I think the Master and Commander series would work as an anime. I'd accept CGI for the technical aspects of the ships - in fact, I'm sure that's the only realistic way to portray all the vessels in the books.

There's a ton of nuance in the books that can be used as voiceover filler too. Perfect fit.

The VA who portrays Major Kusanagi can be the one behind Diana Villiers. EDIT sadly she passed away in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atsuko_Tanaka.

Habryka @ LW takes a break from reinventing Western civilization from first Rat principles to advocate a RETVRN to incandescent lighting:

Eventually, in most of the western world outside of the US, incandescent lightbulbs were literally banned to promote energy saving policies.

This was the greatest uglification in history. Within two decades, much of the world that was previously filled with beautiful natural-feeling light started feeling alien, slightly off, and uncomfortable, and societal stigma around energy-saving policies prevented people from really doing anything about it.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWib7qinqymfxevE4/if-a-room-feels-off-the-lighting-is-probably-too-spiky-or

Look I know Doctorow fails the gen-AI purity test but I think he's making sense here

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/

Why? So it can be firebombed?

(don't fire-bomb residences people)

also it's hilarious that a 5% local tax surcharge on a place you don't even live in is considered Stalinism

I don't deny Putin is a Russian nationalist, I just meant that he could have more profitably reached his goals with a lighter touch. Invading in 2022 hardened Ukraine's opposition, highlighted the behavior of Russian troops in occupied Ukraine, and destroyed a lot of hardware and people.

Before 2022, Putin could project Russian power as this weird chimera of Russia as a promised land of white patriarchy, coupled with invincible military threat. The invasion revealed Russia as both military incompetent and brutal, making resisting Russia militarily the rational choice, and simultanously sidelining Russia's supporters. If you stand with Putin, you also stand with the people who destroyed Bucha.

If all you have is a blog, it's natural for you to think that you can effect regime change through blogging.

But there's a very large step between

1. blog a lot
2. ???
3. absolute CEO-king

Culture matters. The US has had a de jure republic for almost 250 years. Even though the presidency has steadily moved to a more central role, it's one thing to have a literal KING in place. There needs to be a story there, and saying "we need to be more effective or the Chinese will win" doesn't really cut it.

It took France almost 100 years to finally establish republican rule: revolution, Directory, First Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Orleanist monarchy, Second Republic, coup, Second Empire, catastrophic military defeat, Third Republic.

Then we get narrow Pyhrric victory in WW1, defeat again, collaborationist dictatorship, 4th republic, de Gaulle gets fed up, 5th republic.

Even today the French president has more power than in many other republican constitutions.

How does Yarvin propose to remove the republican idea from American consciousness?

Good link, thanks.

The commenter totally missed what a shock the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI were. The natural reaction to "if the king is bad just kill him" is for the king to more or less aggressively remove threats to their persons.

Putin is lucky that Needy Amin's stupid attack on Iran pushed his invasion of Ukraine down to the 2nd most idiotic military adventure so far in the 21st century.

Look, before that, he had a decent hand. Russia was a 2nd or 3rd rate power, but no-one knew it, because the shiny armed forces were just seen on parades. He was getting a decent chunk of cash from fossil fuels, Russia was a good place to do shady business in , and he and his freidns could stash all that money in UK and US banks and send their kids to university there. Every alt-right party could count on some rubles getting sent to them.

So he wasn't Peter the Great, but he wasn't some boyar losing battles with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth either.

In 6 or 12 months, Zelensky would be brought down by a combination of corruption and or shitty economy, and some Russia-friendly oligarch would use Russian disinfo to get elected and tie Ukraine even closer to Russia. But he just couldn't stand that somewhere there were Ukraine kids getting an education in Ukrainian and where the Holodomor was part of the curriculum.

This is part 2 in a serious of posts by Habryka. The first has this tagline:

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism.

(the 3rd is entitled, I kid you not, Vladimir Putin's CEV is probably not that bad)

All 3 are almost impenetrably jargon-y.

HEre's an El Reg piece about doing something similar for low-income UK homes

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/

Stop-AI terrorists: Eliezer Yudkowsky told us to bomb the datacenters.

Yudkowsky: no no no, I said we needed airstrikes to hit the datacenters

IRGC: I gotchu fam Cheap Drones Complicate the Gulf’s AI Boom

(edit reworded comment around link to attempt to make it funnier)