link.dump.01.07.2026

free speech, hogs, reading, and existentialism

hog smoking a pipe and reading next to a dump truck

1. South Carolina is no longer the state with the most banned books. Hooray for Utah being even MORE backwards than my state. A perfect example of one of the downsides to public education I guess but…Squirt is still going.

2. Three current philosophical debates going on in the modern world. Fascinating read. For example, is there no free will but instead just inevitability?

3. Americans spend way more money on healthcare and die way earlier. Pretty bleak fucking analysis here.

4. Speaking of bleak, here’s “doom-coding” where you can be banging out code on your phone anywhere. I think this is satire? Maybe?

5. DOGE didn’t accomplish it’s published goals at all but, listen, there were other things it was really about and apparently those did happen. Or something.

6. Greg Lukianoff did a TED talk about Free Speech and it is, forgive me, FIRE.

7. Change is the root of all bugs. I agree, however, I would also argue that change is the root of all IMPROVEMENT and INNOVATION as well.

8. Grok is enabling mass sexual harassment via AI image generation. Like Sean talks about, it’s because there’s a market force for exactly this type of trash so it can “make sense” to allow this. Of course, it’s still trash.

9. Cloudflare’s Radar Bot Review for 2025 is fascinating reading if you’re a nerd and, you know, I am. There’s a smaller summary I guess if you’re slightly less nerdy but you should embrace the nerd.

10. Fantastic summary of the Year in LLM by Simon Willison.

11. Somehow I missed this enumeration of all the ways Trump is attacking free speech. It’s a little old but nice and detailed.

12. Great piece by Noahpinion about how liberals have lost their “home.”

13. Hogs: a modern day locust.

14. Numbers are in and nobody reads anymore. Feelsbadman.gif