Links and Notes for April 19th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun & Sports

Public Policy & Politics

Samson and Cassandra by Norman Finkelstein (SubStack)

“Feigned lunacy, be it noted, easily transmutes into the real thing as the imaginary phantoms one repeatedly conjures seep into the psyche’s inner chambers. The upshot is that this madness, real or contrived, “renders rational calculations … questionable” as Israel “may behave in the manner of what have sometimes been called ‘crazy states.’””

“He got right that the bell must be sounded; but he got wrong from whence the madness emanates. Medice, cura te ipsum. If Erdan represents even half of the Israeli state and society—the fraction is arguably much higher—a catastrophe looms. True, Israeli leaders have in the past uttered certifiable lunacies. It is sufficient to recall Prime Minister Netanyahu holding up a Loony Tunes-like cartoon of the Iranian bomb at the UN and his pronouncement that it was not Hitler but the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem who masterminded the Final Solution.”

“It might be urged upon Iran to tread lightly so as not to agitate the lunatic in the room. But alas, that is not, in my opinion, a viable option. The documentary record demonstrates that, once Israel has fixed a country in its crosshairs, nothing short of abject submission will bring it to desist.”

It is like papa bear in that regard.

“If the “enemy” power resists initial provocation, Israel will keep escalating with another and another provocation until it proves politically untenable for the targeted entity to passively absorb further blows. That’s what happened when Israel targeted Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser in the early 1950s.”

Or what happened to Russia in Ukraine.

“The lamentable truth is that, short of national suicide, Iran cannot exercise the option of inaction: Israel will almost certainly keep ratcheting up the provocations until Teheran has no choice but to respond. It wouldn’t surprise were Israel to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei then (wink, wink) deny it.”

“The pretexts of October 7 and now Iran’s “retaliation” present the lunatics in Jerusalem with an unprecedented opportunity to rid Israel of the triple challenge to its regional domination: by destroying Gaza, Hezbollah, and Iran; the “fog” of such an explosion would also enable Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. If it is hoped that a sane cabal among the Israeli leadership will crystallize to stop this headlong lurch over the precipice, then it must be said that the odds are against it. Hitler’s biographer, Ian Kershaw, observed that, if it took so long for coup plans to hatch against the Fuhrer, it was because of “a deep sense of obedience to authority and service to the state,” the belief that it was “not merely wrong, but despicable and treacherous to undermine one’s own country in war,” and “even as the military disasters mounted and ultimate catastrophe beckoned, the fanatical backing for Hitler had by no means evaporated and continued, if as a minority taste, to show remarkable resilience and strength.””

“Netanyahu IS Israel: an obnoxious, narcissistic Jewish supremacist for whom only Jews reckon in God’s grand design.”

“It must, finally, be acknowledged that not all Israeli fears are unfounded—the wish is by now widespread that Israel vanish from the map while its capacity has diminished to terrorize its neighbors into submission. But, for the most part, it is a corner that Israel has boxed itself into.”

Palestine speaks for everyone by Jodi Dean (Verso)

“Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? The shattering of the collective sense of the possible made it seem as if anyone could be free, as if imperialism, occupation, and oppression can and will be overthrown.”

“When we witness such actions many of us also feel this sense of openness. Our response is indicative of the subject effect the actions unleash: something in the world has changed because a subject has inscribed a gap in the given.”

“Imperialism tries to shut these feelings down before they spread too far. It condemns them and declares them off limits.”

“This image of the victim produces the “good” Palestinian as a civilian, even better as a child, woman, or elder. Those who fight back, especially as part of organized groups are bad: the monstrous enemy that must be eliminated.”

“Imperialists and Zionists reduce October 7 to a list of horrors not simply to block from view the history and reality of colonialism, occupation, and siege. They do it to prevent the gap of the disruption from producing the subject that caused it.”

Callback to her Alain Badieu citation from earlier.

“After the Night of the Gliders and into the first intifada, to be Palestinian again meant rebellion and resistance rather than acquiescence to second-class citizenship and refugee status.”

“Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar explained, “Kites are not a weapon. At most, they set on fire some stubble. An extinguisher, and it’s over. They are not a weapon, they are a message. Because they are just twine and paper and an oil-soaked rag, while each battery of the Iron Dome costs $100 million. Those kites say: you are immensely more powerful. But you will never win. Really. Never.“”

“Making the kite is more than mourning; it’s an engagement in practical optimism, an element of the subjective process that establishes the subject of a politics, the “you” instructed to make the kite and tell his story.”

“Although imperialist and Zionist forces try to condense the action into a singular figure of Hamas terrorism, insisting against all evidence that with the extermination of Hamas Palestinian resistance will disappear, the will to fight for Palestinian freedom precedes and exceeds it. Hamas wasn’t the subject of the October 7 action; it was an agent hoping that the subject would emerge as an effect of its action, the latest instantiation of the Palestinian revolution.”

“Words used by Leila Khaled to defend the justness of the PFLP’s hijacking tactic apply equally to October 7. Khaled writes: “As a comrade has said: We act heroically in a cowardly world to prove that the enemy is not invincible. We act “violently” in order to blow the wax out of the ears of the deaf Western liberals and to remove the straws that block their vision. We act as revolutionaries to inspire the masses and to trigger off the revolutionary upheaval in an era of counter-revolution.””

It’s nice that you all think so but it’s had the opposite effect. As with 9/11, it’s major effect was the condemnable and murderous response that followed that triggered support for the cause. Perhaps that was the idea. It’s a risky needle to thread.

““Our past demands have become meaningless. No one speaks of Jerusalem or the right-of-return. We just want food security and open crossings.” Al Aqsa flood attacked that despair. The coalition of resistance fighters led by Hamas and PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) refused to accept defeat and submit to the indignity of slow death. Their action was designed so that the revolutionary subject would appear as its effect.”

Lovely citation but getting repetitive. She’s highly enamored of the Badieu reference, of the action eliciting the actors.

“Butler treats Hamas as singularly responsible for October 7, ignoring the fact that the armed forces of multiple Palestinian groups participated in the action, thereby signaling a support for the action extending far beyond the military arm of the party that was democratically elected to govern Gaza.”

Ah, Ms. Dean, you weaken your argument here. While technically true, it’s meaningless, as there haven’t been elections in a generation.

“What we encounter is not depoliticization, it is defeat. Politics continues, but in a form structured by this defeat. Unable to constitute ourselves as a coherent side in the struggle against imperialism, we have trouble taking a side, failing to see or ask which side are we on? Even recognizing sides is dismissed as binary thinking or a childish inability to accept complexity and ambiguity.”

“Which side are you on? Liberation or Zionism and imperialism? There are two sides and no alternative, no negotiation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed. Oppression isn’t managed via enervating concessions to the norms of permitted speech; it’s overturned. The illusion of a middle and a multitude withers away as the division constitutive of the political appears in all its stark brutality.”

You could express regret, I suppose. Like, it’s regrettable that that woman killed her husband but that he’d been beating her for decades. It’s not great that he’s dead, so you regret that it had to end this way. He’d finally made it “him or me”. You’ll suffer for having committed the act but no-one can argue in good faith that is was the wrong decision.

New York City universities step up purge of pro-Palestinian faculty by Daniel de Vries (WSWS)

“[…] recent study shows that of 936 US-based academic scholars on the Middle East, 82 percent said they self-censor when they speak professionally about the Israeli-Palestinian issue, with 81 percent of those holding back criticism of Israel. These threats to academic freedom foster an inability and unwillingness to engage in topics deemed too controversial and too complicated in the classroom.”

“These historic crimes are shattering the legitimacy of the Zionist project and its sponsors in Washington and Europe. The entire political establishment in the US is implicated and deeply hated. But six months of genocide and protests against it has shown that no amount of pleading with the ruling class will alter its course. The attacks on democratic rights on the campuses are an initial indication of the dictatorial methods that will be implemented to achieve the war aims of US imperialism, regardless of popular sentiment.”

’What if we had a nuclear war?’ by Annie Jacobsen (New Scientist)

“Not long after the last world war, the historian William L. Shirer had this to say about the next world war. It “will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquers and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.””

““Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” UN secretary-general António Guterres warned the world in 2022. “This is madness. We must reverse course.””

