Blogger and Freelancer for hire. Written for @MaximumPC and @HotHardware. Writer, aspiring author, podcast Host, and sometimes-YouTuber. Politics: Independent.
New Jersey
Joined January 2011
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Sean D Knight retweeted
🚨🇵🇱 BREAKING: Police raid Polish Constitutional Tribunal as PM Donald Tusk's government moves against its president, in what opponents are calling an illegal coup d'état.
• Police entered the premises of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw on Friday and the court’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, was suspended, in the latest escalation of a long-running dispute over the institution.
• Officers said they moved in after incidents outside the court, including the throwing of dangerous objects at police. The tribunal confirmed the suspension of its president on its website.
• President Karol Nawrocki turned his plane around mid-flight and aborted a trip to Senegal, stating on X: “At a moment like this, the President must be in Poland. I am cutting short my flight to Senegal. I am returning.”
• Opposition leader Jarosław Kaczyński has described the police action as a “coup” against the Constitutional Tribunal involving services under the government of pro-EU Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
• The tribunal is the body responsible for ensuring legislation complies with the Polish Constitution.
Sean D Knight retweeted
A Greek government report has documented 374 incidents affecting Christian religious sites across Greece in 2025, accounting for nearly 97% of all 386 incidents recorded at places of religious significance nationwide.
The overwhelming majority involved the Greek Orthodox Church, which recorded 362 incidents.
Another seven incidents affected Old Calendarist Orthodox Christians, four involved Jehovah's Witnesses, and one concerned the Anglican Church.
The documented offenses included burglaries, thefts, vandalism, sacrilege, grave desecration and other forms of profanation targeting Christian places of worship and religious property.
Sean D Knight retweeted
Europe just made Temu and SHEIN a lot more expensive.
91% of the EU’s cheap online packages come from China. Starting tomorrow, a €5 charge hits each product category on those parcels.
The EU expects up to €6 billion a year in revenue from the new fees, which target low-value, often non-compliant goods flooding the market.
Temu’s parent company already admitted a “considerable impact.” SHEIN is expanding warehouses inside Europe to dodge the hit.
The era of ultra-cheap Chinese direct shipping is ending.
Sean D Knight retweeted
Yesterday's earnings call with Reddit's CEO will be referenced for years to come.
Reddit, $RDDT, is now down -42% in 8 trading days.
AI has disrupted search, and the internet more broadly, forever.
Our thoughts on this are included below.
Reddit's earnings call has exposed the new reality for thousands of companies.
"AI mode does not drive traffic. Not for us and not to anybody as far as I know. It used to be a traffic driver. Now it's not." - Reddit CEO.
The reality is that AI is fundamentally changing the way that humans access the internet.
Just 24 hours prior to this statement, Google's stock erased -$480 billion on the same issue: AI is disrupting the traditional search model.
For decades, the internet operated on a simple model. Search engines directed users to websites, and those websites monetized the traffic.
AI is destroying this business model, and it's happening at an accelerating pace.
The traditional model of internet traffic is rapidly becoming outdated.
The internet has entered a new era.
Sean D Knight retweeted
BREAKING: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says having RAM in personal computers is an inefficient use of the world’s limited DRAM supply, arguing it would be better allocated to data centers, per Tom’s Hardware
Sean D Knight retweeted
BREAKING: Anthropic is now expected to receive a "high junk" rating from major credit rating agencies after its IPO, which could come as soon as November, per FT.
Details include:
1. Blackstone has told investors that Anthropic likely will not receive an investment-grade rating immediately after its IPO
2. Blackstone is working with banks that stumped up financing on selling the debt on to other investors
3. An investment-grade rating is "central" to Anthropic's ability to continue its AI buildout
4. The company says it expects to spend over $800 billion on computing infrastructure between now and 2045
Debt markets are increasingly in the spotlight as AI funding becomes less abundant.
Sean D Knight retweeted
"Nvm guys, it's just click bait"
As if Sauron thinking he's in a love triangle makes this any better. Also, the showrunners already confirmed there is a love triangle. This whole show is so retarded.
What pisses me off is NotR knows better, but money and access are more important than protecting something he's supposedly a fan of. Well, he is a fan of RoP, so I suppose he's protecting that. He damn sure isn't a fan of Tolkien though.
Nah buddy, you don't get to say that.
You sat there, with a forced smile on your face while allowing the showrunners of Rings of Power go uninterrupted as they tried to justify Elrond making out with Galadriel.
You are one of the corporate ass kissers who promoted this trash. You don't get to pretend you're upset about it now.
Signed,
The Tolkien Fandom
Sean D Knight retweeted
Reddit's earnings call has exposed the new reality for thousands of companies.
