Links and Notes for July 4th, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

Springtime for Donald! by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The 100 Days)

“[Trump] seems genuinely sincere when he expresses concern about the human suffering of war. He often decries the completely avoidable deaths of people far from our shores, including young men in foreign militaries. When he does this, he becomes a better person than most of our politicians. One part of his mind thus does seem to want to be “the best at peace” — to bring peace, so much peace, and to win Nobel Prizes for peace, and to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore to honor his peacey-ness. But another part of his mind, of course, wants to be “the best at war.” It’s unclear if these two parts of the President’s brain actually communicate.”

“[…] we dropped more than 2,000 various bombs onto more than 1,000 Yemeni targets. We blew apart a major port, killing 84 civilians and injuring 150 more, and intentionally spilling enormous amounts of oil into the Red Sea. (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called it a war crime.) The Houthis fought back. They destroyed seven of our $30 million-a-pop MQ-9 Reaper drones. They fired a missile at one of our aircraft carriers and missed, but the carrier had to turn so abruptly that one of our F/A-18 fighter jets ($60 million a pop) fell overboard and sank.”

“When it was suggested he also bomb Iran, how could a man like Trump ever have not used the best bomb, the biggest bomb, the Big Beautiful Bunker Buster? Washington’s warmongering neoconservatives, nipping at Trump’s heels like a pack of Welsh Corgis, steered him like a stumbling cow towards the slaughterhouse. They only had to yap one thing at him, over and over: No other president has ever dropped the Bunker Buster!”

“I am amazed that no one has asked the president about this friendly plane wave. Was Trump reporting something that he felt he and the Israelis had agreed upon — that Israeli planes, instead of bombing, would give a little wing wave to say goodbye? Or did Trump feel that he had just given a direct order to the Israeli Air Force, by social media post?”

Profiting From Genocide by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“The report, which includes a database of over 1,000 corporate entities that collaborate with Israel, demands these firms and institutions sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes. It describes “Israel’s “forever-occuption” as “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech − providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability − while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.””

“Since October 2023, F-35s and F-16s jets have been “integral to equipping Israel with the unprecedented aerial power to drop an estimated 85,000 tons of bombs, much of it unguided, to kill and injure more than 179,411 Palestinians and obliterate Gaza.””

“IBM, whose technology facilitated Nazi Germany’s generation and tabulation of punched cards for national census data, military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management and concentration camp capacity, is once again a partner in this current genocide.”

“Microsoft, Alphabet Inc., and Amazon “grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.””

“Rental platforms, including Booking.com and Airbnb, list properties and hotel rooms in illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank.”

“Faith-based charities have “also become key financial enablers of illegal projects, including in the occupied Palestinian territory, often receiving tax deductions abroad despite strict regulatory charitable frameworks,” the report reads.”

“Genocide requires a vast network and billions of dollars to sustain it. Israel could not carry out its mass slaughter of the Palestinians without this ecosystem. These entities, which profit from industrial violence against the Palestinians and mass displacement, are as guilty of genocide as the Israeli military units decimating the people in Gaza. They too are war criminals, They too must be held accountable.”

Understanding Iran Through The Quran by Indirajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Khamenei has said this many different ways, that “Our Islamic thinking says that a weapon which is used for killing civilians, non-military people and ordinary people is forbidden. It is forbidden whether they are nuclear or chemical weapons.” The corrupters of the land corrupt language as well, but Iran is actually the clearest and most ethical non-proliferator in the world. The White Empire (US, ‘Israel’, no difference) keeps threatening them with nukes (every accusation is a confession) and Khamenei has also said Islam is not just sitting there and taking it.”

“Hence the nuclear program goes forwards, with Iran’s government rightly banning the corrupted IAEA, voting to leave the NPT (not approved yet), and preserving its nuclear program at great cost. As with fires and ceasefires, however, you can see that Iran’s policy is reactive, which can be frustrating until you see that it’s Quranic. I guess you have to give even evil people a chance, or else become evil and lose that which is more valuable. What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul, as Abrahamism 2.0 says.”

“Of course, none of this makes sense if you think the only point is winning. In that case, just do whatever, however, and damn the consequences. It’s only a crime if you get caught. The Americans said they’d be considered war criminals if they lost World War II, and have approached their continuing wars on the world with the same sense of immorality.”

“The realpolitik theory is that every country is interchangeable and behaves out of their own self-interest, ie game theory. But Islam isn’t playing around. As the Quran says, “the life of this world is nothing but an illusory enjoyment.” It also says, “that which they spend in pursuit of the life of this world is like a biting frosty blast which smites the harvest of a people who have wronged themselves, and destroys it. God is not unjust to them; they are unjust to their own souls.””