Gute Opfer, schlechte Opfer by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Für die fünf Millionen Toten des Bürgerkriegs im Kongo gab es im Bundestag keine Schweigeminute und sie schafften es auch in kein nennenswertes Talkformat. Aber warum sollte man auch um Kongolesen trauen? Der Kongo ist weit weg und hätte Gott gewollt, dass dort Frieden herrscht, hätte er doch die wertvollen Bodenschätze, die wir für unsere Smartphones und Computer brauchen, woanders verteilt. Drei Millionen Vertriebene im Sudan? Der Krieg im Jemen? Abgeschlachtete Palästinenser und Kurden? Uninteressant. Aber wehe eine russische Bombe trifft ein ukrainisches Plumpsklo oder ein Israeli wird Opfer des Krieges, den sein eigenes Land auf grausame Art und Weise eskaliert.”

The O.J. Simpson trial: Some ugly truths by Martin McLaughlin and David North on October 9, 1995 (WSWS)

“Nevertheless, the claims of frame-up confuse routine sloppiness, lies and arrogance with a genuine conspiracy to manufacture a case. In the Simpson case, with the notoriety it quickly received, this would have required the rapid and high-level coordination of literally hundreds of police officers and technicians, for no discernible political motive.”

But this is a ridiculous argument. It belies the casual framing that occurs all the time. Was this unknown 30 years ago? I doubt it. The questions are: was the case sloppy? Was the main bearer of evidence a horrible racist? How is this less of a frame-up than every other frame-up of a black man?

“Unlike the Simpson case, here police racism and fabrication of evidence were elements in a full-scale frame-up. But there were no chanting crowds supporting the defendants, no denunciations of the FBI, the police and the prosecution. None of these revelations received significant publicity in the media, or saved the victims, whose conviction was required by the FBI and the State Department.”

This in no way means Simpson was guilty. One case has nothing to do with the other. David North—Editor in Chief of the WSWS—is a constant disappointment. He almost always utterly fails to support his opinions with any evidence.

The Forgotten Legacy of John Sinclair and the White Panther Party by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“An enterprising young jazz poet and political provocateur, John Sinclair emerged from his native Michigan’s underground art scene in the late sixties with an itching desire to join the people of the global third world in smashing the white pig state that he and his pale stoner friends in the jazz scene had grown to despise. Like a lot of other misfits from that era, John was through with being bullied just for being freaky and found impoverished guerrilla agitators of color like Huey Newton, Malcolm X, and Ho Chi Minh to be a hell of a lot more inspiring than anything the honky dinosaurs of the Old Left could conjure.”

“So, why then should you give a fuck about a bunch of musty old hippies with guns? For the same reason that I do, because the Second American Revolution is unfinished history. Everything that forgotten outlaws like John Sinclair fought for back in 1968 is more valid now than ever before. The war machine continues to rampage across the globe, performing My Lai Massacres by proxy from Bakhmut to Khan Younis, white supremacy remains a thriving multibillion dollar enterprise with the prison industrial complex devouring Black and brown bodies like a Ku Klux Cthulhu with bipartisan support, and it is the youth, the young people of Babylon, who continue to feel the pain of the third world even from a place of relative privilege.”

Roaming Charges: How to Kill a Wolf in Society by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

Columbia University is witnessing a student uprising, with students camped out in a quad, protesting the genocide of the Palestinians. So, of course, the president of the university was dragged before Congress for antisemitism.

“From Wednesday’s House interrogation of Columbia University’s President, Minouche Shafik…”

“Are you familiar with Genesis 12:3?” Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.) asked Shafik. “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham … If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you … Do you consider that a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?

““Definitely not,” Shafik said.”

The president is, once again, a woman. She has a suitably ethnic name. The woke boxes are checked. The woke are silenced. She was born in Egypt, though. Instead of asking what the hell this lunatic from Georgia is talking about, she says “definitely not.” Why does no-one stand up to these elitist idiots?

Ah, because, according to her bio (Wikipedia),

“She previously served as president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023. She also serves on the board of directors of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Previously, Shafik served as deputy governor of the Bank of England from 2014 to 2017 and permanent secretary of the United Kingdom Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011. She has also served as a vice president at the World Bank and as deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund.”

According to St. Clair, she also “enjoys a life peerage in the House of Lords.” The poor thing. She is an elitist idiot. She’s served every neoliberal entity that there is. All top-notch. The elitists are silenced.

“Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says that if the government locks up 15% of the population, there will be no crime: “Only about 15% of all Americans commit 100% of the crime … If you lock up the 15%, we don’t have any crime.” In other words, he wants to lock up nearly 50 million people. Patrick calls himself a “libertarian.””

If those 15% are all of the criminals, why not kill them outright and free up all of the people who would have wasted their time guarding these incorrigible masses? Is the theory that if you eliminate all of those, you’ve also eliminated all crime? That is, that crime was intrinsic to those who have either already committed them or whom you deem might at some point commit them, so we can eliminate the problem that way? Context has nothing to do with crime? I’m curious, because the lieutenant governor of Texas seems like a scholar, so he might be onto something.

“Jonathan Stone, county chair of the Trump campaign, in New Hampshire is a former cop who threatened to kill his colleagues in a shooting spree, murder the chief of police and rape the chief’s wife because he was suspended by the department 5 days after it was revealed he had been having a relationship with a 15-year-old high school girl. The incident occurred in 2006 but was just made public last week, after a court case brought by a local paper. After Stone was fired from the department, he opened a gun store and later gave Trump an inscribed AK-47. He now serves as a New Hampshire State representative.”

Cops in America are like Israelis: hear me out. There is literally nothing they can do that would make them be shunned from society. Raping 15-year-old girls—you can’t have a relationship with someone who’d not legally allowed to give consent—threatening rape, threatening murder, threatening a shooting spree. All not enough to be ostracized. Cops enjoy the benefits of society that we wish were extended to all members of society: unions, pensions, and an endless faith in their ability to be rehabilitated. That these are luxuries extended only to the enforcers that prevent everyone else from having them shows the deep perversion in American thinking and culture.

“The story the Chicago cops told was that they pulled Dexter Reed over in Humbolt Park on March 21 for not wearing his seat belt, then in the next 41 seconds shot at him 96 times. But a video released this week shows that the police officers couldn’t have seen into Reed’s car, given their location and the GMC Terrain’s darkly tinted windows. Three of the four officers emptied their guns and reloaded and continued firing at Reed as he staggered out of the car, unarmed. One officer fired “at least 50 times.” Reed was shot three times while he was on the ground.”

None of these guys will go a day without pay. They will get therapy if they want it, they will get extended paid leave. They will not lose their jobs. They will not lose their pensions. They will not go to prison. They will not be barred from working in law enforcement. They will not be shunned by their societies. They will be rewarded for murder. Either our society condones the murder of innocent civilians for their skin color, or we have an unshakeable faith that police officers—even if they intended their murderous rampages—can stop doing them without any punishment at all.

“Mike Davis: “Anybody who knows American history knows at least 30% of America has been protofascist forever. and it’s a huge mistake not to understand how deeply reactionary so much of the petty bourgeoisie and middle strata in so many parts of the country is.””

Well, that would explain the love of police.

Let’s Go Crazy by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The executive of the committee of Columbia University Senate—the body that the President is required to consult under Section 444—did “not approve the presence of NYPD on our campus at this time.” Shafik “consulted” but did not receive their approval. Then she called in the NYPD riot squad.”

“Chief John Chell: “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.””

“Moira Donegan: “The arrested students were charged with ‘trespassing’ on the campus that they are charged more than $60,000 a year to attend.””

“Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute: “Columbia University’s decision to use police force to disperse a nonviolent student protest and encampment raises serious concerns about the University’s respect for human rights and its commitment to free expression.””

“This week Itamar Ben Gvir called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners to ease overcrowding in Israeli jails.”

Finkelstein: Israel Is Prepared to Drag the Rest of the World Down with Them by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

Etiquette for College Students by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)

Etiquette for College Students

“How to Ignore the Misery of Those Being Crushed by the Powerbrokers Who Give Money to Your School and who Might Want to Hire You after Graduation.”

