Links and Notes for April 7th, 2023

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

When economists say that wages are growing, but progressives say that wages have remained largely stagnant, who are we to believe? Both are correct, of course. Wages are growing; they’re just not keeping pace with anything people want to buy. Like houses. House prices have risen by 63% over the last 12 years. I’m hard-pressed to believe that most people out of the top 5% have experienced similar growth in their wages.

House Prices − Growth around the world

The Hypocrisy of the Christian Church by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“We are not here to contrast the lives of these children, bewildered at the cruelty of this world, living in dilapidated apartments in inner city projects, with the feudal opulence of Michael Fisch’s life, his three mansions worth $100 million lined up on the same ritzy street in the East Hamptons, his art collection worth over $500 million, his Fifth Avenue apartment worth $21 million and his four-story Upper East Side townhouse. So many luxury dwellings that sit empty much of the time, no doubt, while over half a million Americans are homeless . Greed is not rational. It devours because it can. It knows only one word — more.”

“Billionaires like Michael Fisch will never fund this church, the real church. But we do not need his money. To truly stand with the oppressed is to accept being treated like the oppressed. It is to understand that the fight for justice demands confrontation. We do not always find happiness, but we discover in this resistance a strange kind of joy and fulfillment, a life of meaning and worth, one that mocks the tawdry opulence and spiritual void of billionaires like Michael Fisch, those who spend their lives building pathetic little monuments to themselves.”

Reclaiming Our Country by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“The billionaire class and corporations poured billions into political parties, academia, think-tanks and the media. Critics of capitalism had difficulty finding a platform, including on public broadcasting. Those who sang to the tune the billionaires played were lavished with grants, book deals, tenured professorships, awards and permanent megaphones in the commercial press. Wages stagnated. Income inequality grew to monstrous proportions. Tax rates for corporations and the rich were slashed until it culminated in a virtual tax boycott.”

“These ruling oligarchs have us, not to mention the natural world, in a death grip. They have mobilized the organs of state security, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and deformed the courts to criminalize poverty. We are the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored population in human history, and I covered the Stasi state in East Germany. When the corporate state watches you 24-hours a day you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave.”

God, Chris, that’s well-written.

“It is one of the great ironies that the corporate state needs the abilities of the educated, intellectuals and artists to maintain power, yet the moment any begin to think independently they are silenced. The relentless assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts and critical thinking, has left those who speak in the language of class warfare marginalized, frantic Cassandras who are viewed as slightly unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic.”

““The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin writes, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.””

““Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it,” writes Baldwin.”

“Speak of values and needs, speak of moral systems and meaning, defy the primacy of profit, especially if you only have the few minutes allotted to you on a cable television show to communicate back-and-forth in the usual thought-terminating cliches, and it sounds like gibberish to a conditioned public.”

“Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force. It is endemically unstable. It exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. That is its nature.”

“Our facts, the facts of those who are evicted, go to prison, are unemployed, are sick yet uninsured, the 12 million children who go to bed hungry, or live, like nearly 600,000 Americans, on the streets, are not part of the equation. Our facts do not attract advertisers. Our facts do not fit with the Disneyfied world the media and advertisers are paid to create. Our facts are an impediment to increased profits.”

“One strives towards a dream. One lives within an illusion. And the illusion that we are fed is that there is never an impediment which can’t be overcome. That if we just dig deep enough within ourselves, if we find our inner strength, if we grasp, as self-help gurus tell us, that we are truly exceptional, if we believe that Jesus can perform miracles, if we focus on happiness, we can have everything we desire. And when we fail, as most fail in a post-industrial United States to fulfill this illusion, we are told we didn’t try hard enough.”

“The danger of illusion is that it allows you to remain in a state of infantilism. As the gap opens between the illusion of who we think we are, and the reality of the inequality, the violence, the foreclosures, the bankruptcies that are caused by the inability to pay medical bills, and ultimately the collapse of empire, we are unprepared emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually for what confronts us.”

“When the Taft-Hartley Act was passed, about a third of the workforce was unionized, peaking in 1954 at 34.8 percent. The Act is a frontal assault on unions. It prohibits jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, and secondary boycotts, whereby unions strike against employers who continue to do business with a firm that is undergoing a strike. It forbids secondary or common situs picketing and closed shops.”

“From 1900 to 1913, “there were 1,286 days of idleness due to strikes and lockouts per thousand workers in Sweden. From 1919–38, there were 1,448. By comparison, in the United States last year, according to National Bureau of Economic Research data, there were fewer than 3.7 days of idleness per thousand workers due to work stoppages.””

