Astral Codex Ten

WordPress

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WordPress

Article

WordPress is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between January 22, 2021 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “They’ve changed the comment section to be more like WordPress”; “Is the dichotomy not me vs. Substack, but WordPress (also a great tech company) vs. Substack?”; “Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery”. It most often appears alongside AI, America, Donald Trump.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: January 22, 2021
  • Last seen: January 13, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Logistics
January 22, 2021 · Original source
I know some of you are skeptical. I was too at first, but Substack has gone above and beyond in allaying my concerns. They've let me test out a "no popup telling you to subscribe" feature. They've changed the comment section to be more like WordPress. We've agreed I'm here for a year, but if it goes badly I can leave in 2022 with no hard feelings.
Why Do People Prefer My Old Blog's Layout To Substack's?
May 04, 2022 · Original source
Is the dichotomy not me vs. Substack, but WordPress (also a great tech company) vs. Substack? I think this explains some of it. But some of the people in the comments talked about the colors and layout in particular.
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
Spewing forth from a single WordPress site that doesn’t even display properly in mobile, Real Raw News presents itself as the lone bastion telling the real story of what is going on in America, for everyone who isn’t fooled by the fake news of all the other media outlets.
Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty9. As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted! No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton received a life sentence, only to mysteriously die in prison, perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up executed herself. Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have no rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for telling troops not to attend Trump rallies and for ruling against Donald Trump in court. Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel10 can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened within five minutes. Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve tormenting the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons: The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.” Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall. And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows. “You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed. “Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied. […] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips. She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later. “Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said. During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it. “Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]11. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said. But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said. As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by firing squad. But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or thrown overboard. The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes. The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence. The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance12. What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, Nothing Ever Happens. But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice. Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope. The World’s Laziest Conspiracy One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are un-conspiracies. Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events. But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for total inaction. RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even vote. The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen. It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent. Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee. Trump Will Never Die But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory? That’s right, this review is actually about AI13. The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation? Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s experience machine – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives? But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible. Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this. But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the real body camera footage, and it does show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together. In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with no evidence at all. Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously. But in a sense, all of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the same event caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise. So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for any story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads. Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same? 1 “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?” Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers: A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
Inline links: 9, Jeff Sessions, received a life sentence, die in prison, executed herself, telling troops not to attend Trump rallies, ruling against Donald Trump in court, 10, within five minutes., tormenting, 11, firing squad, thrown overboard, 12, Nothing Ever Happens, 13, experience machine, 1
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well, or backfire? Some of these are long-horizon, some are conditional, and some are hard to resolve. There are potential solutions to all these problems. But why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets? Annals of The Rulescucks The new era of prediction markets has provided charming additions to the language, including “rulescuck” - someone who loses an otherwise-prescient bet based on technicalities of the resolution criteria. Resolution criteria are the small print explaining what counts as the prediction market topic “happening'“. For example, in the Khameini example above, Khameini qualifies as being “out of power” if: …he resigns, is detained, or otherwise loses his position or is prevented from fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader of Iran within this market's timeframe. The primary resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible reporting. You can imagine ways this definition departs from an exact common-sensical concept of “out of power” - for example, if Khameini gets stuck in an elevator for half an hour and misses a key meeting, does this count as him being “prevented from fulfilling his duties”? With thousands of markets getting resolved per month, chances are high that at least one will