Michael Parenti “Poor Countries are not ‘under-developed’, they are over-exploited.” (Reddit)

In Gaza The Sniper Drones Are Crying Like Babies by Caitlin Johnstone

“It is really astonishing, how cruel people can be. How cruel a whole nation of people can be made to be, if they’re indoctrinated just right. You spend your whole childhood being indoctrinated into the belief that one group of people are inferior to your own and don’t deserve the same rights and treatment your group receives, and before you know it you’re blockading aid trucks from bringing that group food, and playing recordings of crying babies on an assassination drone in order to murder civilians at a refugee camp.”

Within that world, though, this is an exceedingly clever trick. It’s like when you see how hunters trick their prey. If you’re not a hunter and you think endangered species should be preserved, then their techniques look like madness. If you don’t give a shit about killing animals and you think the endangered species act is a liberal plot, then you’re going to chuckle to yourself as you fool a bald eagle into walking right into your enfilade.

The Israelis are out hunting and the drone that cries like a baby is like a duck call.

Why They’re Calling Student Protesters Antisemites by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“The result has been a wave of repression on campuses, with universities calling local police to arrest and detain their own students and faculty, many of them Jewish, for the crime of physically being on their own schools’ campuses, ending in-person classes, and barring them from physically returning, to the point of even erecting plywood barricades.”

“Keeping in mind this small sampling of the death and destruction going on in Gaza right now, any reasonable person might ask: How on Earth is it possible that anyone could be most concerned about some students sitting around in makeshift camps and occasionally saying some impolite or stupid things in US colleges?”

“[…] their only recourse is to simply gin up a controversy to draw the media and politicians’ attention away from what has been widely declared a genocide in Gaza, while simultaneously making themselves, the supporters of this crime, out to be the real victims.”

In fairness to them, (A) it’s worked every other time they’ve done it and (B) they have a full-blown persecution complex that lends credibility to their complaints.

Extended episode: Professor Exposes Campus Free Speech Crackdown (YouTube)

As’ad AbuKhalil, Lebanse-American Professor of Political Science at California State University Stanislaus gives a fantastic interview.

““In this country that prides itself on being the freest country in the world, members of Congress are summoning presidents of universities and holding them to account about which views are allowed on college campuses. They’re taking pride that they are clamping down on the freedom of speech of students of the United States. That is very significant. That is western democracy at work.”

At 1:07:00,

“Let us see them [as they are] I mean they are now—the West basically—they are speaking as if they are not in polite company. That’s how they speak; that’s how they think. Let the world see them. They are fundamentally racist. They are bigoted. And they really do not mind the genocide of a population if the people there are of color and they are of [a] different religion. (Because most of them don’t know that some Palestinians are Christian.) And that explains a lot of what’s happening. I mean, the West’s approach to the Middle East has always been motivated by race, by religion, and by imperial interests, as well. And, all that culminates in what is happening in Gaza with the genocide.”

Aaron Maté : War and Congressional Democrats by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

No, Mr. Netanyahu, It’s Not Anti-Semitic to Criticize the Israeli Government’s War by Bernie Sanders (CounterPunch)

“Mr. Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people. But, please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you are facing in the Israeli courts. It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your policies.”

The Accused is a Tramp: How the Slut-Shaming of Brenda Andrew Put Her on Death Row by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Brenda Andrew doesn’t fit the modern profile of a death row inmate. The case against her is as old as the country itself, as old as the Salem Witch Trials. Andrew didn’t need to be put to death because she committed murder. She needed to be executed because her sexual allure was so intoxicating that she could seduce others to commit murder for her.”

“But Brenda’s husband had been murdered and Brenda’s boyfriend had killed him. Brenda had to pay. Not just for the murder of Rob Andrew, but for the mesmerizing power she exerted over James Pavatt. Brenda’s erotic magnetism had corrupted a good man, a Sunday school teacher. She’d seduced him into committing murder. And that kind of dangerous force not only needed to be punished, it needed to be extinguished.”

“The sociologist David Baker studied 42 cases of women given the death sentence by American courts between 1632 and 2014 and found that the women’s sexual affairs were used as evidence against each of them.”

Russia stands alone in vetoing UN resolution on nuclear weapons in space by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)

Look at that headline. Russia prevents banning nuclear weapons in space. I wonder why?

Let’s read the article. The first three paragraphs describes the vote, with China abstaining. The rule would have renewed a 50-year-old committment to ban weapons of mass destruction in orbit.

Why would Russia veto that? Why would China abstain? Is it possible that the U.S. and the other NATO nations are actually on the right side of things here?

The next ten paragraphs describe U.S. allegations against the Russians about wanting to put a nuke in space. This is almost certainly not true in any way whatsoever. I’m just going by the U.S. track record.

Did the reporter ask China why they abstained? Of course not. They asked the famously sinophobic US ambassador to the UN.

“With its abstention from the vote, “China has shown that it would rather defend Russia as its junior partner, than safeguard the global nonproliferation regime,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN.”

How about the Russians? Do we get to hear from them?

The third-to-last paragraph holds the clue:

“Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, called this week’s UN resolution “an unscrupulous play of the United States” and a “cynical forgery and deception.” Russia and China proposed an amendment to the resolution that would have banned all weapons in space. This amendment got the support of about half of the Security Council but did not pass.”

They voted against it because it wasn’t strongly worded enough. They wanted to ban all weapons from space, not just weapons of mass destruction.

The final paragraph is left to Japan’s ambassador to the U.N., representing a country that the U.S.‘s arm so firmly up its ass that it chirpily puppets whatever the U.S. needs it to say.

Biden’s campus crackdown—the Democratic Party bares its fangs, again by Tom Mackaman (WSWS)

“Had these scenes taken place in, say, Iran, there would be wall-to-wall coverage in the American media and demands for “humanitarian intervention” to protect the protesters. But this is America. So the media and the politicians denounce the students peacefully protesting against mass murder as “antisemites.” The crude, transparent amalgam is that opposition to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is antisemitism.

“The propaganda and the police crackdown are organized from the Oval Office. Asked about the demonstrations at a press conference Monday, April 22, Biden said, “I condemn the antisemitic protests.” A day earlier Biden issued a press release stating that “Antisemitism is reprehensible and has no place on college campuses,” announcing the creation of a new police bureaucracy to monitor the campuses called by the Orwellian name “the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” and promising to put “the full force of the federal government behind protecting the Jewish community.””

“It is therefore a matter of pressing urgency for youth protesting the genocide to draw the necessary political conclusions and break once and for all with the Democratic Party, and those political forces grouped around it. They must consciously turn to the revolutionary force that has both the means and the motivation to end war and the capitalist system that breeds it: the American and international working class.”

Journalism & Media

Israel Is Turning Hospitals Into Mass Graves While The West Fixates On ‘Antisemitism’ by Caitlin Johnstone

“Getting far less attention than the fact that some Zionist university students are feeling uncomfortable feelings because other students say Palestinians are human beings […]”

Careful there, Caitlin. Don’t let yourself get so carried away that you become what you despise. Jewish students have every right to feel safe at their universities. You can’t just call anyone who claims they feel uncomfortable a “zionist”. This is denying the very obvious and real antisemitism that some will so happily throw themselves into. Students aren’t the most rational of people, so they’re much more likely to magnify something like your silly statement in their own minds and start trying to take revenge against any Jew they can find. You can’t just pretend that this doesn’t exist. No-one deserves any of this, not most people anyway. People should really be careful not to get so unbalanced that they end up in a stupid silo. There are plenty of Jewish people who feel unsafe who are perfectly sympathetic to a humanist cause. They will come under the wheels of the machine just as would anyone else acknowledging the humanity of a Palestinian.

“If you belong to a group that isn’t supported by the western empire, you can see your entire family murdered right in front of you and the western political-media class still won’t consider you a victim. If you belong to a group that the empire regards as human, then even someone offending your feelings will be viewed as an unforgivable hate crime.”

That’s a separate matter. And it’s true.

America’s “Adults in the Room” Are Revolting by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The crux of their argument […] is that a parent’s responsibility for safety outweighs whatever children think their rights are. To wit:”

“Getting a FISA court order is bureaucratically cumbersome and would slow down investigations — especially fast-moving cybercases, in which queries have proved especially useful. It would cause agents to miss important connections to national security threats. And because this information has already been lawfully collected and stored, its use in investigation doesn’t require a warrant under the Constitution.”

