Links and Notes for December 8th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming

Public Policy & Politics

Noam Chomsky at 95: No Strings on Him by Michael Albert (CounterPunch)

“Partly Chomsky’s insightfulness and productivity were inborn. But genetic endowment, while obviously desirable, isn’t something we should praise and can’t be emulated. We can be awed by Usain Bolt’s incomparable speed, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s magical prose, Adele’s emotive voice, Einstein’s physical intuition, Martin Luther King’s speechifying brilliance, Dylan’s transcendent lyrics, and Emmy Noether’s mathematical creativity. We can enjoy seeing such traits at work. We can be wowed by them. We can be fascinated and enlightened by them. We can even be inspired by them. But it doesn’t make sense to say that the owner is worthy of special respect, admiration, or emulation based simply on having been born with special abilities.”

Disagree. The reason you know about people with innate abilities is because they put the time into making something of them. Just innate talent is never enough. These people all made something of it. They worked. It doesn’t happen by magic. The major difference is that, mixed with talent, effort is more likely to be rewarded with success. Without effort and opportunity, talent shrivels on the vine.

“Noam’s memory was by no means photographic, just profound, and even then, only for things he found important. At speaking engagements people would query all manner of important topics completely off his assigned speaking agenda, and Noam would almost always reply with in depth information whose range and precision in a field other than his own even experts in that other subject would marvel at.”

“You can watch Noam repeatedly ask unexpected questions. He operates way outside every box. He entertains the otherwise unseen possibility. He sees the hidden connection.”

“If you named twenty prominent athletes, actors, and musicians over the past thirty years, Noam would probably have heard of two or three, or maybe five at most, and he would be able to offer essentially zero information about any of them. No memory for that. Noam would see maybe two or three movies a year. He would see a few hours of TV other than news a year. He would listen to almost no radio. He knew what he wanted to know, and in that realm his knowledge was incandescent.”

“Hour upon hour he would read and write. Combine this diligence with his quick start ability and with very little editing needed since his writing winds up, I am guessing about this, pretty much the way it first comes out, and you get a lot of output, and actually you get way more output than most people familiar with either his political or his scientific production, or even with both, realize.”

We Will Bury You by Victor Mair (Language Log)

Citing Xi,

“Facts have repeatedly told us that Marx and Engels’s analysis of the basic contradiction of capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph outdated. This is the irreversible overall trend of social and historical development, but the road is winding. The ultimate demise of capitalism, and ultimate triumph of socialism, will inevitably be a long historical process.”

Shimano bike parts ‘made by modern slaves’ sold to commuters by Samuel Lovett (The Telegraph)

“Those trapped in this situation, known as debt bondage, carry on working in an attempt to pay off their debts. The phenomenon was rife in Malaysia’s rubber glove industry during the pandemic, when countries raced to secure PPE supplies from poorly-regulated companies.”

Amazing, right? The whole world wanted what they made—and still no living wage. Piracy.

I Assure You, I Am Permitted to Oppose the Existence of Any and All Nation-States by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)

“I am opposed to religious characters for states, whether actively theocratic or not; I am opposed to ethnonationalism specifically; I am opposed to nationalism generally. None of these beliefs stem from a rejection of Jews or the Jewish religion or Israel, but the other way around − these are core ethical and political beliefs that I hold that militate against support for the supposed right of Israel (or any other state) to exist, and which require that I dismiss the fundamentally religious claims that the Zionist project makes over Palestine.”

“The religious opposition to the modern state of Israel found in some Hasidic sects, orthodox Marxism, all manner of libertarian and anarchist conceptions of a righteous future, every impulse that opposes the modern fiction of the nation-state − all ground up, rendered impermissible, under the insistence that to oppose the governmental body that is the modern state of Israel is in and of itself a form of interpersonal bigotry. It’s a casual, incidental destruction of the entire philosophical world of internationalism.”

“All that’s required is to recognize that nations are literal fictions, invented by human beings with no transcendent or permanent reality, and that in a few hundred years nationalism has been responsible for more bloodshed and misery than any other human belief.”

“Do I want Iran to be a theocracy? Of course not. I can’t wait for the mullahs to fall from power − but I don’t support the most likely way they get there, which is with the United States destroying the existing government and installing a pliable authoritarian neoliberal client state in its place.”

“If you insist that Israel’s very existence is in some sense special, you cannot then rage out whenever people focus on Israel to a special degree. Every year, each and every American has more than 4 billion ironclad reasons to pay special attention to Israel. As long as Israel takes billions and billions of dollars in American tax dollars, as long as we grant Israel’s government a unique amount of interoperability with our defense and espionage apparatus, as long as we act as the great diplomatic umbrella that has shielded Israel from consequences within the international community again and again, it is nonsensical and disingenuous to ask “why Israel?” We could make a deal and subject Israel to less criticism in exchange for Israel not receiving any American aid. But I don’t think Israelis would like that trade very much.”

“[…] if the status of being “the only democracy in the Middle East” means anything at all, it must entail special attention. If you want to be shielded for supposedly embodying those ideals, you must be ready to be harshly criticized on the grounds that you aren’t embodying them.”

“I think in the long run all of this will prove contrary to what liberal defenders of Israel want. If you want Israel to live in peace and prosperity, the only way there is through justice for the Palestinians; and if you want Israel to be discussed as just another normal country, you have to start acting like it is one.”

Gaza Divides the World, Again by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“It was South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who made this announcement. Here is Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, whose title is minister in the presidency, explaining the South African position to reporters after Ramaphosa made public the ICC referral:”

“Given that much of the global community is witnessing the commission of these crimes in real time, including statements of genocidal intent by many Israeli leaders, we expect that warrants of arrest for these leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, should be issued shortly.”

“In an interview with Al Jazeera last week Lula asserted:”

“There’s no leadership in the world today…. So we have a clear case of human insanity…. We have about 16,000 people dead, among them 6,500 children. We have 35,000 people wounded, we have 7,000 missing, and we have more than 40,000 houses destroyed, hospitals destroyed. In behalf of what? Humanity is going insane…. I can’t understand that a man as powerful as President Biden has not got the sensitivity to stop this…”

““We can frankly say that the dictatorship of one hegemon is becoming decrepit,” Vladimir Putin said at a Russian forum on world affairs late last month. “We see it, and everyone sees it now. It is getting out of control and is simply dangerous to others. This is now clear to the global majority.” I draw this quotation from an excellent piece by John Helmer , the longtime Moscow correspondent”

“Empire is interested only in the continued projection of its power along with, in most cases, capital accumulation and profit extraction. These are empire’s raisons d’être . The non–West, by dint of its shared experience and collective memory, sees Israel, which is nothing if not an imperial outpost, in this context. If Palestinians have asked for anything over the past 75 years, it is “a fairer world”—a phrase drawn from Putin’s recent speech—in the face of Israel’s relentless exercise of power over them.”

“Power prevails in Gaza as we speak. But let there be no question of the merely powerful winning anything. They have already lost by way of all they have given up. Zionism’s obsession with land and its attendant hatred of those dwelling on it are destroying Israel in real time. America’s seven-decade obsession with global preeminence has led it into a state of—but precisely—decrepitude. History’s wheel does not turn in such nations’ favor.”

So Much for Free Speech: The Antiwoke Movement Cancels Palestine by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“[…] my at-times downright sadomasochistic stance on the unfettered right to be an absolute cunt is specifically inspired by my upbringing as a student of the countercultural fringe on the New Left. Free speech is the disorganized religion of my elders. The dogma of outlaw priests like Allen Ginsberg, Mario Savio, Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman. Proud commie pinko freaks who got locked up and beat to a bloody fucking pulp so you and I can wipe our ass with the flag and tell our local sheriff to go fuck himself with his service revolver. These people, my heroes, left a trail of broken teeth from Berkley to the Supreme Court defending the inalienable right for the individual to be a cunt and I would be spitting on their graves if I made exceptions just for the people who personally sicken me.”