hinge upon one of these edge cases. Kalshi resolves markets by having a staff member with good judgment decide whether or not the situation satisfies the resolution criteria. Polymarket resolves markets by . . . oh man, how long do you have? There’s a cryptocurrency called UMA. UMA owners can stake it to vote on Polymarket resolutions in an associated contract called the UMA Oracle. Voters on the losing side get their cryptocurrency confiscated and given to the winners. This creates a Keynesian beauty contest, ie a situation where everyone tries to vote for the winning side. The most natural Schelling point is the side which is actually correct. If someone tries to attack the oracle by buying lots of UMA and voting for the wrong side, this incentivizes bystanders to come in and defend the oracle by voting for the right side, since (conditional on there being common knowledge that everyone will do this) that means they get free money at the attackers’ expense. But also, the UMA currency goes up in value if people trust the oracle and plan to use it more often, and it goes down if people think the oracle is useless and may soon get replaced by other systems. So regardless of their other incentives, everyone who owns the currency has an incentive to vote for the true answer so that people keep trusting the oracle. This system works most of the time, but tends towards so-called “oracle drama” where seemingly prosaic resolutions might lie at the end of a thrilling story of attacks, counterattacks, and escalations. Here are some of the most interesting alleged rulescuckings of 2026: Mr Ozi: Will Zelensky wear a suit? Ivan Cryptoslav calls this “the most infamous example in Polymarket history”. Ukraine’s president dresses mostly in military fatigues, vowing never to wear a suit until the war is over. As his sartorial notoriety spread, Polymarket traders bet over $100 million on the question of whether he would crack in any given month. At the Pope’s funeral, Zelensky showed up in a respectful-looking jacket which might or might not count. Most media organizations refused to describe it as a “suit”, so the decentralized oracle ruled against. But over the next few months, Zelensky continued to straddle the border of suithood, and the media eventually started using the word “suit” in their articles. This presented a quandary for the oracle, which was supposed to respect both the precedent of its past rulings, and the consensus of media organizations. Voters switched sides several times until finally settling on NO; true suit believers were unsatisfied with this decision. For what it’s worth, the Twitter menswear guy told Wired that “It meets the technical definition, [but] I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.” Domer: Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal? AFAICT, this is the only case where the oracle genuinely broke down (as opposed to a legitimate disagreement). In February, it looked like both America and Ukraine had agreed to a mineral deal, but the oracle considered the question and decided this didn’t count as a full agreement (and indeed, the apparent agreement then fell apart). In March, a cabal of YES holders tried again. They waited for a time when all Polymarket employees would be out of the office, and when not too many people would be voting on the decentralized resolution oracle, then spammed it with calls to resolve to YES based on an argument that the February agreement had qualified after all. The YES holders and not-particularly-plugged-in oracle voters pushed the vote towards YES. Then, with two minutes to spare, a Polymarket employee showed up and said that Polymarket’s opinion was that it should be NO. This was technically framed as a recommendation to oracle voters, but it is so effective in establishing the Schelling point that it’s practically always followed. However, in this case, there were only two minutes left, which wasn’t enough time for the voters to change their mind. Seeing that the resolution was trending towards yes, the Polymarket representatives, not wanting to break their streak of always establishing the Schelling point, changed their own opinion to YES, and the final vote was YES 99%. Domer: How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?: Kalshi’s resolution criteria for this market said they would resolve it when a major news source published Oscar viewership numbers. A few minutes after the Oscars, NYT published preliminary viewership numbers, without any caveats saying they were preliminary. The next day, they published another article saying that actually, the real viewership numbers were higher. Kalshi decided that the letter of the resolution criteria was met when NYT published its first article, and that NYT changing its opinion didn’t imply that Kalshi should change the resolution. Traders who bet on the later (ie correct) numbers were unsatisfied with this decision. NYPost: Will America invade Venezuela? On January 3, the US bombed Venezuela, sent in a Special Forces team that successfully captured President Maduro, and announced that they would thenceforward “run the country” (a claim they later walked back). Does this qualify as an “invasion”? Polymarket’s resolution criteria defined “invasion” as “a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela”. It didn’t seem like the US was trying to establish control over Venezuelan territory, exactly, so they resolved NO. Traders who bet on YES were unsatisfied with this decision. With one exception, these aren’t outright oracle failures. They’re honest cases of ambiguous rules. Most of the links end with pleas for Polymarket to get better at clarifying rules. My perspective is that the few times I’ve talked to Polymarket people, I’ve begged them to implement various cool features, and they’ve always said “Nope, sorry, too busy figuring out ways to make rules clearer”. Prediction market people obsess over maximally finicky resolution criteria, but somehow it’s never enough - you just can’t specify every possible state of the world beforehand. The most interesting proposal I’ve seen in this space is to make LLMs do it; you can train them on good rulesets, and they’re tolerant enough of tedium to print out pages and pages of every possible edge case without going crazy. It’ll be fun the first time one of them hallucinates, though. …And Miscellaneous N’er-Do-Wells I include this section under protest. The media likes engaging with prediction markets through dramatic stories about insider trading and market manipulation. This is as useful as engaging with Waymo through stories about cats being run over. It doesn’t matter whether you can find one lurid example of something going wrong. What matters is the base rates, the consequences, and the alternatives. Polymarket resolves about a thousand markets a month, and Kalshi closer to five thousand. It’s no surprise that a few go wrong; it’s even less surprise that there are false accusations of a few going wrong. Still, I would be remiss to not mention this at all, so here are some of the more interesting