Blog on Post-Candide

Weak Arguments Only Count If Someone Tried

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

⊕ Figure 1: Satire on False Perspective, by William Hogarth, 1754

A bad argument for a claim is evidence against the claim. That sounds like a license to dismiss anything poorly argued, and it mostly isn’t — the inference only works when you had reason to expect a good argument and didn’t get one. Weak arguments count against a position only to the extent that someone capable actually tried to make the strong case. Stated flatly that seems obvious; in practice the heuristic is easily used as if the “actually tried” part were free, and it isn’t.

Where This Was Always Leading

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

⊕ Figure 1: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio, 1601-2

Watching the sincere ⊕ I mean the ones who remained intellectually honest. libertarians work through the Anthropic/Fable situation, which has been building for a while.

They’re strung out along the same curve ⊕ tariffs, visa/immigration, censorship, equity stakes, Norway, Venezuela, Anthropic/DoD, Iran, and now Fable… among other things at different speeds, some pointed well before Fable, some only arriving now.

Claude.ai / Claude Desktop UX Idea

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It would be very useful to:

be able to bury a conversation from the recent list (e.g.: conversation is closed, keep it away from active topics)
below the Recents accordion with recent conversations, add a Recent Projects accordion with projects ranked by recentness of the most recent project’s conversation, clicking on the project unfolds another accordion with this project conversations sorted by recentness (the UX described is just an example, there are probably other/better ways to show this)
a user setting, off by default, that hide conversations from Recents if they are implicitly present in the recent project accordion

This way, it becomes easier to separate one-off, ongoing conversations, from ongoing conversations that are part of projects without adding another layer of organisation (folders 👎 or tags 👍 – tags would be great too)

Note on SCMP's China's growing cultural clout article

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick critique of Why Japan thinks China’s growing cultural clout is something it needs to counter.

The headline and intro focus about the Japan / China angle but Japan is only mentioned 4 times. 4 paragraphs deal with the ‘reaction’ from Japan and 34 others contain uninspired glaze over Chinese’ pop culture achievements, of which my personal opinion is:

Wukong ⊕ as a reference point, if you compare it with something like Yotei (American-made although with a lot of Japanese input), it’s pretty weak culturally and Yotei is excellent on that point. was pretty disappointing relative to the hype: the game-play is not original, the graphics are pretty good (intro cut-scene!) but not revolutionary and the historical tale is pretty weak except in setting-up the story.

Why Your Phone Camera Can't See Infrared

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I actually used to own of these Sony camera with Nightlock. As I remembered this, I asked Claude to review what was the evolution of IR imaging with digital cameras and why:

Digital cameras from the early 2000s would pick up near-infrared light with little effort — point a TV remote at the lens and the sensor would register the burst clearly. Attach a dark IR-pass filter and you could shoot striking infrared landscapes in reasonable exposure times. Modern phone cameras won’t do any of this. The reason is a hardware filter, not a sensor limitation or a software restriction.

B-52 Long-Term Maintenance: Airframe and Engine Sustainment

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How to keep running 64 year old planes

Covid19 Vaccine Equity Review

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My daughter was preparing a debate in which she was arguing for a more fair handling of future pandemic crisis. As she asked me to review her opening speech, she was making the argument, in quite a strong way, how unfair the covid-19 distribution had been across countries.

I was a bit concerned she was pushing that example too hard out of youth idealism and I asked Claude first to review the claims, in particular from the standpoint of the Philippines as she was role-playing a representative from that country. The initial Claude output basically confirmed her claims. I then asked Claude to research whether the claims were disputed to make sure Claude didn’t give the answer I was expecting and the result remained solid. Finally, I asked to compile all of that in a pdf that I keep available here for whatever use it can be of.