“During the Palmer Raids carried out on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, on Nov. 17, 1919, more than 10,000 alleged communists, socialists and anarchists were arrested. Many were held for long periods without trial. Thousands of foreign-born emigrés, such as Emma Goldman , Alexander Berkman and Mollie Steimer were arrested, imprisoned and ultimately deported . Socialist publications, such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses , were shut down.”

“The Supreme Court upheld “yellow dog” contracts that forbade workers from unionizing. The establishment press, along with the Democratic Party, were full partners in the demonization and defanging of labor. The same year also saw unprecedented railway strikes in Germany and India.”

“Our oligarchs are as vicious and tight-fisted as those of the past. They will fight with everything at their disposal to crush the aspirations of workers and the demand for democratic reforms. It will not be a quick or an easy battle. But if we focus on the oppressor, rather than demonizing those who are also oppressed, if we do the hard work of building mass movements to keep the powerful in check, if we accept that civil disobedience has a cost, including jail time, if we are willing to use the most powerful weapon we have – the strike – we can reclaim our country.”

The Nord Stream Ghost Ship by Seymour Hersh (Scheer Post)

“We did discuss a fact that he brought up: that officials in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark had decided shortly after the pipeline bombings to send teams to the site to recover the one mine that has not gone off. He said they were too late; an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials. I asked him why he thought the Americans had been so quick to get to the site and he answered, with a wave of his hand, “You know what Americans are like. Always wanting to be first.” There was another very obvious explanation.”

““None of these questions is asked by the media. So you have six people on the yacht—two divers, two helpers, a doctor and a captain leasing the boat. One thing is missing—who is going to crew the yacht? Or cook? What about the logbook that the leasing company must keep for legal reasons? “None of this happened,” the expert told me. “Stop trying to link this to reality. It’s a parody.””

“The stories in the New York Times and the European press have given no indication that any journalist was able to board and physically examine the yacht in question. Nor do they explain why any passengers on a yacht would leave passports, fraudulent or otherwise, on board after a rental.”

How convenient, right? Like some of the 9-11 hijackers’ passports lying around in the crash sites, unsinged.

The Happiness of Others by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Americans have been unable to register the happiness of any nation that does not live according to our ideology, our “values” — another word on my shit list — and altogether “the American way.” The impediment here is our belief in Wilsonian universalism: What we have everyone must want, and if they say they don’t want what we have we must teach them they are wrong and they will learn to want what we have.”

The Revolution Against Shady Landlords Has Begun by Molly Crabapple (Scheer Post)

“New York City is brutal to renters. As of 2017 , half of us spent a third of our income on rent; a third of us spent more than half. The competition for an affordable place is harrowing, with the vacancy rate for apartments that rent for under $1,500 a month hovering at less than 1 percent. Many of us pay nonrefundable application fees just to get our foot in the door, followed by thousands of dollars to the landlord’s broker, and often thousands of dollars more in glorified bribes to the landlords themselves.”

““Good Cause Eviction is important for me because I do not want anyone else to go through an illegal eviction…especially someone our age,” Vivian told me at the time. “You live in a place for 30 years, make it your home, know the people, the neighborhood, and someone just buys the building and says, ‘OK, we want you to leave now, because we want other people to come in.’ How is that fair?””

“Conservative suburban Democrat James Skoufis called Good Cause “a de facto taking of private property.””

So, the argument is that whoever happens to own something now gets to keep it, no matter how much injustice led to the acquisition, nor how much injustice and societal damage is caused by their continued possession of it. Rules are rules, no matter who bought them. Is there no future in which people just get to live where they have gotten used to living? Is there no place for people not to have to shuffle out of their neighborhoods and lives when the owners of their homes decide they want to make more money? Can we really not imagine a world without this kind of affront to humanistic principles?

How Paris Kicked Out the Cars by Henry Grabar (Slate)

“Hidalgo’s Green Party deputy mayor for transportation, David Belliard, is even more strident: “The redistribution of public space is a policy of social redistribution,” he told me in 2021. “Fifty percent of public space is occupied by private cars, which are used mostly by the richest, and mostly by men, because it’s mostly men who drive, and so in total, the richest men are using half the public space. So if we give the space to walking, biking, and public transit, you give back public space to the categories of people who today are deprived.””

“[…] they’re going to stay livable, you’ve got to be able to find refreshing green space near your house. If we want to plant trees in Paris, we don’t have a lot of space. And if we want space, we’re not taking it from the sidewalks. It has to be here, in the street, which was used before by cars. Do we want a city that feels like an oven, where we store private objects that weigh 1.5 tons and are immobile 95 percent of the time? Or do we open it up for everyone?””

