iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 20/03/2025

Whoa, I asked Claude and apparently that was the correct guess:

Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 19/03/2025

I am thinking about adoptiong kittens again (RIP Catberry & Horatio 🥲), and I am almost certainly going to adopt two rescues in NYC. But I realized I didn't know a lot about cat breeds, so I decided to build a tool using PCA and Threes.js fredbenenson.github.io/cat-c…

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 29/11/2024

This is an extremely important point about what kind of populism liberals need to be considering if we are going to win back huge swaths of the electorate. tl;dr: economic populism isn’t going to be enough

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 16/11/2024

Apple’s emoji suggestions used to be extremely narrow and only based on an exact text match of the emoji name (e.g. “Smiling” returned only 😁) Over the last couple years they’ve broadened it to be much fuzzier. Now “death” returns 🌵 and 🏜️ among the others. Maybe because of Death Valley?

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 15/11/2024

One of the only funny things I can remember Andy Borowitz posting

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 15/11/2024

I had a dumb idea about American politics (i.e., that the binary nature of most divisive topics is the cause of an intractable two party system) and asked Claude to challenge me. It's response was remarkably good.

I have a naive idea about American politics, and I'm wondering if it's channeling any theories that I don't know about.

It goes like this: Maybe the reason we're stuck with a two party system is that it's congruent with the fact that most difficult topics have two sides to them. For example, should we have gone to war in Iraq? That largely boils down to a binary answer. Even abortion has this binary nature (you're either pro-life or pro-choice, despite policies having lots of nuance in terms of implementation, etc.)

I think this is important because it makes it harder to argue that a two party system is a fundamentally broken way of doing politics. It may actually just be the natural order of things since third party positions tend to be hard to stake out on divisive topics which seems to inspire so much of politics.

This is a fascinating hypothesis that touches on some deep questions in political science. Let me break down a few key considerations:

First, while many political issues can be framed as binary choices, this framing might be more a consequence of our two-party system rather than a natural feature of the issues themselves. Take the Iraq War example - beyond just "yes/no," there were positions like:

Yes, but only with UN approval
Yes, but focused on counter-terrorism rather than regime change
No, but maintain aggressive containment
No, and pursue active diplomatic engagement
Similarly with abortion, many European countries have developed more nuanced political consensuses that don't map neatly onto the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy.

Second, there's a well-established political science theory called "Duverger's Law" that suggests two-party systems emerge naturally from first-past-the-post voting systems (where the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority). This happens because voters learn not to "waste" their votes on third parties that can't win, leading to strategic voting for the "lesser evil" among the two major parties.
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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 02/06/2023

meanwhile on the other place

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 23/05/2023

ah yes, it is the queers we must be afraid of

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 13/05/2023

Headed to Just Like Heaven @ The Rose Bowl today courtesy of a friend w/ an extra ticket. It's been ages since I've done a music fest like this! Anyone else going? Line up is geriatric millennial++

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 12/05/2023

End of an era (at least according to my iPhone just now).

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 11/05/2023

do they think we wouldn't notice

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 11/05/2023

So did anyone actually buy the idea that the CNN thing was going to be a disaster for Trump? The dude has made being an asshole on TV his career defining achievement, of course this was going to happen

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 08/05/2023

so, uh, it's been a week and don't want to be that guy, but what did I do wrong, @jay.bsky.team? or did the +1-a-week-invite ration get nixed? i promise my invite tree will only consist of people who I'm willing to pledge my first born to

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 05/05/2023

I see things are continuing to go well over on the other site

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 04/05/2023

Just made one of my favorite low-fuss weeknight dishes: Chicken Provençal (someone in the comments suggested adding butter 🧈🤤) cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017327…

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 03/05/2023

Oh yeah. Do I. I spent the pandemic making bread *and* Breadwinner: breadwinner.life

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 03/05/2023

So, uh, what books are people reading? I just picked up the new David Grann.

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 02/05/2023

Amazon tried to send me a 40lb bag of cat litter via USPS which seems like a bad idea. USPS tried delivering it but couldn’t and now all I can think about is my mail guy driving around with my cat litter and now he’s going to leave one of those pink slips and I’m gonna have to go pick it up.

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 29/04/2023

my body wants to be in California but my mind needs to be in NYC

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