“It’s an impressively insulting argument. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 did indeed give government power to collect and store communications. At the time, the ACLU and others argued doing so without a pretense of individual probable cause was unconstitutional, insane even, but Congress disagreed. Fifteen years later, we’re at the stage of post-9/11 history where the chief battles about rights have already been lost, which is the point Waxman and Klein are making. We’ve already got your communications, so it can’t be a 4th Amendment violation against “unreasonable searches and seizures” for us to peek at them, can it? Now go back to bed.”

“While Russell Brand, RFK, Jimmy Dore, Dave Chappelle and countless others are pilloried as right-wing grifters, we’re defining as “adults in the room” everyone from Cheney to Michael Hayden to Bill Kristol to David Frum. The latter ten years ago invoked outrage from self-styled progressives everywhere with his amazing Orwellian defense of FISA, writing, “Government transparency can be the enemy of liberty”.”

Labor

Roaming Charges: How to Kill a Wolf in Society by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Scranton Joe Biden, the blue-collar Prez, just handed anti-union Samsung $6.4 billion in federal subsidies to build a chip plant in anti-union Texas.”

Economy & Finance

The Market Is Rigged to Give All the Money to the Rich: the Case of Covid Boosters by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“It is much more acceptable in policy circles to talk about ways to make tax and transfer policy more progressive than ways to structure the market to prevent the distribution of income from being so unequal in the first place. I always harp on this failure , since it seems much easier to keep rich people from getting so rich in the first place than to try to tax away their money once they have it.”

“The proponents of these government-granted monopolies always argue that they provide incentives to innovate and do creative work. That is true, but also not the issue. The question is whether these monopolies are the best way to provide incentives. They are not the only way.”

“There is no intrinsic reason that later stage development and testing cannot also be supported by public funding, instead of government-granted patent monopolies, as was the case with the Moderna vaccine.”

“Corbevax also has the benefit of not being an mRNA vaccine. Instead, it uses a much older protein-based technology. Many of the people that still have not gotten a Covid vaccine are distrustful of mRNA technology. Whether or not these fears are well-grounded, they are keeping people from getting a vaccine which could protect them against Covid. At least some of these people may take advantage of the opportunity to get a vaccine that is not based on mRNA technology.”

“Corbevax was developed on an open-source model. This means that the process for producing the vaccine, as well as the data on safety and effectiveness, is entirely open and available to anyone. That means anyone in the world with the necessary manufacturing facilities can produce the vaccine. As a result, the vaccine is cheap, selling for around $2.50 a dose in India and Indonesia.”

“[…] the biggest issue here is the prevention of a serious test of alternatives to the patent monopoly system of financing drug and vaccine development. We pursue this route for developing drugs and vaccines because the pharmaceutical industry works hard to stifle any consideration of alternatives. This is a huge issue not only for public health but also as an economic matter.”

It’s criminally immoral to put profits before people.

“Drugs are expensive because we give drug companies monopolies over an item that is essential for people’s health, or even their life. To take a couple of recent examples, the retail price for Imatinib, a leukemia drug, is over $2,500 per prescription. The generic version sells for $13.40, less than one percent of the patent-protected price.”

“We will spend close to $650 billion this year on prescription drugs. We would likely be paying less than $100 billion if these drugs were sold in a free market without patent monopolies or related protections. The difference of more than $500 billion a year comes to almost $4,000 a year for an average family. It is more than half the size of the military budget. It is real money by almost any standard.”

“This redistribution of income from the rest of us to a relatively small clique of people in the pharmaceutical industry has nothing to do with the free market. It is the result of a government policy on granting monopolies and related protections.”

Roaming Charges: How to Kill a Wolf in Society by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“According to Forbes’ annual richest scumbag rankings, “the U.S. is now home to a record 813 billionaires worth a combined $5.7 trillion. China remains second, with 473 billionaires worth $1.7 trillion. India, which has 200 billionaires, ranks third.”

A New Elitist Craze: Fixing the Public’s “Perception of the Economy” by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Noting that 74% of respondents in a recent poll said they felt inflation in the “past year” was going in the wrong direction, author Greg Ip noted flatly “it’s not true,” adding:”

“I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year.”

“Ip might be technically right about the last year of inflation […]”

It’s nice to see people treating a number like “inflation” as so ironclad that there can be no doubt about it. They carefully construct different versions of “inflation” without certain costs—health care, food, gas, housing—and then tell people that it’s nothing to worry about. Prices are still rising, but not as quickly as before, so everything is fine. Just because your salary hasn’t budged in 10 years doesn’t mean that there’s anything to complain about. It’s maddening.

“People aren’t stupid. They’ll read that Pfizer pulled in $58 billion in profits last year […] When they go to an airport on Thanksgiving, they hear an airline rep telling them it now costs $30 for a carry-on. Do they know all the relevant history, that in the 2010s executives at the big four airlines gorged themselves on $43.7 billion in buybacks before demanding and getting, a $50 billion Covid bailout, which in turn resulted in more buybacks, mass layoffs, and even crappier, more dangerous service? No, but they have a good idea they got screwed somewhere […]

“A lot of “pessimistic” voters struggle to pass credit checks just to rent an apartment, but see at the same time that a big bank in America can buy the world’s most toxic subprime company (as Bank of America did with Countrywide) or promote murder and mayhem by evading money-laundering (as HSBC did by serving drug cartels), and they not only get away with it, but get rewarded with fifteen years of low-to-zero interest rate monetary policies. […]”

“[…] when people have no chance at all, and money is transferred by the trillion straight from the Fed to accounts of the idiot rich while hardworking people are asked to pay for it in taxes and inflation, they tend to get pissed off, and it takes them much more than a year to get over it.

“The basics — school, medicine, doctor visits, a home, retirement — have become less and less attainable, while politicians keep waving through giant handouts for the scummiest layers of American society, the leveraged buyout artists and force-placed insurance carriers and pharmaceutical swindlers, the very people making the obstacles higher. These people also happen to be the largest sponsors of both politicians and media organizations.

“These things don’t inspire “pessimism,” but rage. How does anyone justify caricaturing people as dummies for feeling it?”

Science & Nature

The strange and turbulent global world of ant geopolitics by John Whitfield (Aeon)

“Global ant societies are not simply echoes of human struggles for power. They are something new in the world, existing at a scale we can measure but struggle to grasp: there are roughly 200,000 times more ants on our planet than the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.”

That’s an oddly unhelpful way of putting it.

“What is surprising is how poorly we still understand global ant societies: there is a science-fiction epic going on under our feet, an alien geopolitics being negotiated by the 20 quadrillion ants living on Earth today.”

That’s 2.5 million ants per person.

“Social insects – ants, wasps, bees and termites – rely on chemical badges of identity. In ants, this badge is a blend of waxy compounds that coat the body, keeping the exoskeleton watertight and clean. The chemicals in this waxy blend, and their relative strengths, are genetically determined and variable. This means that a newborn ant can quickly learn to distinguish between nest mates and outsiders as it becomes sensitive to its colony’s unique scent. Insects carrying the right scent are fed, groomed and defended; those with the wrong one are rejected or fought.”

“Spared the cost of fighting one another, these ants can live in denser populations, spreading across the land as a plant might, and turning their energies to capturing food and competing with other species. Chemical badges keep unicolonial ant societies together, but also allow those societies to rapidly expand.”

“Unicolonial ants are superb and unfussy scavengers that can hunt animal prey, eat fruit or nectar, and tend insects such as aphids for the sugary honeydew they excrete. They are also adapted to living in regularly disrupted environments, such as river deltas prone to flooding (the ants either get above the waterline, by climbing a tree, for example, or gather into living rafts and float until it subsides).”

“All five of the ants included in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) list of 100 of the world’s worst invasive alien species are unicolonial.”

“In California, the tiny Argentine ant (typically under 3 mm long) has replaced the larger native species that once formed the diet of horned lizards, leaving the reptiles starving – it seems they do not recognise the much smaller invader as food.”

“In the past 150 years, the Argentine ant has spread to pretty much everywhere that has hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. A single supercolony, possibly descended from as few as half a dozen queens, now stretches along 6,000 kilometres of coastline in southern Europe. Another runs most of the length of California.”