"AI mode does not drive traffic. Not for us and not to anybody as far as I know. It used to be a traffic driver. Now it's not." - Reddit CEO.
The reality is that AI is fundamentally changing the way that humans access the internet.
Just 24 hours prior to this statement, Google's stock erased -$480 billion on the same issue: AI is disrupting the traditional search model.
For decades, the internet operated on a simple model. Search engines directed users to websites, and those websites monetized the traffic.
AI is destroying this business model, and it's happening at an accelerating pace.
The traditional model of internet traffic is rapidly becoming outdated.
The internet has entered a new era.
Sean D Knight retweeted
Orwell's great observation in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was that to shrink a person's vocabulary is to shrink his capacity to think.
An impoverished version of English removes the mental tools needed to formulate and communicate complex (and dissenting) ideas. Such is the deep, complex relationship between language and thought.
We don't read "difficult books" to say that we've read difficult books. We read them because they expand the boundaries of what we are capable of thinking and feeling — we ascend to their level. Vocabulary helps us to recognize truths otherwise beyond our grasp.
This revelation is worse than you may think. This must be reversed.
I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT.
It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher...
Vocabulary has collapsed.
Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%.
The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context.
Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340).
The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it.
This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means.
If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these.
If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now.
This cannot go on.
Sean D Knight retweeted
In thousands of Japanese neighborhoods, if you walk into a local community kitchen at dinnertime, you will see a wooden board on the wall covered in colorful paper tickets.
Each ticket was paid for in advance by a stranger on their way home from work.
A hungry child can pull one ticket off the wall and exchange it for a hot, home-cooked dinner with zero questions asked.
This movement is called Kodomo Shokudo, or Children's Cafeterias. It started in 2012 when Hiroko Kondo, a Tokyo greengrocer, learned that a neighborhood child was eating only a single banana after school while his parents worked late. Today, according to the national network Musubie, over 9,000 volunteer-run cafeterias operate across Japan, outnumbering the country's middle schools.
To make sure no child ever feels singled out as poor, any kid in town is welcome to eat for free or 100 yen.
Adults buy pay-it-forward tickets and write little notes on them like: Eat well tonight, and good luck on your math test.
Sean D Knight retweeted
For fifty eight years, my boss in Tokyo believed that beef should be sliced as thin as paper.
In Japan, we cook thin meat for four seconds in boiling broth. That is our way.
Then last month, the YouTube algorithm showed Director Sato a video of a man in Texas smoking a brisket.
It changed his life.
On Monday morning, he called me to his desk. His eyes were bloodshot.
"Have you seen this?" he whispered, turning his monitor toward me. "The American pitmaster does not sleep for sixteen hours. He sits by the fire in the dark. He guards the meat like a castle."
I said, "Sir, it is just a barbecue."
He slammed his hand on the desk.
"This is not cooking," he said. "This is a vigil."
Last Saturday was our annual company picnic by the river in Kanagawa. Normally, we grill thin meat and yakisoba for two hours and go home at 2:00 PM.
I arrived at 9:30 AM to help set up.
Director Sato was already there.
I want to be accurate here: he had been sitting in a folding chair since 10:00 PM on Friday night. He was wearing a towel around his head and staring at a massive black barrel smoker he had imported from Oklahoma.
Inside I said: THIS MAN HAS ABANDONED CORPORATE LIFE FOR THE SMOKE.
When we tried to help him, he held up a pair of metal tongs and clicked them twice.
"Step back," he said calmly. "The stall has begun. Nobody opens the lid."
Twelve Japanese accountants stood in complete silence around a barrel for four more hours. Nobody dared to eat a single noodle until he gave the signal.
At 1:45 PM, he sliced the meat. It fell apart on the cutting board.
My boss looked at the pink smoke ring, nodded once, and wiped a single tear from his cheek.
He has already submitted an official budget request for a trailer smoker for next fiscal year.
Sean D Knight retweeted
Feminists only want special privileges and rights.
But when obligations show up, they don't want them. Not the draft, not the harder jobs, and in this case, in Japan, "overnight work".
Feminists are claiming that this will interfere with their "child-rearing" responsibilities... which they aren't doing much of anyway, as evidenced by the demographic collapse... which started because of feminism and their demand to be represented in the workforce, taking them away from child-rearing in the first place, by increasing the opportunity cost.
At the end of the day, Japanese corpos will exploit both men and women through their rigid "cultural" work demands that still lead to an average lower productivity per hour
⚖️ Japanese women are pushing back against “gender equality” enforced by JAPAN’S SUPREME COURT.
So, what happened?
Historically, ONLY MEN were assigned overnight shifts at Japanese courts. Now, Japan’s Supreme Court has ruled that night shifts at the courts in Tokyo and Osaka must be shared among employees, regardless of gender.