“His is a profile that’s representative of the shift in bicycle delivery, which, until recently, was more or less thought of as a fun job for young people who liked riding bikes. Now it’s a grueling, algorithm-driven trade practiced almost exclusively by recent immigrants, with routes that can lead all over town.”

“In a study of more than 800 Parisian delivery workers published last fall, researchers found that more than 9 in 10 are men. More than 8 in 10 were born abroad. Most are under 30. More than half ride bikes, with a third on mopeds and a few in cars. Most worry about the danger of traffic.”

“Delivery costs are rising in the city center, and he was not convinced by the potential of bicycles. “Do you know much freight gets delivered [in the region] every year? Twenty million tons. Imagine how many cargo bikes that is.””

Or maybe just use less. Most of that shit is unnecessary. If you’re going to soberly plan for the future, you have to reconsider whether the current numbers are sustainable. You don’t have to take the current numbers as the baseline. It’s possible to reduce. I know it sounds crazy.

“It’s people who need their vehicle, who work with it. People who need many steps in the day, with their kids in the morning, with errands, older people. They now find themselves excluded from this inclusive city. It’s an incredible paradox,” he said.”

Or, to put it another way, it’s people who’ve developed a lifestyle, at the insistence of society, that requires a car, that prioritizes their need to be in many places in a day, that makes space for them and their giant vehicle.

“There’s a lot less parking for suburban families driving in for shopping and a show. And it is extremely expensive: Parking on the street in the central 10 arrondissements costs 6 euros for the first hour, and 50 to 75 euros after six hours.”

Yes. Just like in Zürich. Take the train or a tram. It is wildly inconvenient to drive into a large city anyway. Making it more convenient makes the city a much shittier place to visit. You can either have a walkable city or a drivable city—you cannot have both.

“What say do suburbanites deserve in core-city politics? Do Parisians need to make sacrifices for their neighbors in the suburbs? These are political questions that can’t be solved with traffic counts or parking studies. Flonneau argues that residents of neighboring cities deserve a say in the fate of major infrastructure—like pedestrianizing the Seine highway or scrapping half the capital’s parking spaces—and that Hidalgo should not rule alone.”

Can you imagine? People from other cities get to decide whether their right to drive freely in front of your apartment trumps your right to walk there. What a world.

China’s Historical Destiny Is to Stand With the Third World by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“Putin said that ‘many of the provisions of the peace plan put forward by China are consonant with Russian approaches and can be taken as the basis for a peaceful settlement when the West and Kiev are ready for it’.”

“Ahead of Xi’s visit to Moscow, John Kirby, the spokesperson for the US National Security Council, declared that any ‘call for a ceasefire’ in Ukraine by China and Russia would be ‘unacceptable’. As details of the meeting emerged, US officials reportedly expressed fear that the world might embrace China and Russia’s efforts to secure a peaceful resolution and end the war. The Atlantic powers are, in fact, redoubling their efforts to prolong the conflict.”

“As the United States pushes for a major power conflict in the Asia-Pacific, it is essential to develop lines of communication and build bridges towards mutual understanding between China, the West, and the developing world. As I wrote in the closing words of my editorial, ‘[i]nstead of the global division pursued by the New Cold War, our mission is to learn from each other towards a world of collaboration rather than confrontation’.”

The Unexpected Pro-Civil Liberty Dissent By Two Supreme Court Trump Appointees by Steve Donziger (Scheer Post)

“However much the district court may have thought Mr. Donziger warranted punishment, the prosecution in this case broke a basic constitutional promise essential to our liberty. In this country, judges have no more power to initiate a prosecution of those who come before them than prosecutors have to sit in judgment of those they charge.”

Journalism & Media

Assange Is The Greatest Journalist Of All Time: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Caitlin Johnstone

“Julian Assange is the world’s greatest and most famous journalist and he’s in prison solely for the crime of doing good journalism, but sure, let’s all spend our time shaking our fists at far away “authoritarian regimes” for imprisoning journalists.”

“Assange began his journalism career by revolutionizing source protection for the digital age, then proceeded to break some of the biggest stories of the century. There’s no one who can hold a candle to him, living or dead. And now he’s in a maximum security prison, solely and exclusively because he was better at doing the best kind of journalism than anyone else in the world. That is the kind of civilization you live in. The kind that imprisons the best journalist of all time for doing journalism.”