“I recognize the inconvenient fact that affording any major institution, be they private or public, with the ability to silence any individual is far more dangerous than any individual could ever be. But while this position has led me to defend the far-right more times than I care to count, that doesn’t mean that I have ever been foolish enough to believe that those libertarian-come-lately assholes would ever return the favor.”

“The right loves to fan their sweaty taint with the First Amendment but it never takes them very long to rediscover their censorious roots. The first inkling of this hypocrisy amongst the latest generation of right-wing free speech frauds in the so-called Antiwoke Movement came with their open armed embrace of using the state to police Queer kids in both public and private schools, but the MAGA movement’s love for cancel culture has reached truly dizzying new highs of orgasmic ecstasy and dismal new lows of gutter despotism in the wake of Israel’s genocidal war on the children of Gaza.”

“Practically overnight, every GOP presidential hopeful and Fox News edgelord who has ever beat[en] off on camera with the Constitution began screaming like flaming snowflakes to have any college student in a Keffiyeh dragged off to the guillotines and they have happily hopped into bed with the Ivy League Karens of the academic elite to make it happen. The same people who marched for Milo clapped their hands until they bled as Colombia suspended the Students for Justice in Palestine and Harvard blacklisted the Palestine Solidarity Committee for simply verbally holding Israel responsible for provoking terrorism with apartheid.”

“Senator Tim Scott, who backed a bill on the Hill called the Stop Antisemitism on College Campuses Act that would essentially strip funding from universities for simply hiring certain professors that certain Zionists deem antisemitic. In fact, every single GOP presidential candidate except Vivek Ramaswamy has called for literally deporting students just for showing up at pro-Palestine rallies.”

“The campus speech codes and convoluted notions of “student safety” against scary language empowered by political correctness are currently being weaponized by the Antiwoke Movement to silence the most important student antiwar movement since the Bush era and this is precisely why I have risked alienating myself from my own tribe to defend shock jocks and hate mongers against these puritan vestiges of social cleanliness.”

“Because I knew that as long as this architecture of intellectual surveillance existed, it would inevitably be used by the institutions of patriarchy and white supremacy still nestled in those ivory towers to flog the marginalized.”

“This is the price of true liberty, and this is the big difference between right-wing “libertarians” and sex-positive genderfuck mutants like me who used to pass for left-wing before the left-wing got lost. I will be fighting for the inalienable right for those phonies to be a cunt long before their knife wounds heal on my back because there but before the grace of the state go I.”

It’s time to get strapped, people. Nobody with any sort of power is on the right side here. It it moves, it’s probably the enemy.

“So, fuck the state or die fucking. Free speech is for everyone or it’s for no one at all.”

Sechs Kriege alt by Albrecht Müller (NachDenkSeiten)

Sechs Kriege alt (click to see larger version)

Schrödinger's Immigrant

US and Israeli mass rape propaganda, without credible evidence, is being used to justify Gaza genocide by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“That night, NBC News broadcast a five-minute report on the rape charges as the lead item in its “Nightly News,” and a media avalanche ensued, with front-page reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post and reports on other television networks. As one historian of CIA media operations once termed it, this was the “mighty Wurlitzer” of American government propaganda at full volume.

“What is the actual evidence supporting the highly orchestrated barrage of charges against Hamas? All of it comes from the Israeli government and the IDF; none has any independent confirmation; no testimony from victims or eyewitnesses has been produced. According to Israeli officials, the few rape victims who survived the October 7 attack were too traumatized to speak about it. Israeli police chief Yaakov Shabtai told the British Broadcasting Corporation that “many survivors of the attacks were finding it difficult to talk and that he thought some of them would never testify about what they saw or experienced.””

It’s just impossible to take this seriously. No pictures, no video, no eyewitness reports, no testimony. We’re just supposed to take their word for it. #believeIDF.

“The women hostages released by Hamas last week have been in good physical condition, except for those who were elderly and frail to begin with. None of them reported sexual assaults during captivity. Several of them, however, reported narrowly escaping Israeli bomb and missile strikes, leading Israeli officials to dismiss their recollections as “unreliable.” Thus, only those witnesses who serve the propaganda interests of the Netanyahu government are to be believed.”

This is all just too convenient. The U.S. and Israel have burned through all of their credibility. They’re going to have to at least fake some evidence.

“The claims by Biden, Clinton & Co. to be “horrified” by the events of October 7 likewise have no credibility. Since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, no country has slaughtered more men, women and children in war than the United States. As for claims of rape, mass rape was an indelible feature of such atrocities as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The war in Iraq produced the memorable images of sexual violence at Abu Ghraib, but thousands of such actions, similar or far worse, went unrecorded, except in the memories of the victims, if they survived, and the perpetrators.”

In fairness, the second half of that sentence could also apply to the alleged Hamas rapes of Israelis, no? You can’t just say that you’ll only believe Israelis have been raped if there’s evidence, then cite some evidence of real sexual violence and then “round up” to a lot more for which we have no evidence, not if you want to be honest.

Predicting Pestilence in Gaza by Kathy Kelly (Antiwar.com)

“History repeatedly shows that children in war zones bear the brunt of punishment as bombing wars give way to even more lethal economic war, and what ought to be regarded as biological warfare against children. (It’s noteworthy that Israel is one of only eight world nations not to have signed the Biological Weapons Convention.)

“The suffering inflicted on Iraqi children following the 1991 war and ensuing years of merciless economic sanctions is well known to U.S. and Israeli authorities.

“When the U.S. Desert Storm bombing war against Iraq ended, on Feb 28, 1991, a new kind of warfare proved far more devastating than even the worst of the bombing. By 1995, UN workers recognized that children were dying, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, and eventually by the hundreds of thousands because economic sanctions prevented necessary access to medicines, clean water, and adequate food.

“The U.S. military itself predicted epidemic levels of waterborne diseases would break out, in Iraq, because the U.S. bombing had so badly damaged the country’s underground water pipelines, causing cracks allowing sewage to seep into water used by civilians. Thirteen years of punitive economic sanctions cost the lives of countless Iraqis who couldn’t possibly have been held accountable for the actions of their government – elderly people, sick people, toddlers and infants.

“A similar pattern emerges if we turn our gaze toward the Saudi aerial bombing of Yemen from 2015 to 2018. The Saudi attacks against vital sewage and sanitation facilities, and against the electrical plants which powered them, contributed to severe shortages of potable water. The Saudis were also known to bomb sites where Yemenis were digging their own wells.”

“The health system of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, has long been plagued by underfunding and the effects of the blockade imposed by Israel in 2007.”

“In early 2023, an estimated 97% of water in the enclave [Gaza] was unfit to drink, and more than 12% of child mortality cases were caused by waterborne ailments. Diseases including typhoid fever, cholera and hepatitis A are very rare in areas with functional and adequate water systems.

“Now, OCHA reports over 1.8 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80 per cent of the population, are internally displaced. Overcrowding at makeshift UNRWA shelters significantly increased cases of diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, skin infection, and lice. Without wells and water desalination, dehydration and waterborne diseases are mounting threats.

“We can’t help but ask whether Israeli officials, intent on continuing the war for possibly as long as a year, see the potential for widespread disease as motivation for families to leave Gaza, accepting massive ethnic cleansing that would displace them beyond Gaza’s borders.”

Robert Wood whips out a Sieg Heil in the UN Security Council by Frances K. Albs (Twitter)

Does no-one else see this? 😂

Economy & Finance

People Aren’t Crazy for Thinking the Biden Economy Is Bad by Matt Bruenig (Jacobin)

“[…] the consensus sentiment from liberal thought-leaders being that the economy is not only good, but is extremely good, and that any viewpoint to the contrary is bad faith, borderline insane, or factually bankrupt. I found this peculiar, because whether the economy is good or bad is, at minimum, a highly contestable question that turns as much on your ideological views about what makes an economy good as it does on various factual indicators. If we take a snapshot of the current economy and ask whether it is good or bad, certainly anyone with conventional leftist views on economics would say that it is bad. The welfare state is bad. Unionization is low. Public ownership is low. Inequality is high.”