“There is another way to be a globalised society – one that is utterly unlike our own. I am not even sure we have the language to convey, for example, a colony’s ability to take bits of information from thousands of tiny brains and turn it into a distributed, constantly updated picture of their world. Even ‘smell’ seems a feeble word to describe the ability of ants’ antennae to read chemicals on the air and on each other.”

Odours have a complex topography, and it’s been mapped by AI by Jason Castro (Aeon Magazine)

“An early and influential classification scheme for odours by the famed botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, in 1756, included seven types: aromatic, fragrant, ambrosial (musky), alliaceous (garlic), hircine (goaty), repulsive, and nauseous. A contemporary of Linnaeus’s, Albrecht von Haller, was a bit stingier with his adjectives, and proposed a more austere scheme of three basic odour types: sweet/ambrosiac, stench, and intermediate. One senses that ‘intermediate’ is doing a lot of work here, but perhaps Haller adopted the idea out of a conviction that all odours could be squeezed onto a line, and organised along a single axis.”

“[…] distances computed on the map correlate strongly with what has been termed ‘metabolic distance’ – roughly, how reachable one chemical is from another through common metabolic pathways. If nature can easily move from chemical A to chemical B through a small number of fermentation reactions, say, chances are your nose will find A and B to smell alike, even if they lack obvious structural similarities.”

“A mathematician, following up, would say that what is learned is the abstract, high-dimensional manifold that tracks the world’s chemical relationships – its partitioning into the branches, cycles and pathways that shuttle around the world’s carbon. To smell something is to locate it on this manifold, to understand the neighbourhood it lives in.”

Roaming Charges: How to Kill a Wolf in Society by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“It was an angular, trembling, gravely injured wolf pup with a light gray coat–a wolf that could barely move. The wolf was now muzzled and had two collars strapped around its neck, a tracking collar and a shock collar. Roberts pulled the wolf around on a leash, showing off his mangled catch to the 30 or so patrons in the Green River Bar, many of them apparently his relatives. After a couple of hours of drinking and boasting, Roberts dragged the wolf out of this venerable establishment and shot it. Shot it dead.”

“This was the line that must not be crossed. This was the act that must be punished. So Roberts was given a citation for the offense of illegally possessing warm-blooded wildlife. He was fined all of $250, a penalty Roberts gladly paid. One local told WyoFile that Roberts has “been going around town telling people it was worth it. $250? That’s a round for the bar.” It’s the price of fame…or infamy. The two are pretty much inseparable in American society these days.”

Recoding Voyager 1—NASA’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)

“Through their investigation, Voyager’s ground team discovered a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware. This affected some of the computer’s software code.

““That took out a section of memory,” Spilker said. “What they have to do is relocate that code into a different portion of the memory, and then make sure that anything that uses those codes, those subroutines, know to go to the new location of memory, for access and to run it.”

“Only about 3 percent of the FDS memory was corrupted by the bad chip, so engineers needed to transplant that code into another part of the memory bank. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety, NASA said.

“So the Voyager team divided the code into sections for storage in different places in the FDS. This wasn’t just a copy-and-paste job. Engineers needed to modify some of the code to make sure it will all work together. “Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well,” NASA said in a statement.”

True Facts: Bees That Can Do Math! by Ze Frank (YouTube)

One of his best and most informative videos yet. No notes.

Medicine & Disease

Q&A: Dissecting Paxlovid’s “Lifesaving” Claims by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Matt also seized on the constant references to Paxlovid in news coverage as a “lifesaving” medication. As you’ll hear, there’s not a lot of convincing evidence the drug does anything at all, much less proof that it saves lives. He notes a more cautious review by the Cochrane group found the drug “may” be associated with reduced death, but the conclusion is based on “low certainty” evidence.”

“I’m not sure Paxlovid will help with anything at all. During the pandemic, Pfizer oversaw and produced a study that they say showed a 1.3% survival benefit in unvaccinated people who had never had Covid. It was a big study. It was like 2,200 patients or something. So, you can’t write it off as a margin of error. But there are some questionable things about this study. They said it reduced hospitalizations, for example, and everybody else says that Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations. And then you look at the study and they’re very specific that it reduced hospitalizations “ felt” to be caused by Covid. So how did they decide that? What is that?”

“In any case, they produced this one study, handed it to the US government like an invoice, and were paid $18 billion. $18 billion, so that we would all be provided with it for free. It’s more money than we’ve ever paid for a pill. In all of recorded human history, no pill medicine has ever made that kind of money.”

“[…] they did this with Tamiflu. They held back most of the information. With Paxlovid, the New York Times, the the CDC, they all want to call it a lifesaving drug. They’ve got one study they keep pointing to, a randomized trial that claims to show that. But we don’t have one study, we have 18 studies out there, and 17 of them have either come back negative or not been reported or just gone silent or dormant.”

“[…] you do 20 studies at minimum. They haven’t even done that, they’ve done 18, and most of them are garbage or are not producing anything or have gone silent. They got the one that showed something, and that’s the one we know about. I don’t even know what they’ve done internally.”

“He was worried early, saying, “assume it’s on every door handle and on every car door, and with every handshake,” but we didn’t get answers. They didn’t figure that out for 18 months. They could have organized a study at NIH and figured that out in two weeks.”

Art & Literature

On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China by Yan Lianke (The Paris Review)

“This is the situation in contemporary China. The economic window is open and the political window is closed, and culture wanders in the intermediate zone between the two. Contemporary literature approaches the flourishing economy as though hugging a fireball and approaches the ubiquitous politics of contemporary reality as though embracing an enormous chunk of ice.”

“[…] if an old man collapses in the street, it is only natural that bystanders will help him, but when the old man responds by accusing the bystanders of having knocked him down and demands compensation from them, this becomes a special kind of incident—a legal case. Given that the frequency of these sorts of incidents has recently increased, we cannot help but suspect that these apparent victims must hold darkness in their hearts. Accordingly, now if someone collapses or is hit by a car, passersby will often hurry away as though they haven’t seen anything, and although we may find this situation unreasonable, at least we can understand it. This illustrates how, in contemporary China, people’s souls have become numb and dark.”

“What is bred under the open window of the economy is capital, desire, and evil, and what is bred under the closed window of politics is corruption, greed, and contempt for others. People’s hearts become deformed, distorted, and absurd. If an author wants to realistically describe people’s deepest souls, this is his God-given responsibility, and if the author gives this up, he will no longer have any need to exist.”

“[…] the darkness of another person’s heart cannot be discussed because such a conversation might touch on the underlying reason why their heart is dark in the first place.”

“They know that behind that window there lies the greatest truth, but because they have borrowed light, they resemble someone who—after using someone else’s tools or eating someone else’s food—naturally won’t excavate the foundations of that other person’s house.”

“China’s authors are as familiar with the nation’s censorship system as a frequently beaten child knows the rules of his father’s anger […]”

“They understand what can and can’t be written, what can be addressed in a vague fashion (like the Cultural Revolution) and what definitely cannot be mentioned at all (like June Fourth). However, what really leaves authors at a loss is the censorship operators: the individuals who implement specific cultural provisions on behalf of the Party.”

This is a big drawback to culture. The U.S. does not censor like this. It finds other ways to make unwanted thoughts vanish. But it doesn’t stamp them out entirely. It just make no-one care. But you can still publish. Kind of. It’s complicated. The end result is kind-of the same, though.

“[…] publishing organizations have become censorship operators on the principle that “all citizens are soldiers.” After a manuscript arrives, the first thing editors consider is not the work’s artistic or market value but whether it is sensitive and whether the author has attracted the attention of the higher-ups. In this way, editors become the book’s first censors.”

“[…] this sort of operation ultimately succeeds in encouraging a process of self-censorship on the part of the authors themselves. If censorship operation is a kind of power and oppression, then authors’ self-censorship is simultaneously conscious, unwitting, and reflexive.”

The child of an abusive father who has learned what not to say.

“The greatest advantage of the Chinese Writers’ Association is that it ensures that many talented authors won’t have to worry about basic living requirements and other practical considerations and instead can devote themselves to their writing. Instead of a salon system, writers’ associations use organizational and activity methods to discuss, pursue, and expand literature. However, because the basic objective of the professional author system is not artistic freedom and advancement but rather the management, regulation, and control of authors’ writing, thought, and imagination, the potential advantages of the professional author system are mostly lost.”