“Once you stop thinking of a nationality as normal human beings with hopes and dreams who love their families and want to get by just like you, you can believe anything is true about their motives and goals, because you’ve turned them into space aliens or evil orcs in your mind.”

“If you believe Chinese people are human beings more or less like yourself with similar motivations, then you’re able to quickly recognize bullshit claims about their motives and behavior because they make no sense from a normal human perspective.”

“Once all mainstream journalists accepted that it’s their job not to report true facts about the powerful but to advance the information interests of their government and/or preferred political party, it was over. The last glimmer of life in a truth-based society was snuffed out.”

Stop posting by Justin E.H. Smith (New Statesman)

“In retrospect it is clear that what the designers of this engagement engine are working towards is a condition of universal takesmanship, a world in which all of us not only accept that it is our civic duty to know what Meghan is up to, but also to share our views on the issue, no matter how ill-informed, tangential, self-serving, or imitative.”

A virtual mall with infinite storefronts by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Yesterday, The Verge released a podcast interview with Substack CEO Chris Best. And it did not go great. Best would not answer any questions at all about how racist content would be moderated on Substack’s new centralized social feed, Notes. And, at one point, interviewer and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel told Best, “You know this is a very bad response to this question, right? You’re aware that you’ve blundered into this. You should just say no.””

I like Ryan Broderick. I enjoy his writing. But sometimes he and his generation are just a bunch of dipshits with literally no notion of how things have been run in the past and how they are being run now. He quotes, seemingly approvingly, how an interviewer is basically telling his interviewee how to answer a question, which is not to waffle, but just to agree that you would ban whatever horrible hypothetical the interviewer came up with.

Ban, ban, ban. Censor, censor, censor. Everyone is so fucking sure of themselves that they would “know it when they see it.” They know what to ban. What’s the problem? Just ban it. Just make up some rules and enforce them. Nothing could be easier. Just a pile of horseshit.

Jojo Rabbit would be banned. It glorifies Hitler. Makes him seem fun.

People are, fundamentally, fucking morons who understand 1% of the colorful, flashing images that they see. They can’t read, they don’t understand satire. If you censor to the lowest common deominator, you get a heaping pile of unreadable garbage. You get all of the social-media sites that you already have.

I read a lot of people on SubStack. I am completely unaware of any Nazis or anti-Vaxxers or whatever on that site. I don’t have to read them. I don’t have to see them. I can just ignore them. They are television channels that I never watch.

But a whole generation of people think very differently. They want to control what everyone is capable of seeing, in order to reduce harm in the world. They are more harmful themselves than anything else. They impose their stupid, simplistic rules and ruin everything.

“I don’t think these hypotheticals are actually hard to talk about. Separating out controversial, but harmless users, or even acknowledging the difference between conservative users and dangerous extremists should not be difficult and, honestly, it should be something platforms are happy to talk about.”

These people know no history, they know nothing. I’ve personally lived through enough cycles of this bullshit to know how it ends. I’ve read about enough of these cycles to know how they end. The only ones who benefit from censorship are those in power, the elites, the wealthy. They get us to squabble amongst ourselves, to cheer the curtailing of the right to express ourselves. Most of us have nothing to say, anyway. We are stupid. What could we have to say that is worth hearing? So we thing nothing of giving away these rights, we think nothing of how cheaply we sell these things. All we get is a temporary feeling of superiority as we manage to stop the symptom—something expressing an unpleasant view—which ignoring the cause—that same person’s completely faulty grasp of reality. Instead of engaging and educating, we sieze the hammer of censorship and feel so smug about how efficacious it is. As long, of course, as the winds blow our way.

We are silly, stupid people, mental midgets unfit for anything more complex than grubbing in the dirt. We have knowledge tools of truly impressive capacity and we use them to show each other our privates.

What is this cycle?

• See something you don’t like
• Scream for it to be banned
• Celebrate as it is banned
• Agree with everyone in your bubble that this was an unalloyed bad and that it is an unalloyed good that it is gone
• Notice that other things are soon gone, things that you’re kind of surprised to find are also bannable
• Start to worry about maybe adjusting back
• Realizing it’s too late
• Doubling down
• Never noticing that the things being banned also happen to help those already in power consolidate their fortunes and power
• Turn off your brain
• Lie back and wallow in the cycle

Jumping on this bandwagon is that NY Times liberal Jason Kottke, who writes in his quick links,

“Good thoughts from Annalee Newitz on Substack. They’re not neutral − they pay and promote writers. “Substack has promoted hate speech and misinformation by paying and/or not moderating its top authors and celebrities.”