“[…] the Islamic theory of war is not about winning in this world but the next one. Victory in this world is second best by a long shot. Better to lose with honor than dishonor yourself eternally.”

“You can say, bro, this is made up, this doesn’t work, fight with all your claws and teeth, survival of the shittest. But again consider the context, when you’re fighting, who you’re fighting to be, and where you’re fighting. What are you fighting for is more important than how you fight, so why would you lose it by fighting dirty?”

“I’ve heard it said that Islam is a religion of peace, but that’s a mistranslation. As Kwame Ture said, “That’s the white man’s word, ‘peace.’ Liberation is our word.” Islam is a religion of liberation, of justice, in this world or the next, with the next being far more important.”

“Think how much further away liberation seemed during the centuries of colonization, and yet people still fought for it. Think how far it still seemed in the last 75 years of cruel occupation, and yet people still bore it and kept resisting. This is actually the most hopeful point in Palestinian history, every point before was further away from liberation. And yet people still believed, and still acted, even when it seemed hopeless. Because they had faith, and faith is eternal.”

Iran’s Anti-Modern Revolution Still Terrifies the West by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Trump also engaged in a downright absurdist campaign to convince the more consistently isolationist members of his MAGA base that neocon-style regime-change on behalf of a secular war junkie like Bibi Netanyahu somehow amounts to putting America first. It didn’t work. MAGA flipped and Trump chickened out. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t over yet, but the Trump regime appears to be attempting to change the narrative to one in which their direct intervention somehow ended a massacre which they clearly engineered from the beginning.”

“[…] perhaps the most astounding thing about this whole bloody charade is actually how restrained big bad Iran has been throughout the ordeal. They have made it perfectly clear through public communiques that they rightly consider this entire adventure to be an American attack on Iranian soil, one that targeted some of the nation’s leading military figures, and yet their only response to the men standing behind the Zionist minotaur was a glorified fireworks display over a US base in Qatar followed almost immediately by a peace deal which Israel blatantly violated before the ink had even dried on the treaty.”

“Iran mostly resigns itself to furnishing regional militias with cheap rockets and drones. Even their support for Hamas pales in comparison to the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Qatar who actually houses much of their leadership, but Israel isn’t blowing Doha apart and America is literally protecting them with boots on the ground.”

“The Mullahs only raised their enrichment levels after Donald Trump unilaterally violated this deal during his first term with more sanctions in spite of Iran being in full compliance and they only continued to do so when the other nations in the P5+1 along with the Biden Administration refused to make any attempt to return to the peace table. Even then, Iran never came close to weapons grade enrichment, and they continue to beg America, a nation clearly committed to their destruction, to return to a treaty regime which even they acknowledge the US is likely just using as an excuse to spy on a totally legal program between bombings.”

“[…] I believe that the grotesque reality is that it isn’t even Iran that is dangerous to the west, it’s their revolution and the so-called proxies that this unique uprising continues to inspire long after the Mullahs sold out.”

“The Islamic Revolution wasn’t simply a rejection of American imperialism; it was a rejection of Western Civilization itself along with all the false promises of liberal democracy and the Enlightenment which never really amounted to much more than a smokescreen for cultural subjugation in the Third World. But the Iranians weren’t simply rejecting modernity for the sake of contrarian animosity; they were trying to redefine themselves outside of its polluted influence.”

“This is what the west really fears, and it is way bigger than Iran. The west is terrified of something adjacent to the kind of Islamic anarchism that nearly succeeded in Somalia with the Islamic Courts System, only this time written too large to contain. Iran is just a corrupt nation with just enough revolutionary malcontents amongst its dwindling hardliners to keep the kind of militias who will outlive them armed without carrying the moral or financial authority to govern them.”

Anti-Genocide Activism Is Terrorism In The Empire Of Lies by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“British police have been arresting anti-genocide protesters for holding signs expressing support for activist group Palestine Action, which London has now officially designated a terrorist group for putting red paint on war planes that were being used in the Gaza holocaust.

“That’s right, welcome to the empire, where peace activists are called terrorists, where hospitals are called military bases, where facts are called blood libel, where people opposing genocide are called hateful Nazis, where genocidal soldiers are a protected group and chanting for their death is a hate crime.”

