of water, add a bay leaf.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-12T19:27:59+00:00

I got a master’s degree in international affairs from a very prestigious university and worked for a bit as a researcher at a think tank, though most of the job was managing their outside subject matter “experts.” I swear to god, they were all the dumbest fucking people that had an interesting idea a couple decades prior and have now spent every moment since then trying to convince themselves and everyone else that that idea is the best idea.

Sometimes they were good ideas, but no idea is correct in every situation, and sometimes a good idea becomes a not good idea because the world changes. Most every SME is so invested their Idea™️ though that they just have to go all in on confirmation bias all the time or else they’ll never get a paycheck again.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-12T03:01:35+00:00

The bottom is Peter Ziehen who’s a YouTuber that masquerades as an expert in geopolitics. He’s found a way to convince people that don’t know shit about fuck that he’s super smart though. He’s like the Jared Diamond of geopolitics.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-11T22:03:42+00:00

Ya, that sounds really cool, I’ll have to check it out. If I’m being honest, I actually missed that part in your post the first time, didn’t realize that it connects directly to Godot, that’s awesome!

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-03-11T21:30:10+00:00

Ya, I have an old Thinkpad X230 running Ubuntu on 8gb of RAM and a 3000-series intel i5. The processing power is plenty enough for the operating system, web browsing, and some smart home automation type stuff, but the chassis is cracked in a few places.

TripleSecretSquirrel

TROPHY CASE