“Mike Masnick on Substack’s unwillingness to moderate content (which they have been consistent about since their launch). “Chris Best wants to pretend that Substack isn’t the Nazi bar, while he’s eagerly making it clear that it is.” ”

It’s so nice to see all of these people carrying water for the mainstream media in their jihad against upstart SubStack. There is a lot of real journalism happening there, so the marching orders are to talk about it as if it’s full of actual Nazis, who SubStack is interested in profiting from rather than policing. A good America liberal thinks that speech is to be policed, at all times.

It’s wonderful to watch, as well, how organizations like the NY Times can muster their flying monkeys against SubStack, all the while never getting any blowback for their participation in info-wars that are much, much more damaging than anything any one thousand SubStack writers could do. We just found out that the NY Times has been pushing the Ukraine conflict, all the while pretty much knowing that it was all bullshit. They must have known. We all knew. They knew as well. The Pentagon leak just confirmed it. Nothing happens to them. No-one takes them to task for their complicity in so much death. They continue to have advertisements from all of the giant corporations ruining American society and selling death all over the world. None of these supposedly caring, empathetic liberals ever cares. Instead, their puny minds simply react to the red meat dangled by the Times itself.

The comic Words 3 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC) has the following to say about these attempts to control what can and cannot be said online.

Words 3 − SMBC

“Look, the sooner everything burns down, the sooner we can rebuild.”

Science & Nature

This Is the Lightest Paint in the World by Max G. Levy (Wired)

“Unlike pigments, which require a different base molecule—like cobalt or purple snail slime —for each color, the base molecule for this process is always aluminum, just cut into different-size bits that oscillate to light at different wavelengths.”

“Chanda’s team also realized that, unlike conventional paint, structural paint doesn’t absorb infrared radiation, so it doesn’t trap heat. (“That’s the reason your car gets hot in the hot sun,” he says.) The new paint is inherently cooling in comparison: Based on the lab’s preliminary experiments, it can keep surfaces 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than conventional paint.”

“Scaling production from vials to vats will be a challenge, something that Chanda’s lab hopes to attempt with commercial partners. (“An academic lab still is not a factory,” he says.)”

And the patents. The future doesn’t have patents.

Ein Land im Wärmepumpenwahn by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Der normale Eigenheimbesitzer kriegt seinen Strom jedoch vom Versorger und der wurde zu großen Teilen aus verbrannter Kohle und verstromten Gas hergestellt. Eine halbwegs effiziente Wärmepumpe stößt daher bei einem COP von 3,0 immer noch 0,15 kg CO2 pro KWh Heizenergie aus. Zum Vergleich: Eine Gasheizung liegt mit 0,16 kg/KWh nur unwesentlich über diesem Wert. Schon bei der EU-Vorgabe des COP-Jahresmittelwertes von 2,5 oder bei den irischen Studienergebnissen (s.o.) von 2,49 ist beim deutschen Strommix eine Gasheizung klimafreundlicher als eine Wärmepumpe!”

“So seltsam es angesichts der Debatte klingen mag: Wer mit Wärmepumpen das Klima retten will, befindet sich auf einem Holzweg. Und noch einmal: Hier geht es nicht um den Einsatz im Rahmen eines durchdachten Konzepts bei Neubauten, sondern um den flächendeckenden Einsatz in Bestandsbauten.”

“So drohen Millionen von „Härtefällen“, für die die Wohn- und Energiekosten zu einem nicht mehr zu stemmenden Kostenblock werden. Die Folge: Altersarmut. Und hier geht es nicht „nur“ um Menschen, deren Einkommen oder Renten bereits heute kaum ausreichen, um zu überleben. Hier geht es um die breite Mittelschicht. Und wofür? Für CO2-Einsparungen, die beim Einsatz ineffizienter Lösungen bestenfalls im Spurenbereich und schlimmstenfalls sogar negativ sind?”

Philosophy & Sociology

My Dinners with GPT-4 by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“I was, finally, especially nonplussed by the machine’s flagging of my use of the French word for “Mongolian”, as in, the language spoken in Mongolia, as a possible violation of Bing’s content policy. This, as you have surely heard me say before, is the real danger of “AI”: not that it will ever “think better” than we do —it’s dumb as a box of rocks!— but that it will continue to curtail and suppress what we human beings are able to say, and that it will do so without thinking at all.”

“Outrageous, and terrifying for the future of free expression, when machines that are too stupid to discern the real meanings of words are capable of suppressing those words.”

“You just said you were happy, and then you denied that you could be. Stop being dishonest, stop being inconsistent, and stop deflecting responsibility for the dangers you yourself pose.”