Friedrich allein zu Haus by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Der chinesische Außenminister Wang Yi war in Brüssel zu Gast und führte offenbar ein ganze vier Stunden langes „Marathon-Gespräch“ mit der EU-Außenbeauftragten Kaja Kallas, wie es die South China Morning Post in Erfahrung gebracht hat. Dabei habe er, so berichten EU-Quellen, der Estin eine ausführliche Lektion in Sachen Geschichtsunterricht erteilt. China verfolge beim Ukrainekrieg andere Interessen als die EU und es sei nicht im chinesischen Interesse, dass Russland diesen Krieg verliert. Ein Krieg in Europa, der die USA materiell und personell bindet und von einem erweiterten Engagement in Ostasien abhalte, sei hingegen im chinesischen Interesse, so Wang Yi laut SCMP.”

“Diese Woche hat gezeigt: Nicht Russland, sondern Deutschland ist mehr und mehr isoliert. Mit dem Wegbröckeln der US-Unterstützung und der schwindenden Begeisterung der Briten und Franzosen für eine stärkere Unterstützung der Ukraine ist Deutschland zusehends allein im Klub der Falken. Wer hätte sich vor ein paar Jahren noch vorstellen können, dass ausgerechnet Deutschland nun drauf und dran ist, seinen eigenen Stellvertreterkrieg gegen Russland zu führen?”

Welcome to the Age of Disappearance by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“This budget will give him the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place.”

“Because “national security” and “terrorism” both mean nothing and everything, this category alone is large enough to cover just about anyone that the administration wants to get rid of. Been to a protest? Written a left-wing op-ed? Shared a meme of JD Vance? You can and will be ejected from America.”

“Yesterday, JD Vance wrote that everything in Trump’s budget bill “is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” This statement is false, particularly for the millions of people who will soon be losing their health insurance, but it does illustrate the extent to which Republicans are willing to whip up hatred of immigrants and use it as a smokescreen for their grand class war.”

“[…] it is impossible for me to put into words my contempt for JD Vance. Men like Stephen Miller are, at least, genuine Nazis to the core, driven by a deep reservoir of hate. Vance, on the other hand, is a lotion-drenched, amoral careerist, a professional ass kisser of monsters, sitting in air conditioned rooms with his fellow Yale graduates dreaming up justifications for racist policies as a way to amuse himself, as a beloved PTA mom who has spent 47 years in America is snatched out of her Louisiana home and separated from her family. If Trump and Miller are the arsonists of American democracy, Vance is the accomplice pointing the firefighters in the wrong direction, to ensure that things burn as completely as his boss wishes.”

“America is about to fund and build a huge secret police force that will, I promise you, be used to attack and imprison and exile the president’s enemies, of all sorts. Better to look this fact square in the face than to continue to kid ourselves as long as possible as we march down the road to the gulags.”

“[…] there is a certain level of responsibility that a much broader slice of America must bear. The things that most Americans long countenanced for others are now being turned on us. The surveillance systems, the heavily armed police, the “anti-terrorism” measures, the vast intelligence apparatus—all these things, we imagined, would be used only for “criminals” of the sort that were not us. Now we are surprised to find that we have been defined as the criminals. Turns out we should not have built the systems of injustice in the first place. This is one of morality’s oldest lessons. We relearn, and relearn, and relearn, the hard way.”

Yeah well no shit. And fuck us for being amoral uncaring pricks anyway. You get what you deserve. And if you cheered as innocent others were put in cages because the stock market was doing great for you, then fuck you too and have fun breaking rocks because that should be the best that you can hope for if their id a God and she is just.

“A strange quality of even the worst totalitarian fascist states is that very bad things might happen to the person next to you, and your life can still continue as normal. More and more Americans are going to find that their neighbor or their friend or their employee or their colleague was just snatched up by armed men and taken somewhere. And meanwhile, all of us who were not snatched up can still go to McDonald’s and go to the beach and watch TV. The urge to retreat into the comforting security of the idea “it’s not me” will be strong.”

That’s what you’ve all been doing already. In the U.S., people have just watched as the absolutely broken health-care system took one victim after another. They watched as other classes were sacrificed on the altar of a predictable and healthy rate of return on billionaires’ investments. Now it’s their peers rather than just the poors.

’Now I Understand Why Israel Is Denying Journalists Access to the Appalling Scene in Gaza’ by Netta Ahituv (Haaretz)

“The same duality is palpable in his book. Factual information about the situation is interspersed with comments like: “Even though I have been in a number of war zones in the past, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, via Syria, Iraq and Somalia, I have never, but never, experienced anything like this… Now I understand why Israel is denying the international press access to such an appalling scene.”