“Through a process of assimilation, cultivation, and transformation, authors first become “a member of the team,” then they gradually accept an assessment of literary value that is lacking in independent personality, and finally the system achieves its objective of preventing them from producing works that possess independence, freedom, and thought.”

Same in the U.S. if we’re being honest. The mechanism differs but the result is the same.

“One of the greatest disadvantages of the professional author system is that it makes writers lazy and inclined to lose their creativity. Professional authors under this system receive the same compensation whether or not they actually work, and they achieve the same outcome whether or not they actually create anything. It has been thirty years since the beginning of the reform and opening-up campaign, and the market economy is now society’s most powerful force. However, professional authors can go for years without writing anything yet still draw a monthly salary from the Ministry of Treasury and Finance.”

Why write when you’re not allowed to say anything you care about? What’s the incentive?

“The professional author system does not reject freedom of expression, but neither does it actively promote authorial independence. This system allows you to be a writer who is not a Party author, but it does not permit you to produce writings that are neither what the government calls “main melody” nor “positive energy” works.”

Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made. by Constance Grady (Vox)

“Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.”

“[…] you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase. Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click […]”

“[…] as though putting in the labor of writing is a sucker’s game; as though caring whether or not what you’re reading is nonsense is only for elitists. The future is now, and it is filled with trash books that no one bothered to really write and that certainly no one wants to read.”

“These days, the trash ebook publishing landscape is fully saturated with grifters. There are blogs that talk about the industry, but they tend to be clickbait sites riddled with SEO keywords and affiliate links back and forth between each other. Virtually every single part of the self-publishing grift world that can be automated or monetized has been automated and monetized.”

“For the self-publishing grift, good reviews are crucial. The more five-star reviews a book has, the more likely Amazon’s algorithm is to push it toward readers. If you’re mostly publishing trash books, you’re not going to get tons of five-star reviews organically. Big Luca’s Facebook group gave grifters a place to offer to swap five-star reviews or sell five-star reviews for $0.99 a pop. As far as Amazon’s algorithm was concerned, there was no difference between that kind of review and the one a real reader might leave. The results were extremely lucrative.”

“[…] once AI is finished with your outline, you can send it over to a ghostwriter to turn into a book for a mere $500. For a 30,000-word book, that works out to a fee of $0.016667 per word.”

“[…] hire audiobook narrators for a flat $20 fee by haggling their prices down. They’ll introduce you to a network of people who are generous with their five-star ratings and will push your book up the algorithmic Amazon rankings for you.”

“With the advent of AI, it’s easier than ever to flood the whole digital ecosystem with trash in pursuit of passive income.”

“The incentive of the modern book-buying economy for readers is to go onto Amazon and lazily click around with a few search terms, and then buy the first book that looks right with the click of a single button. The incentives are, in other words, driving us all straight into a flood of garbage.”

I don’t even know what to say.

The Billiard Ball by Isaac Asimov

“Priss shook his head slowly. ‘The trouble with Ed, I think, was that he was thinking of the kind of zero gravity one gets in a spaceship in free fall, when people float in mid-air. He expected the ball to float in mid-air. However, in a spaceship, zero gravity is not the result of an absence of gravitation, but merely the result of two objects, a ship and a man within the ship, falling at the same rate, responding to gravity in precisely the same way, so that each is motionless with respect to the other.

“‘In the zero-gravity field produced by Ed, there was a flattening of the rubber-sheet Universe, which means an actual loss of mass. Everything in that field, including molecules of air caught within it, and the billiard ball I pushed into it, was completely massless as long as it remained with it. A completely massless object can move in only one way.’ He paused, inviting the question.

“I asked, ‘What motion would that be?’ ‘Motion at the speed of light. Any massless object, such as a neutrino or a photon, must travel at the speed of light as long as it exists. In fact, light moves at that speed only because it is made up of photons.”

“Anti-gravity is not primarily a device to lift spaceships or to revolutionize mechanical movement. Rather, it is the source of an endless supply of free energy, since part of the energy produced can be diverted to maintain the field that keeps that portion of the Universe flat. What Ed Bloom invented, without knowing it, was not just anti-gravity, but the first successful perpetual-motion machine of the first class-one that manufactures energy out of nothing.’”

Roaming Charges: How to Kill a Wolf in Society by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Charles Bukowski: “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved.””

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The illusion of freedom… (Reddit)

Frank Zappa − the illusion of Freedom

Technology

Why the US government’s overreliance on Microsoft is a big problem by Eric Geller (Ars Technica)

“Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the security firm CrowdStrike, points to the Russians’ ability to jump from a testing environment to a production environment. “That should never happen,” he says.”

Isn’t Crowdstrike a Russiagate promulgator? Ah, yes it is: Russian hacking investigations (Wikipedia) writes “CrowdStrike helped investigate the Democratic National Committee cyberattacks and a connection to Russian intelligence services.”

iPadOS 18 could ship with built-in Calculator app, after 14 Calculator-less years by Andrew Cunningham (Ars Technica)

Is that where we are now with innovation?

Assembly in 76 seconds? See how Xiaomi produces cars by Yes This Car (YouTube)

I don’t know if this is real, but I just wanted to remember where I saw this first.

LLMs & AI

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it? by Molly White (Citation Needed)

“[…] there is a yawning gap between “AI tools can be handy for some things” and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that “well, they can sometimes be handy…” doesn’t offer much of a justification.”

“Like so many technologies, blockchains are designed to prioritize a few specific characteristics (coordination among parties who don’t trust one another, censorship-resistance, etc.) at the expense of many others (speed, cost, etc.). And as they became trendy, people often used them for purposes where their characteristics weren’t necessary — or were sometimes even unwanted — and so they got all of the flaws with none of the benefits. The thing with blockchains is that the things they are suited for are not things I personally find to be terribly desirable, such as the massive casinos that have emerged around gambling on token prices, or financial transactions that cannot be reversed.”

“I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.”

“I’ve been trying to take the time to interrogate my own knee-jerk response to a clearly overhyped technology. After spending so much time writing about a niche that’s practically all hype with little practical functionality, it’s all too easy to look at such a frothy mania around a different type of technology and assume it’s all the same.”

“[…] they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.”

“When critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.”

“LLMs are pretty decent at proofreading, and although they sometimes spit out a few false positives, this example from proofreading my most recent recap issue shows where it caught several mistakes (points 1, 2, 4, and 8; point 5 was also a genuine error, but it was within a quote). However, I don’t think I need generative AI to do this, either. There are a lot of proofreading tools that work quite well, and, helpfully, don’t invent errors that weren’t in the original text (as I’ve found the ChatGPT models are particularly wont to do).”

I hadn’t thought of testing that use case.

“[…] those who speak English as a second language have spoken of LLMs’ usefulness in revising their professional communications. Others use it to summarize meeting notes. Some use it as a starting point for documentation.”

“It constantly suggested plausible but completely non-functional code, scaffolded the project in an outdated format, and autogenerated CSS classes that looked like they could be Bootstrap classes, but weren’t. It’s good at short functions and common boilerplate, but it’s not going to architect a project for you, and, as with writing, it’s not going to “think” of novel ideas. I like it for getting annoying, repetitive tasks out of my way; I don’t worry it’s going to take my job.”

“[…] the tendency for people to put too much trust into these tools is among their most serious problems: no amount of warning labels and disclaimers seem to be sufficient to stop people from trying to use them to provide legal advice or sell AI “therapy” services.”

“[…] the idea that we all should be striving to “replace artists” — or any kind of labor — is deeply concerning, and I think incredibly illustrative of the true desires of these companies: to increase corporate profits at any cost.”

“There are some types of writing where LLMs are already being widely used: for example, by businesspeople who use them to generate meeting notes, fluff up their outgoing emails or summarize their incoming ones, or spit out lengthy, largely identical reports that they’re required to write regularly.”

“Any place on the web that incentivizes high-volume, low effort text is being inundated by generated text, like e-book stores, online marketplaces, and practically any review or comment section.”

“But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could’ve been an email. If you’re using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or is it just middle-management busywork?”