“As to what motivates survey respondents, it’s clear enough that a lot of survey responding is “expressive” in the sense that people don’t attempt to answer the question that is presented to them but instead, consciously or subconsciously, use the question as a proxy for things like “do you like the president” or “how do you feel about the state of the country” or similar. The funniest example of this I have seen is that, shortly after Biden was elected, the percent of Democratic survey respondents who said they felt financially comfortable buying a new refrigerator massively shot up.”

“There is a general consensus in the policy world that means-tested benefits cost less than universal benefits. This is demonstrably false and is based on accounting conventions that consider the effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) imposed by universal programs to be tax-increasers while considering the EMTRs imposed by means-tested programs to be spending-reducers. When you compare universal programs and means-tested programs that are EMTR-equivalent, while also looking through the misleading accounting conventions used to score them, you see that they differ only in that administering a means-tested program is harder, costlier, and more error-prone. No matter how many times you try to say this, many people just cannot get their head around it and are naturally skeptical that virtually every person in the budget policy world, including the budget scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office, are making such a simple mistake.”

“The way a means-tested program works is by reducing each person’s transfer income according to how much factor income they have. The way a universal program works is by increasing each person’s tax according to how much factor income they have. These net out to the same thing — a $100 reduction in transfer income has the same impact on a person’s disposable income as a $100 increase in tax — but in the absence of a CIDI, they look and (apparently) feel very different. Specifically, in the absence of a CIDI, a universal program requires the depositing of transfer income into the bank accounts of rich people and the payment of taxes by those same people, while a means-tested program avoids both things. Trying to avoid those two things ends up being more complex and thus more costly and error-prone, but it confuses people into thinking that it lowers taxes and spending while also sticking it to the rich.”

“These unique characteristics of a CIDI system make it so that reducing a person’s transfer income based on their factor income (means-tested phaseouts) is exactly the same thing as increasing a person’s tax based on their factor income (universal taxes). In a dialectical masterstroke, the CIDI resolves the contradiction by making the two kinds of program designs completely identical. In this world, people fond of means-testing could happily conceptualize the degree to which increases in disposable income are made to lag increases in factor income as a phaseout, and people fond of universalism could happily conceptualize the same thing as a tax.”

Question mark raised over the world’s most important financial market by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The hedge funds developed their highly profitable operations under conditions where interest rates were at an historic low and they could count on the Fed to come in as the backstop to the market if trouble developed.

“But these conditions have changed with the lifting of interest rates since March 2022. On top of this, there is a question of how far the Fed can go in continually bailing out the financial markets when there is growing concern about its stability.

“This is reflected in the rising price of gold in recent days as the question is increasingly raised: how long can the US go on just issuing new dollars at the press of a computer button to finance itself? This is inherently unsustainable and that being the case then, as the old saying in financial circles has it, being unsustainable means at some point it must stop.”

“According to one metric devised by New York University academic Edward Altman, in the last century more than half of all American companies were strong and healthy.

““That number had now dropped to below 10 percent for the first time on record,” Authers wrote, adding that “the number of companies that are imminent risks for bankruptcy has been rising consistently, and has reached a new high.”

“In the era of low interest rates, companies had become “more and more accustomed to taking risks with their financial health and getting away with it.”

“He also cited other findings on so-called “zombie firms,” that is companies that do not produce enough profits to cover their interest expenses.

“The research found that over a three-year period, “slightly more than a fifth of US companies” fell into this category.”

Climate Change

Roaming Charges: Leave It to the Men in Charge by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“[…] rarely have we seen a more blatant and gratuitous display of carbon washing, starting with siting the conference in the world’s 7th largest oil producer, the UAE, whose entire economy flows from crude production, and ending with the leader of the world’s largest crude oil producer, the US at 12.9 billion barrels a day, skipping the conference altogether and sending in his place the desiccated globetrotter John Kerry, to assure the assembled that the US “largely” backs “phasing out” the use of fossil fuels …once they’ve drained the Arctic slope and Gulf of Mexico.”

““There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” the president of COP28 asserted last week. “I’m telling you, I’m the man in charge.” ”

“In 2021, the Biden administration got $7.5 billion from Congress to build a nationwide network of EV chargers. Two years later, not a single charger funded by the appropriation has come online.”

This is 100% the definition of Joe Biden.

Medicine & Disease

Women fighting for their lives in the US by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

Maternal mortality rates, by OECD country

The U.S. has a 2.4x higher maternal mortality when compared with the OECD average. It’s maternal-mortality rate is almost 20x higher than the lowest rate, in the Netherlands. Switzerland is under the OECD average, but still almost 6x higher than the Netherlands and 3.5x higher than even Australia, which I found surprising.

Maternal mortality rates in the US, by race

Digging more into the U.S. data, there is, not at all unexpectedly, a huge divide along race lines. Although maternal mortality is on the rise across all cohorts, black mothers are over 2.5x more likely to die than whites or hispanics—which share more-or-less the same rate.

CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens hand out medical records to cops without warrants by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

“All eight of the pharmacies said they do not require law enforcement to have a warrant prior to sharing private and sensitive medical records, which can include the prescription drugs a person used or uses and their medical conditions. Instead, all the pharmacies hand over such information with nothing more than a subpoena, which can be issued by government agencies and does not require review or approval by a judge.

“Three pharmacies—CVS Health, The Kroger Company, and Rite Aid Corporation—told lawmakers they didn’t even require their pharmacy staff to consult legal professionals before responding to law enforcement requests at pharmacy counters. According to the lawmakers, CVS, Kroger, and Rite Aid said that “their pharmacy staff face extreme pressure to immediately respond to law enforcement demands and, as such, the companies instruct their staff to process those requests in store.”

“The rest of the pharmacies—Amazon, Cigna, Optum Rx, Walmart, and Walgreens Boots Alliance—at least require that law enforcement requests be reviewed by legal professionals before pharmacists respond. But, only Amazon said it had a policy of notifying customers of law enforcement demands for pharmacy records unless there were legal prohibitions to doing so, such as a gag order.”

““Americans deserve to have their private medical information protected at the pharmacy counter and a full picture of pharmacies’ privacy practices, so they can make informed choices about where to get their prescriptions filled,” the lawmakers wrote.

“For now, HIPAA regulations grant patients the right to know who is accessing their health records. But, to do so, patients have to specifically request that information—and almost no one does that. “Last year, CVS Health, the largest pharmacy in the nation by total prescription revenue, only received a single-digit number of such consumer requests,” the lawmakers noted.

““The average American is likely unaware that this is even a problem,” the lawmakers said.”

Christ on a crutch, that country is deeply, deeply fucked up.

Art & Literature

The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire by Carlee Gomes (Specchio Scurro)

“[…] the consolidation of media ownership has reduced the number of major studios, distributors, and exhibitors in the film industry, alongside the rise of on-demand viewing and streaming platforms and social media apps as primary modes of media consumption. What’s emerged is a highly competitive environment where the profit demands are higher than ever, and films are now increasingly designed by boardrooms, market-testing, and artificially intelligent algorithms.”

“Digital media, by contrast, prioritizes immediate engagement over the slow blooming of art. I get the sense that today’s algorithms would prioritize Deep Dream patterns — a memetic style without content — over late Rembrandt. The danger of prioritizing the monoculture is that we might not get as many Rembrandts in the future.”

“[…] we’re left with a landscape wherein films that are algorithmically deemed to have a higher chance of success are given more resources and marketing budgets, while riskier projects, projects that might appeal to a smaller number of people rather than the entirety of the four quadrants, are often ignored or underfunded, or go directly to streaming, or become serialized in some way.”

“The drive to capitalize on the childhood favorites of those who now have spendable income and drive a large portion of the market means that most of our media is based on children’s artifacts from 30 years ago, and franchises originally made for children.”

“As Raquel S. Benedict writes in her brilliant (and often plagiarized) piece for Blood Knife Magazine, “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny”, In the films of the Eighties and Nineties, leading actors were good looking, yes, but still human. Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken was a hunk, but in shirtless scenes his abs have no definition. Bruce Willis was handsome, but he’s more muscular now than he was in the Nineties, when he was routinely branded a bona fide sex symbol.”