That means both men and women will have to work overnight.
And some female employees are NOT happy about it! They’ve raised concerns about the effects of night shifts on hormonal balance, menstruation, and fertility, as well as the added burden of balancing work with childcare and household responsibilities.
Sean D Knight retweeted
My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will:
1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate.
2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority.
3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority.
This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.
Sean D Knight retweeted
Nah buddy, you don't get to say that.
You sat there, with a forced smile on your face while allowing the showrunners of Rings of Power go uninterrupted as they tried to justify Elrond making out with Galadriel.
You are one of the corporate ass kissers who promoted this trash. You don't get to pretend you're upset about it now.
Signed,
The Tolkien Fandom
Sean D Knight retweeted
In America, a hardware store called Harbor Freight.
I walked in to buy one roll of black electrical tape. Seventy-nine cents.
At the register, a bearded clerk named Frank scanned my tape, reached beneath the counter, and placed a massive red five-gallon plastic bucket between us.
"Free bucket weekend," he said.
I looked at the price tag on the bucket. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents.
I looked at my tape. Seventy-nine cents.
I stood before the register while basic arithmetic died in my hands.
"The vessel costs six times the tribute," I informed him. "If you do this for every customer, your house will fall before winter."
"Been doing it for years, chief. Take the bucket."
In my land, when a lord grants you a vessel larger than your purchase, you are expected to fill it in his service.
I held the wire handle with both hands and asked Frank what a man does with such a bucket.
He looked at me the way a monk looks at an uninitiated boy.
"Everything," Frank said, "except carry water."
I thought he was speaking in riddles. He was speaking the literal law of the land.
I have now inspected four garages on my street, and I must report that the entire residential infrastructure of the United States rests upon five-gallon plastic buckets.
Nobody puts water in them.
The first bucket holds rusty bolts from machines that died during the Bush administration.
The second bucket is inverted so a man can sit on it while staring at a lawnmower he has no intention of fixing today.
The third bucket is an emergency step-stool so a father can stand fourteen inches closer to a smoke detector that will not stop chirping.
I carried my red bucket home and set it beside my garage door.
On Saturday morning, my seventy-four-year-old neighbor Walt walked past my driveway with his coffee.
He stopped. He looked at the red bucket. Then he looked at me.
Without a word, Walt walked back to his own garage, returned sixty seconds later, and dropped a brand-new yellow sponge and a brass hose nozzle into my bucket.
"Saw you finally got your bucket," Walt said, tapping the plastic rim twice. "Welcome to the street, kid."
I spent seventy-nine cents on tape.
They gave me a throne, a toolbox, and citizenship on my block.
Sean D Knight retweeted
Allow me to see if I can explain, however verbose I may be. This might be a long one! 🧵
The trend started when @redteneri's post went viral, with people instantly falling in love with the character design. There were quickly people asking REDTEN to draw her making out with other women from the wizarding world, to which he responded with
“I drew this to make guys yearn again. Sorry, but stop asking me to turn it into yuri or something.”
and
“A few people won't shut up in my dms about how great it would be if she were trans.
1) Don't be annoying, I will block you.
2) That just wouldn't work.”
This solidified that this character was made for normal people, not for a particular loud, annoying minority. In addition, those normal people immediately were taken with that word REDTEN used - “yearn”.
For years now our culture has been inundated with an oppressive, grim, and depressing outlook on life. It has been unavoidable, to say the least.
For women, it’s “would you choose the man or the bear,” or “it’s not ALL men, but it’s ALWAYS a man”, or merely the fact that the #1 clientele for pornography is men, while simultaneous the people shaming women for producing that pornography are, buy and large, men. These ideas stem from the valid critique that modern men have the capacity for incredible violence, hostility, and hypocrisy, and there is no shortage of stories of men doing just that.
For men, it’s seeing things like Lindsay Clancy killing her children and vast swaths of people supporting her, or how it feels like 9 times out of 10, when a woman online says something, there’s an OnlyFans link in her bio, or how women seem to have opposite reactions to Shane Gillis’ gym jokes and Sydney Sweeney’s prediction market ads. These observations have led to the valid concern that modern women have the capacity for incredible violence, immodesty, and hypocrisy, and there is no shortage of stories of women doing just that.
Regardless of how anyone feels on these subjects (I’m just one man, I’m definitely under no illusion that I’m going to solve modern gender wars by myself), the prognosis isn’t looking good. Popular culture reflects this - in feminist media, men are often depicted as toxically masculine or inept while women are depicted as “empowered” and without need of a man. In anti-feminist media, women are often depicted as sexually deviant or stupid while men are depicted as "empowered" and without need of a woman. I got married pretty quickly, so I can’t personally speak to this too well, but I have heard multiple stories about how horrific the dating scene is today. After all, with how much tension there is between men and women, why would we want to even be together?