“No one wants to open up Etsy to look for a thoughtful birthday gift, only to give up after scrolling through pages of low-quality print-on-demand items or resold Aliexpress items that have flooded the site.”

“LLMs may be new, but the behavior is not; just like keyword stuffing and content farms and the myriad ways people used software to generate reams upon reams of low-quality text before ChatGPT ever came on the scene, if the incentive is there, the behavior will follow. If the internet’s enshittification feels worse post-ChatGPT, it’s because of the quantity and speed at which this junk is being produced, not because the junk is new.”

“Although AI company datacenters are not intentionally wasting electricity in the same way that bitcoin miners perform millions of useless computations, I’m also not sure that generating a picture of a person with twelve fingers on each hand or text that reads as though written by an endlessly smiling children’s television star who’s being held hostage is altogether that much more useful than a bitcoin.”

“There is a huge amount of work that goes into compiling and labeling data to feed into these models, and each new model depends on ever-greater amounts of said data — training data which is well known to be scraped from just about any possible source, regardless of copyright or consent. And some of these workers suffer serious psychological harm as a result of exposure to deeply traumatizing material in the course of sanitizing datasets or training models to perform content moderation tasks.”

“[…] the reality is that you can’t build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that’s kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations. And you certainly can’t justify the kind of exploitation, extraction, and environmental cost that the industry has been mostly getting away with, in part because people have believed their lofty promises of someday changing the world.”

“I would love to live in a world where the technology industry widely valued making incrementally useful tools to improve peoples’ lives, and were honest about what those tools could do, while also carefully weighing the technology’s costs. But that’s not the world we live in. Instead, we need to push back against endless tech manias and overhyped narratives, and oppose the “innovation at any cost” mindset that has infected the tech sector.”

“Some AI boosters will argue that most or all original thought is also merely a mashup of other peoples’ thoughts, which I think is a rather insulting minimization of human ingenuity.”

How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? by Anil Ananthaswamy (Quanta Magazine)

“For all their brilliance, artificial neural networks remain as inscrutable as ever.”

What a stupid sentence. And he’s leading with it.

“As these networks get bigger, their abilities explode, but deciphering their inner workings has always been near impossible. Researchers are constantly looking for any insights they can find into these models.”

Oh my, it gets worse. This article is useless. It might as well have been written by an AI.

Talking Dog > Stochastic Parrot by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse)

“These systems are like a talking dog. It’s amazing that anyone could train a dog to talk, and even more amazing that it can talk so well. But you mustn’t believe anything it says about chiropractics, because it’s just a dog and it doesn’t know anything about medicine, or anatomy, or anything else.”

Macroeconomics of AI? by Mark Liberman (Language Log)

“Using existing estimates on exposure to AI and productivity improvements at the task level, these macroeconomic effects appear nontrivial but modest—no more than a 0.71% increase in total factor productivity over 10 years. The paper then argues that even these estimates could be exaggerated, because early evidence is from easy-to-learn tasks, whereas some of the future effects will come from hard-to-learn tasks, where there are many context-dependent factors affecting decision-making and no objective outcome measures from which to learn successful performance. Consequently, predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years are even more modest and are predicted to be less than 0.55%.”

“[…] there is also no evidence that AI will reduce labor income inequality. AI is also predicted to widen the gap between capital and labor income. Finally, some of the new tasks created by AI may have negative social value (such as design of algorithms for online manipulation), and I discuss how to incorporate the macroeconomic effects of new tasks that may have negative social value.”

“[…] administrative automation may be different, at least in some settings. I predict that applications of “AI” to administrative functions will decrease productivity more than they increase it […]”

Notes on how to use LLMs in your product. by Will Larson (Irrational Exuberance)

“You can estimate accuracy for a model and a given set of prompts using evals – You can use evals – running an LLM against a known set of prompts, recording the responses, and evaluating those responses – to evaluate the likelihood that an LLM will perform well in a given scenario”

That sounds a lot like manual regression-testing, but you’re covering it up by calling it evals.

“Supplementing large general models with specific data is called “fine-tuning” and it’s currently ambiguous when fine-tuning a smaller model will outperform using a larger model.”

“Even the fastest LLMs are not that fast – even a fast LLM might take 10+ seconds to provide a reasonably sized response. If you need to perform multiple iterations to refine the initial response, or to use a larger model, it might take a minute or two to complete. These will get faster, but they aren’t fast today”

“Models have a maximum “token window” of text that they’ll consider in a given prompt. The maximum size of token windows are expanding rapidly, but larger token windows are slower to evaluate and cost more to evaluate, so even the expanding token windows don’t solve the entire problem.”

“An effective approach to RAG depends on a high-quality retrieval and filtering mechanism to work well at a non-trivial scale. For example, with a high-level view of RAG, some folks might think they can replace their search technology (e.g. Elasticsearch) with RAG, but that’s only true if your dataset is very small and you can tolerate much higher response latencies.”

“It’s unclear if today’s limiting factor for model size is availability of Nvidia GPUs, larger datasets to train models upon that are plausibly legal, capital to train new models, or financial models suggesting that the discounted future cashflow from training larger models doesn’t meet a reasonable payback period.”

“For example, at some point nuclear fusion is going to become mainstream and radically change how we think about energy utilization in ways that will truly rewrite the world’s structure, and LLM training costs could be one part of that.”

Fusion saves the day! Just twenty more years. JFC, now LLMs are going to become efficient when we get fusion? And when we get fusion, the first thing we do is power LLMs with it?

“You can make all sorts of good arguments why this perspective isn’t fair to copyright holders whose data was trained on, but long-term I just don’t think any other interpretation is workable.”

No. What we mean is rules are for the poor. Justice and fairness for the rich. Copyright was useful as long as it moved money in the right direction. As soon as it is getting in the way of a new money conveyor, then it will be dispatched, with extreme prejudice.

Programming

Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout by Jen Simmons (Webkit Blog)

“In graphic design, a layout that has uniformly-sized columns and no rows is often called a “symmetrical columnar grid”. For centuries, columnar grids were the dominant type of grid used in page design.”

“However, there are big questions still being asked about how CSS should handle masonry-style layouts. Some people remain skeptical that this capability should be part of CSS Grid, and want it to instead be its own separate display type. Others are questioning whether or not this kind of layout is needed on the web at all — they aren’t sure that well-known websites will use it. With such fundamental disagreements at play, no browser can ship. We must first come to consensus in the CSS Working Group.

“This is where we need your help. We’d like real-world web designers and developers to weigh into the discussion, and express what it is that you want. Your input really can make a difference.”

“[…] we’ll walk through how the CSS Grid Level 3 proposal works, and how you can use its new capabilities. We’ll show you why we believe these features should be part of CSS Grid, and explain what the alternative would be if the CSS Working Group creates display: masonry instead. ”

“Making masonry a simple and separate layout type would avoid the work necessary to keep Grid and Masonry working together in combination — both now and in the long term. Doing this would simplify the layout model, make it easier to implement in browsers, reduce the potential for performance traps, and allow the feature sets of Grid and Masonry to diverge.”

I’m not a fan of this option.

“[…] we believe there’s an advantage to having these two types of grid layouts intertwined. This way the CSS Working Group will always define all new additions for both modular and columnar grids. There won’t be something added to display: grid that will be left out of display: masonry, or vice versa. For example, many developers want CSS Grid Level 4 to provide a mechanism for styling grid areas and grid lines — perhaps a way to add a background color to a track, or create a rule line in a gap. It’d be great to ensure that will work for both modular and columnar grids from Day 1.”

“[…] once you start to write a lot of code using this feature, it’s likely you’ll come to the realization that we did — this really isn’t about the layout used by Pinterest or other similar sites. This is a mechanism for telling the browser, “please create a grid, but without any rows.”

Perhaps the best syntax could be grid-template-rows: none; to convey “please do not give me any rows”. Sadly, it’s too late to use this name, because none is the default value for grid-template-* and means “please give me only implicit rows, no explicit ones”.

“Instead we could use the name off to convey “please turn off the grid in the row direction, and give me only columns”.”

Rendering Math in HTML: MathML, MathML Core, and AsciiMath by Andrew Lock (.NET escapades)

Another standard that has had a hard time landing is MathML. The original standard is XML and is so complicated that almost no browser has made a serious attempt at implementing it.