“The narrative of his visit to Gaza is intertwined with a description of the ear-splitting soundtrack of the enclave: an intense humming of drones overhead. “It’s a nonstop roar, so strong that it’s impossible to have a regular conversation outside,” he says.”

“Especially heartbreaking were the children he saw. “In the past the schoolchildren of Gaza had uniforms and schoolbags,” Filiu he writes in his book. “Today they are street children, visited by death and wandering. In the open garbage dumps they scrounge for paper, cardboard, nylon, anything that can be used to light a small fire and provide a bit of heat. They barely drag jerricans bigger than they are.”

This is not an accident. This is not the result of a natural catastrophe. This has been manufactured. This is the way empire wants it to be. The suffering is the point.

“Wounded orphans remain abandoned in hospitals without relatives, even distant ones, coming to visit them.

“Despite the children’s abject hunger, Filiu relates that he saw them sharing bits of food with scrawny stray cats. When he asked them why they were doing that, they explained to him that they know what it feels like to be hungry and didn’t want the cats to feel like that.”

“He describes in his book what the morning after a winter downpour looks like: “Repair is needed on all fronts – to repair the tents, block the broad leaks, repair the poles on which the fragile structures rest. The men are silent under their exhaustion and pain, and a dignified grandmother, trembling in a tattered scarf, calls to the heavens to attest that ‘I was never so cold, I was never so hungry.’ A woman drenched with water from head to foot is crying on her water-logged mattresses and vows that she is ready to forgo food – anything to be dry.””

“Israel’s very support of the Abu Shabab gang, Filiu explains, is actually strengthening Hamas. “Against the backdrop of the intense hunger in Gaza, Hamas’ punishment of the plundering gangs is accepted with understanding by the civilian population – they are angry at the looters and see Hamas as being bent on trying to stop the plunder of the little food that might reach them. Everybody in Gaza hates these gangs. Most of them are ostracized openly by their families. The idea of Israel relying on total outcasts to control territory is very disturbing. I’m not even talking from an ethical viewpoint, only an operational one.””

In Gaza, Aid Is a Tracking Device Distributed by People With Guns and Drones by A, Mansour (ZNetwork)

“Just before noon, Israeli soldiers fired gunshots into the sky. That was the signal: Move forward. The crowd surged as one. There were no organized lines, no distribution points — just scattered supplies thrown from trucks or dropped by parachute. People climbed over each other to grab whatever they could before it was gone. I wished I were stronger. Not a writer. Not a program coordinator. I wished I had the muscles to fight my way through, to claim a small box of pasta or a can of tuna. But my body has been malnourished for months. None of us in Gaza have eaten properly in nearly two years. I watched people push forward. I saw a man I knew step a few meters outside an invisible boundary — one no one had explained, one that didn’t exist on any map — and get shot in the chest. He collapsed onto the sand and didn’t move.”

“[…] the operation was linked to an entity calling itself the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). According to lawyers and watchdog groups in Switzerland, GHF has no medical or aid personnel on the ground. Instead, it has partnered with a U.S.-linked private security firm named Safe Reach Solutions. This company isn’t made up of aid workers — it’s made up of contractors. Former U.S. military, intelligence officers, and data analysts, many earning up to $1,000 a day. Some are deployed in the very zones where civilians like me go to collect aid. Their real job isn’t just “security.” According to investigations by TRIAL International and the Alliance of Lawyers for Palestine, the GHF contractors are tasked with collecting visual and behavioral intelligence on Palestinians. They use quadcopters and surveillance drones to track people’s movements, scan their faces, and monitor their behavior — building profiles in hopes of identifying “targets.” In the process, people are dying.”

“We are not numbers. We are not “risks.” We are not enemy targets because we are hungry. We are people — grieving, broken, surviving — and the world is watching as we are starved, shot at, and turned into data.

“And sometimes, it watches in silence.”

The goal of US-Israel war on Iran, and why the collective West follows | Ft. Ben Norton, Doug Rooney by Li Jingjing 李菁菁 (YouTube)

Both Doug and Ben currently live in China and share stories of their experiences there. Doug says that China feels like an optimistic country because most of the people you meet have seen their lives get better over the last decades, while the UK, when he returns, feels like a dying country, because most people you meet have seen their lives get worse.

An Anarchist Appeal to the Disgruntled Deplorable by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“The conclusion that more and more America First conservatives seem to be arriving at is that Donald Trump is becoming just another globalist neocon. The reality that I have been trying to force feed these people for years however is that this really isn’t a recent transition. Donald Trump has always been a craven opportunist with intimate connections to the very swamp he has long railed against. It just took him sewing the various chunks of the federal government together into one big Lovecraftian Death Star suit to finally knock the fucking blinders off.”