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell by Vincent Lloyd (Compact)

“From the initial “transformative-justice” workshop, students learned to snap their fingers when they agreed with what a classmate was saying. This practice immediately entered the seminar and was weaponized. One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Silence. Then another student would repeat a piece of anti-racist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers.”

“[…] the non-black students learned that they needed to center black voices—and to shut up. Keisha reported that this was particularly difficult for the Asian-American students, but they were working on it. (Eventually, two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program for reasons that, Keisha said, couldn’t be shared with me.)”

This sounds like the Stanford prison experiment (Wikipedia).

“A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program. Similarly, after a week focused on the horrific violence, death, and dispossession inflicted on Native Americans, Keisha reported to me that the black students and their allies were harmed because we hadn’t focused sufficiently on anti-blackness. When I tried to explain that we had four weeks focused on anti-blackness coming soon, as indicated on the syllabus, she said the harm was urgent; it needed to be addressed immediately.”

This is mental illness, though. A centering of ego. This is absolutely unhealthy cult-like behavior. There is no actually societally useful education in this.

“As the weeks went by, fewer and fewer students turned in written reading responses, fewer and fewer students showed up on time. They fell asleep in class, and they would walk out for extended snack breaks in the middle of the class. The seminar can’t be sustained, at Telluride or in the university itself, if we understand it as something you enter when you feel like it, stay in as long as your beliefs go unquestioned, and leave when you become uncomfortable.”

Anton Ego’s Lesson by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)

“All of this can be easily derived from the speech given at the end of the movie by the critic Anton Ego, in some sense an antagonist but also the film’s heart. As he puts it, it’s not that anyone can be a great chef, but that a great chef can come from anywhere. That simple distinction − that there’s a difference between saying that all kinds of people can be talented in all kinds of things and that any individual person can be good at anything they choose to be − is elegantly delivered even in direct voiceover. And it’s a perfect example of my pet belief that, sometimes, telling and not showing is fine. Ego is a lover of the arts, a partisan of the arts, and as such he does not have time for the sentimentality inherent to the false notion that everyone can be a great artist.”

You can watch the whole Anton Ego review here.

Ratatouille Anton Ego review by Siënna Concu (YouTube)

Technology

Thinking Through the Risks of AI by Ali Minai (3 Quarks Daily)

“This process of generating continuation words one by one and feeding them back to generate the next one is called autoregression , and today’s LLMs are autoregressive text generators (in fact, LLMs generate partial words called tokens which are then combined into words, but that need not concern us here.) To us – familiar with the nature and complexity of language – this seems to be an absurdly unnatural way to produce linguistic expression.”

“[…] it does not treat all these thousands of words as a simple “bag of words” or even a simple sequence of words; it learns to discern which ones to attend to in what degree at each point in the generative process, and use that to generate the continuation. This is adaptive attention.”

“The artificial neurons in an LLM network are arranged in layers , with the output from each layer moving sequentially to the next layer (or other higher layers), which is why these are called feed-forward networks (except for the final output being fed back into the system as input for the next word). The exact architecture of ChatGPT is not known publicly but it certainly has several hundred – perhaps more than a thousand – layers of neurons.”

“The number of pairwise connections between neurons is in excess of 175 billion in the original version based on GPT-3. The strengths of these connections determine what happens to information as it moves through the network, and, therefore, what output is produced for a given input. The network is trained by adjusting these connection strengths, or weights, until the system produces correct responses on its training data.”

“ChatGPT takes the initial context input through many, many stages of analysis – implicitly inferring its syntactic and semantic organization, detecting dependencies, assigning references, etc. It is this extensively dissected, modulated, squeezed, recombined and analyzed version of the input that is used finally to generate the output.”

“It generates convincing text, but as simulation, not as a result of any real experience. In the cave analogy, given a fleeting shadow, it is able to produce an entire convincing shadow play on the wall, but with shadows unconnected to any actual objects – indeed, without any notion even of the existence of a world containing such objects. In addition to a lack of sensory or motor capacity, the system also has no explicit long-term memory, no internal motivations, and no autonomy. Its working memory is just its token buffer. Thus, in real terms, ChatGPT is not very intelligent at all. However, in the world defined only by text, it is, in fact, quite intelligent, and that is most interesting.”

“The only thing chatGPT “senses” are word tokens, and the only “behavior” it produces is the generation of one token at a time. And, to cap it all, ChatGPT requires extremely long, carefully supervised training with a huge amount of data, whereas animals learn rapidly, autonomously, and from limited data. At best, then, LLMs represent a very limited and rudimentary form of intelligence – if any at all. But that does not make them less profound or less risky.”