Enter REDTEN, and the word “yearn”. A killer character design combined with the purpose to bring desire back to male-female relationships. Then, a (rather genius, in my opinion) choice to refer to the character as Malfoid, which, on top of being a pun, was a way to gatekeep the character from that particular loud, annoying minority. Then an artist named @yunayuispink, being a normal person who fell in love with the character design, posted some fanart on Bluesky where she got insane amounts of hate because of the successful gatekeeping. Yunayu made the choice to not give in to the hate, and continued posting what she wanted anyways. This further solidified that Malfoid belongs to us normal people, and not to that particular loud, annoying minority. These things, plus another that I'll get to later, were the catalyst for the explosion of fan creations, if I had to point to it.
Fanart, fanfiction, songs, and yearning. Oh, the yearning. Yearning for what? Not for the fictional Malfoid or the fictional Harry, but for real relationship. To find someone worthy of desire, and simultaneously to be someone worthy of desire. To love, and to be loved.
For men, it’s the idea that they can find someone pretty and confident, who might still be a little rough around the edges, and fall in love with them. Someone worthy of being loved and desired. That they could become a Harry - someone worthy of being loved in return. That they could make sacrifices of themselves, perhaps utilizing their capacity for violence, to protect that which they love against the "Dark Lords" of this world, and that their someone would admire their sacrifice, support them when they falter against those evils, and make their sacrifice worth it.
For women (once again, trying my best at diagnosis considering that I am not a man), I hope it's the idea that they can find someone handsome and strong, who might still be a little rough around the edges, and fall in love with them. That they could become a Malfoid - someone worthy of being loved and desired in return. That they could find someone who loves them enough to sacrifice for them, someone admirable, kind, and dangerous, someone who will protect them against the "Dark Lords" of this world, and that they could support when their someone falters against those evils, that they could make their sacrifice worth it.
Furthermore, there has been another aspect to the trend that has inspired the creation of culture from these artists - and that is the observation many of us have had that J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World, beloved though it is, has some imperfections. These imperfections do not necessarily make the story worse or bad at all, but they do allow aspiring authors, dreamers, and yearners to "fill in the gaps", so to speak. The most impactful one that I'll point to was @MaroonR19's "fate defying expelliarmus", a photo of Harry and Malfoid both holding a single wand, simultaneously casting the spell that brought an end to the Dark Lord. This, in the opinion of many Malfoid enjoyers, would have been a perfect book-end to the canon story of Harry Potter; love stopped Voldemort that night at Godric's Hollow, and love, fully realized between two people who once were at odds with one another, stopped him again. Now, those who have read the books realize that Rowling actually did write this into the canon story (whether it was Snape's love for Lily Potter that drove him to side with Dumbledore, eventually spelling Voldemort's defeat, or the same love that Lily had for Harry rebounding, and Voldemort grafting a piece of his soul onto Harry - that one sacrifice Lily made saved him twice), but it did not resonate as firmly as this idea has.
I've seen all different kinds of thoughts on Rowling's gaps in the storytelling; whether it's Ginny's lackluster romance story, Draco Malfoy's lack of a fully-fledged redemption arc, how Harry had more chemistry than Ron did with Hermione (this last critique is, admittedly, more understandable from people who only watched the movies), or the fact that the theme of love conquering evil seems to play second fiddle for fetch quests and elder wand shenanigans in The Deathly Hallows. The Malfoid-enjoying community has taken to creating art and stories that provide alternative ideas to these points, and however cringe outsiders may find it, these Harry Potter fanfictions and alternate universes have been, on the large, wholesome; notably different than the reputation that Harry Potter fanfictions from a decade and a half ago.
Malfoid enjoyers are having fun spending time dreaming up scenarios where Harry and Dracaena (I'm not playing favorites with the name, just using it as it's the one I see most frequently) fall in love at the Yule Ball, scenarios in the future where they have a family with little kids running around, or where one or both of them return to Hogwarts as adults as professors. A little bit of a wholesome snapshot into where Rowling's beloved story could have gone, were the seemingly small change made to swap Draco Malfoy for a different character, Dracaena Malfoy. To me, it's genuinely impressive how much such a change improves the story.
The community is very wide, and many people have different ideas, often at odds or otherwise contradicting each other. There are artists who use AI as a tool, people who use AI to entirely generate "new scenes" for an alternate universe, and artists who despise AI altogether. But despite these conflicting ideas, they all have agreed chiefly on one main idea:
Malfoid is worth yearning for.
