AI Note-writer Progress Our note-writer (wholesome-raspberry-stilt) has written community notes on X with 47M views. The cost per helpful note is about $7. You can look at our notes here: goodheart-labs.github.io/cn-…

nathan fielder creating a play called “smokers allowed” to get around the smoking ban what’s the loophole? nathan’s responding “theater law” makes me laugh every single time 😭

Learn the news months in advance by subscribing to my round ups (I wrote this in May)

Go where the people making the world better are, and marry for love. (though wealth is a good proxy for this, imo)

No recorded home starts in four boroughs! None! Nada! Zero! Zilch! Labour promised to bulldoze the blockers btw. People literally told me to vote labour in 2024 because they were supposedly YIMBY. Suckers. Single biggest failure of their administration.

ht:

if nobody builds it, nobody will build it

This is a fascinating theory about the origins of monogamy.

I always thought that the ancient Romans were tolerant about sexuality, until the rise of puritanical Christianity. Reading Kyle Harper, I learnt that this picture is not exactly false, but it is extraordinarily misleading: worksinprogress.co/issue/wer… - Sexual penetration of a free Roman man was severely punished, possibly by death. Consenting to penetration was also seriously punished. Lesbianism was not criminalised, but was regarded with contempt. - The one great subject of permissiveness was the penetration of enslaved people. Although relatively few people owned slaves, many prostitutes were enslaved and prostitution was ubiquitous, so coerced sex was widespread. - In some parts of the empire, many married women probably seem to have worn face veils in public. - There was not even theoretically a norm of male fidelity: although wives were required to be faithful to their husbands, the inverse was not even aspirationally true. - Early Christianity wrought a kind of revolution on ancient morality. All forms of sexuality apart from procreative sex within monogamous marriage were relentlessly and violently condemned, and even marital sex was allowed only rather grudgingly. In effect, the Christians extended to men the restrictions that had previously applied only to women. - To a limited extent, they also extended the protections previously enjoyed by free men to other groups of people. Although the early Christian record on slavery is mostly very poor, they did introduce the first laws against the forcible prostitution of slaves. Transgressors were to be arrested and sent to the public mines, ‘which is’, the law ran, ‘less of a punishment than that of a woman who is seized by a pimp and compelled to endure the filth of an intercourse that she did not will’. It is not clear how much behaviour actually changed in practice – the Christians were never able to get people to behave exactly as they wanted. But the change in official norms was revolutionary, and not quite the revolution I expected.

dating on hard mode: thinking trans people deserve respect and also that cops are good

san francisco to enter this year’s eurovision

Autonomous vehicles are like congestion pricing: Before being rolled out, people are opposed to the idea in theory. But after experiencing how great it is in practice, they become really supportive.

Police are generally good. Without police, all conflicts can eventually escalate to force so violent young men and obnoxious people get their own way.

I told the cops and they said they’d act. A quiet public park is a commons. It is not for the most obnoxious people to monopolise.

No10 Policy Unit is hiring a Director of AI and Society

Britain:

Oh this story is delicious. Some choice parts for you:

As well they should. Why would the government subsidize free puppies?

RT @pastasnack_e: Single ladies: now is a great time to lock in a guy with a bad hairline.