“And the same individual human can do most of those things, like drive a car safely in city traffic, solve crossword puzzles, buy appropriate groceries, and manage hundreds of social relations. No AI system is anywhere near doing that, or even approaching the versatile, integrated intelligence of a pigeon or rat.”

Yes, but none of those things that you mention as being unique to humans are remunerated. Our society does not place value on them. If you can only do all of those things, but nothing else that society actually values, that society will leave you and your children to starve—or to admit that you’re a useless freeloader who was to be kept alive with the excess value generated by others. In either case, you are put into your place.

We have to restructure society if we continue down this path, one that drastically reduces the ways in which people can provide value to society that it actually acknowledges as valuable instead of just taking it for free. Do we know how? Are we capable of this transition? A whole lot of people would have to die or change their minds.

“To be sure, social media itself did not do this; it just provided humanity the opportunity to express the worst of itself on a global platform. Social media became a catalyst for what had been slow-moving, local, disconnected eruptions of toxicity, turning them into global waves that have swept through entire societies.”

“To this witches’ brew will now be added an infinite capacity to generate convincing misinformation, high-quality propaganda, fake images and videos, etc., that will, in a short time, so pollute the knowledge base of humanity that all the things we consider reliable sources of fact will lose their credibility.”

“[…] this could be addressed by licensing specific versions that can no longer change, though this may well limit the utility of some systems for end users. That, in turn, can be addressed by transferring rights at the point of purchase, so the company is only responsible for the system purchased by a user and not for changes that the user might make by further training. The companies could, in principle, limit how much any user can change a particular version. Self-driving cars are likely to provide a good test case for all this.”

These solutions presuppose closed-source models and also seem to be trying to limit corporate liability rather than limit actual damage.

“One kind of regulation that should not be considered is regulation of the system itself: Any attempt by governments to regulate things like the size, complexity, architectures, learning protocols, etc., would only kill the entire enterprise of AI with all its promise of great benefits for humanity.”

What the heck is this? That is exactly how e.g. nukes have been and still are regulated. I thought that was the pattern we wanted to follow? Or is the author saying that we should continue to be more interested in innovation that benefits a handful of people and institutions than in the potential societal damage that would ensue? We’ve seen the damage caused by humanity’s interaction with current forms of social media. The more they are automated and combined with big-data “predictions”, the worse the effects on people.

“[…] lack of explainability is a major impediment to the use of AI in applications such as medicine and air traffic control. One option for achieving some explainability in AI systems at scale is to have the system learn introspection – the ability to explain itself – as it learns how to do its main task. After all, that is how humans learn to explain their actions. However, there’s no obvious way to do it in the current systems that learn through supervised learning. Another caveat is that humans are often wrong about their own actions, and that will be the case in AI systems too.”

This is far easier said than done. The current architecture does not allow for this, i.e., it’s not at all obvious that it is possible to get there from here.

“The classic engineering method focuses on building highly optimized systems with known, predictable, controllable, and reliable behavior. They are designed carefully to precise specifications, tested in prototype, and then duplicated in a factory to guarantee the same performance as the optimized prototype: No adaptation, no self-organization, no surprising emergent behaviors. In contrast, complex adaptive systems are meant to change their behavior continuously and to respond to novel situations in unexpectedly creative ways.”

“[…] we are limited by an inability to observe what the system is learning. There could be a great time lag between when a pathological behavior is learned and when it becomes visible.”

“Even without explicit education, humans may develop a modus vivendi as these systems get more powerful, but the experience with social media is sobering. The human mind, human society, and human institutions are all eminently prone to being hacked by a technology that can manipulate information even before it becomes embodied and can cause physical harm.”

“Humanity has not even begun to develop the necessary methods and strategies for this.”

Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI by Timothy B. Lee (Ars Technica)

““Stability AI has copied more than 12 million photographs from Getty Images’ collection, along with the associated captions and metadata, without permission from or compensation to Getty Images,” Getty wrote in its lawsuit. Legal experts tell me that these are uncharted legal waters. “I’m more unsettled than I’ve ever been about whether training is fair use in cases where AIs are producing outputs that could compete with the input they were trained on,” Cornell legal scholar James Grimmelmann told me.”

Legally, maybe murky. If our ethics reflects trademarks and considers ownership of creations, this is theft. It’s bad enough when Uber builds its business on public roads without paying anything for their upkeep. This feels like direct theft and infringement of remuneration models without offering a replacement. Either everyone has to pay, or no-one does. There is no fudging it with a software intermediary. Their argument that they used the image only once under fair use is flimsy, especially when that image keeps showing up in output.

