The graphical aids in practical engineering videos are quite well done, especially when he creates scale models in the garage. You are missing out if you only read it, if you can afford to spend the time watching.
Nothing prevents inserting video clips — or, for that matter, interactive demos or other media — into the flow of a blog post. Youtube incentivizes its "creators" to optimize for view time, so even the most respected channels can be quite redundant in their presentation. And even when it's well edited and "organized", it doesn't necessarily prioritize what would be most useful.
Does it bother anyone else when people use their teeth to scrape food off a metal utensil (rather than lips, or teeth to food)? I wish English had a specific word for that affront.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by this.
I was once at a table with someone who was eating tomato soup by putting the spoon into their mouth, bitting it, and then pulling the spoon out. I was losing my mind listening to it.
Dip, ting, dip, ting. Dip, OUCH!.
They chipped their tooth. They chipped a tooth eating tomato soup.
Kinda sad for me to know this because one of my favorite things about chopsticks is their precision. I can pick exactly the piece of food I feel like eating in the next moment. This makes it sound like I'm not supposed to be picky.
> To keep putting the chopsticks into the same side dishes. It is proper etiquette to first eat rice, move on to eat from a side dish, eat rice again, and then eat from a different side dish.
More about politeness to other guests in the context of a shared meal than being picky (and probably also with some similar logic to the TCM theories of how and what to eat, and maybe giving face to the host).
I have witnessed people arguing with their own lawyers by pasting LLM generated output. That said, lawyers do love to argue so maybe it's fun for them.
em-dashes are a symptom of the problem; they are one of the “dead giveaways” mentioned in the OP which is why I brought them up as an example of slop-scrubbing before forwarding to other humans
Also that journalists are paid for their work, often by someone with political interests, so they are already subject to pressure to modify their reporting. Hopefully not usually threats of violence though!
I think this is way worse. Traditionally violence towards journalists comes from (A) predictable entities and (B) they are curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and deniability.
In contrast:
1. Any number of arbitrary unknown bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have even anticipated, like whether an event happened at 4:59 or at 5:01.
2. The violence can arrive from all sides, simultaneously. Bettors who like what you wrote are not your allies, and one way to ensure an existing report is not revised is to put the journalist out of commission.
3. The same "prediction" market can act as a criminal coordinator for subcontracting the violence, with a new bet: "Will $JOURNALIST revise $ARTICLE with $CHANGE on or before $TIME?"
Commodities futures markets have an actual purpose, which is to make business inputs (or outputs) more predictable. Like if I know I need ten tons of corn next year, it's safer to buy futures now than to wait and see how the price of corn fluctuates over that time, potentially sabotaging my business operation. (Of making corn chips.)
Similar business cases can be made for futures from polymarket. For example if I start a business in the USA I may want to hedge by buying some futures Jesus will not return before 2027.
Wall Street is doing price discovery which benefits index investors. They're also lending (e.g. private credit) which benefits economic activity.
Robin Hood options trading is just lighting money on fire under the guise of "investing", which insidiously somehow seems more responsible than gambling on roulette.
Technically you can't bet on the demise of a person, at least in the US, as participants recently discovered when the previous supreme leader of Iran was killed and their "leadership change" bet did not pay out.
This is true for Kalshi but not for Polymarket. Also Kalshi voided the bet and it got sued. By the way prediction markets are commodity securities where Matt Levine mentioned it should not allow death contracts. Here we are though..
Kalshi doesn't pay out for demise of a person (though, arguably inconsistently[1]); Polymarket does (probably in violation of US regulation, but there are no rules anymore).
[1]: For example, they did pay out on a bet over whether Jimmy Carter would attend Trump's 2025 inauguration; he didn't, at least in part because he was dead.
Polymarket is headquartered in NYC; it's a US company; it has many US customers, and it knows that, even if it did a wink-wink dance "disallowing" that prior to 2024. Since then, it has explicitly expanded into the US market[1]. It is unambiguously subject to US regulations (if we had a regulator who chose to enforce those regulations).
[1]: "Following the end of the investigations, Polymarket announced the acquisition of QCEX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million. The acquisition allowed Polymarket to legally operate within the United States under regulatory compliance. The company received an Amended Order of Designation from the CFTC in November 2025 and began actively expanding in the United States market."
Yeah but we can see right through all that lawyer bullshit right? Gambling markets like polymarket are morally corrupt and we having given them too much space in our society already.
That particular part isn't lawyer bullshit. They're beta testing a completely separate system that runs under US regulations. It looks like it'll be legal in a non-bullshit way.
Moral issues are a different topic, and weak geoblocking on the international version is another different topic.
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