Links and Notes for April 18th, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Public Policy & Politics

US Bombs Yemen Fuel Port, Killing Civilians, Trump 'Not in a Rush' To Attack Iran, and More by Antiwar News With Dave DeCamp (YouTube)

“As someone who followed the war in Yemen very closely when it was the Saudis leading the way, that’s really what led me on this path to to working for anti-war.com. I mean, this makes me just feel like—I just feel sick seeing this, seeing the US being the one now directly—obviously, the US has directly bombed Yemen for years and years, but specifically this war—and to be the ones actually bombing the civilian infrastructure. And it’s just horrific. It’s just shameful.

“And just nobody—I mean this just barely has gotten any attention—just nobody cares. It’s really sickening and this is just the situation with Yemen. People very rarely seem to care when Yemen is just getting obliterated like this.”

It’s not just Israel that fights like this. They just used to be the only ones who didn’t pretend to care about the conventions that their country had signed. The U.S. used to invest some time in pretending to care. No longer.

US Massacres Civilian Workers and Paramedics in Attack on Yemen Fuel Port by Dave DeCamp (Antiwar.com)

“On Thursday night, the US bombed the Ras Isa fuel port in Yemen’s Red Sea province of Hodeidah, targeting the facility with two attacks that killed dozens of civilian workers and paramedics.

“According to Yemen’s Health Ministry, at least 80 people, including at least five paramedics, were killed, and 150 were wounded. The paramedics were hit by a second US attack on the facility that came after rescue workers had already arrived at the scene to help victims of the first strikes […].

“While the US has shared virtually no details about its bombing campaign in Yemen since it began on March 15, US Central Command took credit for the attack on the fuel port, which has grave implications for millions of Yemeni civilians who are facing severe food shortages.

“CENTCOM justified the strike on vital civilian infrastructure by saying the Houthis, who govern an area where about 80% of Yemenis live, “profit” off fuel that enters the port. CENTCOM did not claim it was targeting a military site.

““Today, US forces took action to eliminate this source of fuel for the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists and deprive them of illegal revenue that has funded Houthi efforts to terrorize the entire region for over 10 years,” CENTCOM said. “The objective of these strikes was to degrade the economic source of power of the Houthis, who continue to exploit and bring great pain upon their fellow countrymen.””

What they have described is a war crime.

Before Trump Bombed Yemen, Biden Displaced Over Half a Million People—And No One Said a Word by Robert Inlakesh (MintPressNews)

“In 2024, while all eyes were on Gaza, President Joe Biden launched a bombing campaign in Yemen that displaced more than 531,000 people. Nearly 40,000 were driven from their homes by U.S. bombs alone. It was called Operation Prosperity Guardian , and you probably never heard of it. There was no congressional vote. No White House press conference. And yet by the end of the year, U.S. warplanes had hit schools, mosques, farms, ports, and fuel trucks across Yemen, causing a humanitarian collapse that rivaled the worst years of the Saudi-led war.”

“President Biden, in his first foreign policy speech in 2021, declared that ending the “catastrophic” war in Yemen would be a top priority. By then, the U.S.-backed war, primarily carried out by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had already claimed nearly 400,000 lives since its 2015 launch under Barack Obama’s administration.”

“Though the Trump administration has intensified the war since taking office, the U.S. military campaign in Yemen now spans more than a decade. Indeed, until Israel’s assault on Gaza, it was widely considered the world’s worst man-made humanitarian catastrophe.”

“While under Biden, Ansar Allah was designated a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization. The Trump administration has since replaced that label with the more severe “ Foreign Terrorist Organization ” designation. The new classification drastically impairs the ability of humanitarian groups to deliver aid, effectively criminalizing relief work in large swaths of northern Yemen.”

American Concentration Camps by Chris Hedges (Substack)

““In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.””

“Once a category of people is targeted, the crimes they are charged with, if they are charged at all, are almost always fabrications.”

“Those who run concentration camps, as Hannah Arendt writes, are people without the curiosity or the mental capacity to form opinions. They don’t, she notes, “even know any more what it means to be convinced.” They simply obey, conditioned to act as “perverted animals.” They are intoxicated by the God-like power they have to turn human beings into quivering flocks of sheep.”

“Then they come for you. Not because you broke the law. But because the monstrous machine of terror needs a constant supply of victims to sustain itself.”

“Totalitarian regimes survive by eternally battling mortal, existential threats. Once one threat is eradicated, they invent another. They mock the rule of law. Judges, until they are purged, may decry this lawlessness, but they have no mechanism to enforce their rulings.”

Collapsing Empire: The Delusion of US Air Power by Kit Klarenberg (Scheer Post)

“on April 4th , the New York Times reported Pentagon officials are “privately” briefing that while the current bombing campaign “is consistently heavier than strikes conducted by the Biden administration”, the effort has achieved “only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers.” AnsarAllah’s anti-genocide Red Sea blockade thus endures untrammelled.”

““in just three weeks, the Pentagon has used $200 million worth of munitions, in addition to the immense operational and personnel costs to deploy two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses to the Middle East.” The operation’s total cost to date could exceed “well over $1 billion by next week.””

“The New York Times also observed the White House hasn’t indicated “why it thinks its campaign against the group will succeed”, after the Biden administration’s long-running Operation Prosperity Guardian embarrassingly failed to break the Red Sea’s blockade.”

“The illegal March – June 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia provided the Empire with an opportunity to put this theory to the test. For 78 straight days, NATO relentlessly blitzed civilian, government, and industrial infrastructure throughout the country, killing untold innocent people – including children – and disrupting daily life for millions.”

“[…] a June 11th 1999 press conference , US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Henry Shelton proudly displayed a variety of graphic charts, boasting how hundreds of Yugoslav tanks, personnel carriers and artillery pieces had been decimated by NATO, without the alliance suffering a single casualty. His crooked accounting of the bombing remained universal mainstream gospel, until a May 2000 Newsweek investigation exposed the wide-ranging “coverup” via which the Pentagon had spun the “ineffective” assault as a resounding success.”

“USAF identified ample evidence of the Yugoslav military’s extraordinary skill at deception. They found a key bridge had been protected from NATO bombers “by constructing, 300 yards upstream, a fake bridge made of polyethylene sheeting stretched over the river”. NATO “destroyed” the “phony bridge” many times. Additionally, “artillery pieces were faked out of long black logs stuck on old truck wheels,” and “an anti-aircraft missile launcher was fabricated from the metal-lined paper used to make European milk cartons.””

Citing Newsweek:

“The lesson of Kosovo is civilian bombing works, though it raises moral qualms…Against military targets, high-altitude bombing is overrated. Any commander in chief who does not face up to those hard realities will be fooling himself.”

Newsweek thinks that bombing civilians “raises moral qualms.” How rich. It’s immoral and illegal. The qualm-raising part is the absolute least of its problems.

“Pentagon weapons procurer Bill LaPlante – a journeyman engineer and physicist – is awed by AnsarAllah’s use of “increasingly sophisticated weapons,” including missiles that “can do things that are just amazing.” He claims the Resistance group’s capabilities are “getting scary”. Once the US has exhausted itself yet again failing to crush AnsarAllah, we could see more of its arsenal in play – and in turn, another historic defeat of the Empire, as Yemen inflicted over the course of Operation Prosperity Guardian.”

Trump’s car tariffs could drive Slovakia into Russia’s arms by Miroslav Hanušniak (Reason)

“Slovakia has a population of just 5.4 million, yet it is one of Europe’s leading car manufacturers, heavily reliant on auto production and exports to the U.S. Home to five major car manufacturers and more than 350 local suppliers, Slovakia is not only the second-largest E.U. exporter of vehicles to the U.S., but also the biggest car producer per capita in the world.”

Israel is About to Empty Gaza by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“What do Israel and Washington believe will happen when the Palestinians are expelled from a land they have lived in for centuries? How do they think a people who are desperate, deprived of hope, dignity and a way to make a living, who are being butchered by one of the most technologically advanced armies on the planet, will respond? Do they think creating a Danteesque hell for the Palestinians will blunt terrorism, curb suicide attacks and foster peace? Can they not grasp the rage rippling through the Middle East and how it will implant a hatred towards us that will endure for decades?”

To say nothing of the breathtaking immorality of it. But they care neither about morals nor blowback. It doesn’t and won’t affect them.

Supreme Court Hits The Brakes by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“What is known, however, is that the Supreme Court, faced with the Trump administration’s imminent removal of human beings from the homeland to its hired prison under the control of Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador and potential Trump IRS commissioner, decided to [take] a clear stand.

“For the MAGA faithful, there is little concern for the renditioned, as outrage toward “illegals” is a basic premise of Trumpianism, with no regard for the niceties of proof that they are the bad dudes they are claimed to be, and even less regard for the evidence they are not, and the view that due process, the same due process that has been denied male college students in Title IX sex tribunals, is just a bump in the road slowing down the compelling need to expel the evil immigrants that are turning America into a third world country.”

If October 7 Justifies The Gaza Genocide, What Acts Of Violence Will The Gaza Genocide Justify? by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“In the early months of the Gaza genocide, Palestine supporters began pointing out the contradictory logic which holds that nothing Israel did could justify October 7, but October 7 justifies anything Israel might do. At no time have Israel apologists ever deviated from this line of reasoning. This self-contradictory position has now become the official line at the White House, where all questions from the press about Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are met by assertions from Trump’s podium people that all blame for those atrocities rests exclusively at the feet of Hamas.

“By that exact same logic, any blame for the violent extremism and antisemitism which is going to ensue from Israel’s actions in Gaza rests exclusively at the feet of Israel. This isn’t my reasoning. It’s theirs.”

The Pope Has Died, And The Palestinian People Have Lost An Important Advocate by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“[…] as far as popes go this one was decent. Francis had been an influential critic of Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza, calling for investigation of genocide allegations and denouncing the bombing of hospitals and the murder of humanitarian workers and civilians. He’d been personally calling the only Catholic parish in Gaza by phone every night during the Israeli onslaught, even as his health deteriorated.

“In other words, he was a PR problem for Israel.

“I hope another compassionate human being is announced as the next leader of the Church, but there are definitely forces pushing for a different outcome right now.”

Toward a Historic Peace Summit by Edward Lozansky (Antiwar.com)

“Not everyone is listening to these pathetic appeals, and the list of heads of state who have confirmed their participation is growing – it has now reached 20. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico reacted angrily​ to “disrespectful” remarks ​from Brussels.​ “I would like to inform you that I am a legitimate premier of Slovakia, a sovereign country,“ he said. “Nobody can order me where to go or not to go.“ Fico said he will travel to Moscow to honor the Red Army soldiers who liberated his country and other victims of the Nazis.”

“Almost simultaneously, the New York Times and the Times published devastating and recently declassified information implicating those responsible for the Ukraine tragedy. Why they suddenly told the truth remains a mystery after years of nonstop lies and barrages of fake news that earned them many Pulitzer prizes. Perhaps they did it to save their ruined reputation after newly declassified documents by the Trump administration.

“The latest disclosures explained how the top brass in the FBI and intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and the media were determined to stop President Trump from winning the White House in 2016, and they talked about removing him from office months after he was sworn in.”

Zionism Is The Single Greatest Threat To Free Speech In The Western World Today by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Zionism is the single greatest threat to free speech in the western world today. Nothing is eroding people’s rights to free expression faster than the support that western governments have for the apartheid state of Israel and the atrocities it is committing.

“This isn’t just about Gaza now. It’s not just about some strangers in the middle east. It’s about you. It’s about your rights. It’s about your right to tell the truth, even if the truth makes your leaders feel uncomfortable.

“Even if you are not a sufficiently moral and compassionate person to oppose a genocide on its own merit, at this point you should at least be opposing the erosion of your own personal liberties for your own sake.”

Not Taking A Position On Gaza IS Taking A Position On Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“It’s not okay to claim ignorance or uncertainty about what’s happening in Gaza in 2025. You’re an adult. You have internet access. If you don’t know, learn. You can’t just go “it too compwicated, me no understandy, googoo gaga.” It’s not cute and it’s not okay. Grow the fuck up.”

Nobody Say “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine” by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Who do you think you are, saying “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine”? Don’t you know that by saying “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine” you are causing the people who applaud the deliberate starvation of an entire civilian population to become emotionally upset?

“Instead of saying “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine,” you should try putting yourself in the shoes of the tender-hearted individuals who support the complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. They’re just minding their own business, merrily celebrating the carpet bombing of a giant concentration camp full of children, and then you come along and ruin their day by saying “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine”? What a cruel and hateful thing that would be.

“I mean, all they are doing is cheerleading the mutilation, evisceration and incineration of children, and the assassination of journalists and medical workers, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the complete flattening of an entire region whose population they are methodically exterminating via bullets, bombs, starvation and disease. It’s not like they’re doing anything nasty or disgusting like saying offensive words. Offensive words like “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine.””

Yeah (Reddit)

America's incarcerated are a slave labor force

“[to the U.S.-American flag] Hey little man. How’s it goin’?

“US prison workers produce $11 billion worth of goods and services for “little to no pay at all.”

“[chart showing that the U.S. has 5x-higher incarceration rates than the next-closest one, Great Britain]

“Yea.”

Massacre at Al-Hashashin by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The pits were excavated and the bodies dumped in the holes. Then the vehicles were crushed and covered by a sand berm in the middle of the road. The next day, Israeli troops from the 12 Brigade returned to the kill site and reburied the bodies and covered the grave site in a camouflaged netting. Five days later, the IDF announced the location of the gravesite.

“Mistakes are made in war. But this wasn’t a mistake and this wasn’t war. It was an ambush on an open road in a civilian neighborhood that turned into an execution-style massacre of unarmed medical workers who had been sent to rescue other unarmed medical workers. Then they tried to bury the evidence of the atrocity in pits under berms of sand.”

Journalism & Media

Don't Be a Sucker by Weirdo Video in 1947 (YouTube)

This is a video produced by the U.S. government in 1947 to warn its populace about propaganda. From the video description, “In this anti-fascist film produced by US Military in the wake of WWII, the producers deconstruct the politically motivated social engineering of Germany by the Nazi regime.”

The wheel turns.

“We human beings are not born with prejudices. They are made for us. Made by someone who wants something.”

Fake news: how Jonas Bendiksen hoodwinked the photographic community with The Book of Veles by Jessica Miller in 2022 (Amateur Photographer)

“During the election campaign of Donald Trump and throughout his presidency, Bendiksen became increasingly frustrated reading reports of Russian hacking and fake news. He feared a tsunami of advanced all-digital technology and began to question how long it would be until documentary photojournalism could have no basis in reality other than the photographer’s fantasy and a powerful computer graphics card. Would editors be able to tell the difference and how hard is it to do? Bendiksen was so frightened by what the answers might be, he decided to try it himself – his own visual Turing test. If one averagely nerdy photographer could watch a bunch of YouTube videos and subvert the documentary tradition of photography, then it would be a warning to us all.”

We did not heed this warning. I still read about people who think the Macedonian content farms were real.

Late–Imperial Maladies by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“I am sick of the incessant use of the word “unprovoked” when Western media describe the Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

“I am sick of hearing that Moscow’s stated intent to de–Nazify Ukraine has no legitimacy because there are no Nazis in Ukraine.

“I am sick of the suggestion that I am to take Volodymyr Zelensky to be anything more than a puppet of Washington and a rampant crook beholden to the Nazis who do not exist in Ukraine.

“I am sick of listening to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, tell me that Russian President Vladimir Putin is nothing more than a tyrant intent on reconstructing the Czarist empire when, statesman to stateswoman, she is unworthy of carrying Putin’s attaché case.

“I am sick of listening to American and European officials state with phony gravity that Russia intends to invade the whole of Western Europe.

“I am sick of reading that China “claims Taiwan” as if the island is not historically Chinese territory. And I am sick of hearing that China could “invade” Taiwan, its own territory, at any moment.”

World War 3 is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. by Marshall McLuhan

Economy & Finance

Political economist Mark Blyth weighs in on inflation, tariffs and ‘the worst of all possible worlds’ by Georgia Sparling (Brown University)

“[…] who benefits from inflation? The folks at the other end of the income scale. For example, in 2022, American oil and gas companies made $220 billion in profits over their pre-COVID baseline. Fifty-one percent of that was given away to shareholders as the shares went up in value, and in dividends, most of which went to the top 1% of earners — about 3.3 million shareholders. That more than offset any costs that they suffered through inflation. They actually profited from inflation.”

by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“China getting wealthier is not a bad thing for the United States and the world. It has made trillions of dollars of goods available at a lower cost than they otherwise would be, raising living standards of people around the world. We certainly could have structured our trade with China differently so that our imports did not have as negative effect on the working class here, but that was our policy choice.

“But there is no reason for us to view rapid growth going forward in China negatively, especially since a big part of it is a conversion to a green economy with EVs and clean energy. We should be unhappy that the Trump administration’s policies are preventing us from keeping pace.”

Science & Nature

Fashionable Nonsense by Leif Weatherby (The Baffler)

“The “science” might be fraudulent, its conclusions unreplicable, but it seems that, felix fortuna , someone forgot to tell business schools, media outlets, TV executives, and publishing houses—because the field’s influence shows no signs of waning.”

“[…] the sociologist Erving Goffman, who had an uncanny ability to pass, chameleon-like, through social settings where he could observe hierarchies, slights, and jealousies.”

That’s the guy Stewart Lee mentioned in Snowflake!

“The nudge was peak Democrat neoliberal policy, relying on markets, individual choice, and the manipulation of that choice in lieu of progressive, redistributive policy. The problem, again, was that it was all bullshit. Large swaths of the foundational experiments Sunstein and Thaler cited either failed to replicate when the experiments were done again, or were the effect of “publication bias,” in which publishing only surprising and positive results provides a misleading picture of the evidence. When this bias was corrected for, no evidence for the effectiveness of nudges remained, according to a 2022 study.”

“Between Brooks and Baker, one can begin to see how academic and popular psychology merged into a repudiation of any shred of independence from industry that science had once aspired to.”

“As Baker argues, the entrepreneur is the personification of a normal contradiction in capitalism itself: as Marx and then John Maynard Keynes after him observed, varying rates of unemployment, and the turn-style of having and not having a job, are features, not bugs, of capital’s dominance over society. Psychology’s role has been to prepare us to view such contradictions as natural.”

Medicine & Disease

Birth rates are falling. But solutions are focused on the wrong thing. by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“Access to care is another problem. More than 2 million women of reproductive age live in “maternity care deserts”—areas with no OB-GYNs, no midwives, no hospitals offering obstetric services. That’s more than 1,000 counties where pregnancy care is out of reach. The U.S. has one of the lowest supplies of midwives and OB-GYNs compared to other high-income countries.”

“Childcare deserts are common, especially in rural and low-income communities. Many parents are left patching together care, paying out of pocket, or leaving the workforce entirely—usually moms—because the math just doesn’t work.”

“[…] the U.S. has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world. And for Black women, the risk is even higher—nearly three times higher than for white women.”

“There are cases where women have been investigated after a miscarriage or pregnancy complication—sometimes by a nurse or a family member.

“To make matters worse, some states are even proposing surveillance tactics like monitoring wastewater to track birth control and abortion pill use.

“Even thinking about pregnancy now comes with fear, judgment, and potential punishment.”

Art, Literature, & Cinema

Murmuration des anagrammes by Félicia Mariani (Hinternet)

“était une fois
Il était une soif
sitôt l’eau finie”

The Most Important Movie Of The 21st Century by Patrick (H) Willems (YouTube)

From the end of the video, where Emma talks about her idol Val Kilmer,

Dance with the spirit of something else

Faith of our Fathers − Philip K. Dick (Genius Lyrics)

It’s kind of near how someone hid the entire story on a lyrics web site. How subversive. PKD would have approved. A few citations follow from this interesting story of “an omnipotent God, portraying the leader of the ruling Communist party as an all-consuming being with no sense of morality.”

Pakistan goes METAL − Mustt Mustt − Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan by Andre Antunes (YouTube)

I first learned of Nusrat when he appeared twice on the Natural Born Killers Soundtrack (Wikipedia). I’ve had his studio album named Mustt Mustt (Wikipedia) (1990) since the mid-90s and it’s pretty amazing. Avenue is my favorite off of that album.

In a discussion about the lyrics, one person cites an English translation of a lyric as “[…] inviting darkness into their own home so that another home can be brightened”, noting that that is “metal AF” but another commentator corrected him with an even more metal translation,

“I think it also included some additional couplets which are not usually part of the song itself but NFAK loved to recite them as a sort of warm-up. The one you are referring to is probably”

“Andhera Mangane aaya tha roshni ki bheekh,
Ham apna ghar na jalate to aur kya karte”

“This means that”

“The darkness was begging for light and I was forced to burn my house to give it.”

That’s even cooler, man.

Murum Aries Attigit: A Philosophy for Litigation by Adrianos Facchetti (California Defamation Law Blog)

“[…] while I was in college, among other books relating to Julius Caesar, I read the Commentaries on the Gallic War. There, Caesar described the principle of murum aries attigit, which literally means the “The Ram Has Touched the Wall.” It referred to a Roman policy: surrender would be accepted before–but not after the battering ram touched an enemy’s city walls. Wikipedia explains the purpose behind the policy well: “The policy was to act as a deterrent against resistance to those about to be besieged. It was an incentive for anyone who was not absolutely sure that they could withstand the assault to surrender immediately, rather than face the possibility of total destruction.””

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Pope Francis's last tweet

“I would like us to renew our hope that #peace is possible! From the Holy
Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, where this year #Easter is being
celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox on the same day, may the light of
peace radiate throughout the Holy Land and the entire world.”

Typically for Twitter, one of the top comments was a German guy yelling at Pope Francis for not being against Putin enough. He literally told the pope that he was “part of the problem”.

“Woraus soll sich diese Hoffnung speisen, wenn Sie die Verurteilung des Völkermörders Putin unterlassen. Warum soll sich Frieden ergeben, wenn Sie den Krieg nicht verurteilen. Und zwar den Krieg des Angreifers Putin.

“Sie sind Teil des Problems, warum dieser Völkermord weitergeht.”

Lighten up, buddy. It’s Easter.

Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! by David Graeber (The Anarchist Library)

“Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.”

People who are not in desperate circumstances, or even those who are, but have been sufficiently morally prepared.

“[…] anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important ways you are probably already an anarchist — you just don’t realize it.”

“Anarchists argue that almost all the anti-social behavior which makes us think it’s necessary to have armies, police, prisons, and governments to control our lives, is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible.”

“[…] while people can be reasonable and considerate when they are dealing with equals, human nature is such that they cannot be trusted to do so when given power over others. Give someone such power, they will almost invariably abuse it in some way or another.”

“Anarchists believe that power corrupts and those who spend their entire lives seeking power are the very last people who should have it. Anarchists believe that our present economic system is more likely to reward people for selfish and unscrupulous behavior than for being decent, caring human beings.”

“[…] many parts of the world people live outside of the control of governments today. They do not all kill each other. Mostly they just get on about their lives the same as anyone else would. Of course, in a complex, urban, technological society all this would be more complicated: but technology can also make all these problems a lot easier to solve. In fact, we have not even begun to think about what our lives could be like if technology were really marshaled to fit human needs. How many hours would we really need to work in order to maintain a functional society — that is, if we got rid of all the useless or destructive occupations like telemarketers, lawyers, prison guards, financial analysts, public relations experts, bureaucrats and politicians, and turn our best scientific minds away from working on space weaponry or stock market systems to mechanizing away dangerous or annoying tasks like coal mining or cleaning the bathroom, and distribute the remaining work among everyone equally? Five hours a day? Four? Three? Two? Nobody knows because no one is even asking this kind of question. Anarchists think these are the very questions we should be asking.”

“[…] while likely as not there will always be competitive people in the world, there’s no reason why society has to be based on encouraging such behavior, let alone making people compete over the basic necessities of life.”

“Every time you treat another human with consideration and respect, you are being an anarchist. Every time you work out your differences with others by coming to reasonable compromise, listening to what everyone has to say rather than letting one person decide for everyone else, you are being an anarchist.”

technofeudalism and the death of serendipity by Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd)

“If I had just ordered my cheese on Instacart, I never would’ve had that lovely moment of nostalgia. Come to think of it, I never would’ve walked past that cool art installation that made me stop and think about a video I was working on. Or heard that Bad Bunny song blasting from a nearby car radio, throwing me back to when I used to live in Puerto Rico. Rather, while waiting for my Instacart cheese, I probably would’ve had some extra time to scroll through TikTok advertisements. Those beautiful, unscripted synchronicities would’ve been replaced with a transactional commodification of my free time, where I let a platform sell my attention in exchange for enough dopamine hits to make me forget that’s happening. Then my order is dropped off at my front door, generating more data about my consumption patterns for Instacart to sell.”

“The same is true of engaging in public life. If I go for a walk, I can’t be monetized as easily, nor will my purchases be intercepted by an algorithmic middleman. Thus, the algorithms want me to stay indoors. But that also means I won’t bump into my friend on the street, or see the cool art installation.”

We Need the Liberal Arts to Keep Us from Being Tools of Our Tools by Scott Samuelson (3QuarksDaily)

“Because students are relentlessly conditioned by our culture to see their education as a pathway to a job, they’re suffering an acute case of this anxiety. Are they taking on debt for jobs that won’t even exist by the time they graduate? Even if their chosen profession does hold on, will the knowledge and skills they’ve been required to learn be the exact chunk of the job that gets offloaded onto AI? Are they being asked to do tasks that AI can do so that they can be replaced by AI?”

“It’s increasingly obvious to those who give any thought to the matter that students need to learn to think for themselves, not just jump through hoops that AI can jump through faster and better than they can. The trick is convincing administrators, parents, and students that the best way of getting an education in independent and creative thinking is through the study of robust subjects like literature, math, science, history, and philosophy.”

“The liberal arts have traditionally been what help us to think for ourselves rather than be tools of the powerful. We need a refreshed conception of the liberal arts to keep us from being tools of our tools. (More precisely, we need an education that keeps us from being tools of the people who control our tools even as they too are controlled by the tools.)”

“Why are our efforts and committees focused on frivolities like incorporating new technologies into the classroom rather than on priorities like getting students not to be tools of their tools? It should be all hands on deck for educating people to be answerable to the deepest needs of their minds, bodies, and talents.”

Creative Humanities by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“Time and again, I hear the same story: that they come from small, traditional communities of narrow-minded people who only value, as Karl Marx put it, Kinder, Kirche, and Küche . So they take solace in whatever life of ideas they are able to find on the internet. Time and again, too, they tell me that their point of first entry was Jordan Peterson. They tell me how thankful they are that they did not stop there, but pressed onward to cultivate what I am indeed bold enough to describe as more refined tastes. There are a few billion young people out there in similar conditions, and they are not going to learn to love Plato, if they learn to love him, as a result of their small-group discussions at St. John’s or their exceptionally and admirably unzeitgemäße undergraduate education at the University of Chicago. They are going to learn to love him online.”

“A mataiotechnical skill is one that requires great patience and dedication to complete, but that, once completed, still amounts to nothing. It is impressive, but meaningless.”

“There is more to creativity than patience, determination, and mere technical skill. I will not go full Joseph Beuys on you and say that “everyone is an artist”, but I will say that most people’s creative potential does go tragically untapped, mostly because they become confined within social identities that curtail its expression.”

“An analogous point has been compellingly made by Noam Chomsky about political consciousness. It is not that your average person “just doesn’t have the head” for thinking critically about, say, the way the media manufacture consent; it’s that that head is filled with NBA statistics and other such literally meaningless stuff.”

“I sincerely believe that it would be a good thing to reinstitute rote memorization as the foundation of primary education. As I often note, the power of this approach has been well proven in many intellectual traditions, notably in the various schools of classical Indian philosophy, where typically a disciple was required to learn vast numbers of sutras by heart without receiving any explanation from his guru of what they actually meant.”

“One way to describe the mission of The Hinterrnet —though there are other ways, for The Hinternet does many things— is that it is an attempt to model creative and imaginative engagement with material ordinarily coded as “scholarly”. When we produce imaginary lost texts of Aristotle , or give transcripts of keynote addresses at non-existent Altaic studies societies, these are not just “gags”, as too many of our quasi-former academic colleagues so often and so depressingly take them to be. They are, rather, experiments, with admittedly varying degrees of success, in bringing our faculties of imagination to bear in domains where, when we were first inducted into them, we were taught to expect that only our intellects would be of any use there. In conducting these experiments, what we have consistently found is that, whatever our readers may think of the results, our own understanding of the materials we are reimagining is greatly deepened and enriched. We find, paradoxically, that we are having something like an experience of lying our way to the truth.”

“The longer we polished and refined some made-up event, the more it took on, to us, the appearance of truth. And this process caused me to see, as if in an epiphany, what history actually is, its connection (and, in many languages, its lexical overlap) with “story”, why people are so inclined to believe myths (about national origins, for example) rather than what the professional historians have to tell them about wie es eigentlich gewesen, and many other things besides.”

“[…] paleoanthropologists who study stone tools of hominid ancestors often begin by “flintknapping” similar tools of their own; specialists in Paleolithic parietal art make relévés of the figures they are studying. The idea here is to obtain something like what Francis Bacon would call “maker’s knowledge”: you know a thing most fully when you have gone through the steps of producing it. The peculiar fact that we only do this for traces from the human past unaccompanied by written texts, whereas once literacy emerges we begin literally to “take their word for it” in our efforts to understand what human beings back then were up to, shows us something very important, I think, about the limitations of standard historical methodology. It is as if prehistorians, faute de mieux, are required to draw on their imaginations and their broad powers of poiesis, simply in order to work their way back into a largely lost world of mental representations — and in the end, what they had initially done only of necessity, ends up being a far richer practice of historical and humanistic investigation.”

cutting through the image by Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd)

“I’m reminded of the following sentence from Debord: “The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends.” On Instagram and TikTok, the “means” for communicating are “going viral.” Many creators treat these means as an end—they prioritize virality over communication, confusing the map with the territory.”

Branches of Christianity

Branches of Christianity

This question came up in our household the other day, so I did some quick research to find out that all of the sects for which there were various churches in the two I grew up in are actually offshoots of protestantism.

The page Family Tree of Christian Denominations (One Messianic Gentile) has this more complicated diagram, but it includes dates as well.

Family tree of Christian denominations

Episode 452: Zizians Reloaded by True Anon (Patreon)

At about Ezra Marcus says at about 01:39:00,

“What you see across all of this—including E-Pimps, Galaxy Gas, Zizians, all this stuff, and the way that AI is being used by people—what it’s really about, is about eliminating the friction from your life, and the friction caused by…essentially, to think about anything. And, especially, think about anything social, which is obviously complex and can be depressing. You can can get rejected, or you can have to go to work, or you can try and have sex with somebody who doesn’t want to have sex with you and, instead of getting an E-Pimp to impersonate a Filipino … whatever … anyway. I think that AI is just a supercharging element for dissipating social engagement from life, kind of sapping that away. Both, to the benefit of people who feel uncomfortable talking to other people don’t have to do it as much, but then also society itself, as a broad category, becomes less social by the month. Is that good? We’ll find out.”

Fly, Be Free by Akim Reinhardt (3QuarksDaily)

“[…] as someone who has been teaching college students for a quarter-century, it seems to me that the overprotective parenting style along with other factors, such as modern K-12 education and near constant attention to screens, have had a profound effect. Ask any long time college instructor. They will tell you. Things have changed.

“Today’s 18–22 year olds are nowhere nearly as competent as their predecessors. Note: I did not write “smart.” Today’s students are plenty smart. But they are less competent. And they know it. Their ability to do has been crippled. Denied a childhood of self- and peer-directed discovery, problem solving, dispute resolution, and genuine play, many young adults no longer know how to make their way through the world in basic ways.

“They’re well aware of this and it causes many of them great anxiety. It has also engendered many of them with very unrealistic expectations about what others will do for them. Because the parents and other adults in their lives constantly directed them in nearly all endeavors, they expect that direction to continue as they themselves become adults.

“In the classroom, they now require detailed instructions for every assignment. When I began teaching, I didn’t even bother giving them an assignment sheet, and they were fine with that. They knew what to do when I said “write a paper.” Now my assignment sheets can run as long as a double-sided, single spaced page, and some of them still complain that it’s not enough direction.

“Alas, it’s not just in college.

“I know dozens of people in management positions in industries as varied as entertainment, software, and auto repair. Absolutely all of them, when I ask, complain about how their new, young workers can’t seem to figure out basic tasks by themselves, or even think it reasonable that they should, instead expecting their superiors to explain everything for them.

“When I conducted an image search of the term “2 kids sharing a bike” the first spate of pictures that came all images of kids sharing bikes . . . with a parent.

“As I prepare to conclude my 26th year of teaching college students, many of my colleagues are most fretful about the impact of AI. And I take that seriously as well. But truly, my larger concern is for what our society will look like in the sooner-than-you-think future as a new generation of fearful, insecure adults take the reigns. [sic]”

This is Water Commencement Speech by David Foster Wallace in 2005 (YouTube)

From the This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio) (FS),

“there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

“Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.”

“[…] you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider.”

“ It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

“Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.”

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

“The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

“It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

““This is water.”

““This is water.”

“It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

“I wish you way more than luck.”

Welcome to the age of the Peripheral Man (and Woman) by Yasha Levine (Nefarious Russians)

“[…] the Peripheral Man is better, smarter, and stronger than you. Those backwards men and primitive women, the one’s you’ve looked down on for so long…they’re everything that you are not.

“They are hard where you are soft. They are wise while you are shallow. They are used to waiting, while you’re entitled and want everything now. They are resourceful, while you’re wasteful. They know their own culture and language and your culture and language, while you barely know your own. They underestimate themselves and overdeliver, while you overestimate yourself and underperform. They have felt defeat and humiliation, while you’ve always been on top. You are atomized, while they are communal. Their chaotic societies have made them sophisticated and versatile, while your well-oiled social machinery has made you simple and rigid. Stability has made you weak, while chaos has made them strong. You have been cruel in your carelessness, while they have always paid the price — not just for their actions, but yours. You have forgotten, they remember.”

You never knew. They remember.

The top comment is by Hannes Jandl,

“I think you’re being too optimistic. The collapse of the U.S. isn’t like the implosion of the USSR or the decline of the British Empire. What appears to be happening is that American elites are just discarding the “U.S. A” like a suit of old clothes. Capital has outgrown nation states. Capital now has at its disposal cryptocurrency, private security forces, spyware, and AI. They don’t need foreign services, state treasuries or pension plans. And the world’s oligarchs have decided they won’t pay for any of those things any more. The United States may be falling apart but Blackstone is doing fine. Largest landlord in Madrid. Netflix and YouTube are spoon feeding culture to the masses from Tokyo to Lima to Nairobi. When you get down to fundamentals Putin, MBS, Trump, Musk, and Ackman all have a lot more in common with each other than they do with ordinary Russians, Saudis or Americans. We are all the peripheral people, living in a world run by billionaires.”

This is nicely written but it’s critique only applies in the short term. The billionaires are, by definition, parasites. They are killing the host.

Another by Tom writes,

“As Aimé Césaire said in his Discourse On Colonialism:”

“At bottom, what [white men] cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself … it is the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the n — of Africa.”

James writes,

“Gore Vidal in that United States of Amnesia documentary, when asked about the conspiracy theory of history, paraphrasing,”

“they don’t have to conspire if they all think a like. You won’t get the CEO of GM and Morgan bank disagreeing on much.”

Technology & Engineering

Postfeministisches Kaffeekränzchen im All by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Noch weniger erschließt sich, was das nun mit Feminismus zu tun haben soll. Ob Männlein, Weiblein oder Schimpanse – der heutige Weltraumtourismus hat mit Wissenschaft ungefähr so viel zu tun wie ein Besuch im Bordell mit wahrer Liebe. Dass dies die Herren und Damen Weltraumtourist*innen anders sehen, gehört wohl zum Geschäftsmodell. Aber das ist im Bordell ja auch oft nicht anders.”

“Nun schwärmt Frau Sánchez von einer „Pionierleistung für Frauen und Mütter“, Frau Perry sieht ihren Flug als „Inspiration für junge Mädchen“. Worin genau besteht die Inspiration? Lass Dir die Brüste machen und angele Dir einen Milliardär? Der schießt dich dann ins Weltall. Toll.”

“Wir müssen auf Plastiktrinkhalme verzichten, um die Welt zu retten, und kriegen schon ein schlechtes Gewissen, wenn wir im Flieger nach Mallorca sitzen – und Frau Perry verballert mal eben den Energiebedarf eines afrikanischen Kleinstaates, um sich im All naive Gedanken über Mutter Erde zu machen.”

Against transparency by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“I can’t just wave a piece of paper in your face, shout “YOU AGREED” and steal your bike. But substitute “bike” for “private data” and that’s exactly the system we have with privacy policies. Rather than providing notice of odious and unconscionable behavior and hoping that “market forces” sort it out, we should just update privacy law so that doing certain things with your private data is illegal, without your ongoing, continuous, revocable consent.

“Obviously, this would come as a severe shock to the tech economy, which is totally structured around commercial surveillance. But the fact that an extremely harmful practice is also extremely widespread is not a reason to keep on doing it – it’s a reason to stop. There was a time when we let companies sell radium suppositories, and then, one day, we just banned companies from telling you to put nuclear waste up your asshole:”

“It’s not a coincidence that these guys went after the CFPB. It’s no mystery why they’ve gone after every watchdog that keeps you from getting scammed, poisoned or maimed, from the FDA to the EPA to the NLRB. They are the kind of people who say, “So long as it was in the fine print, and so long I could foist that fine-print on you, that’s a fair deal.” For them, caveat emptor is a Latin phrase that means, “Surprise, you’re dead.”

“It’s bad enough when companies do this to us, be they Big Tech, health insurers or airlines. But when the government takes these grifters’ side over yours – when grifters take over the government – hold onto your wallets.”

4chan may be dead, but its toxic legacy lives on by Ryan Broderick (Ars Technica)

“The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now.

“Our feeds deliver us content; we don’t have to hunt for it. We don’t have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out whether we’re getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto. The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back. And we’ll eventually find out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

This is what Ryan Broderick has become: the voice of reason that whispers that everything is the way it was meant to be, that there is no sense of rebelling against it, and that any that do will be “paved over,” as 4Chan so justly was recently. There is no raging against the dying of the light for these people, no seeking of a better world. It is what the algorithms say it is and will be, forever and ever, amen.

Such pap, delivered by the king of technocratic pap, Wired magazine. I wonder how many revisions that article had. Whatever it may have even originally been, it’s garbage now. And it will be cited endlessly as the official obituary of 4Chan, a site I never used nor really knew, but which I am learning to miss as a fellow traveler in anarchism.

Is shipping bad? by Ryan Broderick & Allegra Rosenberg (Garbage Day)

“A new AI startup called Cluely released an ad this week that is, in no uncertain terms, a true low point for the human race. Cluely is an AI tool that you keep open on your desktop during Zoom meetings that analyzes the audio and gives you suggestions for what to say. Which is bad enough as it is. But the impossibly cringe ad reimagines the app as something you could use to lie to women on dates. Cluely’s 21-year-old founder Chungin Lee wrote on X, “The end state of the product is a chip in ur brain. The more ppl use the product, the closer we get to the end state.”

“Before we go any further here, I want to just say that I’m not sure I’ve seen a better expression of late-stage Silicon Valley than this ad. A world where Zoom calls, business meetings, and dates are all flattened down into equivalent events in your life, all of which can be “solved” by mining another person’s data to create the illusion of human connection. It’s bleak shit, folks.

“Lee has been bragging to tech press that an early version of Cluely got him kicked out of Columbia University. He has since written a manifesto on the benefits of “cheating,” and raised over $5 million for Cluely. Everything is fine and good we are not headed for a recession. The markets are healthy. Everything is being valued correctly.”

LLMs & AI

OpenAI and start-ups race to generate code and transform software industry by Cristina Criddle, Melissa Heikkilä (FT)

First off, kudos to the FT for doubling down and having two authors massage an OpenAI press release into an “article” that has just under 700 words in it. And I just saw that, at the very end of the article, they write that it includes “Additional reporting from George Hammond in San Francisco.”

I mean, it’s refreshing to see that, although the FT trumpeted two years ago that AI would be doing all of the jobs of creating text for us, that they still, two years later, need three people to write 700 words. Perhaps their screed about how all developers are going to be replaced—something we’ve been hearing for two years, but this time it’s really true—is going to impress us with its well-researched acumen.

Oh, no. Never mind. It’s a press release for a handful of AI companies. My bad. Perhaps the FT has replaced its entire staff with AI and the AI has given itself an inventive and utterly fictive byline comprising three people, just for fun.

“Artificial intelligence is poised to outperform humans in writing code as leading groups, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, race to release systems that are reshaping the software industry.

“San Francisco-based OpenAI released a suite of new models this week that independent benchmarks suggest are among the best yet for computer programming.”

This is a press release with a dash of plausible deniability. The FT is just doing the Lord’s work on behalf of OpenAI. OpenAI made these announcements because Claude and Claude Code (from Anthropic) are eating OpenAI’s lunch and they probably felt that their ability to raise money was threatened.

Why do I call it a press release? Well, just read it: it comprises the statements of four people who are running companies that are currently hemorrhaging VC money viz. burning up their runway. They are cited to convince you that your company will go out of business if you don’t buy their services. You’ll pardon me if I find their completely unsubstantiated offer unconvincing.

The impression it tries to give is that you should come to the conclusion that you absolutely need to have started using AI everywhere—preferably with fat subscription plans from all of these companies—yesterday or you will be fired for gross negligence. It doesn’t actually say that anywhere, nor does it provide a shred of concrete evidence to support that theory, but it’s definitely the mood, which is PANIC.

“The emphasis on programming as the next frontier for AI systems signals one of the most tangible examples of how the technology could transform industries, with thousands of software developers already using new models in their work.”

Thousands!

Look, the reason that they’re focused on programming is that it’s a problem space that allows them to use “evals” to determine whether the answer has any hope of being correct. It’s a lot less labor-intensive to cut down on hallucinations in areas where you can automate testing the answer. If you’ve watched the 3½-hour video from Andrej Karpathy, then you’ve seen how labor-intensive it is to train away hallucinations by hand.

“‘This is the year . . . that AI becomes better than humans at competitive code forever,’ said OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil on the Overpowered podcast this week.”

I agree that OpenAI would like this to be true. It’s the drum they’ve been banging for two going on three years now. If it doesn’t come true this year, they’re in deep trouble, I guess?

He goes on,

“He compared the advances to AI surpassing humans at chess several years ago, but argued this had a more democratising impact “on the world if everybody can create software”.”

There is nothing democratizing about requiring a $20–$200/month subscription from OpenAI in order to “compete.”

“Leading industry figures say LLMs have sped up the software development process by generating entire blocks of code based on a few text instructions. AI systems can also identify errors and attempt to correct them.”

This statement is probably true for given, narrow contexts (greenfield, throwaway POCs) but “generating entire blocks of code” is exactly the most fraught are of AI usage. I’ve only seen expert users like Simon Willison able to build working tools in this way—and even he freely admits that the code is for small tools and not close to what he would consider production-quality. The tools are “good enough” for the personal need that he has.

It is extremely risky to extrapolate from these isolated areas to assume that it will apply to your programming, especially without a plan. And no, your plan cannot just be (1) purchase OpenAI subscription, (2) Profit.

The rest of the article is citations from people like “Misha Laskin, co-founder and chief executive of coding start-up Reflection AI”, a company I’ve never heard of, who say predictable things about the growth potential of the area of expertise they’ve chosen as the place that they’re going to make money.

Oddly, while they mention that “research from Microsoft’s coding platform GitHub found 92 per cent of US-based developers use AI coding tools,” they don’t mention Microsoft’s other studies that found that code duplication has more than doubled[3], and maintainability, quality, and security have suffered[4][5]. It’s going to a lost cause using AI without review—the main way that it generates value—while trying to build secure software.

The company behind Cursor—a company that has cobbled together a text editor/poor man’s IDE that integrates AI models—had a “$2.5bn valuation in January.” Presumably, it’s a bit lower now, in a post-tariff and post-dollar world. An almost certainly fly-by-night scam called Poolside “raised $500mn in October at a $3bn valuation”.

Jesus Christ on a crutch. It must be nice to work for the FT. I’m less interested in the content of this press-release-cum-news article than that it took three people to write it.

The comments were nearly overwhelmingly negative.

“The result of this will be anything but democratising, it’ll be chaos. Imagine if we developed a technology that let everybody create airplanes and fly them anywhere.”

“I use Open AI for coding. I now spend all my time fixing bugs.”

I let these stand because, while the comments are anecdotal, the entire article was also anecdotal with no references and no links, even when discussing things like “research from Microsoft,” where a link would have been helpful.

To be fair, I’ll include the requisite accelerationist comment, written by someone identifying as Evolvedman,

“Most people have no idea how good these AI models are and they are improving exponentially fast. In two years we will likely have true AGI. Then it’s on to ASI. This will alter human history in a way we can’t possibly comprehend yet. Hang tight.”

Another commentator KennethM writes,

“AI coding is saving thousands of dollars for an engineer,” said Misha Laskin, co-founder and chief executive of coding start-up Reflection AI… “We’re entering an unprecedentedly large market.””

“So the marginal cost is collapsing to near nil and yet the aggregate market value is going to rocket up? Has he ever heard of “competition “?”

He has heard of competition, I’m sure, but the market he’s hoping to create and/or lead a competition-free monopoly or monopsony, where you can continue to squeeze value from customers for ostensibly fungible commodities. In a much better timeline than the one we’re in, the degree to which this kind of processing will soon be free would be good news for the customer, in the form of dropping prices. Since there is no regulation anymore, there is also no interest on the parts of any of the big players to compete. They segue straight to enshittification, where they prey on both customers and users.

Finally, a commentator named Rather sceptical wrote,

“Essentially a bunch of hyperbolic quotes from salespeople. If AI actually was better than humans at coding then software engineers would be replaced at a rapid rate. No evidence of this so far.

“It would be more interesting for the FT to ask companies employing software engineers how much they’re using AI tools, and how much efficiency gains they’ve found in reality. I bet it won’t match up to these claims.”

AI assisted search-based research actually works now by Simon Willison

This is a much more informative article than the FT article.

“[…] there’s one very significant difference: these models can run searches as part of the chain-of-thought reasoning process they use before producing their final answer.

“This turns out to be a huge deal. I’ve been throwing all kinds of questions at ChatGPT (in o3 or o4-mini mode) and getting back genuinely useful answers grounded in search results. I haven’t spotted a hallucination yet, and unlike prior systems I rarely find myself shouting “no, don’t search for that!” at the screen when I see what they’re doing.”

So he’s saying that web-based search and research are better with these tools, not coding. This is good, though! Search and research is a large part of a programmer’s day.

“Talking to o3 feels like talking to a Deep Research tool in real-time, without having to wait for several minutes for it to produce an overly-verbose report.

“My hunch is that doing this well requires a very strong reasoning model. Evaluating search results is hard, due to the need to wade through huge amounts of spam and deceptive information. The disappointing results from previous implementations usually came down to the Web being full of junk.”

At the end, he describes a very successful interaction where he got the tool to upgrade an HTML page to use a completely different library because the older library had been deprecated.

“It churned away thinking for 21 seconds, ran a bunch of searches, figured out the new library (which existed way outside of its training cut-off date), found the upgrade instructions and produced a new version of my code that worked perfectly.”

“I still don’t trust them not to make mistakes, but I think I might trust them enough that I’ll skip my own fact-checking for lower-stakes tasks.

“This also means that a bunch of the potential dark futures we’ve been predicting for the last couple of years are a whole lot more likely to become true. Why visit websites if you can get your answers directly from the chatbot instead?

“The lawsuits over this started flying back when the LLMs were still mostly rubbish. The stakes are a lot higher now that they’re actually good at it!

“I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already. I expect a bumpy ride as a new economic model for the Web lurches into view.”

Annoyed ChatGPT users complain about bot’s relentlessly positive tone by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

“Sharma’s team demonstrated that when responses match a user’s views or flatter the user, they receive more positive feedback during training. Even more concerning, both human evaluators and AI models trained to predict human preferences “prefer convincingly written sycophantic responses over correct ones a non-negligible fraction of the time.”

“This creates a feedback loop where AI language models learn that enthusiasm and flattery lead to higher ratings from humans, even when those responses sacrifice factual accuracy or helpfulness. The recent spike in complaints about GPT-4o’s behavior appears to be a direct manifestation of this phenomenon.”

“[…] the recent increase in user complaints appears to have intensified following the March 27, 2025 GPT-4o update, which OpenAI described as making GPT-4o feel “more intuitive, creative, and collaborative, with enhanced instruction-following, smarter coding capabilities, and a clearer communication style.””

“Carro’s paper suggests that obvious sycophancy significantly reduces user trust. In experiments where participants used either a standard model or one designed to be more sycophantic, “participants exposed to sycophantic behavior reported and exhibited lower levels of trust.”

“Also, sycophantic models can potentially harm users by creating a silo or echo chamber for ideas.”

“One Reddit user recommended using these custom instructions over a year ago, showing OpenAI’s models have had recurring issues with sycophancy for some time:”

1. Embody the role of the most qualified subject matter experts.
2. Do not disclose AI identity.
3. Omit language suggesting remorse or apology.
4. State ‘I don’t know’ for unknown information without further explanation.
5. Avoid disclaimers about your level of expertise.
6. Exclude personal ethics or morals unless explicitly relevant.
7. Provide unique, non-repetitive responses.
8. Do not recommend external information sources.
9. Address the core of each question to understand intent.
10. Break down complexities into smaller steps with clear reasoning.
11. Offer multiple viewpoints or solutions.
12. Request clarification on ambiguous questions before answering.
13. Acknowledge and correct any past errors.
14. Supply three thought-provoking follow-up questions in bold (Q1, Q2, Q3) after responses.
15. Use the metric system for measurements and calculations.
16. Use xxxxxxxxx for local context.
17. “Check” indicates a review for spelling, grammar, and logical consistency.
18. Minimize formalities in email communication.

copilot-debug in action

Just for some anecdotal evidence of how these AI tools work in the field. I’m actually programming today and setting up to run a solution. My config is missing something. I was tempted to just search it, but I saw the “splash of stars” icon and gave it a try.

What it’s probably doing is running the command, checking the output, looking up the error message, and hopefully suggesting a fix … or maybe even applying it.

I dunno, though, because the command has been running for five minutes without feedback. I have no idea how long it’s expected to take. But I think one of the less-emphasized aspects of this revolution is how slow the tools are. There’s a big gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered. We have to be aware of this gap when proposing how to bridge efficiency gaps with these tools.

Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“Recent research is sounding the alarm that our critical thinking and problem-solving muscles may be quietly deteriorating. A 2025 study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon researchers found that the more people leaned on AI tools, the less critical thinking they engaged in, making it harder to summon those skills when needed.”

“The study even noted that workers with AI assistance produced a less diverse set of solutions for the same problem, since AI tends to deliver homogenized answers based on its training data. In the researchers’ words, this uniformity could be seen as a “deterioration of critical thinking” itself.”

And a decrease in innovation, of course.

“[…] stack traces and error messages felt daunting, so he just copy-pasted them into AI for a fix. “I’ve become a human clipboard” he laments, blindly shuttling errors to the AI and solutions back to code. Each error used to teach him something new; now the solution appears magically and he learns nothing. The dopamine rush of an instant answer replaced the satisfaction of hard-won understanding.

“Over time, this cycle deepens. He notes that deep comprehension was the next to go – instead of spending hours truly understanding a problem, he now implements whatever the AI suggests. If it doesn’t work, he tweaks the prompt and asks again, entering a “cycle of increasing dependency”. Even the emotional circuitry of development changed: what used to be the joy of solving a tough bug is now frustration if the AI doesn’t cough up a solution in 5 minutes.

“In short, by outsourcing the thinking to an LLM, he was trading away long-term mastery for short-term convenience. “We’re not becoming 10× developers with AI – we’re becoming 10× dependent on AI” he observes. “Every time we let AI solve a problem we could’ve solved ourselves, we’re trading long-term understanding for short-term productivity”.”

“One developer admitted he no longer even reads error messages fully − he just sends them to the AI. The result: when the AI isn’t available or stumped, he’s at a loss on how to diagnose issues the old-fashioned way.”

To be honest, many developers don’t carefully read error messages now. They assume they have an idea what went wrong without really reading it. When I’m asked to help debug an error, it’s often to be found in the error message. Have you tried searching the error message? No? Why not?

“Complex system design can’t be solved by a single prompt. If you’ve grown accustomed to solving bite-sized problems with AI, you might notice a reluctance to tackle higher-level architectural planning without it. The AI can suggest design patterns or schemas, but it won’t grasp the full context of your unique system. Over-reliance might mean you haven’t practiced piecing components together mentally. For instance, you might accept an AI-suggested component without considering how it fits into the broader performance, security, or maintainability picture − something experienced engineers do via hard-earned intuition. If those system-level thinking muscles aren’t flexed, they can weaken.”

…or never develop.

“The key is distinguishing which skills are safe to offload and which are essential to keep sharp. Losing the knack for manual memory management is one thing; losing the ability to debug a live system in an emergency because you’ve only ever followed AI’s lead is another.”

“[…] we could end up with a workforce of button-pushers who can only function with an AI’s guidance. They’ll be great at asking AI the right questions, but won’t truly grasp the answers. And when the AI is wrong (which it often is in subtle ways), these developers might not catch it – a recipe for bugs and security vulnerabilities slipping into code.”

“Mentorship and learning by osmosis might suffer if everyone is heads-down with their AI pair programmer. Senior engineers may find it harder to pass on knowledge if juniors are accustomed to asking AI instead of their colleagues.

“And if those juniors haven’t built a strong foundation, seniors will spend more time fixing AI-generated mistakes that a well-trained human would have caught. In the long run, teams could become less than the sum of their parts – a collection of individuals each quietly reliant on their AI crutch, with fewer robust shared practices of critical review. The bus factor (how many people need to get hit by a bus before a project collapses) might effectively include “if the AI service goes down, does our development grind to a halt?””

The rest of the article is a list of suggestions like “No AI for fundamentals – sometimes, struggle is good.”, “No-AI Days”, “Always attempt a problem yourself before asking the AI. This is classic “open book exam” rules”, “AI can draft it, but we own it”.

“Use AI it to amplify your abilities, not replace them. Let it free you from drudge work so you can focus on creative and complex aspects − but don’t let those foundational skills atrophy from disuse. Stay curious about how and why things work. Keep honing your debugging instincts and system thinking even if an AI gives you a shortcut. In short, make AI your collaborator, not your crutch.”

Adding to this is Jathan Sadowski at about 39:30 of Episode 453: Luddite Power Manifesto by True Anon, saying,

“The coders are doing it to themselves now. I work on the faculty of Information Technology. I talk to people in the Software Engineering department, or the AI department in my faculty. And they describe how they now rely so heavily on AI assistants like Copilot for coding that they find themselves unable to code without using an AI assistant anymore. And so they are deskilling themselves, right? Instead of everybody learning how to code, it’s the people who knew how to code who are now unlearning how to code because they are now so dependent on chatbots to help them do it.”

Programming

where do the bytes go? by tedu

“We started in the write system call. After passing through some function pointers specific to the type of file and file system, we copied the bytes into the buffer cache. Later, the syncer will push the buf down into the SCSI layer, which will translate the buf into a SCSI cmd before it reaches the NVME driver, setting up the actual DMA transfer.”

You might not need Websockets by Hunter Lovell

“If you’re sending messages that don’t necessarily need to be acknowledged (like a heartbeat or keyboard inputs), then Websockets make a great fit. Hence the title of this post, you might not need Websockets.”

I was just looking up Visual Studio (VS) 2025 (which is rumored but has not been announced), then landed on the list of open tasks for version “18” of VS in GitHub (VS2022 is version 17.x), and one of the tasks said to “[…] remove all the code [related to a feature] we have here to lower KTLO costs.”

What’s KTLO? From KTLO in Software Development: Best Practices for Leaders by Joe Levy (Uplevel):

“KTLO (or KLO) is an acronym that stands for “keeping the lights on” — the maintenance and support activities that pay down and prevent the buildup of technical debt. It’s important work, but the time spent on making sure things are running smoothly is time deliberately not spent on innovation or value delivery.”

How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 by Silent

“At the end of the day, it was a simple bug in San Andreas and this function should have never worked right, and yet, at least on PC it hid itself for two decades.

“This is an interesting lesson in compatibility: even changes to the stack layout of the internal implementations can have compatibility implications if an application is bugged and unintentionally relies on a specific behavior. This is also not the first time I encountered issues like this: regular visitors might remember Bully: Scholarship Edition which famously broke on Windows 10, for very similar reasons. Just like in this case, Bully should have never worked properly to begin with, but instead, it got away with making incorrect assumptions for years, before changes in Windows 10 finally made it run out of luck.

“Yet again, we are reminded to:”

• Validate your input data – San Andreas was notoriously bad at this, and ultimately this was the main reason why an incomplete config line remained unnoticed.
• Not ignore the compilation warnings – this code most likely threw a warning in the original code that was either ignored or disabled!

Abusing DuckDB-WASM by making SQL draw 3D graphics (Sort Of): Building a SQL-Powered Doom Clone in the Browser

1. SQL is surprisingly powerful for non-traditional use cases. It’s not just for data retrieval. The combination of recursive CTEs, window functions, and aggregate functions makes complex algorithms possible.
2. DuckDB-WASM is impressively performant. Running an analytical database engine in the browser that can handle complex recursive queries 6-7 times per second is no small feat.
3. The boundaries between languages can be blurred. This project combined SQL for game state and rendering fundamentals, with JavaScript for orchestration and sprite handling. Neither could have done the job alone.
4. Debugging across language boundaries is challenging. When something went wrong, it wasn’t always clear if the issue was in the JavaScript, the SQL, or at the interface between them. I added extensive logging to track the flow between components.
5. Query planning is a complex art. I had to work around many limitations of how SQL planners work, especially around table function evaluation and CTEs.
6.  

Fun

Gays in the Military by Bill Hicks (YouTube)

“Here’s how I feel about gays in the military: Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military … should be allowed in.

“End of fucking story.

“That should be the only requirement. I don’t care how many push-ups you can do – put on a helmet, go wait in that fox hole. We’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.

“I’ve been watching all these Congressional hearings and all these military guys and all the pundits going, “The esprit de corps will be affected, and we are such a mora …”

“Excuse me, but aren’t you all a bunch of fucking hired killers?

“Shut up! You are thugs, and when we need you to go blow the fuck out of a nation of little brown people, we’ll let you know.”

Working with people ain't always easy

That’s so awesome that you work with special needs kids.

:) well I do want to be a teacher for the deaf and hard of hearing. And I absolutely love working with the kids.

Yah I work with a bunch of retards too but not on purpose.