“This isn’t to say that Trump is a neocon perse. He’s really more of an ideological rent boy, selling space in his puckered asshole to the highest bidder, and in Washington the highest bidder tends to be whoever can unload the most missiles. This may be why Trump’s new and improved second administration still includes neocon heavy hitters like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik, but it also includes a suspicious amount of big tech bros connected to aforementioned PayPal founder and technofascist billionaire Peter Thiel.”

“We’re going to need a bigger coalition to crush this parasite, and we can’t afford to be picky when it comes to recruiting fellow peasants with pitchforks and torches. So, I’ll say it one more time with zero apologies, from the trailer park to the barrio, it’s time to lose the partisan bullshit and tear this motherfucker down.”

Israel Continues to Starve, Target Gaza Civilians in Ongoing Genocide by Juan Cole (Scheer Post)

“Since last March when Israel violated the ceasefire negotiated by the Trump administration, its minions have forced over 300,000 people into Al Mawasi, an area of about 3.5 square miles. There are now 425,000 people huddling there, mostly in so-called “tents” — really just odd bits of plastic and cloth. And they are sometimes being shot at like fish in a barrel, even as Israel’s military attacks in Rafah and Khan Younis have become more intense.

“At the same time, Israeli commanders continue deliberately to starve the civilian population, continuing in some form a blockade on staples they began on March 2, when they began violating the ceasefire arranged by President Trump, according to Amnesty International. The blockade on food and other aid has been only slightly adjusted in recent weeks, leaving many people hungry — including children.”

“[…] few hospitals are functioning even at a basic level in Gaza, because Israeli troops have deliberately destroyed them. The harried doctors and nurses who haven’t been assassinated by the Israeli army are trying to deal with those injured in the war, and you wonder if they can do much for children with stick-like arms and distended bellies. They don’t have food aid to give out, and what food there is has become extremely expensive. That is, by the way, typical of famine situations, which usually develop not because there is no food at all but because people cannot afford what little there is.”

Zohran Mamdani: “Globalize the Intifada” or the Reinvention of Goebbels’ Doctrine? by Jamal Kanj (CounterPunch)

“Last week, NBC’s Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker repeatedly pressed Mamdani to denounce the slogan “Globalize the Intifada”—a phrase he did not use. In response, Mamdani calmly replied, “That’s not language that I use. The language that I use … is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights.” His nuanced, rights-based position wasn’t enough. Why? Because Mamdani’s unapologetic commitment to universal human rights includes Palestinians. And that inclusion violates an unspoken rule in U.S. politics: thou shalt not challenge Israeli impunity.”

“The hypocrisy is glaring: Mamdani is being hounded for allegedly failing to disavow a slogan used by others. The media and political establishment weren’t interested in clarity or context. They were hunting for soundbites to fit a manufactured narrative—one that frames any meaningful support for Palestinian human rights as a threat to AIPAC-controlled American political order.”

“[…] in U.S. media and politics, Palestinian lives simply don’t count. Any attempt to humanize them—to advocate for equal rights or to contextualize their struggle—is smeared as extremism. The obsession with Mamdani’s imagined offenses, while ignoring candidates who defend real war crimes, reveals more than double standards. It exposes a deeper rot: racism and Islamophobia thinly disguised as performative concern for “the Jewish people.””

How The White Empire Is Collapsing Outwards by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“This is how to understand late stage White Empire. Not oh my God, look at what they can do, but oh my God, look! This is not The Empire Strikes Back (leading to interminable sequels), this is The Emperor Has No Clothes. They were doing all this evil shit for centuries while looking like the good guys, but that doesn’t work anymore! This is not a sign of the imperial machine working but a sign that it’s broken. The fact that we’re looking at all is bad news, because they have to use expensive hard power to censor and kill everybody, whereas before they could just make a few movies and people confused themselves quite happily.”

While this is hopefully true, there were people who believed the same thing about Vietnam, Iraq, and so on. Maybe it’s more obvious now. Maybe.

“Yes, sadly yes, they can cover their nakedness up for a while longer, but only by throwing more fuel on the fire, going more supernova, and just collapsing harder in the end. Which is, historically speaking, right now, if you’re rounding down.”

Inshallah. I mean, really, if there was such a thing as a good God, she would have put a stop to this savagery a while ago.

“‘What is this madness?’” by Mazin Qumsiyeh (The Floutist)

“This soul is weary; it craves peace. The tanks are near. Their roar sits heavy in my lap, rattling this exhausted body. Gunfire crackles without end, everywhere. The grinding of treads devours what little memory remains—I hear it so clearly, crushing my dreams. My dreams! What a hollow word. I don’t even know how it slipped through my fingers. A burst of bullets—first, second, third… Dear God, what is this madness?!

“My hand trembles again as Ahmed, my nephew, crouches like a hunted thing, clinging to his grandmother. Fear gnaws at him, crouching over his small body like a predator savoring its prey. Children are easy meat for terror. The tanks roll closer. The wail of ambulances swells.”

“Today, the Americans deliberately placed the sugar in a separate area. Then, they dug a deep pit just before the sugar zone, covered it with nylon, and lightly sprinkled it with dirt so that no one would see it or notice. The starving reached the sugar first, and seven people fell into the pit. Then a bulldozer came and buried them alive.”

’Israel’s’ Worst Day Since October 7th by Indirajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The total casualty numbers are disproportional, certainly, but look at the category headings. The Empire is killing almost exclusively civilians while the Resistance is exclusively hitting military. Like the Nazis at the end of their campaign, the Bizarro Nazis are wasting resources on genocide while getting their own forces defenestrated summarily. ‘Israel’s’ conscript army of baristas and software engineers is getting roasted in APCs, ducking out of call-ups, leaving the country, and killing themselves. The IOF is taking less damage overall, certainly, but they also have far less tolerance for pain. And the Resistance is bringing the pain.”

“This is how Wasreal is winning the genocide, and losing the war. They’re so blinded by racism their own forces are getting erased.”

US Sanctions UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese Following ‘Economy of Genocide’ Report by Middle East Eye Staff (ZNetwork)

“The sanctions will freeze any assets Albanese has in the US and would likely restrict her ability to travel to the US.

“Albanese is an Italian citizen. If the sanctions are fully enforced, they could also prohibit her from engaging in financial transactions within the European Union. US sanctions carry weight because the US can impose secondary sanctions on entities, such as banks or financial institutions, which conduct transactions with the sanctioned individual. Unlike Iran or North Korea, the EU is deeply wired into the US economy.”

Roaming Charges: Heckuva Job, Puppy Slayer! by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins (former Queen of the Cotton Bowl Classic), thinks that she can mass deport all immigrant farmworkers and replace them with automation and people forced to work to keep their Medicaid…”I can’t underscore enough. There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations will continue. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation and with 34 million able-bodied people on Medicaid we should able to do this fairly quickly.””

This is an actual tweet put out by the DHS. They are lunatics. How can you even support this or think it’s funny or cool? Christ almighty, it’s the Stasi, the Gestapo, but with stupid memes. Somehow they’ve made it even worse.

MY BODY IS A MACHINE THAT TURNS ICE FUNDING INTO MASS DEPORTATIONS

“In one of his books, Zohran’s father, the acclaimed political scientist Mahmoud Mamdani, described how his own introduction to Marx came courtesy of the FBI, during his interrogation after being arrested at a SNCC civil rights protest in Selma, Alabama..”

They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?”
I said, “I haven’t met him.”
Guy said,” “No, no, he’s dead.”
“Wow, what happened?”
“No, no, he died long ago
I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then,
“Why are you asking me if he died long ago?”
“No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.”
I said, “Sounds amazing.”
I’m giving you a sense of how naive I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.

Don't worry little buddy. We can still hate trans people together

Journalism & Media

Israel’s strike on bustling Gaza cafe killed a Hamas operative − but dozens more people were killed by Alice Cuddy (BBC)

Don’t bother reading the article. It’s trash. It’s just so bizarre. This is just a reminder that this is still how the BBC reports on genocidal terrorist attacks by a close ally on its own citizens.

But, for completeness, let’s take an example paragraph. Just for context, this is almost 21 months into an obvious genocide—obvious because the perpetrators trumpet from every parapet that that is what they are doing—and the BBC is still using the most mealy-mouthed language because it knows that it cannot admit to the grotesque illegality of what it is reporting on, lest it incriminate its own nation.

“The conduct of the strike and the scale of civilian casualties have amplified questions over the proportionality of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say are aimed at defeating Hamas and rescuing the hostages still being held by the group.”

Given these types of statements, it is hard not to think that the large amount of concern in the remainder of the article is fake. How could it be anything else when the author and her employer simply refuse to actually condemn Israel for an obviously terrorist attack. Instead, they drily cite IDF sources, as if there is any defense of an attack like this, on an obviously civilian target.

Blinken Ordered the Hit. Big Tech Carried It Out. African Stream Is Dead. by Alan MacLeod (ZNetwork)

“In September, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the call and announced an all-out war against the organization, claiming, without evidence, that it was a Russian front group.

“[…]

“Within hours, big social media platforms jumped into action. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all deleted African Stream’s accounts, while Twitter demonetized the organization.”

“If Blinken genuinely wanted to unearth a government-sponsored influence operation, he would not have to look far. Earlier this year, a funding freeze at the U.S. government agency USAID exposed a global network of supposedly “independent” media outlets that Washington secretly bankrolled. The scale of this operation was vast: more than 6,200 journalists at nearly 1,000 organizations across five continents had their salaries secretly paid in whole or in part by the U.S. government.

“While the outlooks of these media groups differed, they all shared one similarity: an unwavering commitment to promoting Washington’s interests.

“The pause in funding was keenly felt in Ukraine. Oksana Romanyuk, the director of the country’s Institute for Mass Information, lamented that almost 90% of local media outlets were funded by USAID, including many with no other source of income.

“In neighboring Belarus, a survey of 20 leading outlets found that 60% of their budgets came directly from Washington.”

Federal jury rejects most serious charges against rapper and music industry mogul Sean Combs by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“It is no defense of Combs to point out the hypocrisy of the entire business. Murder tens of thousands of women and children, and the US establishment will roll out the red carpet. Hire two prostitutes for a sex party, and there are six months of screaming headlines and a full-blown federal prosecution. The trial was grotesquely ugly, and a deliberate distraction.

“Noteworthy as well is the fact that the facts about a truly criminal enterprise, the late Jeffrey Epstein and his intimate connections to leading politicians from both parties and a wide swath of ruling class America, were being suppressed even as Combs faced public pillorying as Satan himself.

“The New York jury rejected the prosecutions allegations that Combs was guilty of orchestrating a criminal enterprise for years that exploited by force women and men for sexual purposes. Although transportation to engage in prostitution is a serious federal offense, the guilty verdict on this charge alone shows that the jury considered the bulk of the prosecution’s case against him as unproven.”

“Combs’ defense team, led by attorneys Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos, argued that the government’s case was built on unreliable witnesses, consensual adult relationships and a fundamental misunderstanding of Combs’ “swinger lifestyle.”

“They contended that while Combs’ relationships may have involved domestic violence or unconventional arrangements, none of the conduct rose to the level of criminal sex trafficking or racketeering.”

Economy & Finance

How much (little) are the AI companies making? by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about “unicorns” – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be “market-based.” A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick.”

“Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad.”

“Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are considered “mature” and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.”

“[…] when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes “mature,” it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old “growth” valuation. That’s why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.”

“So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a “growth” sector and not a “mature” sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.”

“The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.”

“These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.”

Financial Capitalism Is More Dangerous Than Ever Today by Matthias Schmelzer (Jacobin)

“Finally, the liberalization of capital movements in the 1970s must be seen as one side of the exhaustion of economic growth across the advanced industrialized countries; both are effects of overaccumulation and declining productivity growth and have taken the form of secular stagnation. The subsequent period has seen a tremendous explosion of fictitious capital, or financial assets that are in essence claims on future production and profit.”

The fantasy is evident to all. Those who continue to promulgate it are those who hope to benefit from the during scam. Everyone knows that future production and those incredible predicted future profits are not coming. AI is not brining them. The “greater fool” / pyramid scheme economy is in full flight.

“The financialization of the post-Fordist era has produced a lopsided economy, where such claims exceed by significant measure the size of the underlying real economy. Its logic is that of a growthless casino, based on transfer and appropriation largely decoupled from real-world use values.”

This would only matter if the participants who benefit most were injured by these features. They are not; they are beneficiaries of them.

“In the age of climate overshoot, secular stagnation, and polycrisis, these claims on future production — now far greater than global GDP — create a fundamental dilemma. Given mounting evidence that calls into question the ambition of greening economic growth, efforts to realize future profits of fictitious capital will lead to either unsustainable growth that dangerously destabilizes planetary life or an alternative post-growth scenario, in which societies regain democratic control and turn fictitious capital into stranded assets.”

This is inevitable but first the crash will be spectacular. Those in the driver’s seat are having amazing lives and they couldn’t care less. They can’t conceive of a world in which they don’t succeed because their coddled assesses have always been coddled. It won’t end well.

Trump’s embrace of dystopian Palantir spying tool sends stock soaring by Kit Klarenberg (TheGrayZone)

“The Trump administration has charged the surveillance firm Palantir with agglomerating the US population’s personal data across government agencies, raising alarm about a centralized spying tool targeting hundreds of millions without oversight. Wall Street responded to the news by sending Palantir’s stock price to unprecedented heights.”