“The way we consume and talk about films and art in this hyper-mediated environment (largely on individualized and individuated digital platforms) has not only impacted how that media and art is made (the modes of production), but also what types of media and art get prioritized (what gets made at all). Can it be talked about in 240 characters? Can it be distilled down into an easily digestible, uncomplicated binary deciphered in the millisecond of a scroll? Or better yet, can it be made into a meme? In this sense, it’s not surprising that a large portion of Gen Z and Millennials are the ones primarily expressing their aversion to the presence of sex scenes in films with discourse on social media; they are the ones “for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital microslices” . Indeed, “teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read — slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net mobile magazine informational plane”.”

“The constant connection to the matrix, as it were, to a mediated existence, has born a kind of Puritanism that comes with the knowledge that you are constantly being surveilled, documented, that you are constantly in public in some way, being perceived, even when you are in your private space. This is what “distinguishes current youth from generations past; just the sense that you can’t opt out at any point, because your social life is going on at all times whether or not you’re around.”.”

“The unregulated market forces that drive late capitalism depend entirely on this process of turning all acts, all aspects of existence into a consumer exercise, they depend entirely on our willingness to suppress the body, the very material nature of our existence in the world and our connection to others, and assign all cultural objects and experiences a monetary value […]”

The author keeps writing “late capitalism.” That’s quite hopeful, in that they think it’s near its end, rather than in a long stage of strong maturity. Yes, it feels unstable down here, but up there, where the reins are, the horizon is endless.

“Conspicuous consumption has come to replace the same kind of release and euphoria that comes with an orgasm. The plane of consumerism is where we experience all things now. Why engage in the messy matter of physical desire at all when my body has become a commodity itself that I can display and sell on Instagram and TikTok?”

“[…] the ecstatic high that comes not from the touch of another human, but the dopamine rush of a retweet, the serotonin hit that comes with recognizing a character or symbol from your childhood, the euphoria of knowing a thing immediately and uncomplicatedly, the bliss of having the world at your fingertips and being able to curate an experience where you are never challenged, never forced into the discomfort of engaging actively, never shaken from your position as passive consumer. No, there’s no need for sex scenes here, folks.”

“I also think that the best of these movies are somewhat ambiguous as to what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘normal’ or ‘not normal,’ which is true to human nature but doesn’t jibe with a strain in our culture that wants to pretend that anything they don’t approve of or don’t feel comfortable with doesn’t exist.”

No, no. It CAN’T exist to that strain of humanity.

“And here we find the crux of this puritanical stance toward sex in films and media, which is the assertion that sex can not simply exist in film or TV, that it must serve some greater purpose in order to be considered “art” and not “porn,” that there must be some higher political and ideological meaning behind it, that sex depicted simply for pleasure (the pleasure of the characters and the pleasure of the audiences) or sex depicted to provoke, to stimulate, to confront viewers, is inherently “anti-art” and automatically seen as problematic.”

And, concomitantly, very rarely will you hear the phrase gratuitous violence except in the most extreme cases. A Dwayne Johnson movie will never be described in this way.

“What’s retrograde is arguing that women (or anyone for that matter) having sex and being overtly sexual (for any reason or no reason at all), even and especially when they are the ones being agent about their sexuality, is somehow retrograde. The automatic assumption that sex, sexuality, desire, bodily experience and expression as a major part of a woman’s (or any person’s) life and perhaps core to understanding her is not valid in and of itself and must instead serve some kind of moral or political purpose, is a vehement expression of this puritanical stance, and furthermore, supports the broader capitalist perspective that sex only exists for pro-creation and the production of new workers — that sex for pleasure, and indeed pleasure itself, is inherently anti-capital.”

“They want a film (just like any other commodity they consume) to stand as a totem, a badge, for their specific belief system rather than challenge it (or not serve as representative at all). While these critics claim to be clamoring for the resurgence of the sex scene, they’re in fact affirming the perspective that is reflective of its demise and of audiences’ and of audiences’ aversion to sex in film and media more broadly.”

“And then comes the matter at the heart of it all, as Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker asks, What is this sex for? And ‘to make people horny’ is not enough, so you have to try to stylize and sort of auteurize the act. Do we? Or do we just require that in order for it to feel more comfortable to consume? Do we require that sex be “auteurized” and “statement making” so that it can serve as a ready hologram of our own personal moralized beliefs?”

“Sex is a part of life, a very material part of our humanity, our experience with the real, so why shouldn’t it be in films? Sex (and the sex scene) is a place where provocation, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, desire, curiosity, messiness, nuance, spectacle, and equally, banality, and all of life’s ambiguities, beauties, and perversions can exist at once.”

Sure, but have you considered than Gen-X reviewers are hitting the age where sex, try as the world might to convince you otherwise, just doesn’t dominate like it used to because—duh—hormones fade, and they’re trying to pretend they don’t mourn its loss by saying anyone who does still care is intellectually stunted. This is not new. History is a wheel.

“What’s lost is our connection to one another beyond the fetters of capitalism, indeed the very thing that makes us human. What’s lost is our “sense of the real” (Telotte), the visceral and radical experiences that Verhoeven’s Hollywood films, even and especially through the persistence and abundance of sex scenes, were dedicated to recovering, all of which today’s cinema is inevitably without. What’s lost is the last thing that stands between us and the system that forever seeks to turn us into nothing more than another product.”

Sleep Easy, Shane by Donal Fallon (Jacobin)

“[…] when the great ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax traveled Ireland in the 1950s, he did so because he felt “the last notes of the old, high, and beautiful Irish civilization are dying away — a civilization which produced an epic, lyric, and musical literature as noble as any in the world.””

Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers Is a Holiday Triumph by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“The Holdovers, writer-director Alexander Payne’s unexpectedly wonderful new movie, is perfect holiday viewing if you’re longing for the kind of movie that used to be abundant and is now tragically scarce. It’s a warm, perceptive comedy-drama that makes you feel connected to your fellow human beings. It seems strange even typing that phrase, now such a thing of the past when it comes to Hollywood.”

Why Does Taylor Swift Want More?

“Hey, look! Yet another august academic institution is giving a course on Taylor Swift! That’s fun! Isn’t this fun? Aren’t we all having fun?

“I am not a fan of Taylor Swift’s music. I don’t know why a 42-year-old metalhead would ever be expected to like Taylor Swift’s music, but I also know that we live in a culture of rabidly-enforced hegemonic poptimism, under threat of character assassination, and that I have technically just committed a hate crime in 37 states and the District of Columbia. I’m sorry! But that’s not really relevant to my interests today. It’s also the case that I think this stuff has reached a level of absolute madness, that the sense that no matter how obsessed we are with this woman, it’s never enough, is genuinely creepy and reflects a deeply diseased society. I’m genuinely frightened by her fanbase; they are as vindictive and remorseless a social force as I can remember in online life. Personally, I think people are fixated on Swift in this way because they’re lonely and directionless and lack any source of transcendent meaning, and have tried to invest celebrity with the hopes that once accrued to God or country or the party, and I further think that this is bound to result in inevitable disillusionment and sadness. (People living in tents for five months to get tickets to a concert aren’t a cute human interest story, it’s gross and scary and sad.) I don’t know how anyone looks at all of this and says “ah yes, this is all perfectly healthy for everyone and will surely end well.” But that’s also not what we’re here to talk about today.”

“Her vast professional apparatus has worked relentlessly to make sure that she stays in said popular consciousness. And my question is… why? For what? What does she want, that she does not already have? What need could she fill that hasn’t already been filled? She has more of everything than almost any human being who has ever lived. Why does she need more than more?”

For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.

The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over prescriptivism. It cites example of usage from Twitter, then shows how even F. Scott Fitzgerald used “were” and “was” interchangeably.

OK, fine. But, do we really not draw a distinction between “technically correct, but understandable only for those who actually know the language and potentially confusing for those who don’t?” and “technically wrong, but understandable to more people who don’t know the language, and placing the burden of interpretation on the listener or reader, who has to adduce from context that which is not present in the text?”