stories: Fhantombets: Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Twelve hours before the announcement, someone placed a large Polymarket bet on Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, bringing her probability from 4% to 73%. When Machado later won, observers suspected insider trading. But an account named fhantombets claims to have interviewed the winning trader; although he did not reveal his exact strategy, the interview better matches a story where he was good at navigating WordPress directories, and found that the Nobel team put a draft of the announcement up early in a nonpublic part of their WordPress site. He won about $70,000. LuishXYZ: Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad? This is a small town in Ukraine that the Russians obviously were not going to capture; the Polymarket price trended toward zero. The resolution criteria named maps by the well-regarded Institute For The Study of War as canon. A few hours before resolution, ISW updated their maps to show the the town captured by Russia, which was definitely false. Polymarket resolved to YES, and the fictional Russian advance disappeared. The Institute then issued a statement saying the map update was “unapproved”, and fired one of its staffers who had presumably been involved. The cheater’s exact winnings are unknown, but based on the size of the market are probably mid-6-digits. TechCrunch: What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call? Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong delivered the company’s “earnings call”, ie a speech to investors about its recent progress. At the end, he said “I've been tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call”. Armstrong is worth $10 billion and doesn’t need to manipulate a $50,000 market for the money - he later described his comments as “trolling”. Other crypto executives condemned the move, with one saying that “you need your head examined if you think it’s cute or clever or savvy that the CEO of the biggest company in this industry openly manipulated a market.” I might need my head examined, because I think it’s at least kind of funny. Forbes: Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year? A trader called AlphaRaccoon got 22/23 of these Polymarket questions right, and has a history of implausibly good performance on Google-related questions. They basically have to be a Google insider, but (since all of this is done through crypto) nobody has a good way to figure out who. They made $1 million. NPR: Will Maduro be captured? Just before the secret operation that captured Maduro, someone placed a mysterious $32,000 wager on YES. Was this insider trading by someone in the administration or military? Nobody knows, since the profits go to an anonymous crypto wallet. But the article mentions that the crypto wallet appears to be cashing out through regulated KYC-compliant US exchanges, which suggests they’re not very worried about their identity getting discovered. Maybe they just got lucky after all. AlanMCole: How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing? Karoline Leavitt is Trump’s press secretary. On January 7, she held an ordinary press briefing. Kalshi had its usual market about how long the briefing would last, divided into bins of greater than vs. less than 65 minutes. At the 64:24 mark, Leavitt ended the conference in what appeared to be a sudden manner, and the “less than 65 minutes” bin shot from 2% to 100%. A viral tweet convinced many people that Leavitt must have been insider trading, but Cole counterargued that Leavitt could only have won about $4,000 from the market, which probably isn’t enough to risk one’s job as White House Press Secretary. Sometimes people just end press conferences at weird times. Cole concluded: Now, some opinions and generalizations, as someone who looks at prediction markets plenty (I’ll probably write something about my own experience with them at some point.) 1. This market, like many of them, is pretty stupid. I like substantive markets; this isn’t substantive. 2. The major prediction markets have a wildly undisciplined comms strategy where any attention is good attention, and they love implying all sorts of crazy wild west stuff is going on to get attention. 3. People do bet on things potentially subject to manipulation or insider trading. But usually the markets like that (such as duration of press conference, or stupid “what will be mentioned” markets) are small, especially relative to the wealth of key decisionmakers. 4. Losers in markets are huge whiners, and the more frivolous and tiny their bets, the more likely they are to whine. Sometimes in sports it’s pretty egregious. They’ll get mad at a team for running out the clock when ahead but under some spread they bet on. 5. Lower-quality financial news often doesn’t pay much attention to quantity. (For example, dumb stories about how a decisionmaker has a conflict of interest because they’re invested in an index fund which is 3 percent comprised of some company.) 6. Given the platforms’ undisciplined social media strategy of “promote prediction market chatter no matter what kind of chatter it is,” I don’t think this tweet rises even to the status of “lower-quality financial news.” Kalshi’s team, whatever their faults, are extraordinarily efficient at getting batched approvals of many near-identical markets with slight parameter variation; I’ve seen Tarek speak about this on Odd Lots. The result is they’ve got TONS of them, for better or worse. You’re gonna see 1-in-100 upsets on tiny Kalshi markets for as long as this regulatory equilibrium holds, even if nothing unusual is going on, simply because they’re publishing hundreds (thousands?) of markets per day. There’s a saying that you can’t con an honest man. This isn’t exactly true. But it’s easier to con people who are playing in a “what words will Brian Armstrong say today” market than people who are trying to do something useful, and I have trouble feeling sorry for these people when Brian Armstrong says silly words. Conditional Markets: A Modest Proposal Conditional markets (“decision markets”) are the strongest case for prediction markets potentially being revolutionary. The idea is - you may want to base a decision (like which candidate to elect) on an outcome (like how they’ll affect the economy). So you make two markets: If the Democrat gets elected, will the economy be good four years later?
Inline links: UMA Oracle, Keynesian beauty contest, Will Zelensky wear a suit?, calls this, told Wired, Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal?, How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?, another article, Will America invade Venezuela?, stories about cats, Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize?, claims, Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad?, a statement, What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call?, described, Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year?, Will Maduro be captured?, How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing?