Links and Notes for May 9th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Trump’s ‘Mineral Rights’ Deal is about Continuing the American War in Ukraine by Rob Urie (CounterPunch)

“The problem for Mr. Trump is that the Russians are less prone to taking US pronouncements at face value than the American public is. Mr. Trump’s ploy to pose the US as a mediator in the war, as opposed to the lead antagonist, retains the fiction begun by the Biden administration that the US is a sympathetic bystander. However, the Russians are working from a different set of facts. Since the start of 2022 (or 1990), Russia’s facts have comported with actual outcomes, whereas American facts haven’t.”

“The utterly predictable images of dead infants and destroyed building in Ukraine, with Donald Trump’s face superimposed over them, will buoy the electoral prospects of any Democrat in 2028 who says that they are willing to preemptively nuke Russia. With history as a guide, count on every Democrat proclaiming that they will preemptively nuke Russia.”

“The administration’s argument, if memory serves, was that they had crossed several Russian nuclear ‘red-lines’ and the Russians hadn’t responded, so they must be bluffing. Now consider Russian Roulette. Every pull of the trigger suggests that the gun is empty until the one where you find yourself standing before your maker wondering what went wrong.”

“Russia recently inked a non-binding, and very lawyerly worded, mutual defense agreement with Iran that could be brought to bear if Iran is attacked by the US and Israel. With Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu having spent much of his life trying to instigate a US war with Iran, the contours of WWIII begin to come into focus.”

“Americans may wish to consider that nothing that they have been told over the last forty years by either the American political class or the establishment press has turned out to be true. Iraq had no WMDs. Russiagate was a calculated fraud perpetrated by MI6 and the CIA to support their war against Russia.”

Force Multiplier by Tanvi Misra (The Baffler)

“[…] it was this Kafkaesque, The Trial moment: Juan Carlos being arrested for no crime by a nebulous U.S. authority, which he has no way of appealing to,” said Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, who was present at the courthouse that day. It was, he added, an “insane ruling by the judge, completely violating this man’s Fourth Amendment rights, surrendering jurisdiction of a U.S. citizen over to ICE.””

“The people they are likely to target are the ones whom they believe don’t belong, based on their skin color, accent, inability to speak English, or some other trait. This has been well-documented by rights groups: the UN’s racial justice experts previously criticized the Biden administration for not discontinuing 287(g) given that it “indirectly promot[es] racial profiling.” If questioned, proving citizenship isn’t always so straightforward. Millions of Americans do not have ready access to documents like a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers for a variety of reasons, and people of color are overrepresented in this group. And, as Lopez-Gomez’s case shows, having those papers in hand may not always serve to immediately alleviate the threat of arrest and detention.”

“That model had fallen out of favor in the first place because of what it looked like in practice—most notoriously, in Maricopa County, Arizona, under Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who focused “on the spectacle of cruelty in a very Trumpy way,” said Lena Graber of ILRC. Arpaio and his team of deputies conducted worksite raids, set up traffic patrols profiling Latinos (for which courts later convicted him), and set up a jail he proudly called a “concentration camp.” He was later held in contempt for defying court orders telling him to stop—though was eventually pardoned by Trump. Arpaio’s egregious execution of 287(g) ultimately cost millions of taxpayer dollars in legal fines and penalties.”

“Some of Arizona’s sheriffs do not seem keen to repeat the risks that come with going down the Arpaio route, and state level legislation to increase collaboration was vetoed by Governor Katie Hobbs. But that makes them something of an outlier in the South: the Texas Senate just advanced a bill to mandate 287(g) for counties with over one hundred thousand residents, and Georgia passed a similar state law last year. Florida’s Highway Patrol was the first agency in the nation to implement the task force model this year.”

“The ardent support of state and local police in Florida makes Trump’s mass deportation fantasies much more likely to be realized. It also boosts the propensity for collateral damage—not just because U.S. citizens will be arrested, but because of the processes and precedent these arrests will consolidate. “We have a crisis of due process in this country where we have [an attitude of]: ‘enforce first and ask questions later,’ and ‘detain and deport first,’ and ‘ignore the contrary evidence that’s in your face,’” said Graber. “That is so damaging to our civil rights and our democracy at large.””

It’s worse. A lawless country is dancing its way toward ethnic cleansing and an Israeli-style ethnostate.

The War On Words by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“[…] the American Department of War became the Department of Defense in 1949. Because the world belonged to them now, and the only offense was resistance. As that bitch Winston Churchill said, “the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” It came as he foretold, though of course his idea of liberation was subjugation for everyone else in the world. That’s how it unfolded.”

“America took up the white supremacists burden after World War II, assimilating Nazis into NATO and nuking entire cities to put the fear of Great Satan into the USSR. Finishing Hitler’s world war against communists was branded the ‘Cold War’”

“It was all the perfect war crime. A White Empire that didn’t exist, waging wars that never happened.”

“The truth is that since World War II never ended we have lived through an endless American war against the world which isn’t even called cold anymore”

“The old and dying empire is literally trying to kill the future in Palestine, by killing so many children. But as Vladimir Putin said, referring to the historical White Empire,”

“They are used to, for centuries, stuffing their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they need to understand that their vampire’s ball is coming to an end.”

America Has Declared A Global Strike Against America by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The cruelty is the point, they want the world to know. School is out. Migrant disappearances, torture, and abuse have always been happening (this is America), but now it’s happening to educated people who thought they were a class above. Now they’re discovering that they were second class all along, and that class is out.”

“America is trying to pivot to China with one foot stuck in the sand and the other in the swamp. They’re running out of ammo and their soft power is all gone. It’s still going to take millions of lives to finish the evil empire off (if they don’t go nuclear), but they’ve already blown their own head off. American leadership has been braindead for years. Trump just finished the job.”

“America was ruled by Ronald Reagan for an entire generation, real Reagan followed by nerd Reagan, cool Reagan, dumb Reagan, and black Reagan. These Reagans deindustrialized America, Biden began demilitarizing it, and Trump is defenestrating it from the fake-ass global economy it built, and the moral reputation it falsely built up. They say when one door closes another one opens, but America has closed all the doors and is sitting alone in the garage with the engine on.”

America Can’t Beat China. They Should Join Them by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“As the world develops and society advances, failure to reform and open up would lead us to a dead end. Similarly, carrying out reform and opening up in a way against a socialist orientation would also lead us to a dead end. We must, therefore, remain keenly aware of the direction in which we are heading, namely to keep improving and developing socialism, not to set out on a different path.”

“China did not try to ‘beat’ America, which is a uniquely western perception, fearful as they are of their own colonial shadow. The greatest western fear is the golden rule being applied to them, that others would do unto them as they have done. Western propaganda is really projection, what if they were like us, genociding, invading, debt-trapping, and dropping nukes on people? Everything bad they say about China is really a reflection. Every accusation is a confession. But that’s not China. China is China, which needs to be understood on its own terms, in its own words.

“For the past 40 years, China has literally minded its own business while America has been mindfucking their own population and literally bombing. The CPC set ambitious goals for themselves and strived without tearing others down.”

“[…] western propaganda is directed at its own populations, to make them tolerate their hated governments by hating someone else more. But China is actually chill, as Speed has shown by just walking around. Socialism has comprehensively proved that it’s a better governance and production system, while capitalism is comprehensively fucking itself.”

“American media almost never lets China speak for itself, instead employing a class of professionally wrong people to explain something they don’t understand and are not even curious about.”

“I don’t expect anything from America. As Goldfinger told James Bond, No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” There is no point talking to people that don’t listen, especially while they’re killing children. There is no point reasoning with Donald Trump, or even the Democrats, who follow the same line with more hypocrisy and hyperbole.”

“The hard historical fact is that America is a colony while China is a civilization, and America cannot become civilized no matter how hard they try. And they’re really not trying at all. America would rather go down the way they came up, in a flurry of barbarity, brutalizing the native people of Palestine, slandering heroes like Hamas and Yemen’s Ansarallah, and spreading lies about the true leader of the free world, China, which leads by example rather than coercion.”

“To learn one must have a basic level of respect for the teacher, and Americans simply cannot yet understand this. They cannot understand that China is not their enemy and that even if they were, that there is no greater teacher than the enemy (as Mazer Rackham said). As Tony Soprano said, those that want respect, give respect, and America gives and increasingly gets none.”

“This is just who they are and they don’t care who knows it. This is who they always were, because hindsight is 20/20. All the debates are dead and all the death speaks for itself. All that’s left is the killing and a chilling silence. Even from my own mouth. What’s left to say? They bomb hospitals now. They always did.”

“Witnesses are disappeared off the streets or abducted from airports. We’re in the complete denial phase now. This never happened, even as it happens worse than ever. If the cognitive dissonance rings too loudly in your head and you dare open your mouth, they’ll disappear and deport you. That’s just where we are now. It’s the final solution, and STFU about it. There’s more debate within ‘Israel’ than in the occupied imperial core, where they’re more worried about the cost of their iPhones than what they see on them. As the Colosseum crumbles, who cares who’s being fed to the lions? People are more worried about keeping their cheap seats and cheap concessions.”

“‘Israel’s’ style of public relations is to deny that their attacks happened, to blame the attacked for killing themselves, then saying they deserved to die, then say someone behind them deserved to die, then say just ‘oops’, then blame other countries, then finally call their critics antisemites.”

“[…] as the saying goes, a liberal supports every liberation movement except the current one, every civil rights movement but the one happening right now. America, Australia, Canada, the UK, France, Germany; it’s all one White Empire to us underneath and they can all go to hell in the same handbasket.”

“[…] the executioners at the end of history are increasingly tired and lazy, and don’t even bother with the cover-up. They just openly bomb hospitals now, and don’t care who knows about it.”

The Art Of Trade War by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“We consider Confucius (Master Kong) ancient (-500), but he himself was harking back to Emperor Shun from 1,700 years before him. As The Analects (15.5) records, “The Master said, “Is Shun not an example of someone who ruled by means of wu-wei? What did he do? He made himself reverent and took his proper [ritual] position facing south, that is all.”” This one of the more confusing axioms of Confucius because it actually expands your mind the most. As the footnotes to the Hackett edition note, “This idea of “ruling by not ruling”—concentrating on self-cultivation and inner Virtue and allowing external things to come naturally and noncoercively—has been a constant theme throughout the Analects.” This has also been a constant ideal throughout Chinese history though, like wu-wei, rarely grasped and only briefly held.”

“Master Sun said, “winning a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the best possible outcome. Best is to subdue the enemy’s troops without ever engaging them on the battlefield.” Like Confucius, a true warlord would look like they’re doing nothing, because everything had already been done.”

“You have to take time in the past to relax in the future.”

“Master Sun said, “A victory that does not surpass the understanding of the vulgar crowd is not the best sort of victory. Nor is the finest way to win a battle one that the whole realm applauds.” As they continued, “He who excels in battle doesn’t have a name for cleverness, nor does he garner accolades for his courage. He never errs in winning battles, because he places his men where they are bound to win, and he conquers those who are already lost.””

“I’m not saying that anyone in China is consulting these intro level books, these are common-sense insights, at least in China. Plan ahead, prepare, any parent worth their salt teaches this, you don’t necessarily need great sages. I am saying that China is dealing small-minded people who have only now picked on someone their own size and are having a literal crash course in world history. The great advantage of Chinese central planning is basically just having a fucking plan, which is somehow witchcraft to pantser Americans.
‘What is this sorcery?’ they say, ‘someone thinking more than a tweet ahead?’ This should not be news after getting bested by everyone from Vietnam to the Taliban, but a coward dies a thousand times before their death.”

“This hard, painstaking work across multiple continents and millions of stakeholders was the ‘temple calculations’ made long before trade war broke out. China’s ruler had already taken a ritual position facing (Global) South. This is why it appears that Xi is doing nothing now, because the hard work of preparation has already been done. And you can see what happened. China went from trading the most with the Global North (White Empire I call it) to trading the most with the Global South.”

“Most of the world’s population is in most of the world and that’s where most the wealth was too, until Europeans looted it. The imperialists are lucky that the world doesn’t want revenge or restitution, just to move on without things going nuclear. America (as heirs to the White Empire) could have had a privileged place in a multipolar world for another century, but they seem determined to piss it away this decade.”

“Americans ended up buying the same stuff through third parties like Mexico and ASEAN, at a markup. This is similar to what happened to Russian oil, which suddenly began being sold to dumbass Europeans as if Indians struck a geyser.”

“It’s like the joke about Australia protecting its trade routes (with China) from China. China has never threatened America and looks for win-win trade with everybody, even people that don’t deserve it. If I spend millions ‘de-ghosting’ my house that doesn’t make ghosts real, it just makes me a moron.”

“They said, “In view of the fact that under the current tariff level, there is no possibility for the US to export goods to China, if the United States continues to impose tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States, China will ignore it.” In another statement they said, “Even if the United States continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer have economic significance and will become a joke in the history of the world economy.””

“America had to delay its heaviest tariffs for 90 days and exempt most electronics trade with China, ie most of the value. Meanwhile China has not blinked on its reciprocal tariffs and has effectively blocked rare-earths exports to America entirely. America is now in a position where it can only import finished electronics from China, and anyone trying to manufacture them at home is fucked. If you try to import a computer from China that’s fine, but if you try to import the parts and assemble your own, you get tariffed. This does not bring manufacturing home, instead it’s like man, you fucked.”

“China has won a war they never wanted but prepared for, while America has started a war they’re not ready for at all.”

“Thus bullshit artist meets the people who wrote The Art Of War, and is confused to death by Confucian wu-wei with Marxist characteristics. While it may look like China is doing nothing, they have taken an infrastructural position facing south,”

Trump Doesn’t Want To Deport, He Wants To Deter by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“When you watch plainclothes agents abducting Runeysa Ozturk (from Tufts) in broad daylight, you are not watching some brave expose, this is an advertising campaign, a flash mob intended to go viral. The viral fear does the work a thousand agents could not, other people self-censor, self-deport, and stay home. When ICE agents abducted Merwil Gutiérrez, knowing he was the ‘wrong’ guy but saying “Take him anyway,” this was not some fuck up. The cruelty is the point and the casual nature of it is the sword. This can’t happen to everybody, but it could happen to anybody. So the people police themselves, in a way ten thousand police could not.”

“Liberals act like there’s no precedent for this President, when Trump is just the office shorn of hypocrisy. As Hannah Arendt said (herself a racist, but nevermind), Trump just expresses the “growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions—which were actually the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy.””

“What Trump doesn’t get in his haste is that the ‘immigration problem’ is not supposed to be resolved. It’s supposed to be a perennial problem, enabling them suck in seasonal labor. People without rights for people with property rights, that’s what the capitalist overlords want. There’s no wage theft from illegal people, it’s a victimless crime, ie pure profit. Anti-migrant hatred is encouraged by American elites to keep their costs down, it’s an advertising campaign, not meant to be taken to its logical conclusion.”

“Note that the US companies who thrive off this enslaveable labor are not punished at all. Yet that would be the easiest place for a government to start. ICE agents (many of them Hispanic) don’t need to walk the hot border, they could just walk into a few air-conditioned board rooms and check the books. But they don’t do that, because that would actually interfere with white power.”

“Americans don’t get that they wouldn’t get people fleeing into their country if they weren’t shooting other countries up. It’s all a show at their expense (also), and increasingly a charade.”

What If They’re Just Stupid? by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“[…] try to intelligently analyze White Empire as best I can, but something irks me. What if there is no plan? What if they’re just stupid? What if the simplest answer is that they’re just simpletons? What if they’re just cutting coke with Occam’s Razor, and licking the blade with wild abandon? At this time, a Great Man Theory (GMT) of history won’t do, we need a Great Idiot Theory (GIT).”

“Trump is the heir to an inheritance that’s already been spent. He’s the hair combed over a baldness that’s already apparent. He’s the last furious attempt to simply eat the palimpsest of history before it’s overwritten by present rebellions. White Empire was always evil but only now does it appear stupid, as it’s ending. Evil is just stupid in the long run and this is the long run. As Frank Sinatra sang, send in the clowns, don’t bother, they’re here.”

Talk Is Cheap: Trump Can’t Negotiate Because No One Believes Him by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Iran are also serious people. They have serious missiles that can incinerate America’s Persian Gulf bases without nukes, by the American military’s own admission. America is trying to run their Path To Persia war plan from 2009, which is just nuking the old WMD lie in the media microwave and hope nobody notices. Since we first saw WMD I ago, Iran has advanced everything but the nuke, and proved it in True Promise I, II, and III. Even what passes for serious minds within the Pentagon know that war with Iran would mean losing oil, bases, and just losing, as much as ‘Israel’ tries to mind control them.”

“Iran is ready to defend itself, whatever the cost, and simply do not accept Trump as boss of anything except pulling Netanyahu’s chair out. Ayatollah Khamenei is an old hand and knows that the Americans are not to be trusted, leaving nothing but broken treaties behind them.”

“The great innovation of America as head of White Empire is figuring out that there’s more money in losing wars than winning them. As Vladimir Putin said, “For centuries they have nurtured a habit of feasting on flesh and filling their pockets with money. But they must realize that the ‘vampire’s ball’ has come to an end.””

“The common wisdom is never start a land war in Asia, and America has started three.”

“I can travel to China, Russia, and Iran freely, but would be arrested in America (I’m a big Hamas supporter). Just note that supporting the resistance against genocide is banned in the West, whereas the group is not proscribed in most of the world. That’s free speech for you, on the most important subject that matters.”

Everybody Doesn’t Want To Rule The World by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“[…] these are philosopher kings compared to the sound-bite simpletons that pass for western leaders. Westerners talk about free speech, but these ‘autocratic’ leaders have given their people the most basic condition for free speech, which is freedom from western domination. Westerners are so narcissistic that they only want to see mirrors, and are deeply confused and angered when they see other faces, saying other things. They want to smash such things, and call the wreckage Freedom™.”

“Now that great power conflict has resumed, however, America discovers that they’re not a great power anymore. Their proxy army is beaten by Russia, their paltry navy is beaten by Yemen, their pussy air force is only good for bombing children from afar, and their pathetic economy is beaten by China.”

The Two Contradictions Of Nacism by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“But why improve ideologically, if all other ideologies are disproven? Why progress historically if history is over? Why hedge your bets at all if you’re hegemon? This is how the end of history became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The capitalist hare fell asleep thinking no way the commie tortoise could outrun them, and now it’s too late. All they can do is cry foul and blame the judges for a race they set and just slept through of their own accord.”

“The Nacis second contradiction is that they need direct government intervention to beat the commies, but they can’t because that would make them commies. America has made the very idea of governance seem communist and a bit gay, which makes them ungovernable. All the US government can do is give money away to rich people and hope that some invisible hand compels them to do something useful, which it doesn’t,”

“Even Naci dicktators can’t do much directly, just raise tariffs on a spreadsheet. They can’t even control interest rates cause that’s run by a private banking cartel (the Fed is not, in fact, federal). America has been dismantling the very idea of government for decades and now they get what they wished for. The place is ungovernable and the people are helpless.”

“The Catch-22 of the book was that you had to stop flying bombing runs if you were crazy, but if you wanted to stop those suicidal raids you were obviously not crazy and had to do it. Catechism-22 is that America has to do government programs to beat the commies, but if they want to do government programs they are commies and have to beat themselves up over it.”

“The National Capitalists could learn something from their mortal enemy, communism, but that would make them fucking commies, so they’d rather die stupid. The Nacis could learn from history, but they already declared an end to it, and cannot open a book they’ve already burned. All they can do is unload high-powered weaponry on children in a vain attempt to kill the future but the future, inshallah, comes. Nacism cannot resolve contradictions it doesn’t admit with tools it will not use.”

Trump’s Shocking Moves Echo Past Presidents by Ted Rall

“During the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, which included many college students, Bill Clinton’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (the predecessor of ICE) detained and initiated deportation proceedings against students from Canada and Europe who were arrested for opposing free trade agreements. Under Reagan, the INS moved to deport African students who participated in rallies urging colleges to pull investments out of apartheid-era South Africa. Nixon’s FBI and INS worked to revoke the visas of students who protested the Vietnam War, particularly those from Canada and Latin America. George W. Bush conducted “extraordinary renditions,” including off U.S. streets, where individuals like Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, were detained without charge and sent to third countries for interrogation that included torture, under the guise of national security.”

“[…] the real Deporters in Chief were Bill Clinton, who “removed” 11.4 million undocumented workers from the U.S., and George W. Bush, with 8.3 million. The Bush Administration kidnapped “enemy combatants” without due process and shipped them the U.S. concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay.Detainees from countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and others were held in a third country (Cuba) without being returned to their home nations. Some were later transferred to fourth countries like Albania or Qatar for resettlement or further detention.”

“Through his National Performance Review (later renamed “Reinventing Government”), Clinton eliminated 377,000 federal jobs—17% of the total workforce. He got rid of about 100 programs and consolidated 800 agencies. Not unlike Musk’s “fork in the road” mass email offers, Clinton offered buyouts up to $25,000 to about federal 100,000 workers. Reagan, Carter and Nixon each fired tens of thousands of federal workers. Like Trump, Reagan called for the elimination of the Department of Education; probably like Trump, he failed.”

I ‘Stood My Ground’ — but It Was the Police Raiding My House by Maurice Chammah (The Marshall Project )

“The State Attorney Office for the Fourth Judicial Circuit sent a statement summarizing the decision to forgo prosecution. The raid was legal, prosecutors said, and Ford and Anthony Gantt may have known about past drug sales at the residence. But the subsequent arrests of officers raised questions about the police work that led to the raid, and would make it difficult to prevail in a trial. “But for these arrests, the prosecution would have continued,” spokesperson David Chapman wrote in an email.”

It’s so infuriating: Everyone just assumes it’s OK to sneak unannounced into someone’s home. That country is 100% broken.

Germany in Crisis Part 4: Wanderers and Seekers by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Merz, pouncing immediately after the much-watched elections in February, has already made the nation’s future direction clear. The date we need to think about is not May 6. It is March 18, when a vote in the Bundestag confirmed what was by then bitterly evident: Germany’s postwar democracy is failing; a sequestered elite in Berlin now proposes to set the nation’s course irrespective of voters’ preferences.”

“The nation’s neoliberal “centrists” — who now declare themselves very other than the center of anything — have just told Germans, Europeans, and the rest of the world that Germany will now drop the Social Democratic standard the nation has long held high in the service of a wartime economy.”

“In my read, those purporting to lead Germany have so thoroughly and for so long suffused public space with the tropes of Cold War paranoia that they can no longer change direction without discrediting themselves. They have, as the saying goes, no reverse gear. Or to reference the observation of a friend I quoted in the previous piece in this series, the entrenched German leadership has been speaking the language of the victor so long it knows no other — this even as the victor grows tired of speaking it.”

“As many German economists will tell you, there is no reconciling Russophobia and the sanctions regime that accompanies it with any kind of economic recovery.”

“The thought that the now-undeniable prominence of a rightist party signals some kind of Nazi revival in Germany is beyond preposterous. You can read all about this in The New York Times and other Western media, but you cannot find it while walking around in Germany.”

“AfD was founded a dozen years ago by Euroskeptics opposed to the anti-democratic intrusions of Brussels technocrats and to a runaway influx of immigrants. It is “nationalist” insofar as it favors German sovereignty and “pro–Russian” insofar as it considers the breach of interdependent relations with the Russian Federation ruinous. As the party gained adherents it attracted various far-right elements — this cannot be disputed — but these are best understood as the fringe of a once-fringe party.”

“Germany’s domestic intelligence service on Friday, May 2, officially classified AfD as “far right extremist”—a first step to banning it altogether. Let’s take just a sec to get this straight. German citizens are to be protected from a party that enjoys more support among them than any other? How ridiculous is the Merz clique going to get? The neoliberal authoritarians who control Berlin are now down to erecting barricades to keep out the hordes commonly known as voters.”

“The stone buildings that survived the infamous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 are charred black, giving the city the look of an eternal memorial to the 25,000 lives lost over those two dreadful nights.”

“My companion pointed to one that, with no picturesque image, was simply some lines inscribed in Fraktur, the old German script. “You had better let me translate this for you,” my companion said. She wore an amused smile as she spoke. And then her impromptu translation: “It is not enough to have no ideas. You must also be incapable of executing any.””

“This is how the people of the old East Germany address the people of the old West Germany. They speak with irony and disdain — piercing sarcasm and bitter humor an habitual resort. You hear in them what I came to read in the phrases rendered in Fraktur: You hear reproach, you hear refusal, you hear an independent intelligence, you hear truths you do not hear elsewhere.”

“[…] they developed an abiding distrust of authority during the GDR years. But a paradox here: It was in their resistance to the East German state that East German people preserved who they were, what it was that made them German. And it is this distrust and resistance that informs their views and attitudes today toward Berlin and the west of Germany — their disdain, their refusals. More than one easterner told me they view the centrist regime in Berlin as another dictatorship.”

Ukraine’s battlefield position is deteriorating fast by Alex Vershinin (Responsible Statecraft)

“Russian political and military leadership appears to have grasped the attritional nature of the conflict and the importance of preserving resources. They have gone out of their way to preserve their combat capabilities and on three occasions in 2022—at Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson—gave up land to save soldiers. These defeats were public relations nightmares, but they preserved experienced soldiers, who were used to form the core of the new army.”

“Russian forces are suffering 7,200 permanent losses and 10,800 RTD per month. At the same time, Russians are recruiting 30,000 volunteers a month, plus the wounded who have recovered. This translates into growth of 24,000 soldiers every month, including RTD. Even if Russian losses are double what Mediazona was able to count, the Russian army is still expanding.”

“Russia has three times the population of Ukraine, and in the case of artillery ammunition, it vastly outproduces not only Ukraine, but the entire West by a ratio of three to one.”

“The chart below averages out the percent of prewar population lost by locality and then compares it to the total population of Ukraine. The final estimate is about 769,000 dead, and based on historical data, likely another 769,000 wounded who will never recover enough to go back to the front.”

“As older formations lost their experienced personnel and combat effectiveness, new formations took extra casualties before they could gain enough experience to be useful. Ukrainians are seeking to change this, but it may be too late. The. experienced soldiers are replaced by men captured on the streets, who have no desire to fight. Last year, 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers deserted. The newly formed 155th Brigade lost over 1,700 of 6,000 men to desertion before it reached the front line.”

“The Russians are in the opposite situation. Russian advantages in manpower and equipment are growing. Russia is fielding an equivalent of two new divisions a month. Battlefield conditions and growing combat power mean that they are unlikely to accept any ceasefire until final peace terms are agreed, something they have already made clear. They are also likely to stretch out the negotiation process to improve their battlefield position. Time is on their side, and unless peace can be agreed to now, they are on a path to victory which could have devastating political and economic consequences for the rest of Europe.”

It doesn’t have mean this, of course, but Europe won’t have it any other way.

“I don’t know”: Trump rejects due process, Constitution in NBC interview by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

“Trump’s open repudiation of the Supreme Court, the US Constitution and its core protections is not merely the ranting of an increasingly unhinged reactionary. It is the bluntest expression of the political outlook of the American ruling class. As the World Socialist Web Site has previously explained, Trump’s election marks “the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States.””

“[…] a society in which the 19 wealthiest families in the United States control $2.6 trillion, while hospitals and school programs that serve tens of thousands of workers and their families are shut down.”

“The budget calls for sweeping cuts to science, health, education and other vital social programs. It includes a proposed $35 billion reduction to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with $27 billion slashed from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—gutting disease research—and an additional $4 billion in cuts targeting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

“Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by more than 50 percent, cutting it from $9.1 billion to $4.2 billion—$500 million less than its 1980 funding level. The cuts include $254 million from the Superfund program for toxic waste cleanup and $235 million from the Office of Research and Development, which investigates the environmental impact of hazardous chemicals.”

“As part of the administration’s broader effort to eliminate the Department of Education (ED), the proposal includes $12 billion in cuts—primarily targeting Title I funding that supports low-income students.”

AfD-Verbotsdebatte: Man muss die Ursachen und nicht die Symptome bekämpfen by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die Stärke der AfD ist ein Symptom für die Unzufriedenheit. Sie ist aber nicht deren Ursache. Selbst wenn man die AfD in letzter Konsequenz verbieten würde, wäre diese Unzufriedenheit nicht weg. Ganz im Gegenteil.”

“Die Wähler sind diesen Weg „in die Mitte“ nicht mitgegangen. Doch anstatt sie überzeugen oder zumindest auf sie zuzugehen, grenzte man sie lieber aus. Je größer die Widersprüche wurden, desto schärfer wurde die Ausgrenzung. Nicht mehr links oder rechts, sondern richtig oder falsch, gut oder böse waren nun die Kategorien. Die Spaltung der Gesellschaft kam nicht von unten, sondern wurde von oben – von Politik und Medien – befördert und forciert.”

“Und was meinen Sie, passiert, wenn der Mainstream der Mitte nun die AfD verbieten will? Denkt irgendwer ernsthaft, dass die Nonkonformisten dann zu Konformisten mutieren, brav Markus Lanz schauen, den SPIEGEL abonnieren, ihr Kreuzchen bei einer der „guten“ Parteien machen, ihren Diesel verschrotten, sich in Flüchtlingshilfeprogrammen engagieren und den Kulturkampf verloren geben? Pustekuchen!”

“Entweder wir vereinen die Menschen und bilden das gesamte gesellschaftliche Spektrum wieder in der politischen Debatte und in der realen Politik ab und kitten die Gräben. Das wären übrigens genau die Entwicklungen, mit denen man die AfD sehr erfolgreich kleinkriegen würde. Oder wir treiben die Spaltung der Gesellschaft durch immer enger gesetzte Leitplanken des Erlaubten, weitere Ausgrenzungen und Dämonisierungen, Parteiverbote und einer Zuspitzung des Kulturkampfes voran. Ersteres nennt sich Demokratie, Letzteres Autoritarismus.”

How Hamas Sees the Current Moment: An Exclusive Interview With Osama Hamdan by Jeremy Scahill (Drop Site News)

“Hamdan said that Palestinians have both a moral obligation and a legal mandate under international law to employ armed resistance to fight an Israeli occupation that has been repeatedly ruled illegal in international courts and is condemned as a system of apartheid by the world’s leading human rights organizations. “You can’t talk about de-weaponizing the nation who is under occupation, while they are occupied by the most powerful army in the region,” he said. “Hamas did not invent the resistance for Palestine. In fact, the Palestinians resisted the British occupation and, since then, the Israeli occupation for decades.”

“Hamdan addressed the Palestinian Authority’s collaboration with Israel in its ongoing assault on the occupied West Bank. He cited the example of the Jenin refugee camp, where Palestinian Authority security forces imposed a siege for 40 days, dismantled resistance cells and seized weapons, clearing the way for an Israeli invasion that lead to the destruction of over 600 homes. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in the West Bank since January, the largest displacement there since 1967.”

““I think we will turn the world to a kind of, not a jungle, maybe worse than a jungle, because even in the jungle, the animals, they kill to eat but they don’t kill more than this. But when you commit a genocide, it’s really a disaster which cannot be explained by words or by saying, ‘Sorry, I have done this and I will not do it again.’””

““We’ve said clearly, we are a people under occupation. We are not fighting just because we like to fight or it’s a good idea to fight others. We are not fighting the Israelis because, for example, they are Jewish people. We don’t have a problem with the Jewish people,” he said. “Even if a Muslim came to occupy my land, I will fight him. It is not related to the religion. It is related to being an occupier or not an occupier.””

Pope Francis was a Fraud, and the Vatican is Still a Cesspool by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Even by Vatican standards Francis was a master showman, posing as a humble ascete while operating a parochial empire spangled by more pilfered jewels than a Liberace theme park. I hate to admit it, but the bastard almost had me going for a minute there too with his whole Yoda in charge of the Death Star routine, and I’m a genderqueer anarchist who was molested by two priests before I was old enough to spell my own name correctly.”

“Pope Francis was more of a kind of spiritual custodian put in place to mop up the mess of a blasphemous temple drowning in the cesspool of its own sins. Think of him as a kind of Catholic Obama, sent to polish the image of a toxic brand while doing everything in his power to strengthen its lethal capabilities.”

“Back in 2013, the Church’s involvement in a massive conspiracy to protect the sexual predators deeply imbedded among its ranks just kept expanding with every filthy new detail that seeped from the cracks of the Vatican walls. The then current Pope Benedict’s role as John Paul’s point man at the top of the cover-up had just recently been exposed, as had his involvement in protecting pedophiles closer to the bottom during his tour as Archbishop of Munich.”

“When an investigation in France revealed that an estimated 330,000 children had been systematically abused by over 3,000 priests over a period of 70 years, Pope Francis apologized. When a grand jury exposed a similar conspiracy across six dioceses in my home state of Pennsylvania, Pope Francis apologized. When a trip to Ireland, home to nearly 15,000 victims, not to mention a veritable gulag archipelago of despotic orphanages, industrial schools, and laundries, nearly resulted in a riot, you better fucking believe that Francis apologized.”

“It took them six years just to reconvene for the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church in 2019 and the only real concrete measure to come out of this much vaunted shindig was a single decree ordering all priests and nuns to report abuse and cover-ups to Church authorities with zero orders to report them to anyone outside of the Church. That’s it. Nothing else. An order to report abuse back to a leadership that has already been publicly exposed to be guilty of engaging in it. In what universe is this an acceptable response to the largest child sex ring in recorded history?”

“The Pope even imparted the final blessing at this creep’s funeral in St. Peter’s Basilica in 2023, just six years after Australia’s Royal Commission released a report proving that men like Pell presided over at least 4,444 incidents of child sex abuse between 1950 and 2010. I use the word “proving” because every single act was reported to church authorities and zero action was taken.”

“At a certain point, we have to burn the church to save the cross. A thousand years of this shit is long enough. We must do as Jesus did and turn over the tables in the temple of emptiness, and that includes the ones occupied by corpses like Francis.”

Trumpland by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Media outlets prioritize access to the powerful more than truth. They amplified lies and propaganda to propel us into a war on Iraq. They lionized Wall Street and assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Life savings were gutted. They fed us the lies of Russiagate. They slavishly cater to the Israel lobby, distorting coverage of the genocide and university protests to demonize Palestinians, Muslims and student protestors. They dance to the tune of their corporate advertisers and sponsors.”

“A little more than 10 percent of faculty positions are now tenure-track. Nearly 45 percent are contingent part-time employees or adjuncts. One in five are full-time, non-tenure-track positions. Universities, by radically reducing tenure-track and adequately paid positions, have become extensions of the gig economy. Adjunct professors and graduate workers are often forced to apply for Medicaid, take second jobs teaching at other colleges, driving for Uber or Lyft, working as cashiers, delivering food for Grubhub or DoorDash, walking dogs, house sitting, waiting on tables, bartending and living four or six to an apartment or camping out on a friend’s sofa.”

“This instability assures wealthy donors that the neoliberal ideology that is ravaging the country, along with enabling the genocide in Gaza, will not be questioned by academics fearful of losing their positions. The rich and the powerful are lauded. The working poor, including those employed by the university, are forgotten.”

“Trump’s vipers are snuffing out what is left of our open society, putting the finishing touches on the dirty work begun by billionaires and corporations. This is the end of a process. Not the start. Trump had a lot of help.

“There is a word for those who did this to us.

“Traitors.”

Military Industrial Simple by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indi.ca)

“A white-collar bust-out describes the military industrial complex from the imperial perspective. It’s the art of the steal, looting the imperial treasury by losing imperial wars. They don’t want the Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Ukrainian governments to succeed, they just want them to bleed (money) then move onto the next hypocrisy. It’s ultimately the good faith and credit of the US Republic that’s being busted out, used to fund a war machine that doesn’t work except for laundering money back into the Beltway Mafia.”

They’re parasites, killing the host.

“A bust-out works where the mafia takes control of your restaurant (say), runs up bills on the joints credit, steals or sells goods out the back, and never pays the debt back. When it all goes to shit, they burn the place down for the insurance money, or just leave. This is broadly what private-equity (La Cosa Nostra for less spicy whites) has done to the US as a whole, ever since Ike warned about the military industrial complex. They took control of the American Republic after World War II, ran up forever war bills on the joint’s credit, overcharge or just steal money out the unauditable Pentagon, and never pay the mounting debt back. Now it’s all going shit and they’re burning the place down, dumping and pumping the entire US economy in a last orgy of insider trading.”

“America acts so troubled by the problems in the world, but that’s like a soap company acting troubled by dirt. It’s just advertising, and CNN and BBC get their cut of the blood money accordingly. America is the world’s biggest arms dealer and they create the world’s biggest problems and embiggen them through privatized propaganda. They create both supply and demand, forming a vicious circle that drives their business cycle.”

This is an excellent argumentative lever, of which I should be availing myself most often. It is undisputed that the U.S. has the biggest military in the world, by at least an order of magnitude. It is similarly undisputed that the U.S. is the world biggest arms dealer, almost by the same margin. It is also the source of the world’s propaganda, marketing, and cultural influence. How in God’s name do people think that these are not all working hand-in-hand? Of course, the U.S.‘s immense propaganda organization is being used to convince the world that it needs the weapons that the U.S. creates. What else could it possibly be for? This is a country that has been run like a business for at least a century, if not longer. It is doing what seemingly every large capitalist organization does: rather than considering in any way whether what it has to offer is of any value, it instead uses the influence the lucre it has accumulated from its antisocial behavior to convince unwilling customers to continue buying that which it has to offer, in an endless cycle of violence and futility. It truly is captured by the creeds expressed in Goodfellas and The Sopranos. The 2022 book The Withdrawal by Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad describes the exact same mechanism.

“It’s also much better if your solutions don’t actually work. The bombs just need to look like they work, so the suckers keep buying more. Thus America creates more terrorism everywhere they go to ‘eliminate terrorism’ (like in AFRICOM). Why the fuck would they want to eliminate terrorism? This would be like Dove eliminating dirt. They’re homicidal, not suicidal.

“America loses repeatedly to nouns (terrorism, drugs, poverty) because they’re ultimately about numbers, everything else is just marketing. There is no sincerity in the American news any more than during the commercials. They are no more sincere about human rights and democracy than Coke is sincere about you having a good time with your friends.”

A devastatingly good description.

“The military industrial complex never had to work (as mentioned, it’s better if it doesn’t) but it had to appear to work, and now appearances are no longer deceiving. The White Empire (NATO, all those bitches) has lost a huge land battle to Russia, a huge naval battle to Yemen, and no longer has air superiority over its most superior colony, ‘Israel’.

“Whereas it took America decades to lose in Vietnam and Afghanistan, they’re losing in years to Russia and Iran, far too little time to run the scam. Now it actually looks like a scam and, worst of all, they’re expending too many munitions to even resupply them. The thing with a bust-out is that you actually cannibalize the business, which is what America has done to the military industrial complex. Whereas they used to actually manufacture shells and ships, now they barely manufacture shit. They got fat on 10 year contracts delivering million dollar missiles that don’t work and are stuck when facing skinny Yemen in a hot war.”

“All that’s left is the dénouement of every bust-out. As Henry Hill said, “and then finally, when there’s nothing left, and when you can’t borrow another buck from the bank [coming] or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match.” And thus finally, from this perspective, Trump is not some aberration. He is the historical arsonist, arriving right on schedule.”

Trump Halts Bombing of Yemen, Reportedly Under Saudi Pressure, and to Dismay of Israel by Juan Cole (Scheer Post)

“Both the Biden administration and the Trump administration have bombed Yemen in reaction to the Houthi targeting of Red Sea shipping and attacks on Israel in sympathy with the people of Gaza, against whom Israel has conducted serial atrocities. Trump alone has ordered 800 bombing raids on the desperately poor country. Yemen is the only Arab country to have reacted against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Its methods, however, have involved war crimes, since it has attacked civilian container ships, most of them not actually connected to Israel, and has attacked civilian targets in Israel — or has been unable to control its missiles, endangering civilian life — which is a war crime.”

Time For All Anti-Imperialists And Justice Loving People To Defend Burkina Faso (Scheer Post / Black Agenda Report)

“The U.S./EU/NATO axis is desperate to re-colonize Burkina Faso and to halt any further influence across Africa set by the example of the Alliance of Sahel States. What the U.S is angling to undermine is a popular process of decolonization.

“Under President Traoré’s leadership, Burkina Faso has advanced toward food sovereignty, established a national gold refinery, and taken critical steps to reclaim its resources for the benefit of its people. The vague and opportunistic accusations issued by AFRICOM are designed to undermine these gains and set the stage for imperialist subversion. When U.S. officials speak of “strategic interests,” they mean the unfettered right to plunder Africa’s mineral wealth, dominate markets, and exploit African labor, all without the consent of African peoples. We must not allow the absurdity of the U.S. and NATO, currently complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, to pose as moral arbiters in Africa.

“BAP and USOAN call on all anti-imperialist forces to join in active defense of Burkina Faso, demand the expulsion of AFRICOM from the continent, and ensure that no African nation suffers the fate that befell Libya in 2011.”

War against the Islamic State (Wikipedia)

I recently learned that this is what the U.S. now seems to be calling what it once called the GWOT or the Global War on Terror. I read it in a mini-biography about a participant in an interview as having fought in the War Against the Islamic State. The U.S. seems to have yielded to a desire to fancy up the term for its second decade, with the destruction of Libya now classified as a triumph against a so-called Islamic State. The Wikipedia article was very clearly written by those who consider themselves to be the victor in this nearly wholly fictive conflict.

“Many states began to intervene against the Islamic State, in both the Syrian civil war and the War in Iraq (2013–2017), in response to its rapid territorial gains from its 2014 Northern Iraq offensives, universally condemned executions, human rights abuses and the fear of further spillovers of the Syrian civil war. In later years, there were also minor interventions by some states against IS-affiliated groups in Nigeria and Libya. All these efforts significantly degraded the Islamic State’s capabilities by around 2019–2020. While moderate fighting continues in Syria, as of 2025, IS has been contained to a small area and force capability.”

India-Pakistan Ceasefire, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“A chilling effect has already taken place, because many people are unwilling to risk weeks or months in a cage while the world’s most murderous and tyrannical government works to deport them to another country — even if they might wind up winning in the courts eventually.

“This chilling effect is a theft of the rights of US citizens as well as non-citizens, because it robs citizens of their right to hear what these activists have to say. Their government stepped in and hid speech that is critical of US foreign policy from their ears, determining that it would be best if Americans did not consume such wrongthink. If this isn’t tyranny, then nothing is.

“Free speech is being stomped out throughout the western world to protect Israel and its western backers from criticism. There is no greater threat to the right to free expression in our society today. It must be opposed, and opposed ferociously.”

A guy here just asked me about the news that Trump had invited white South Africans to the U.S. because they were an “oppressed minority”. It’s just a tsunami of idiocy that can be quite overwhelming. You’re just watching the water recede with dread and wondering what’s going to crash down on your head next. Trump is the Voltron of idiotic white-man-butt-hurt conspiracy theories.

It’s pretty wild how we were fighting about stupid shit that affects nearly no-one like “trans people in sports” and then it was stuff that hits half the population like “hey whoops no more sovereignty over your body if you’re a woman” and now all bets are off for everyone with “who ever needed guilty-until-proven-innocent, due process, Habeas Corpus, and courts anyway?” and roving quasi-military gangs of people who refuse to identify themselves, have never heard of a warrant, bodily autonomy, or evidence, and are therefore completely indistinguishable from the inevitable copycat gangs that have almost certainly already appeared. I’m just surprised that none of those 400M guns in private hands has popped off yet, leading to a hero’s parade in front of the White House for a fallen ICE soldier.

US-Hamas talks show that peace is possible by Aaron Maté (Substack)

“If Trump can break from his own record and reach a deal with Iran, that would be a major step forward. But ultimately, no US president will be able to usher in Middle East peace until the fundamental flashpoint is addressed: Israel’s decades-old suppression of Palestinian self-determination.

“In a recent interview, former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant acknowledged that Hamas, in launching the Oct. 7th attack on Israel, was trying to end one of the world’s longest running military occupations. “[Hamas] were speaking about Israel withdrawing from [the West Bank]… about how to divide Jerusalem… in return for a [hostage] deal,” Gallant said.

“In other words, Hamas was seeking the internationally accepted solution in which Palestinians obtain a state in just 22% of their stolen homeland. Until a US president is willing to join Palestinian leaders in that historic compromise, any talk of Middle East peace will remain a smokescreen for perpetual US-backed Israeli aggression.”

Trump Declares the ‘Neocon’ Era Over by Matthew Petti (Reason)

“President Donald Trump has a vision of a “great transformation” in the Middle East. But it’s not the transformation that American leaders have talked about bringing at gunpoint. At his Tuesday speech at a U.S.-Saudi investment summit in Riyadh, the president denounced the failures of “interventionists” and promised a future “where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.”

“Those words came with action. In his speech, Trump promised to lift all U.S. sanctions on Syria, and the day after, he shook hands with new Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who had a $10 million bounty on his head from the U.S. government just six months ago. In the weeks leading up to the summit, Trump ended the U.S. war in Yemen and negotiated the release of the last American in Hamas captivity. It remains to be seen whether he can follow through.”

What in the hell is actually going on? Is this what it’s like to be involved with someone who’s bipolar?

Journalism & Media

NPR and PBS say they will “push back” on Trump’s executive order terminating their federal funding by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“The order, like the other decrees signed by Donald Trump during his 100-plus days in office, is aimed at intimidating and silencing any criticism, including from establishment news outlet like NPR.”

That may be true but it’s also true that NPR is viciously biased state media, ludicrously biased against Trump for the last eight years. They don’t just report on actual terrible things he’s said and done but also promulgate every stupid little detail of every stupid conspiracy theory against him. Of course he’s going to go after them. And of course it’s going to be harder to default their so-called journalism because most of their work is Democrat propaganda.

“On April 28, 2025, the CPB filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after the president attempted to fire three of the five members of the CPB’s board of directors. In a statement, Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the CPB said, “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is not a government entity, and its board members are not government officers. Because CPB is not a federal agency subject to the President’s authority, but rather a private corporation, we have filed a lawsuit to block these firings.””

I don’t get how the president can fire people in companies that don’t belong to the government.

“[…] label voices of political opposition within the US as “radical left-wing” and “communist,” including those of the public radio and television networks which are generally aligned with the pro-capitalist politics.”

Blatantly Biased Collaboration by George Monbiot

“[…] leftwing voices are largely excluded (I define left as confronting economic power and right as supporting it). A study across nine years by Cardiff University of the non-party panellists invited on Question Time found that all the people who appeared most often are on the right.”

“He went on to defend Jeremy Corbyn and to report and comment, in great depth, on the genocide in Gaza. He has become, as a result, a pariah in all mainstream outlets, comprehensively deplatformed by the great “defenders of free speech”. Though his journalism is as thorough and as responsible as ever, he has not appeared on a network BBC programme since 2019, when his focus shifted, in effect, from right to left. Now he works only for Middle East Eye, Declassified and Byline Times.”

“How much more obvious could this be? Defend powerful interests: welcome, brother. Confront the status quo, challenge the lies, call for higher journalistic standards at the BBC: avaunt ye, demon. To be principled is to be excluded.”

“Occasionally the BBC makes bold programmes, such as Louis Theroux’s new documentary about West Bank settlers. But you can name and number these deviations, while the views and demands of economic power have become the background hum across its entire news and current affairs output. In other words, the BBC behaves much like Starmer’s government: appeasing critics on the right and far right, while suppressing the left. In doing so, it undermines its own survival. When it faces an existential crisis, as both Labour and the BBC might in 2029, who will defend it? The right – and the plutocrats the right exists to champion – want it gone, while the left now sees it as a hostile force. It is appeasing itself to death.”

How To Make Your Mind Harder For The Propagandists To Manipulate by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Westerners assume that if the world were experiencing another Holocaust, another Transatlantic Slave Trade, another Cuban Missile Crisis, they would hear about it in the news at an appropriate level of urgency. But that simply isn’t how it works. The only reason the western public is ever told about anything bad that happens at a high level of frequency and urgency is when it is convenient for the western empire, like when Russia invaded Ukraine. When that happened it was the main story in every western outlet for ages, and Russia was clearly framed as the evil aggressor, with all the NATO aggressions which provoked the invasion going completely unmentioned.”

“If you look at the hyperlinks I cite in my articles to describe the criminality of the empire it’s usually either straight out of the mainstream press or some other independent author who’s citing mainstream news reporting. The difference is that I regularly spotlight those admissions, while the imperial media will mention them once halfway down an article somewhere and then let the daily news churn carry it away down the memory hole.

“Western propaganda doesn’t consist so much of manipulating what gets reported but how it gets reported. How often something gets mentioned. How often the perpetrator of an abuse is explicitly named. The type of language used to describe a given offense.”

“You have to just focus on the raw data of what’s being reported about what the empire is up to from day to day without allowing your perception to be colored by the way in which that data is reported. If you come across a key piece of information about the empire’s criminality you’ve got to hold onto it and remember its significance for yourself, because the imperial press sure aren’t going to remind you. They’re going to be acting like it never happened by next week.”

“[…] one of the most important things you need to do to maintain a truth-based worldview is to take complete control over your own understanding of the importance of the pieces of information which come across your field of vision. You can’t rely on others to tell you how important they are, because all the most amplified and influential voices in our society are working to manipulate your understanding of their importance, and most ordinary people you’ll interact with are being manipulated by those voices to some extent. Public political discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by these distortions.”

Labor

The Failure of Warren Buffett by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“It is not just some dark coincidence that Buffett’s rise has coincided with the increasingly chaotic devolution of America into an unstable oligarchy, ruled by a dangerously narcissistic aspiring king. Buffett may be nicer than many of his wealthy peers, but his wealth has been produced by the same system that produced theirs. Buffett’s capitalism is better than the most cutthroat version, because in his version, investors can still buy into the system and share in the wealth. The pool of beneficiaries is slightly larger. But it is not large enough to keep democracy alive.”

“The success of shareholder capitalism for its shareholders has produced the crisis of economic inequality that has erased the public’s belief in the American dream and led to the cynicism that gave rise to Trump. It has produced the ability of businesses to control politics through money that has erased (for good reason) the public’s belief in genuine democracy. It has produced the implacable, omniscient power of gigantic, monopolistic tech firms to control all aspects of public life, a power that is now being taken advantage of by an extreme right wing government that wants to send enemy citizens and non-citizens alike to overseas gulags.”

“It is simply not true that shareholder capitalism, unleashed on the globe, is the path to human flourishing and prosperity. It is more accurate to say that it is the path to prosperity for a portion of humanity that may be modestly expanded by certain reforms, but that can never be everyone. Warren Buffett controls a fortune of more than a hundred billion dollars himself. He controls hundreds of billions of dollars more through his company. His words and deeds are so closely followed that he could very well move trillions of dollars worth of capital with his actions. This great power is derived from his demonstrated ability to produce wealth within the bounds of American capitalism. The system he has championed has come to rule the world. The world he leaves behind—the teetering and oligarchal America of today, the scary, divided, declining empire lashing out in rage and fear—is one that will not accord with his stated values.”

Economy & Finance

Private Equity and Hospitals: Have They Finally Gone Too Far? by Eric Salzman (Racket News)

“Working hand in hand with private equity firms are real estate investment trusts (REITs), which have $185 billion in healthcare holdings. Private equity managers like Cerberus sell a hospital group’s land and buildings to the REITs and turn a huge profit. Meanwhile, the REIT portfolios the property, earning a steady stream of lease income from the target hospital and because they are a REIT, the income is tax free. The hospitals no longer own their real estate and are now on the hook for millions of dollars in lease payments to the REIT for years to come.”

Bridget Read’s ‘Little Bosses Everywhere’ by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“They charge more product to their credit cards, insisting to their “uplines” that they are selling machines (and not that they are filling their garages and attics and living rooms and kitchen cupboards with unsold, unsellable junk). What they don’t understand is that all the “successes” in the cult are either scammers who are getting rich off people like them, or they are people like them, going deep into debt and desperately trying to pretend that they’re selling as well as those uplines.”

“The hordes of indebted, cost-sunk, self-castigating failures are suckers for yet another scam: selling victims “training” to improve their sales technique. After all, if everyone around you is selling this crap without breaking a sweat, the failing must be your own. You need coaching, training, seminars, cassettes, books, retreats, all of it piling debt on debt.”

“The engine of a pyramid scheme needs social capital for fuel: to bring in new recruits, a cult member has to draw on the bonds of trust, fellowship and solidarity in order to convince their targets that this is a bona fide enterprise (and not a cult). Faith groups – especially fringe faith groups – have this kind of capital in spades. This goes double for faiths that demand large families (which is why we see such deep penetration of MLMs into Mormonism and orthodox Judiasm). If your faith demands that you produce a “quiverfull” of mouths to feed, then the chances are that you will not be able to survive without being enmeshed in a mutual support network with your co-religionists. MLMs convert this trust, generosity and mutual dependency into cash (at a ruinous exchange rate) and then funnel it “upline” the cult leaders, who reap billions.”

“Predatory inclusion is when scam artists adopt the language of social justice to pitch their cons – think of all the crypto bros who sold their ripoff schemes as a way to “achieve independence for women” or “build Black wealth” (thanks, Spike Lee):”

“Predatory inclusion is parasitic upon the bonds of solidarity forged in adversity, and this goes double for the MLM variety. As MLMs cut away the strands of the web of mutual support, the cult leaders replace them with rabid anti-Communism, the kind of far-right rhetoric that brought Christian conservatives into the Reagan coalition and ultimately led to Trump’s fascist takeover.”

“Companies like Uber promise drivers a high hourly wage. A small number of drivers are randomly allocated extremely large payouts by the system, in order to convert them into Judas goats, who fill gig-work message boards with tales of their good fortune. As Veena Dubal documents in her seminal work on “algorithmic wage discrimination,” this tactic is devastatingly effective, convincing other Uber drivers to put in extremely long hours for sub-starvation wages, and then blame themselves for “being bad at Uber” – just like the downlines at Mary Kay and Amway who think the problem is with them.”

“The past 40 years have been a long process of tearing us away from one another, teaching us to see one another as marks, to mistrust systems of mutual aid as Communism. Read’s Little Bosses Everywhere is a brilliantly told, deeply researched history of the past and present of the ultimate business model for late-stage capitalism: destroying the lives of everyone around you while pretending to be a small businessperson.”

They Are Making Venezuela’s Economy Scream by Vijay Prashad (ZNetwork)

“Kissinger wrote, the US must apply maximum pressure to prevent Chile from accessing any further finances, including access to international banks and multilateral financial institutions as well as private US businesses. In the aftermath of Chile’s nationalisation of its copper industry, US multinational mining companies – such as Kennecott – sought to intercept Chilean ships and seize their copper or prevent the country from selling copper to third parties, including European countries. The US used its power over the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to deny loans and pressured international bodies to stop Chile from initiating arbitration proceedings over legal challenges to its mines.”

“In our September 2023 dossier The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973, we show how the coup against Allende’s government was in fact a coup against any attempt by Third World countries to exercise sovereignty over their raw materials and build a socialist economy with those gains. Exactly the same motives are evident in the case of Venezuela. In February 2019, Trump gave a speech in Miami about Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and socialism in which he declared that ‘the twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere’.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Trans-World Listening Disc by Mary Cadwalladr (Hinternet)

“Clive is camping over in Saguaro with Wikki (his girlfriend— though he tells me I’m not supposed to call her that, nor to use “her”, but honestly I just can’t keep up anymore, and even though I went to the trouble of naming him after the greatest critic of my lifetime, Clive clearly has not read a complete English sentence since he finished high school, so I really don’t see why I, or anyone my age, should contort myself to speak the way he, or anyone his age, demands — they’re not paying attention anyhow!”

“[…] recover the very earliest recordings of vernacular culture, in the hope, perhaps vain, of inferring back still further, and of gaining some insight, no doubt aided by the phantasmic excesses of historical imagination, into what human beings were doing and saying, into how they were holding themselves, in the broadest sense of that expression, before they began holding themselves for the recording devices that entered our midst and profoundly disrupted human life, in ways that we are still far from appreciating or understanding, over the past century and a half.”

I Guess Jameis Winston Gets the Grandfather Clause, Too by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“I don’t think there’s any coherent way to insist that Woody Allen should be cast out forever for his alleged crime while cheerfully enjoying Mike Tyson’s second career as a beloved kitschy figure. That hasn’t stopped a lot of people from doing just that, though.”

“Woody Allen still gets condemned despite the age of the accusations and the lack of conviction, after all, just like Ben Roethlisberger is still judged despite never being convicted. To repeat myself, consistency is the heart of morality, and without consistency, people have every right to dismiss your moral claims.”

A Hegelian Reading of the New Science of Consciousness by Slavoj Žižek (The Philosophical Salon)

“Our mind models the external environment by predicting what kind of perceptual experience is most likely to occur next, given prior experiences, and the result is our familiar subjective world of objects that have three-dimensional shape, size, color, relative position, movement, and so forth. This constructed experience is not a representation of the world “as it actually is,” but, rather, a model that is good enough to allow us to navigate the environment and do the things that biological beings must do to survive and reproduce.”

“As a philosopher, my first reaction to this theory concerns the status of Seth’s theory itself: is it – and what it claims about reality – also a controlled hallucination? If yes, why should we take it seriously as truth, as the description of the way things “really are”? If not, how can our mind step out of controlled manipulation?”

“Capitalism is not only a part of history, a moment in the global narrative; it is itself the prism through which we see all the steps leading to it. True history is thus not a gradual development of parts but a series of shifts in how its ‘whole’ itself is structured. We do not have a Whole which comprises its parts: each part comprises multiple universalities between which we will inevitably choose, without necessarily being aware of doing so.”

“[…] a conscious system (or, rather, a system regulated by a symbolic order) is not only more than a sum of its parts: its Whole itself is one of its parts, or, as Seth puts it, it represents to itself its model, and it survives only through this self-representation.”

“Enjoyment itself is something that parasitizes upon human pleasures, perverting them so that a subject can draw a surplus-enjoyment from displeasure itself. What characterizes subjectivity is thus a weird redoubling of life – a subject lives not just between the two deaths, as Lacan put it following Sade, but also between the two lives, the biological/organic self-reproduction and the quasi-autonomous life of what Lacan calls the big Other, the symbolic order.”

“We should not identify (what we experience as a free volitional) decision with consciousness: our basic decisions are unconscious. In the conceptual space of cognitive sciences there are physical processes and consciousness, with no place for the Freudian unconscious. Recall the case of falling in love: it is never a conscious decision/choice – all of a sudden, I just become aware that I am deeply in love.”

American Homeostasis by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“Among my most unmodern views, no doubt, is the unshakeable conviction that it was a grave transgression to introduce, over the past century, alongside plastics, synthetic fertilizers, nuclear fission, technologies for peering directly inside the living body and monitoring its real-time workings. As our ancestors understood, that is a forbidden zone. We thought we were overcoming death in neglecting the wisdom of our ancestors, and going right ahead with our MRIs and our biopsies. What we actually ended up doing, I can’t help but feel, is darkening the shadow that death casts over life, making its presence felt constantly, inviting it into the smallest of our small-talk.”

“It is not a certainty that a town the size of Sacramento should have its own symphony.”

“[…] we would not be hearing this music at all if Henry McCarty had not killed eight people before being gunned down himself, in New Mexico in 1881, at the age of 21, thus playing his small part in the epic transformation of the American West into the sort of place where you might support culture with an annual tax-deductible gift to the symphony.”

“[…] way for the accident-injury attorneys, and for the philanthropists whose alms are never given in silence, but come with brass plaques on the backs of symphony seats.”

“In the lobby some old ladies are talking. One had been a student at Stanford, and another at Cal (that’s what they call UC Berkeley around here), but they assure the third in the conversation that they’re best friends anyway. They must be eighty years old, and they’re still defining their relationship by reference to the athletic rivalry between their undergraduate institutions.”

“One could easily get the impression that what this class of Americans would really like to see is simply a more competent continuation of American imperial hegemony into the future, more bombings of the Houthis, for example, but less leakage to the media about it. The anti-Trump Americans will grab at absolutely anything they think might have traction, and then display each of their heteroclite criticisms alongside one another as if they were of the same import and nature: Hegseth is bad, for example, because he’s doing the administration’s work sloppily — the implication being that if he were doing it well it would be unobjectionable. And this current news item is discussed in the same tenor, with the same grave disapproval, as the truly unconscionable and evil disappearings of green-card holders not accused of any crime.”

“What is forgotten in all this talk of draft-dodging and astronauts and Teslas and tariffs and the Trump-Putin bromance is any question such as: Was the Vietnam War justified, or wasn’t it? Is the risk of escalation with a nuclear-armed Russia worth it, or isn’t it? Is the neoliberal free-trade order worth maintaining, or isn’t it? Should Europe be maintained indefinitely as a vassal state, or might there be some preferable arrangement? Is the fact that the markets don’t like Trump’s tariff plan a convincing argument against it? The markets, after all, don’t like the Amazon rainforest, or plastic-free oceans, or affordable insulin either.”

“I’d rather have one person with me who can argue, Wendell Berry said of his efforts to stop strip-mining in Kentucky, than 1000 who can chant slogans. But the truth is I will never have to make such a choice, and if anything it is the coiners of risk-free anti-tyranny clichés who are complicit. Nothing preserves homeostasis more effectively than the mutually neutralizing power of reciprocal cliché-mongering.”

“In Houston we visit the Rothko Chapel. I’m horrified. I do recall enjoying Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel No. 5 (1971) at an earlier period of life, and I know I once had some kind of feeling for post-war minimalism. But my heavens, what a dreary conjuncture of historical circumstances that left us with this shrine to nothingness! It’s Auschwitz. It’s Hiroshima. It’s the void at the end of history. My companions are all declaring that it’s wonderful that there’s a place like this where you can go “just to sit and contemplate”. To contemplate what, though? I understand that it’s supposed to be some kind of radically inter-denominational space, with perhaps a greater portion of Zen Buddhism than any of the other religious traditions that get an acknowledgment in the literature on display in the foyer. But the Buddhists approached the void with rigorous preparation and with appropriate fear and trembling. We do it to fill up an afternoon, in a space funded by parties concerned in the first instance not with contemplation, but with the accumulation of power through extraction of the earth’s resources.”

Bertolt Brecht 'War Primer' by Jesse Welles (YouTube)

Do Germans realize how lucky they are? (Reddit)

“If you’re an economic immigrant from a third world country (like myself), you need to 1. Save enough money to immigrate. 2. Apply for a visa, wait for months, and pray for the best. 3. Find and keep a job at the risk of leaving empty handed otherwise. 4. Learn a new language. 5. Deal with the ausländerbehörde, permits, visas, changing jobs, freelancing, almost any decision you make needs to be approved by them and good luck finding an appointment. 6. Face racism especially when applying for jobs and apartments but everyday racism too. 7. Have the constant feeling of insecurity as a non citizen, especially with the current political climate.

“In addition to that, you have a weak passport, you miss your family and friends back home, and most probably you have an identity crisis.

“To be perfectly clear, I’m not complaining about Germany, I love it here. I just wonder if Germans understand how lucky they are just by being born here. Do they recognize the gulf between their quality of life, and the rest of the world?”

The Insidious Libertarian-to-Alt-Right Pipeline by Matt Lewis (The Daily Beast)

A friend sent me this article. It’s OK. He said it was 2/5 but was interested in my opinion on it.

Libertarianism is a superficial dead-end that has a deeply unempathetic core. While its proponents will tell you all day long that communism could never work because people suck, they never acknowledge that libertarianism would then likewise be doomed to the same Hobbesian nightmare for the same reason.

Speaking of “reason”, I’ve been a subscriber to that magazine for years and I’ve listened to the occasional Nick Gillespie podcast (though he’s a smug sonofabitch). I’m not even close to a libertarian but they have some good writers and it’s good to keep an eye on alternative points of view. It’s better than the Atlantic, the NYT, etc. simply because they doesn’t just regurgitate the opinion that the state demands of them.

The dog-eat-dog instructions pounded into your brain by nearly every part of society (advertising, news media, education) lead naturally to people adopting superficial forms of libertarianism. Perhaps the richer form would be closer to anarchism but it’s hard to tell if that’s being too generous, simply because of how the word “libertarian” has been tainted by its deviant proponents over the years. In a way, it’s the same with anarchism, which people think of in terms of punk gang members robbing grandmothers rather than, say, Noam Chomsky or David Graeber.

This article is all fine and good—and, honestly, pretty well-established by now—but I am 100% still waiting for a mainstream rag like the Daily Beast to discuss the also-extremely-powerful-and-influential, if not more influential-and-powerful “insidious Progressive-to-Neoliberal-to-Neocon” pipeline, where so-called progressives “progress” from caring about many things holistically, to caring about only themselves and their in-group and its safety and security, to actively promoting wars around the world in order to maintain that status quo, damn everyone else to hell.

There is nothing antisocial about anarchy. The state wants you to think it would be violent chaos so that you stop looking over the fence at the greener grass there and settle for the violent chaos you’ve been given.

Anarchism posits that all of the “system X won’t work because people suck” theories fail to point out that it’s more like “desperate people suck” or “desperate people will exchange their principles and humanity for mere survival.” A logical person would think that you could also solve problems by keeping people out of desperation. They’d be nicer to each other because there’s more to gain than by being cut-throat jerks.

The solution we’ve settled on is to build a society that promotes cut-throat jerks and keeps everyone else miserable and sniping at each other so that they don’t notice who’s picking their pockets. This sets things up so that the cut-throat jerks pick the pockets and make sure that the two sides blame each other. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Exhibit A is the psychotic degree to which nearly the entire U.S. is focused on what is very obviously not its biggest problem, which is immigration.

The argument of “I should be able to smoke crack if i’m not hurting anyone with it” is a good summation of how many people see libertarianism. I think the more nuanced form has to consider not only societal utility (are you doing something useful in addition to smoking crack?) but also the degree to which pathological behaviors are addictive and will overwhelm the system (how large a percentage of freeloaders can a society bear before it collapses? What even is a freeloader? If all you do is smoke crack and crap on the sidewalk, you’re going to wear out your welcome quickly. If you also happen to be an expert at keeping the water-filtering plant running, then … hmmmm, … I guess beggars can’t be choosers). If you’re the crack-smoking sidewalk-crapper but you’re also congenitally mentally disabled, then what? Compassion, right? This is where simpleton libertarians already stumble and get cruel. But it’s also where so-called liberals are unable to admit that there is an upper limit to how much slack a society is both capable of and willing to take up.[3]

“I think that everyone has good in them, and they need only be given a chance to show that niceness.

“it seems to me that libertarianism is cynical anarchism. So, instead of, “Without older brother we can self organize like starlings” you get, “I want noone entreating on my personal freedom to smoke scrack in society.” The differing sentiments, for my money, being the preservation of individualism in the latter.

“With some cursory research, libertarians believe in a minimal government for upholding, “individual liberties”. Despite me giving away my young age below, I’m old enough to know that “upholding of individual liberties” means “we play by my rules”.”

“[on the article suggestion] It’s a little “Are you like christ” coded”

Touché

“Without older brother we can self organize like starlings”

Such a pretty phrase.

“I think that everyone has good in them, and they need only be given a chance to show that niceness.”

This is where I’ve landed, if I’m honest. Perhaps I’d write “almost all people” to offer a carveout for the handful of incorrigibly depraved, congenitally broken, or institutionally shattered.

“smoke scrack”

1972 enjoyed the hell out of this one, too, and is delighted it was left untouched.

“minimal government for upholding, “individual liberties””

Without stronger social obligations and programming, this inevitably devolves into storm troopers. The word “minimal” is quickly blown out of reach by the strong wind of authoritarianism.

The thing about the “lemme do what I want with me” is that we live in a society. While you think you’re being an individualist, you look like a narcissist to everyone else. Your loved ones are not only neglected, they’re forced to take up your slack. Mom and Dad are getting neither a call nor a visit. And what does “not bothering anybody” even mean? Can you fly your drone over the pristine mountains of Switzerland, imbuing square kilometers of the idyllic landscape with a high-pitched whine? Can you ride your E-bike/E-motorcycle up any hiking trail because bikes aren’t expressly prohibited? Can you jet-ski on a lake others are trying to swim in? There are always going to be disputes about how much “I’ve got mine, Jack” is too much.

The Independent Ink in Conversation with Chris Hedges by The Independent Ink (YouTube)

At about 26:00,

“Well, that requires tremendous empathy. And that empathy allows them to step into the shoes of another—especially someone who’s persecuted—and see the world from their perspective. […]

“I think probably it’s very difficult to teach empathy but people can…I mean, this is why it’s important to live outside the United States. People can live in other cultures, and language is important.

“So, you know, I speak a few languages. I if you have a linguistic fluency and you’re living in another culture, then you can begin to see, because every culture looks at reality differently. Then you can
begin to see the world from their perspective. But, most importantly, it allows you to critique your own culture.

“But you can’t do that unless you’re bicultural. And most Americans are monocultural. They don’t speak another language. 50% of all Americans don’t have [a] passport. And then, even when they leave the country, they’re on some cruise ship or a bus. I mean, I used to see it in Egypt. They have virtually no contact with the civilization or the country that they’re visiting, other than in terms of, you know, people who carry their bags and cook their food.

“Yeah, I think that empathy is key. Ignorance—or the way Muslims are demonized the way, Palestinians are demonized—is easy when you’ve never been in their culture and you don’t speak Arabic and you don’t what you’re talking about. It is always, as an Arabic speaker, it always stuns me to hear all these people talking about the Muslim world where I spent seven years.”

Technology & Engineering

Cybersecurity’s on the front line in the culture wars by Rupert Goodwins (The Register)

“[…] we see Microsoft’s badly rattled Brad Smith promising to protect EU data in the US courts should Trump come after it, the rapid expansion of datacenters on EU power grids – sorry, soil – and the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. There’s no reason to doubt that he means all this; it’s not the quarter of Microsoft’s revenue he’s scared for, it’s the creation of plausible competition at nation-state scale. Both China and the EU have the resources to create software infrastructures to challenge the US; but only the EU is built of companies that speak English as their internal lingua franca.”

“[…] the FCC, America’s communications and broadcast regulator, has said it will not approve mergers or acquisitions of any companies supporting “invidious” woke agendas. The overt politicization of a communications regulator is an ill-fitting shoe in a democracy.”

“Where global companies like Microsoft are going to see both cost and consequence is in the stark truth that what passes for the “invidious woke agenda” in Trump’s administration is just basic civil rights in Europe.”

“This is simply not an environment where Europe can protect its citizens’ digital safety, nor can the shattered trust be quickly repaired. Microsoft and its giant tech confreres may fervently wish this isn’t so, but it is so. From Maine in the Atlantic to Florida in the Gulf, a silicon curtain is descending across the ocean. We may not see it lift in our generation.”

Writing at the Speed of Thought by No Boilerplate (YouTube)

“It’s difficult to miss something that you’ve never experienced.”

“Speed up your editing; speed up your thinking.”

Why 75% Of Businesses Aren’t Seeing ROI From AI Yet by Megan Poinski on January, 2025 (Forbes)

“The study also shows 60% aren’t tracking the right metrics to determine ROI. How are they missing this?

“These are smart people that are running successful companies that have good intent, so it’s not incompetence and it’s not people just being ignorant of it. Many times, companies ask the wrong people to own some of these initiatives and they sit in a silo in the organization without the position to actually influence the outcomes.

“Data scientists are asked to deploy gen AI. They usually report four or five layers into the CIO organization. They build a tool, [and] it takes them longer to build it because they want to get it to a level of precision that might not be needed. Once they get it, they say, ‘IT organization, take it.’

“I am now a salesperson in a call center and I have a tool that can help me do things faster. I’m not using it. Why? Because my quota is to do different actions. To start [getting the AI tool used], I need to change the quota. Well, the data science team is not going to go talk to the head of sales and say, ‘Change the quota for your salespeople.’ They’ll say, ‘I don’t talk to you.’ So the data science team needs to work through their chain of command to get to the CIO, to then get to CFO to engage CEO and chief sales officer to influence that outcome. And then, the chief sales officer needs to work with individual regional chairs who say, ‘This is a great idea, but my bonus is tied to different outcomes for the whole year. So we can do it next year. Let’s put it in the planning process.’”

LLMs & AI

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College by James D. Walsh (New York Magazine)

“After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.””

“I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.””

“In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?””

As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond by Jakob McWhinney (Voice of San Diego)

“The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud. That has put teachers on the front lines of an ever-evolving war on fraud, muddied the teaching experience and thrown up significant barriers to students’ ability to access courses. What has made the situation at Southwestern all the more difficult, some teachers say, is the feeling that administrators haven’t done enough to curb the crisis. ‘We Didn’t Used to Have to Decide if our Students were Human’”

“Even after dropping the fraudulent students, though, the bot nightmare isn’t over. As soon as seats open up in classes, professors often receive hundreds of nearly identical emails from purported students requesting they be added to the class. Those emails tended to ring some linguistic alarm bells.”

Meine Erfahrungen mit Vibe Coding by Toni Steimle (LinkedIn)

“Eine komplexe App erfordert weiterhin echtes technisches Know-how und gutes Software-Engineering. Sonst läufst du Gefahr, am Ende mehr Zeit mit Fehlerbehebung und Aufräumen zu verbringen als mit dem eigentlichen Entwickeln.”

“Wenn deine Eingaben unklar oder sprunghaft sind, wird auch das Ergebnis der KI danebenliegen. Auch AI-Tools brauchen klare Anforderungen. Manche tun so, als könnte ChatGPT & Co. magisch erraten, was wir meinen – das klappt leider selten.”

“Daher hat es sich bewährt, top-down zu arbeiten: Beschreibe zuerst das große Bild. Was soll die App können? Welche Nutzerprobleme löst sie? Welche Features sind geplant? Lass das Tool diese Anforderungen gern nochmal in eigenen Worten zusammenfassen und als kleine „Dokumentation“ festhalten. So stellst du sicher, dass die KI dich richtig verstanden hat, bevor es ans Eingemachte geht und die Anforderungen bleiben auch für spätere Sessions erhalten.”

“Der Code kann mit der Zeit ziemlich chaotisch werden – inkonsistente Styles, doppelte Funktionen, provisorische Lösungen, die nie bereinigt wurden. Kurz: typischer Prototypen-Spaghetti-Code. Das ist anfangs egal, schließlich läuft die App ja. Doch spätestens wenn du das Projekt erweitern oder an Teammitglieder übergeben willst, wird es schwierig.”

“Wichtig ist, Refactoring zur Gewohnheit zu machen, zum Beispiel nach jeder größeren Feature-Implementierung einmal aufzuräumen, bevor du weiterbaust. So bleibt dein Codebase gesund und verständlich, auch wenn du viele wilde Ideen ausprobierst.”

There Is No AI Revolution by Edward Zitron on February 24, 2025 (Where's your ed at?)

“The New York Times reports that OpenAI projects it’ll make $11.6 billion in 2025, and assuming that OpenAI burns at the same rate it did in 2024 — spending $2.25 to make $1 — OpenAI is on course to burn over $26 billion in 2025 for a loss of $14.4 billion. Who knows what its actual costs will be, and as a private company (or, more accurately, entity, as for the moment it remains a weird for-profit/nonprofit hybrid) it’s not obligated to disclose its financials.”

“I do not believe that generative AI is a “real” industry — which I define as one with multiple competitive companies with sustainable revenue streams and meaningful products with actual market penetration — because it is entirely subsidized by a combination of venture capital and hyperscaler cloud credits.”

“OpenAI, as a company, is piss-poor at product. It’s been two years and ChatGPT mostly does the same thing as it used to, still costs more to run than it makes, and ultimately does the same thing as every other LLM chatbot from every other generative AI company.”

“A BBC investigation just found that half of all AI-generated news articles have some kind of “significant” issue (Ars Technica), whether that be hallucinated facts, editorialization, or references to outdated information.

“And the reason why OpenAI hasn’t fixed the hallucination problem isn’t because it doesn’t want to, but because it can’t. They’re an inevitable side-effect of LLMs as a whole. ”

“These realities — the lack of utility and product differentiation — also mean that OpenAI can’t raise its prices above the breakeven point, which would also likely make its generative AI unaffordable and unattractive to both business and personal customers.”

“To use Operator or Deep Research currently requires you to pay $200 a month for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro, a $200-a-month subscription.

“Sam Altman has revealed that the $200-a-month subscription, much like the rest of OpenAI’s subscriptions, loses money because “people are using it more than expected.”

“Furthermore, even on Pro, Deep Research is currently limited to 100 queries per month, adding that it is “very compute-intensive and slow.””

“Deep Research is also not a good product. As I covered last week, the quality of writing that you receive from a Deep Research report is terrible, rivaled only by the appalling quality of its citations, which include forum posts and Search Engine Optimized content instead of actual news sources. These reports are neither “deep” nor well researched, and cost OpenAI a great deal of money to deliver.”

“To put this in perspective, the entire combined monthly active users of the Copilot, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Perplexity apps amount to 66 million, or 19.47% of the entire monthly active users of ChatGPT’s mobile app. Web traffic slightly improves things (I say sarcastically), with the 161.6 million unique monthly visitors that visited the websites for Copilot, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and Perplexity making up 65.69% of all of the traffic that went to ChatGPT.com.

“However, I’d argue that including DeepSeek vastly over-inflates these numbers. It’s an outlier, and it’s also a relatively new company that’s enjoying its moment in the sun, basking in the glow of a post-launch traffic spike, and a flood of favorable media coverage. I imagine that when the dust settles in a few months, we’ll get a more reliable idea of its market share and consistent user base.”

“These numbers aren’t simply piss poor, they’re a sign that the market for generative AI is incredibly small, and based on the fact that every single one of these apps only loses money, is actively harmful to their respective investors or owners.

“I do not think this is a real industry, and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.”

“The Information reported last week that Anthropic has projected (made up) that it will make at least $12 billion in revenue in 2027, despite making $918 million in 2024 and losing $5.6 billion somehow.

“Anthropic is currently raising $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation for a business that loses billions of dollars a year with an app install base of 2 million people and a web presence smaller than some niche hobbyist news outlets.”

“The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft intends to spend $93.7 billion on capital expenditures in 2025 — or roughly $8,518 per monthly active user on the Copilot app in January 2025. Those figures, however, may already be out of date with Bloomberg reporting the company is cancelling some leases for AI data centers. If true, it would suggest the company is pulling back from its drunken AI spending binge — although it’s not clear to what extent.”

“Google is currently planning to spend $75 billion on capital expenditures, or roughly $4,167 per monthly active user of the Gemini app in January 2025. Sundar Pichai wants Gemini to be “used by 500 million people before the end of 2025,” a number so unrealistic that someone at Google should have been fired, and that someone is Sundar Pichai.”

“For context, Microsoft made $69.63 billion in revenue in its last quarter. $13 billion of annual revenue (NOT profit) is about $3.25 billion in quarterly revenue off of upwards of $200 billion of capital expenditures since 2023.”

“And even then, Google, Amazon and (to an extent Microsoft), the companies making the most investments in AI, do not want to state what that revenue is. I hypothesize the reason that they do not want to disclose it is that it’s pretty god damn small.

“It is extremely worrying that so few companies are willing to directly disclose their revenue from selling services that are allegedly revolutionary. Why? Salesforce says it closed “200 AI related deals” in its last earnings. How much money did it make? Why does Google get away with saying it has “growing demand for AI” without clarifying what that means? Is it because nobody is making that much money?”

“Do you not see that this kind of sucks? Do you not see that generative AI runs contrary to the basic tenets of what makes science fiction cool? It doesn’t make humans better, it reduces their work to a stagnant, unremarkable slop in every way it can, and reduces the cognition of those who come to rely on it, and it costs hundreds of billions of dollars and a return to fossil fuels for some reason.

“It isn’t working. The users aren’t there. The revenue isn’t there. The best time to stop this was two years ago, and the next best time is as soon as humanly possible.

“I have said that generative AI is a group delusion in the past, and I repeat that claim today. What you are seeing in the news is not the “success“ of the artificial intelligence industry, but a runaway narrative created by and sustained by Sam Altman and OpenAI.

“What you are watching is not a revolution, but a repetitious public relations campaign for one company that accidentally timed the launch of ChatGPT with a period of deep desperation in big tech, one so profound that it will likely drag half a trillion dollars’ worth of capital expenditures along with it.

“This bubble will only burst when either the markets or the hyperscalers accept that they have chased their own tails toward oblivion. There is no justification for any of the capital expenditures related to generative AI — we are approaching the limit of what the transformer-based architecture can do, if we haven’t already reached it. No amount of beating off about test-time compute and connecting Large Language Models to other Large Language Models is going to create a new use case for this technology, and even if it did, it’s unlikely that it ever makes enough money to make it profitable.

“I will keep writing this stuff until I’m proven wrong. I do not know why more people aren’t more worried about this. The financials are truly damning, the user numbers so small as to be insignificant, the costs so ruinous that they will likely cost tens of thousands of people their jobs […], and inflict damage on tech valuations that may rival the dot com boom.”

“OpenAI and Anthropic are not real companies — they are free-riders, living on venture-backed welfare for an indeterminate amount of time because the entire tech industry has agreed to rally around the world’s most unprofitable software. And like any free rider that doesn’t actually produce anything, when the money goes away, they’re fucked.”

“ChatGPT is sustained entirely on deranged, specious hype drummed up by a media industry that thinks it’s more remarkable to write down the last lie that Sam Altman told than say that OpenAI has lost $9 billion dollars in the last year and intends to more than double that number in 2025 for absolutely no reason.”

It has been nearly three years since we were supposed to have been revolutionized by AI. In the tech world, this is a very long time to still be waiting, especially considering how many resources and how much money has been thrown at it.

As noted in an article about students at U.S. universities using ChatGPT to cheat at, well, everything—Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College by James D. Walsh (New York Magazine)—there really are few use cases worth spending this much money on. And OpenAI recently announced that students will be able use ChatGPT Plus for free, right when they would use it the most, and right before those same students will pretty much stop using it for three months.

This suggests that the people behind OpenAI are fiscally irresponsible to the point of outright mental incapacitation or that they have huffed so much of their own supply that they are literally out of their minds. You can’t just give away your product to the only part of the market where you actually had any realistic penetration. And, even there, you were already losing so much money per user because the product itself is unsustainable financially. What a boondoggle. What an utter waste of money.

OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry by Edward Zitron on April 14, 2025 (Where's your ed at?)

“To put that in context, OpenAI had revenues of $4bn in 2024. This deal values OpenAI at 75 times its revenue. That’s a bigger gulf than Tesla at its peak market cap — a company that was, in fact, worth more than all other legacy car manufacturers combined, despite making far less than them, and shipping a fraction of their vehicles. ”

“OpenAI also revealed it now has 20 million paying subscribers and over 500 million weekly active users. If you’re wondering why it doesn’t talk about monthly active users, it’s because they’d likely be much higher than 500 million, which would reveal exactly how poorly OpenAI converts free ChatGPT users to paying ones, and how few people use ChatGPT in their day-to-day lives.”

“I can also find no evidence that Crusoe, the company building the Stargate data center, has any compute available. Lambda, a GPU compute company that raised $320 million earlier in this year, and according to Data Center Dynamics “operates out of colocation data centers in San Francisco, California, and Allen, Texas, and is backed by more than $820 million in funds raised just this year,” suggesting that it may not have their own data centers at all. Its ability to scale is entirely contingent on the availability of whatever data center providers it has relationships with.

“In any case, this means that OpenAI’s only real choice for GPUs is CoreWeave or Microsoft. While it’s hard to calculate precisely, OpenAI’s best case scenario is that 16,000 GPUs come online in the summer of 2025 as part of the Stargate data center project.

“That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 300,000 Blackwell GPUs that Microsoft had previously promised.”

“The problem is that these measures, even if they succeed in generating more money for the company, also need to reduce the burden on OpenAI’s available infrastructure.”

“I can see OpenAI’s failure having a similar systemic effect [to Lehman in 2008 for the banking sector]. While there is a vast difference between OpenAI’s involvement in people’s lives compared to the millions of subprime loans issued to real people, the stock market’s dependence on the value of the Magnificent 7 stocks (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, NVIDIA and Tesla), and in turn the Magnificent 7’s reliance on the stability of the AI boom narrative still threatens material harm to millions of people, and that’s before the ensuing layoffs. ”

“As a result, a chunk of NVIDIA’s future revenue is dependent on OpenAI’s ability to fulfil its obligations to CoreWeave, both in its ability to pay them and their timeliness in doing so. If OpenAI fails, then CoreWeave fails, which then hurts NVIDIA.

“Contagion.”

“With Microsoft’s data center pullback and OpenAI’s intent to become independent from Redmond, future data center expansion is based on two partners supporting CoreWeave and Oracle: Crusoe and Core Scientific, neither of which appear to have ever built an AI data center.

“I also must explain how difficult building a data center is, and how said difficulty increases when you’re building an AI-focused data center. For example, NVIDIA had to delay the launch of its Blackwell GPUs because of how finicky the associated infrastructure (the accompanying servers and cooling them) is.”

“OpenAI spent 2023 training its GPT-4o model before transitioning to its massive, expensive “Orion” model which would eventually become GPT 4.5, as well as its video generation model “Sora.” According to the Wall Street Journal, training GPT 4.5 involved at least one training run costing “around half a billion dollars in computing costs alone.””

“If it required $40 billion to continue operations this year, it is reasonable to believe it will need at least another $40 billion next year, and based on its internal projections, will need at least that every single other year until 2030, when it claims, somehow, it will be profitable “with the completion of the Stargate data center.””

“I believe OpenAI will still continue to use Microsoft’s compute, and even expand further into whatever remaining compute Microsoft may have. However, there is now a hard limit on how much of it there’s going to be, both literally (in what’s physically available) and in what Microsoft itself will actually OpenAI them [sic] to use, especially given how unprofitable GPU compute might be.”

• SoftBank is putting itself in dire straits simply to fund OpenAI once. This deal threatens its credit rating, with SoftBank having to take on what will be multiple loans to fund OpenAI’s $40 billion round. OpenAI will need at least another $40 billion in the next year.
• This is before you consider the other $19 billion that SoftBank has agreed to contribute to the Stargate data center project, money that it does not currently have available.
• OpenAI has promised $19 billion to the Stargate data center project, money it does not have and cannot get without SoftBank’s funds. [a bit of an Ouroboros (Wikipedia) there]
• Again, neither SoftBank nor OpenAI has the money for Stargate right now.
• OpenAI needs Stargate to get built to grow much further.

“It’s also important to note that absolutely nobody other than NVIDIA is making any money from generative AI. CoreWeave loses billions of dollars, OpenAI loses billions of dollars, Anthropic loses billions of dollars, and I can’t find a single company providing generative AI-powered software that’s making a profit. The only companies even close to doing so are consultancies providing services to train and create data for models like Turing and Scale AI — and Scale isn’t even profitable.”

“Everything that I’m describing is the result of a tech industry — including media and analysts — that refuses to do business with reality, trafficking in ideas and ideology, celebrating victories that have yet to take place, applauding those who have yet to create the things they’re talking about, cheering on men lying about what’s possible so that they can continue to burn billions of dollars and increase their wealth and influence.

“I understand why others might not have written this piece. What I am describing is a systemic failure, one at a scale hereto unseen, one that has involved so many rich and powerful and influential people agreeing to ignore reality, and that’ll have crushing impacts for the wider tech ecosystem when it happens.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The gist of this newsletter is that there is a lot of money promised from sources who do not seem to have it (Softbank, OpenAI), Microsoft has vastly underdelivered on its promise of GPUs, and has drawn back from building two datacenters. Oracle is building a datacenter only for OpenAI but using two former crypto-mining companies—Core Scientific and Crusoe—with no prior experience in building datacenters—to say nothing of AI-compute-focused datacenters—and neither of which have any processing power of their own. They would seem to need to buy it from Microsoft—the only vendor either one of them contract with—and Microsoft has vastly slowed its play on building out capacity.

OpenAI must grow to survive. That’s its only business model. The amount of money invested in it so far by what we’ll generously deem angel investors was predicated on incredibly high P/E ratios and accordingly high rates of return. It is difficult to see how these investments pan out in any way, given the climate today. OpenAI needs to keep swimming or it dies and and its appetite for money and compute is starting stretch the credulity of even the most credulous in the first case, and exceeds both current and planned capacity in the second. And Open AI is in the best financial health of any of its competitors, as hard as that may be to believe. Anthropic, Perplexity, Copilot, etc. are all even worse as far as generating anything approaching a viable business plan, even after three years of draining the best brains available.

Throw into that whole financial equation the fact that even Europe is starting to shrink from using services hosting on U.S. soil—or is, at the very least, looking for off-site or domestic redundancy, which Microsoft announces new European digital commitments (Brad Smith) is eager to provide—and you’ve got a huge problem that makes the ever-more-ridiculous-sounding business case for a U.S.-hosted provider of a service still looking for a market and product—more than just toys that people think are fun—after three years and that bleeds dozens of billions per year sound even less plausible.

Except prices to go up significantly. Except uptime to degrade significantly.

Since the viability/longevity/scalability of tools and providers is not at all given, It seems prudent to think about AI as a lever rather than as a replacement. Given the broken financials in the gen-AI business, prices will almost certainly rise; we need to think about what these tools are worth to us. We should also be clear about what we do if the services were to no longer be offered at all or if they become to expensive for us to use.

Atlassian: “We’re Not Going to Charge Most Customers Extra for AI Anymore”. The Beginning of the End of the AI Upsell? by Simon Willison

“It’s impressive how quickly LLM-powered features are going from being part of the top tier premium plans to almost an expected part of most per-seat software.”

Sure, you can think about it like that. Or you can think of it like people aren’t willing to pay for AI because there’s no real value to it yet, but you have to include it anyway or the hype train leaves without you. What a world.

Quoting Luke Kanies by Simon Willison

“AIs can find your syntax error 100x faster than you can.”

I don’t even know what to say. Are you working in a non-compiled language? Like, one without even linter? Can’t the linter or compiler find the error even faster? Do you not have an IDE that shows syntax errors right in the source code? Are we regressing here and using AI to do things for which deterministic tools exist? Or are we citing people who don’t even understand the basic tools available for programming? This use case seems to be about solving problems with AI that have long since been solved by deterministic tools.

Building TMT Mirror Visualization with LLM: A Step-by-Step Journey by Unmesh Joshi

Builds a prototype in seven clear steps, showing each prompt (and justifications).

“This article documents a journey in building a complex, interactive UI with no prior experience in D3.js or UI development in general.The work was done as part of building a prototype for an operational user interface for the telescope’s primary mirror, designed to show real-time status of mirror segments. It highlights how LLMs help you “get on with it”, giving you a working prototype even when you’re unfamiliar with the underlying tech. More importantly, it shows how iterative prompting — refining your requests step-by-step — leads not only to the right code but also to a clearer understanding of what you’re trying to build.”

Function calling using LLMs by Kiran Prakash

“It’s important to emphasize that when using function calling, the LLM itself does not execute the function. Instead, it identifies the appropriate function, gathers all required parameters, and provides the information in a structured JSON format. This JSON output can then be easily deserialized into a function call in Python (or any other programming language) and executed within the program’s runtime environment.”

This is an approach that works very well when you don’t have a testing environment: build a plan, evaluate validity of the plan, and then apply the plan after verification. You should also be able to slice the work into sub-tasks to make verification more reliable. This is the approach I took for a PowerShell script that runs against an ADOS instance: it’s production data, so you really want to be sure what is going to be executed.

In the implementation, you can see how the code he writes prepares the query to the LLM in a structured way with the required context in an attempt to guide the result. Happily, he begins by writing unit tests!

This is another good step-by-step example of working with an LLM, but for a different task: it’s using an LLM as an interpreter for the user’s input. It’s basically a way of adding a natural-language “search-like” interface to an app without forcing the user to structure their input, without developing an UI, and without writing a parser. The advantage is that you get a way of querying a potentially large API surface in a way that in more amenable to more users.

I think of an example from Markus Schenkel from Cudos, who talked about using an MCP plugin for working with a CAD/CAM program—apps that notoriously have dozens of toolbars and thousands of functions. He could formulate his “novice” request as text, and the LLM, together with the mapping to tool functionality, made relatively good guesses about what he was trying to do. It often took a few attempts—but he was able to accomplish his task, whereas he would have either given up or had to invest a lot more time to get it done otherwise.

I think this is great for products that are in proof-of-concept stage, so that you don’t iterate on UIs too early in the design process. But we also have to be aware that we have UIs for a reason. Once there’s a well-established set of use cases and functionality, then it’s unclear that making users continue to use a command-line interface where they compose text is better than a GUI.

At any rate, the article is filled with detail and code (in Python) for using an LLM in the way described above. There’s a section on refactoring at the end, a comparison to the rules-engine-based approach that this technique seeks to replace, and also a comparison of function-calling with MCP.

Programming

Why performance optimization is hard work by Alisa Sireneva (purplesyringa)

“Pruning “obviously” suboptimal approaches is all but a heuristic. I like to think I’m more in tune with an x86-64 CPU than most people, and it still manages to surprise me from time to time. Dumb algorithms can become more applicable due to vectorization, smart code can fail due to branch misprediction or store-to-load forwarding gone wrong.”

“You no longer choose whether to apply an optimization: you also need to select parameters via more trial and error. For example: Hybrid sorting algorithms can switch between different implementations due to high big-O constants, FFT can switch between recursive and iterative approaches to better utilize processor cache. Depending on data density, the optimal set structure might be bitsets, hash sets, or complementary hash sets.”

“For another example, consider a program that executes n times either action A or B depending on probability p. If p is far from ½, branch prediction means it’s better to implement the switch with an if; if p is close to ½, branch prediction will fail and a branchless approach will work better. Not only does the relative performance of A and B matter here, but the cost of branch misprediction matters as well, and that might depend not only on the CPU but on the precise code executed.”

“Register pressure is even worse because that is only a problem because of the ISA, not the microarchitecture. The hardware has enough registers, they just aren’t exposed to user code. You can try to split data between general-purpose registers and vector registers, and that works as long as you seldom cross the GPR-SIMD boundary, but at that point, you might as well change your profession.”

“Any developer can see that the following two snippets are (supposed to be) equivalent:”

let condition1 = HashSet::from([a, b]).contains(&c);
let condition2 = a == c || b == c;

“But compilers aren’t going to optimize the former into the latter (JVM’s JIT, in some cases, excluded). They don’t reason in abstractions, and they certainly don’t reason in your auxiliary abstractions. This doesn’t just apply to high-level code: LLVM does not even understand that bitwise AND is an intersection.”

“Compilers are optimal transpilers – barring a few exceptions, they codegen exactly what you wrote in the source. They allow you to write assembly with the syntax and capabilities of Rust or C++, but don’t you dare forget that the arr.map(|x| × / c) you wrote will invoke idiv without performing obvious libdivide-style precalculations.”

“Despite obvious shortcomings, compilers don’t allow you to correct them on things they get wrong. There is no way to provide both optimized assembly and equivalent C code and let the compiler use the former in the general case and the latter in special cases.”

“Even Apple’s LLVM fork lacks scheduling annotations for Apple Silicon. How am I supposed to write efficient code when Apple doesn’t bother to tune their own compiler? Optimizing code for such a platform is 90% reverse engineering and 10% writing meaningful code – and writing meaningful code is already hard.”

“Small improvements compound and help form a better user experience, even if no single optimization seems valuable on its own – much like improving data transfer rates has led to structural changes in how we process and utilize information. Optimizations save time, and time is the one resource people don’t get enough of.”

Building Our Engineering Guild: A Story of Growth and Evolution by Boaz Adato (Medium)

“[…] overlapping solutions, inconsistent standards, and a codebase that grew more complex with every new feature. Technical debt started piling up, and different domains became tightly coupled — trade-offs we consciously made at the time for speed. What used to be a quick refactor turned into a massive undertaking — especially tricky without proper test coverage. Even small changes started requiring careful coordination across multiple teams.”

“With this structure, code ownership started to decline, and too many “no-man’s-land” areas emerged — pieces of code that nobody felt fully responsible for, and only a few super-skilled engineers dared to touch.”

“If you’ve ever worked in a rapidly growing company, you probably know that feeling when you look at another team’s code and think, “Wait, we already solved this problem… differently.””

“[…] we launched the Guild Task Pool — an initiative that empowers engineers to contribute to technical improvements beyond their daily product work. Engineers across the organization are encouraged to dedicate up to 20% of their time to Guild tasks, ensuring a balance between product delivery and technical excellence.”

“The idea was simple but powerful: create a centralized system where any engineer could propose and work on technical initiatives, leveraging knowledge scattered across different teams. To ensure alignment with company priorities, Guild tasks are coordinated with product and team leads, integrating technical improvements into the broader roadmap. This structured approach helps engineers balance their regular responsibilities while actively participating in driving technical excellence across the organization, ensuring that the ownership and knowledge of our platform’s evolution remains distributed across all teams.”

“The Guild offers a unique space for engineers who enjoy diving deep into complex technical challenges. It tackles cross-repo architectural decisions, facilitates team-wide codebase modernization processes, and addresses the kind of engineering problems that make for interesting technical discussions.”

“[…] the Guild isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Some teams initially saw it as a distraction from their product goals. Others worried about losing their autonomy. These were and still are valid concerns, but with proper communication, transparency and expectation setting we are addressing those.”

“The Guild works best when engineers love solving complex technical challenges beyond their immediate team, enjoy collaborating and sharing knowledge, and can balance product delivery with technical excellence”

Ralph Steiner Mechanical Principles 1933 by particle particle (YouTube)

This video is mesmerizing, occasionally quasi-pornographic (consider a different soundtrack and you’ll see what I mean). The reason I’ve categorized it as “programming” is that it makes immediately evident that mechanical design is also programming but at a much broader level of granularity. You see how only several debugging sessions could have led to a particular design, how the “if this part moves like this, then that part will move like this” leads to a design that produces the desired motion, or torque, or tempo.

The Decisionmaker by KRAZAM (YouTube)

Tweet about durability by James Cowling (Twitter)

“The best thing you can do for your own durability is to choose a competent provider and then ensure you don’t accidentally delete or corrupt own data on it:”

• Ideally never mutate an object in S3, add a new version instead.
• Never live-delete any data. Mark it for deletion and then use a lifecycle policy to clean it up after a week.

Fun

skill issue (Reddit)

Potato − Potahto

Please don’t tread on me, sir (Reddit)

My favorite people are the police and my boss

“The least rebellious people on Earth, congratuling themselves on being more rebellious than anyone: “I’m a renegare! My favorite people are the cops and my boss.””

Alliance Defending Freedom: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) by LastWeekTonight (YouTube)

At about 07:40,

“One of its key founders was James Dobson, a man who looks less like a real person and more like AI’s answer to the question, “What do they look like without their hoods?””

Boom.

At about 16:00,

“John: […] this testimony from a teenage girl named Grace about what had happened to her team at her state softball tournament

“Grace: We stepped onto the field motivated to go in and play our hardest and to display how hard we’d trained. But that spirit of determination was quickly dampened with one of confusion and doubt when we discovered that our opponents were fielding a biological male who identified as a female. Our entire team’s focus and motivation was affected as we grappled with the impact of this new player. Sure enough our opposing team won. The boy gave them an edge both physically and mentally that we couldn’t match. I had heard stories like this happening to other girls in other states but I never expected it would happen at my school.

“John: Well, I’ve got great news for you: it didn’t. It didn’t happen at your school at all because it turned out there was no trans girl on the opposing team. That team’s coach even told us “they only thought she was trans because she had short hair and was good.” And, while Grace’s team did lose, they also lost 16-6—an ass-whooping so bad no one player could be responsible for it. And, on top of all that, Grace isn’t just any old high schooler. It turns out she’s actually the daughter of Kristen Wagner. She’s basically the ultimate transphobic Nepo baby or, to put it more winsomely, transphobic person of nepotistic descent.”

At about 29:00,

“ADF, though, is something different. It’s worked extremely hard to put a misleadingly friendly face on what is an utterly hateful ideology. And it benefits immensely from people not knowing just how poisonous and disingenuous it is.

“But for the record, this is a group that will talk winsomely about personal liberty, all while fearmongering about softball players that don’t exist, shitty studies that don’t apply,
and pedophile cakes that no one will ever order.

“And it might actually be important for everyone to know that at the end of the day, ADF at its core is really a lot like the pews at an imaginary donkey wedding, which is to say, absolutely full of shit.”