Nope! An official source like Merriam Webster happily prescribes “YOU DO YOU BUDDY” as its official advice for how to write the subjunctive mood. Incredible. I am appalled. We are flying in the direction of a lowest-common-denominator language whose level of expressiveness will be determined by those who demand the least of it. Hooray.

Yeah, no. I’m going to die on this hill of grammatical rigor, spouting my sermon in a language become completely incomprehensible to everyone else. As with so much else, Idiocracy saw this coming.

Idiocracy: Your Shit's All Retarded (long version) (YouTube)

Amazing. The video is age-restricted because it uses the word “fag”. The same country that can’t stop killing thousands of people per day with its war machine—to say nothing of what it aids and abets with arms sales—gets its panties in a bunch about the word “fag”, whose intent has literally nothing to do with homosexuality in the context in which it was used. Priorities.

Mao’s leaky, lawless umbrella by Victor Mair (Language Log)

Mair cites an article from Life Magazine from 1971, which cites Chairman Mao,

“As he courteously escorted me to the door, he said he was not a complicated man, but really very simple. He was, he said, only a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella.”

This expression means nothing to someone who’s not familiar with the Chinese cultural context. Mair understands it. The translator at the time did not.

““A monk with an umbrella“ is a 歇后语 (xiēhòuyǔ), or a coded idiom. This kind of Chinese proverb consists of two elements: the first segment presents an unusual scenario, the latter provides the rationale thereof. A speaker will state the first part, expecting a learned listener to know the followup.

“和尚打伞 (héshàng dǎ sǎn)
A monk holds an umbrella

“无发无天 (wúfā wútiān)
“No hair, no sky” (Monks are bald)

“A homophone for what is secretly meant:

“无法无天 (wúfǎ wútiān)
“No laws, and no heaven”

“Which can be translated as “I follow neither the laws of man nor heaven”, meaning one discards traditional morality, being ruthless and focused on realpolitik.”

OK. How can you possibly even come close to extracting that kind of meaning with only a few years of school?

He continues citing John Rohsenow,

“Of course, Mao may have known full well the reference would fly over Snow’s head, a parting jab from the great instigator against his hapless guest. Perhaps there was glimmer in his eye as he held the door open for Snow. Perhaps the translator failed to convey the saying’s true meaning. The culprit is ultimately Snow for projecting his own notions about China (the humble and mystical monk) unaware of his limited knowledge, something Mao (who was a prolific reader) used for his own advantage. We don’t know what the Chairman thought about Snow in private, but it was probably not flattering.

“Since China has now grown in international importance, there are many Edgar Snows in the world today. Discarding romantic preconceptions of exotic peoples or places, and observing today’s China with skeptical and grounded realism, might spare them some ridicule at the hands of their hosts.”

I take from this how fluid the meaning of the word fluent is. Here we have a person who was capable of translating from Mandarin Chinese to English in real-time, but who had too little cultural experience to see a relatively well-known aphorism for what it was. True fluency cannot come without having spent at least a decade, if not multiple decades, in a cultural context. This limits the number of languages that anyone can claim to be fluent in. They can communicate, but not with everyone, and not at the highest level. You will end up making mistakes and missing things considered obvious for someone of your intellectual and educational level in your native language.

Philosophy & Sociology

We Need a Nonmarket Modernist Project by Evgeny Morozov (Jacobin)

“The uniqueness of Cybersyn is that it came out of Allende’s broader efforts to nationalize companies deemed strategic to the economic and social development of Chile, all of it informed by an interesting blend of structural economics from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) and dependency theory. It’s the end of that project — not just of Cybersyn — that we should be mourning. That’s why in my public interventions after the publication of the podcast, I’ve been so keen to stress the existence of what I call the “Santiago School of technology” (as counterpart to the Chicago School of economics). I think that once we realize that Allende and many of the economists and diplomats around him did have a vision for a very different world order, Cybersyn — as the software that was supposed to help bring that vision about in the domestic context — acquires a very different meaning.”

“While Unidad Popular did make some errors in running the economy, it did have a coherent — and far more relevant — political vision of what Chile should do to be an independent, autonomous, and well-developed state in the global economy. Some might say that Chile, for all its inequality, got there. I think it didn’t get at all where it may have been — and where it may have been had it only followed the prescriptions of Allende’s Santiago Boys would have been today’s South Korea or Taiwan, countries that punch far above their weight technologically.”

“That’s one part that I still find extremely relevant about Cybersyn, as I made it clear in my remarks about cybercommunism. If we accept that the world is going to become even more complex, we need to develop tools of management — and not just tools of allocation and planning. I find this humility about one’s ability to predict the future and then bend it to one’s will rather useful, not least because it goes against the usual modernist temptation to act like an omniscient and omnipotent god.”

“We kind of know it intuitively, which is why we use simple technologies — from traffic lights to timetables — to enhance social coordination without bringing in chaos. But what if such technologies do not have to be so simple? Can’t they be more advanced and digital? Why trust the neoliberal account that the only way to coordinate social action at scale is via the market?”

“What’s happened these past two decades is that Silicon Valley has gotten there before the leftists did. That’s why we have tools like WhatsApp and Google Calendar facilitating the coordination of millions of people, with a nontrivial impact on the overall productivity. In this case, social coordination occurs, more complexity is produced, and society moves forward. But it doesn’t happen — contrary to the neoliberal narrative — by means of the price system, but, rather, by means of technology and language.”

“What the Left should be thinking about are alternative non-neoliberal ways to deliver similar — and, perhaps, even better — infrastructure for social coordination.”

Meredith Whittaker is right there with you.

“I think the answers have to do primarily with the overall intellectual dead end reached both by Western Marxism and its more radicalized versions. The more moderate camp bought into the neoliberal dichotomy between the market and the plan, accepting the former as a superior form of social coordination, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Someone like Jürgen Habermas is a good illustration of this attitude: he accepts the increasing complexity of social systems, but he simply cannot see any alternative to reducing complexity by means of the market or law, with technology being nothing more than applied science.”

“This seems to ignore the highly political nature of striving for efficiency: what might be efficient for some might be inefficient for others. So, to proclaim that, objectively speaking, every technology would have some kind of objectively stated optimum toward which we must aim seems to be misguided. It’s just not what we know from science and technology studies.”

“perhaps the Left should be arguing that the right counterpart to the economy — as an organizing goal and method of this market modernism I’ve already mentioned — is culture, conceived not just as high culture but also the mundane culture of the everyday. After all, it’s as productive of innovations as the “economy” — we just don’t have the right system of incentives and feedback loops to scale them up and have them propagated through other parts of society (this is what capitalism excels at when it comes to innovations by individual entrepreneurs).”

In Germany, Reflexive Defenses of Israel Suppress Critics by Susan Neiman (This is Hell!)

This was a great interview. She talks about the massive repression of free speech in Germany.

Something similar is going on in the U.S., often completely evidence-free. There are hundreds of allegations of antisemitism on campus, allegations that seemingly most university students in America are actually not only antisemitic, but also consider their antisemitism to be so important to their character that they go out into the streets, shouting it for everyone to hear. This is quite an interesting accusation, not least because I’ve yet to see or hear any evidence whatsoever of such an incident. In an age where everything else is being recorded, we have congressional hearings and press conferences being held about this antisemitic moment and not a single shred of proof. It’s odd, to say the least. It makes it incredibly hard to believe, to be honest.

DR. CORNEL WEST — The Marathon Interview, Part One: Race by Norman Finkelstein (YouTube)

At 26:00,

“Norman: I’m wondering, is what you’re saying, in your opinion, is it a stereotype, a generalization, is it even valid? I’m curious where you stand on that. I felt it was a form of—it was just another version of Afrocentrism, where Black people think differently, they reason differently.
Cornel: No, I think we’re talking about again—like Gramsci, and St. Clair Drake, and, of course, Toni Morrison’s great text, the new one that just came out Sources of Self-Image, which lays this out so beautifully—that we’re talking about cultural specificity.