“The earliest, Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 1, was recommended in 1998, and was even included in Mozilla 1.0!

“[…] the second edition of MathML 3.0 approved as an ISO standard in 2015.”

Another standard MathML Core, which has only about 30 elements, as opposed to the almost 200 in MathML 3.0.

“AsciiMath was originally created as way to more easily write MathML. An early implementation, ASCIIMathML.js, used a similar approach to MathJax: drop the file on your page, and it will scan for any AsciiMath notation and replace it for you.”

The article has a whole bunch of examples, like (-b-sqrt(b^2-4a*c))/(2a) for the quadratic equation, which is easier to read than its MathML equivalent. It reminded me of the equation-formatter that I wrote for SAT questions, way back in 1995. See Formatting Equations for documentation explaining how to use the mini-language I invented for it. It looks a lot like ASCIIMathML, with support for large brackets, stacked fractions, square roots, long division, and nesting of all elements.

For example,

• @[m size ({1 over x}2 size ) @] produces .
• @[m 1 over 2,1 over 3, 1 over 4,…,1 over n @] produces .
• @[m sqrt{{sqrt 16} over {10 over 27~+~x}}@] produces .

See Formatting Equations for more examples.

Don’t Do This With Extension Methods by Adam Storr (Powered by Coffee)

I don’t really agree with most of the reasoning that this developer has about why extension methods are OK or not. But it made me think about the drawbacks that I see to them, i.e., how I think you should work with them.

Please be aware that I spent almost all of my career as a software-developer and -architect as a framework developer. Every time I sat down to explain the difference between the rules for writing framework code and application code, I would usually come up with: nothing. There is no difference.

You can be more lax in code that you’re never going to maintain—i.e., proof-of-concept code or one-off scripting code—but if there’s a chance that you’re going to have to maintain it, then you’re basically writing framework code and you’re going to need to follow the rules for framework code, which, as I’ve noted, are the same rules.

Anyway, on to the rules for static methods.

• Be ruthless about single-responsibility principle.
• Think about your extension method’s dependencies. Which decisions is it making for you?

The example from the article is as follows:

public static class StringExtensions
{
    public static int WordCount(this string str)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(str))
        {
            return 0;
        }

        return str.Split(new char[] { ' ', '.', '?' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries).Length;
    }
}

• The characters are fixed; should the app or framework offer a settings object to configure this?
• How is white-space determined? Same thing. Do you need options?

You may not need options! It’s just that, if you bury this in a framework or app, you’re not going to be able to change the behavior in any way whatsoever unelss you start passing parameters or default parameters.

Comment on “Wrote some shit code and regretting it now.” by vinnymcapplesauce

“The real lesson is: document the shit outta the code and the decisions that went into making it what it is. And document your *plans* for refactoring it later when time and budget permit.

“Version 1 code is always bad. You hardly even know what you’re building with v1, let alone the best way to do it. And most projects never get to v2.

“I have code that I wrote over 15 yrs ago that is still in production, and although I’d feel embarassed for anyone else to see that code, I have tons of documentation in place so anyone following behind me will be like “yeah, this is shit, but I see *why* it’s shit.” lol”

This is very good advice.

Your product comprises more than just source code. There are also design decisions and a backlog.

People are accustomed to thinking of the source code, but not so much the design decisions or backlog. When I write “backlog”, I don’t mean you need a project-tracking tool, but that you’re keeping track of what you still need to do (backlog), and why you made the choices you did (design decisions).

That information can be in a project tracker, a readme file/docs folder, and/or distributed as TODOs and notes in the source code itself.

Show HN: LangCSS – An AI Assistant for Tailwind

One stupid thing to build another stupid thing. God wept.

Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers by KRAZAM (YouTube)

“Your friends and family understand what you do.”

“Your friends and family appreciate your humorous work stories…”

“DevOps is a meaningful term.”

“That joke you told in your meeting was funny! If your coworkers were not on mute, you would’ve heard them laughing.”

At the beginning, it shows that outages were up 1940% from last month.

Microservices by KRAZAM (YouTube)

“We need to pass a time range containing current time, and a time representing the end of the universe.”

“Learned a lot today; love Galactus.”

“Surprise and delight users by displaying their birthday on the settings page. … Timezone? Korean bday vs. others.”

TIL Happy New Year! You Are Now a Year Older in Korea: In the Korean peninsula, every person turns a year older on New Year’s.

I Have Delivered Value… But At What Cost? by KRAZAM (YouTube)

Supressing Rules Using .editorconfig Files (GitHub)

I can’t explain how much this comment thread annoys me. This is how much fun it is discussing things with developers who think they know everything better, but can neither read nor accept that their use case is not a use case.

The developer writes “StyleCop Analyzers has known incompatibilities with such a configuration and as such strongly encourage that it not be done that way.” He goes on to note that, when XML-documentation is disabled, the compiler will not indicate a difference between XML comments and

I only ever want to drive in a straight line, so I should be able to buy a car without a steering wheel.

For anyone who fought their way through the comments to get here, this is my takeaway:

• Just turn on XML-documentation-generation for all of the assemblies where you’re using StyleCop.Analyzers. Ignore the documentation-related inspections in the .editorconfig.

The user is saying: Why can’t I have a car without a steering wheel? I’m just going to drive in a straight line anyway. You’re making me use a steering wheel I’ll never need. I want a free version that does exactly what I want, no matter how unreasonable.

• The information-handoff between Roslyn and analyzers is not reliable enough in some combinations of versions when XML-documentation processing is disabled. You can try it, but it’s not a supported mode.
• It’s not worth the effort to try to handle this more gracefully for the edge cases when the easier solution is to just enable XML-documentation-generation and to ignore the ensuing XML file.

CppCon 2016: Nicholas Ormrod: The strange details of std::string at Facebook by Nicholas Ormrod (YouTube)

Tutorial: Use pattern matching to build type-driven and data-driven algorithms (Learn Microsoft)

Pattern-matching on objects is lovely (been available since C# 7.0). The version you’re using still uses “switch statements”. There’s another level called “switch expressions” (available since C# 9) that you could use if your were returning a value.

C# 9.0: Pattern Matching in Switch Expressions by Thomas Claudius Huber

string favoriteTask = obj switch
{
  Developer dev when dev.YearOfBirth == 1980 => $"{dev.FirstName} listens to metal",
  Developer dev => $"{dev.FirstName} writes code",
  Manager _ => "Create meetings",
  _ => "Do what objects do",
};

Speaking of syntactic sugar, you can check out what the compiler generates with this web site:
SharpLab.IO.

Throw in any compiling code on the left, and you get the “lowered” version on the right.

If you throw this in:

using System;

public class C {
    public void M(object obj) {
        string favoriteTask = obj switch
{
  Developer { YearOfBirth: >= 1980 and <= 1989 and not 1984 } dev
    => $"{dev.FirstName} listens to heavy metal while coding",
  Developer dev => $"{dev.FirstName} writes code",
  Manager _ => "Create meetings",
  _ => "Do what objects do",
};
        
    }
    
    private class Developer {
        public int YearOfBirth { get; }
        public string FirstName { get; } = string.Empty;
    }
    
    private class Manager {}
}

You can see that the generated logic is quite straightforward. The snippet below elides the generated code for the Developer and Manager classes. It’s not how I would have written it, but I bet it’s pretty efficient.

[NullableContext(1)]
public void M(object obj)
{
    Developer developer = obj as Developer;
    string text;
    if (developer == null)
    {
        text = ((!(obj is Manager)) ? "Do what objects do" : "Create meetings");
    }
    else
    {
        int yearOfBirth = developer.YearOfBirth;
        if (yearOfBirth >= 1980 && yearOfBirth <= 1989 && yearOfBirth != 1984)
        {
            Developer developer2 = developer;
            text = string.Concat(developer2.FirstName, " listens to heavy metal while coding");
        }
        else
        {
            text = string.Concat(developer.FirstName, " writes code");
        }
    }
    string text2 = text;
}

Fun & Sports

Roaming Charges: How to Kill a Wolf in Society by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“In 8 years of high school and college basketball, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s teams went 212-8. In the six years he played varsity at both of those levels, his teams went 162-3 and won the championship every year he was eligible to win.”