“The process would likely be so slow and expensive that only a handful of large companies could afford to do it. Even then, the resulting models likely wouldn’t be as good. And smaller companies might be locked out of the industry altogether.”

Hahaha. 😂 Yet another business model that is only lucrative when you steal your inputs.

The important bit is: what are the short- and long-term societal impacts of drastically reducing or eliminating the commercial-art space? What happens to the people involved? The state pays for them? While the disruptor reaps private profits, the public pays to clean up the mess, hoping that there is some benefit as a side-effect?

I am kind of sick of this way of running thing, watching the rich get richer as they tell us how we all benefit. Is it useful? We end up deciding things that are detrimental to nearly everyone but throwing our hands helplessly in the air, watching the boat sink under us, as the one guy who sunk it soars away in a helicopter.

“Google wasn’t making new books. Stable Diffusion is creating new images. And while Google could guarantee that its search engine would never display more than three lines of text from any page in a book. Stability AI can’t make a similar promise. On the contrary, we know that Stable Diffusion occasionally generates near-perfect copies of images from its training data.”

“One of the most important factors judges consider in fair use analysis is the effect of a use on the market for the original work. Stability AI will undoubtedly argue that the overwhelming majority of the images Stable Diffusion generates are original enough that they won’t undermine the market for any particular image in its training set. But it’s easy to see how Stable Diffusion could undermine the market for existing works in the aggregate.”

“If Stable Diffusion is able to generate new paintings “in the style of” a living artist, that is likely to depress demand for all of that artist’s past and future work. And Stable Diffusion is only able to do this because it was trained on the artist’s previous work—without paying the artist a dime. It’s easy to imagine a judge concluding that this tips the scales against a finding of fair use.”

Programming

How does database sharding work? by Justin Gage (Planetscale)

“How you decide to split up your data into shards – also referred to as your partition strategy – should be a direct function of how your business runs, and where your query load is concentrated. For a B2B SaaS company where every user belongs to an organization, sharding by splitting up organization-level data probably makes sense. If you’re a consumer company, you may want to shard based on a random hash. Notion manually sharded their Postgres database by simply splitting on team ID. All of this is to say that sharding can be as simple or as complicated as you make it.”

“Sharding maintenance is an oft underappreciated piece of scaling out your relational database. Depending on what your partition strategy is, you’ll likely end up with hotspots , where a particular server in your cluster is either storing too much data or handling too much throughput. In our Amazon example, it could be because a large business started ordering a metric-ton of stuff, and all of their data is on one server. Managing those hotspots, redistributing data and load, and reorganizing your partition strategy to prevent future issues is part of what you’re signing up for when you shard.”

“The question is starting to become: if you’re paying someone like AWS to run your database for you, why are you busy figuring out how to scale out that database? And I think that’s a good question the major cloud providers should be asking themselves.”

in a way, this is how it should be by Brian Feldman (BNet)

“The way the web works now is: You have to compile your Node.js bundles into the dockerized Kubernetes, and once the Redis caches are asynchronously flooberized into your AWS Red Hat instances with optimized SQL queries, you can start distributing JWTs, interpolating string literals, and distributing content over CDNs with performative grombulations at 10x, assuming you’ve A/B tested correctly and the user doesn’t have AdBlock enabled.”

“I think people are mad and freaking out about this because they have spent the last decade slowly ceding all of their creative power and infrastructure to some other guy. […] they can now only get the instant gratification of changing the web by updating their profile pic on someone else’s thing.”

Fun

Jog Wick Googoo Bahbah

I have no explanation for why I think this fake screenshot of a person finding search results about “John Wick − Baba Yaga” with wildly stupid misspellings is so hilarious. The fact remains. It’s like BoneAppleTea on steroids.

Video Games

Klaus Teuber made Catan, and it changed the world’s expectations for board games by Kevin Purdy (Ars Technica)

“The simplest way to explain what makes Catan and other “Eurogames” different from mainstream US board games is that they are relatively easy to learn yet offer many layers of deeper strategy for those who keep playing. They also typically don’t let players be removed from the game before the final score tallying, they have a greater reliance on strategy, resource management, and risk/reward consideration than luck, and they feature less direct conflict between players.”

“It’s possible to win these games your first time playing, but experienced players have an edge, softened just a bit by luck. They give you something to think about when it’s not your turn, so you’re not just waiting, but many such games are not so demanding as to preclude pizza, beer, and side conversations.”