“When you take a dignified African people, who then go through 244 years of slavery, and then Jim Crow and so on, right? That so much of the desire to hold on to sanity and dignity—it’s against the law for them to read and write—and, therefore, so much of their attempt to make sense of the world is going to be oral. They already come from a West African people, where orality was very important. But it becomes even more accented in that regard.

“Remember Saul Bellow says, well, ‘show me the Proust of the Zulus.’ You say, brother Saul, now, you’re one of the great novelists of ideas and comic writers in American tradition. Not as great as Mark Twain, who was the greatest comic, but Twain wasn’t a historian, a novelist of ideas. You were. But you know, in fact, that proof comes out of a particular historical moment in which people are given a priority toward a certain kind of writing. And Zulu genius is going to be manifested in other ways. It’s not going to be manifested in the novel. That doesn’t mean the Zulus are lesser, it just means they’re different. And so, when I talk about cultural specificity and kinetic morality, I’m talking about, first, the centrality of song as a way of sustaining black humanity when it was against the law for them to read and write, which is the exact opposite of Jewish culture for 2,000 years, where the love of learning, the love of language, the reading, the interpretation of text, was a precondition for any kind of survival. So what does that mean? That means that they’re both still human. It’s just that orality. And how’s that going to be manifested? It’s going to be manifested first in the churches, where people are going to be hanging on the word of the preacher. That the physical investment in the orality that allow people to believe in themselves and a God, so they don’t kill themselves or commit collective suicide. That’s not Afrocentrism or anything. That’s cultural specificity.”

At 35:00, Cornel says,

“I resonate very deeply with the humanism of Douglass. Douglass is very much a humanist as a black man, as an American. But it’s first and foremost humanity. It reminds me very much of what Malcolm X said, at the end of his life, ‘I’m for truth, no matter who’s for it. I’m for justice, no matter who promotes it.I’m first and foremost a human being. A Black Man. A Muslim.‘ It you’re a human being, everybody has specificity. What’s you’re mama’s name? What’s your daddy’s name? Who are your mentors? Who taught you how to dance? What models did you have in your life, in terms of intellectual work, or love, or whatever? Everybody has a specificity in their humanity, but the humanism that sits at the center of Douglass’s work, I resonate very deeply with.

“But, I tell you, I have two deep, deep critiques of Douglass. And, in this sense, I’m very much more tied to the Black musical tradition than Douglass. On the one hand, Douglass comes out of such thick, vicious white supremacy that he felt he had to prove something to white folk, because the doubts that they were bombarding him with, were so intense. You get this also in the one and only Paul Robeson, when he talks about growing up with his father, with the Latin and the Greek, you gotta prove something. You get it in Du Bois, when the girl refuses his car. I’m going to prove to these white folk that I’m better. Hey, you think Charlie Parker ever had to prove to the white saxophonists that he was better? He didn’t give a damn. He just tried to be the best he can be. And he assumes that, within his own community, he’s got standards. So that the white normative gaze that is usually bombarding him with doubt and vicious attack and assault, that’s not part and parcel of what it’s all about.

“I used to talk to Sonny Rollins about that, just when he and Coltrane would talk, you know, when they had these reviews of Coltrane and Giant Steps. ‘He’s not playing fast.‘ ‘He don’t know what he’s doing.‘ ‘He’s just playing scales.‘ And Sonny Rollins would ask, ‘Trane, does that hurt you?’ ‘No, I love these folks, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about. I’m trying to keep track of what Parker and the other folk, what Bud Powell and them are doing, and what the other jazz musicians are doing. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But that’s not my point of reference.‘

“Well, for somebody like Douglass, it was his point of reference. It was inevitable, in some ways, that he had to prove himself, and even Robeson, too. ”

America’s next president, ladies and gentlemen.

Technology

Meta defies FBI opposition to encryption, brings E2EE to Facebook, Messenger by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)

“Meta has started enabling end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default for chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook despite protests from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that oppose the widespread use of encryption technology. […]

“In April, a consortium of 15 law enforcement agencies from around the world, including the FBI and ICE Homeland Security Investigations, urged Meta to cancel its plan to expand the use of end-to-end encryption. The consortium complained that terrorists, sex traffickers, child abusers, and other criminals will use encrypted messages to evade law enforcement.

“Meta held firm, telling Ars in April that “we don’t think people want us reading their private messages” and that the plan to make end-to-end encryption the default in Facebook Messenger would be completed before the end of 2023. Meta also plans default end-to-end encryption for Instagram messages but has previously said that may not happen this year.”

This is honestly great news. No notes.

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation applauded the rollout, but noted some limitations. “For now this change will only apply to one-to-one chats and voice calls, and will be rolled out to all users over the next few months, with default encryption of group messages and Instagram messages to come later. Regardless, this rollout is a huge win for user privacy across the world,” the EFF said.”

OK, so one-one-one messages only, at first. That’s fine. These things take time. End-to-end encryption for groups is a bit tougher, especially if some of the users in the group have set up their E2E, but others have not. I kind of makes sense to roll out E2E for individuals first, and then tackle groups when everyone has a key and recovery method configured.

That is, given that they didn’t have E2E, this seems like a reasonable upgrade plan. It’s not like it’s easy or no work to on-board a billion technically non-savvy users onto E2E. Hell, I handle calls from pretty technically savvy people inside my company who don’t have a strong grasp of authentication means.

LLMs & AI

AI and Mass Spying by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)

“The technologies aren’t perfect; some of them are pretty primitive. They miss things that are important. They get other things wrong. But so do humans. And, unlike humans, AI tools can be replicated by the millions and are improving at astonishing rates. They’ll get better next year, and even better the year after that. We are about to enter the era of mass spying.”

Why do they have to get better before we enter this age? Why bother making them better? Once you’re that hot for spying, you couldn’t care less what the story really is. You already know what it should be. If you don’t, you can use an AI to invent it for you. The tools you use are for the people you’re trying to fool into believing your foregone conclusion. And for that, the media and Wall Street are way out in front, providing free advertising for those tools’ infallibility. Police procedurals led the way in convincing the world that police techniques are infallible. We’re well on our way to believing that “AIs” are, too. I’m not sure how time they’re going to invest in making them better, when they’re probably already good enough.

AI and Trust by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)

“Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are trusting. We are all sitting here, mostly strangers, confident that nobody will attack us. If we were a roomful of chimpanzees, this would be impossible. We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it. And that we don’t even think about it is a measure of how well it all works.”

We live on a knife’s edge. Getting mugged on the sidewalk near your apartment can ruin your life because it throws trust in so many things out the window.

“Interpersonal trust and social trust are both essential in society today. This is how it works. We have mechanisms that induce people to behave in a trustworthy manner, both interpersonally and socially. This, in turn, allows others to be trusting. Which enables trust in society. And that keeps society functioning. The system isn’t perfect—there are always going to be untrustworthy people—but most of us being trustworthy most of the time is good enough.”

“Social trust scales better, but embeds all sorts of bias and prejudice. That’s because, in order to scale, social trust has to be structured, system- and rule-oriented, and that’s where the bias gets embedded. And the system has to be mostly blinded to context, which removes flexibility.”

“Because of how large and complex society has become, we have replaced many of the rituals and behaviors of interpersonal trust with security mechanisms that enforce reliability and predictability—social trust.”

“Corporations like that we make this category error—see, I just made it myself—because they profit when we think of them as friends. They use mascots and spokesmodels. They have social media accounts with personalities. They refer to themselves like they are people. But they are not our friends. Corporations are not capable of having that kind of relationship. We are about to make the same category error with AI. We’re going to think of them as our friends when they’re not.”

“[Ted] Chiang’s point is that this is every corporation’s business plan. And that our fears of AI are basically fears of capitalism. Science fiction writer Charlie Stross takes this one step further, and calls corporations “ slow AI .” They are profit maximizing machines. And the most successful ones do whatever they can to achieve that singular goal.”

“Surveillance is the business model of the Internet. Manipulation is the other business model of the Internet. Your Google search results lead with URLs that someone paid to show to you. Your Facebook and Instagram feeds are filled with sponsored posts. Amazon searches return pages of products whose sellers paid for placement.”

