In school, we learned that different portions of the tongue were sensitive to different tastes. It turns out this was fabricated; an exaggeration of the findings of a 1901 experiment. Correlation between taste and tongue area is weak to non-existent.

What else were the teachers confidently wrong about?

These mental reframes are so valuable.

Saying "this is beautiful, here's why" is genuinely more vulnerable than saying "this is overrated."

Generally, I assume almost nobody will read anything I write here or on fediverse sites. It's a place to practice writing succinctly.

Then I remember that censorship resistance is closely related to easy scraping; public, permissionless availability means the machines can read it too. Nostr posts are the most accessible LLM training data, while the managed platforms increasingly lock social media posts behind paid API deals.

So if you’re not writing pseudonymously and you don't have much of a public footprint, don't be surprised if your Nostr history becomes the core of what models know about you.

Webb lays out some background on Polymarket. Since it's already a powerful force, her claim that the origin has been obscured warrants attention.

Polymarket isn't just a place to bet on politics. It's a place where political odds turn into media narratives, donor signals, campaign inputs, and voter expectations.

It sounds like Part 2 will cover the maximal version of that shift. We already see attempts to steer prediction-market graphs against polling data close to elections. The amount of money involved suggests the incentives are not theoretical.

Episode 1 of Chainsmoker Cat just aired, and the reactions are as funny as the anime.

A cat girl is ruining her life with a high time-preference slacker lifestyle, including the headline nicotine addiction. It's deliberately weird, and we've forgotten how to enjoy that.

Every response has people reading their personal viewpoints in. They're disgusted by or attracted to the dirty slacker lifestyle. They're scared it promotes smoking, or glad it portrays it as ruinous. They find the catgirl hot, or think it lampoons catgirls entirely, and there's someone further angry or enthused about whichever of those interpretations they land on.

No two people are watching the same cartoon. But there's something in it for everybody, even people who can't be happy without something to be mad about. This one's going to be interesting.