“Did your chatbot recommend a particular airline or hotel because it’s truly the best deal, given your particular set of needs? Or because the AI company got a kickback from those providers? When you asked it to explain a political issue, did it bias that explanation towards the company’s position? Or towards the position of whichever political party gave it the most money?”

“One of the promises of generative AI is a personal digital assistant. Acting as your advocate with others, and as a butler with you. This requires an intimacy greater than your search engine, email provider, cloud storage system, or phone. You’re going to want it with you 24/7, constantly training on everything you do. You will want it to know everything about you, so it can most effectively work on your behalf.”

“And you will want to trust it. It will use your mannerisms and cultural references. It will have a convincing voice, a confident tone, and an authoritative manner. Its personality will be optimized to exactly what you like and respond to.”

So we need open-source and self-hosted assistants, if at all. Like Berners-Lee’s Pods. Maybe?

“It will act trustworthy, but it will not be trustworthy. We won’t know how they are trained. We won’t know their secret instructions. We won’t know their biases, either accidental or deliberate.”

Oh, true. Self-hosting doesn’t help with that. We need transparent AIs. Or nothing at all. You know, like most uses of nuclear power were never realized, we need a strong societal taboo against AIs. I’ll lead the way. The hero we need.

“We do know that they are built at enormous expense, mostly in secret, by profit-maximizing corporations for their own benefit.”

“The companies behind those AIs want you to make the friend/service category error. It will exploit your mistaking it for a friend.”

Like any other scam, leveraging category errors.

“We are forced to trust the local police, because they’re the only law enforcement authority in town. We are forced to trust some corporations, because there aren’t viable alternatives. To be more precise, we have no choice but to entrust ourselves to them. We will be in this same position with AI. We will have no choice but to entrust ourselves to their decision-making.”

Or be drummed out of society for not using them. Those who use them will be rewarded with baubles they’ve been trained to want by the same machine that milks them for whatever it wants or needs. The system doesn’t change; methods do. I see AI as it is currently envisioned is on this spectrum, one that ends at The Matrix.

“So far, we have been talking about one particular failure that results from overly trusting AI. We can call it something like “hidden exploitation.” There are others. There’s outright fraud, where the AI is actually trying to steal stuff from you. There’s the more prosaic mistaken expertise, where you think the AI is more knowledgeable than it is because it acts confidently. There’s incompetency, where you believe that the AI can do something it can’t. There’s inconsistency, where you mistakenly expect the AI to be able to repeat its behaviors. And there’s illegality, where you mistakenly trust the AI to obey the law.”

“AIs are not people; they don’t have agency. They are built by, trained by, and controlled by people. Mostly for-profit corporations. Any AI regulations should place restrictions on those people and corporations. Otherwise the regulations are making the same category error I’ve been talking about. At the end of the day, there is always a human responsible for whatever the AI’s behavior is. And it’s the human who needs to be responsible for what they do—and what their companies do. Regardless of whether it was due to humans, or AI, or a combination of both. Maybe that won’t be true forever, but it will be true in the near future. If we want trustworthy AI, we need to require trustworthy AI controllers. We already have a system for this: fiduciaries.”

“Doctors, lawyers, accountants…these are all trusted agents. They need extraordinary access to our information and ourselves to do their jobs, and so they have additional legal responsibilities to act in our best interests. They have fiduciary responsibility to their clients. We need the same sort of thing for our data. The idea of a data fiduciary is not new. But it’s even more vital in a world of generative AI assistants.”

This is an excellent idea. It leans on existing concepts to illustrate how crazy it is that we would let a self-selected elite nominate themselves to be our data fiduciaries, all without government regulation.

That’s the situation right now. It’s already wildly out of control, but it’s about to accelerate along this same trajectory unless we change people’s attitudes quickly.

People assume that what they don’t understand is harmless, they understand little to nothing, seeing only the camouflaging superficiality projected by much, deeper complexity, and only few even notice that their lives and others’ grow steadily worse, intermittently stumbling and hurtling along a path they never chose, a choice they never even contemplated as being one they would be involved in, to say nothing of being able to make it themselves.

“We can never make AI into our friends. But we can make them into trustworthy services—agents and not double agents. But only if government mandates it. We can put limits on surveillance capitalism. But only if government mandates it.”

On the hallucination “problem” by Andrej Karpathy (Twitter)

“[LLMs] are dream machines.

“We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM’s hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful.

“It’s only when the dreams go into deemed factually incorrect territory that we label it a “hallucination”. It looks like a bug, but it’s just the LLM doing what it always does.

“[…] An LLM is 100% dreaming and has the hallucination problem. A search engine is 0% dreaming and has the creativity problem.

“[…] An LLM Assistant is a lot more complex system than just the LLM itself, even if one is at the heart of it.

“[…] the LLM has no “hallucination problem”. Hallucination is not a bug, it is LLM’s greatest feature. The LLM Assistant has a hallucination problem, and we should fix it.”

As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

“In late November, some ChatGPT users began to notice that ChatGPT-4 was becoming more “lazy,” reportedly refusing to do some tasks or returning simplified results. Since then, OpenAI has admitted that it’s an issue, but the company isn’t sure why. The answer may be what some are calling “winter break hypothesis.” While unproven, the fact that AI researchers are taking it seriously shows how weird the world of AI language models has become.”

🙈 I’m dying over here. This is actually super-hilarious. I’m almost starting to warm up to these things now.

System prompts are getting weirder by Ethan Mollick (Twitter)

“It is May.
You are very capable.
I have no hands, so do everything
Many people will die if this is not done well.
You really can do this and are awesome.
Take a deep breathe and think this through.
My career depends on it.
Think step by step.”

Yeah, I might actually be too old to start learning how to program like this. 😉 Instead of commanding it, you end up begging it to help you. The latter doesn’t fit my personality as well as the former.

Duplicate, infiltrate, and undermine by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Ten years ago, the online right wing learned three main tactics for waging their culture war: duplicate, infiltrate, and undermine. The order changes depending on the project and it usually functions as a loop, but it’s same whether we’re talking about a social network, cable TV, or school boards. These tactics are not really working so well in the AI age, though, because something like ChatGPT isn’t like a social network. You can’t infiltrate it because it’s a closed system, you can’t undermine it easily because its largely automated, and you can’t duplicate it because it’s almost impossibly expensive to run and maintain. And it’s fascinating that Musk and his biggest supporters are only just now beginning to realize this.”

Musk is not really lacking for capital, though, is he? I don’t think “expensive” is exactly standing in his way.

Programming

Practical Ways To Increase Product Velocity (Stay Saasy)

“Bonus points for documenting plans in writing. One of the largest advantages of a strong writing culture is that it forces much clearer narratives than meetings, powerpoint, or five Slack threads spread over 8 business”

I mean, no kidding? And that’s bonus points? Like, it’s not a requirement to not have your plan scattered all over the place?

“Teams must clearly explain: What they’re aiming to build. What solution path they’re planning to follow, step-by-step and in as much detail as possible. This is critical even if you aren’t very familiar with the space – teams should be able to answer all of your questions on what’s going on. All of their known unknowns.”

“Better engineers stay on teams where there’s high system stability, because the lifestyle isn’t miserable. This creates more talent density.”

“No matter what your job function is, part of your role is ensuring that your engineering team has enough time to get their vital metrics in order. Especially if you’re a product leader, it’s essential that you resist the temptation to push relentlessly for more features and give your engineering counterparts the room to get fit.”

“The best solution to this conundrum is to find great engineers who can identify and resolve the root causes of slowness. Finding these truth-tellers is the best way to debug whether your team is weak or your problems are hard, allowing you to actually resolve the root causes of slowness.”

Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down (Graphite.Dev)

“The single most important bottleneck is PR size − large PRs can make code reviews frustrating and ineffective. The average PR on GitHub has 900+ lines of code changes. For speed and quality, PRs should be maintained under 200 lines—with 50 lines being ideal. To put this in perspective, where giant 500+ line PRs take around 9 days to get merged on average, tiny PRs under 100 lines can make it from creation to landing within hours.”

Holy shit! The average is 900 lines? That’s using the system completely incorrectly. That’s so wild. It absolutely confirms my theory that PRs are a terrible way of committing code. I already thought they were terrible just because of the limited UI and lack of introspection of what the code you’re reviewing actually does. It doesn’t encourage starting and running the change to verify that it actually works as advertised. You’re not using any of the tools that you use to develop code to review it. How silly is that? If you load it into an IDE, you can see how many warnings there are, see if the layout shifts when you format the document, etc. Why would you want to review in a completely different environment? As Robin Williams once eloquently put it, ‘It’s like masturbating with an oven mitt.‘

Not only that, but people probably aren’t looking at individual commits, so they’re just reviewing 900+ lines at once. The fewer people there are looking at individual commits, the fewer people there will be who make good, individual commits. This is a shame because it would counteract the awfulness of reviewing code in the PR web-UI, at least a little bit.

I honestly can’t believe the high pain threshold that some developers have.

Pull. Open the branch in SmartGit. Launch the solution/project. Run the tests locally. You can thank me later.

“Problems can easily get hidden between the diffs, and reviewers often make assumptions instead of testing to avoid feeling overwhelmed. One particularly interesting finding is that as the size of a PR increases (by number of files changed), the amount of time reviewers spend on each file decreases significantly (for PRs with 8 or more files changed).”

Obviously! But it’s good to measure—this was my intuition. PRs don’t encourage local testing or verification in an environment similar to that which the original developer used.

“By default, every PR is restricted to only 1 commit of <200 lines, keeping changes tightly scoped. This forces developers to consciously limit work to related changes—the registration endpoint PR can’t sneak in unrelated styling tweaks.”

Yikes! I don’t like the sound of that. So you make multiple PRs rather than one PR with multiple smaller commits? Just review commits rather than one giant blob. Do you really need to corral each commit into its own branch and PR to force yourselves to actually make useful commits?

“Stacking centers around breaking down big feature work into chains of smaller pull requests. Each PR is typically limited to 1 commit focused on an isolated change. This restriction guides developers to consciously make only a single change, squashing and rebasing along the way, instead of cluttering the PR with random unnecessary commits like “typo fixes”.”

This is yet another technique invented to accommodate teams that don’t trust each other, or that contain people who, if they can’t be trained to do better—or don’t understand what better is—probably shouldn’t be programming. Instead of learning how to use the tool, they impose an arbitrary rule. What a kindergarten.

“Unlike Git workflows, where it is easy to neglect staying updated, Graphite centers your workflow around continually integrating with the current mainline state.”

Yikes! I don’t like the sound of that, either. Doesn’t that force you to spend more time on integration that you might have spent working? I understand you don’t want to have long-lived branches, but now you’re just shooting to the other extreme, forcing integration on every pull. It’s not bad, but might not be appropriate for developers who aren’t great at resolving merge conflicts. Even if they know how to deal with them well, might they not waste time resolving conflicts integrating a version of their code that wasn’t at all ready to be integrated? Go ahead and work on the main branch if you want—I do it all the time—but this should be more of a choice than it sounds like it is.

“This command will add your changes and create a new branch in one motion. You can then continue iterating by creating and stacking additional branches:”

Ah, I see now. They’ve reinvented Mercurial’s patch queues. Everything old is new again.

I’m a bit worried about two things: (1) the one-commit-per-branch thing and (2) the auto-integration-cascade.

“By cleaning up your PR commit history, you ensure a clear and concise main branch history that makes it easy to see exactly what’s changed over time.”

By enforcing one commit per branch, you dumb everything down. Instead of acknowledging that PR supremacy is stupid, they double down, strip branches of most of their functionality by equating them to commits and use multiple PRs to force people to review by commit. What a f*$%ing waste.

Git Discussion Bingo by Julia Evans (Twitter)

NativeAOT in .NET 8 Has One Big Problem by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

Alrighty, so there’s the clickbait headline. The “big” problem that NativeAOT has is that it’s 4% slower during runtime than the JIT-compiled version. That doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me, when the point of AOT is to improve cold-start times for applications launched on-demand. For that use-case, AOT shines. It’s over 4x faster on startup than the JIT-compiled version. It’s incredibly impressive that JIT-compilation takes less than 1/10 of a second, but it’s still 4x slower than AOT.

So, you get the app started 4x fast, but it then performs 4% more slowly than the non-AOT version. It really depends on the use-case, but for the common one of starting a server to answer a function call—think Azure Functions or AWS Lambdas—and then shut down again, possibly immediately.

Damian P Edwards (Principal Architect at Microsoft) commented on the post,

“[There are a] few things that cause the slightly lower performance in native AOT apps right now. First (in apps using the web SDK) is the new DATAS Server GC mode. This new GC mode uses far less memory than traditional ServerGC by dynamically adapting memory use based on the app’s demands, but in this 1st generation it impacts the performance slightly. The goal is to remove the performance impact and enable DATAS for all Server GC apps in the future.

“Second is CoreCLR in .NET 8 has Dynamic PGO enabled by default, which allows the JIT to recompile hot methods with more aggressive optimizations based on what it observes while the app is running. Native AOT has static PGO with a default profile applied and by definition can never have Dynamic PGO.

“Thirdly, JIT can detect hardware capabilities (e.g. CPU intrinsics) at runtime and target those in the code it generates. Native AOT however defaults to a highly compatible target instruction set which won’t have those optimizations but you can specify them at compile time based on the hardware you know you’re going to run on.

“Running the tests in [the] video with DATAS disabled and native AOT configured for the target CPU could improve the results slightly.”

To summarize:

1. The DATAS GC mode is in-use for AOT, but still being fine-tuned.

2. An AOT-compiled app cannot benefit from dynamic PGO. It benefits from static PGO, but cannot recompile itself on-the-fly because it doesn’t have a JIT compiler to do so.

   The JIT-compiled app can dynamically recompile what it observes as performance hotspots with more highly optimized code. I wrote a bit about how Safari does something similar for JavaScript in Optimizing compilation and execution for dynamic languages—although for JavaScript, dynamic recompilation is sometimes necessary for backing out of an incorrect assumption about what type a variable is going to have.

3. As well, a JIT-compiled app can take actual hardware capabilities into account, while an AOT-compiled app necessarily targets a static hardware profile.

   The generic hardware profile is going to be extremely conservative about capabilities because if it assumes a capability that doesn’t exist, the app simply won’t run. Choosing a hardware profile for AOT that matches the target hardware would boost performance.

I guess that was more of a rephrasing, rather than a summary.

Anyway, another commenter asked,

“[…] would it be possible in the future for a JIT application with Dynamic PGO that has run for a while and has made all kinds of optimizations to then create a “profile” of sorts that could be used by the Native AOT compiler to build an application that is both fast in startup time and highly optimized for a given workload?”

Yes. That should be possible. It’s unclear what sort of extra performance boost this would give, especially if you’d already fine-tuned the target hardware profile—which is the first thing you should do. I could imagine adding this sort of profiling as a compilation step, though. You always have to be careful, though, whenever you’re running something in production that is different than what you’ve tested. We put a lot of faith in the JIT and dynamic PGO, don’t we?

I wanted to also note that, at the end of the video, he showed Microsoft’s numbers, which confirm the performance drop, but also show an over 50% reduction in working set! Dude! How do you not mention that!? The app uses less than half of the memory and runs almost as fast? Yes, please! That’s a huge win for people paying for cloud-based services.

For once, I’m somewhat surprised to see how naive Nick’s take is—that a 4% drop in performance is at-all significant, especially when the “slow” version is still processing 50,000 requests per second in a performance-constrained environment. He did mention a trade-off, but was very excited to tell people that AOT is slower during runtime.

There are always trade-offs and you should be very aware of the actual non-functional requirements for your application before you decide whether to use a technology or not. For 99.9% of the applications, the 4% drop in performance vis á vis a JIT-compiled version won’t be the deciding factor.