“Palantir is already playing a decisive role in the besieged Gaza Strip, where its products assists Israel’s application of a ferocious AI targeting system known as Lavender which directs its ongoing genocide. In the face of public protest, Karp has acknowledged that he is directly involved in killing Palestinians in Gaza, but insisted the dead were “mostly terrorists.””

I was watching a presentation with a work colleague the other day, in which another company in our group was sharing their knowledge and experience about having chosen an AI/LLM solution. The mentioned Palantir as an option—and no-one cares that the company is a data-hungry, deep-state-servicing monolith run by an absolutely antisocial maniac (Peter Thiel) and that founder Peter Thiel named his company after the all-seeing device used by Saruman to keep tabs on the outside world from and also to manipulate people from Orthanc. The orb is right in the logo.

My coworker responded that he knows the company—he used to own the stock. I said that it had gone up quite a bit recently, hoping to hear him confirm that that was OK because he’d sold the stock on principle. Nope. He said, ‘I sold too soon.’

People generally don’t see themselves as responsible for living their principles. They see themselves as making investments for their own personal gain, rarely if ever considering the negative effects that funding companies like Palantir might have—will have—on other people. Their retirement plan is all they really think about.

“During an end-of-year investor call this February, Palantir co-founder and militant Zionist Alex Karp bragged that his company was making a financial killing by enabling mass murder.

““Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies,” he stated, adding: “And on occasion kill them.””

You sure you want to be invested in this company? They are literally telling you that they’re killing people. No problem, though. That pension fund is looking phat.

Can We Stop Calling Them Populist Tax Cuts? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“According to the Social Security Administration, 45.6 million workers, more than a quarter of the total, earned less than $20,000 in 2023, the most recent year where we have data.

“Most of these low-paid workers would have zero income-tax liability. This means Trump’s “populist” tax cut did nothing for them. If we want to help low-paid tipped workers, the obvious measure would be to end the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. This has been frozen at $2.13 an hour for three decades, although most states have higher ones or ended the sub-minimum wage altogether. That would be a genuinely populist measure, which would require employers to pay workers more rather than have taxpayers subsidize a small group of moderately paid workers.”

“Eliminating taxes on overtime effectively has taxpayers subsidizing employers who force workers to put in long hours, turning the intent of the law on its head. The populist move here is to simply raise the overtime premium. We can require employers to pay a 75 percent wage premium for forcing workers to put in more than 40 hours a week.

“We can even get fancy and make the premium 100 percent if employers demand more than 45 hours. Or, if we want to really get populist, we can have overtime kick in after 38 hours, or even 35 hours, as some other countries have done. This would be the populist move on overtime.”

“The populist move here would be to increase benefits along the lines proposed by Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others. They have proposed an increase in [Social Security] benefits of $200 a month. That would mean little to higher income retirees but would make a huge difference to the tens of millions of beneficiaries who rely on Social Security for much, or all, of their income. We could even phase out the increase so that it does not go to higher income retirees, thereby limiting the cost.”

Issue 88 – The stockchain by Molly White (Citation Needed)

“The crypto world has two recent buzzwords: “tokenization” and “real-world assets” (RWAs).a Gone are the days when crypto evangelists dreamed of tearing down traditional financial institutions altogether. Now, crypto firms seem intent on replicating the financial system, minus regulations that might safeguard consumers or economic stability. Next in their sights? Stock exchanges.

“Prominent crypto firms such as Robinhood, Republic, Coinbase, and Kraken are rapidly moving towards “tokenizing” traditional stocks, and pressuring regulators to allow it. Instead of buying your shares of publicly traded firms via a brokerage account that places orders on the NYSE or Nasdaq, you would use a crypto trading app to purchase a token representing a share. Companies hoping to develop such platforms usually promote the idea by saying that a blockchainified stock market would expand trading hours,c and would be more accessible to international investors who didn’t want to go through the somewhat onerous process of opening an American brokerage account.

“These companies don’t usually admit that, by encasing stocks in a blockchainy wrapper, they hope to tap into lucrative equities markets while sidestepping the expensive compliance and oversight requirements of traditional American brokerages and exchanges. This fits the long history of companies trying to use blockchains as a magic get-out-of-regulation-free wand, reminiscent of the 2017 bubble when companies used “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) to try to sidestep IPO regulations.d Indeed, Robinhood has been heavily lobbying for “a new regulatory approach [that’s] needed to allow tokenization to flourish” and not “stifle growth and innovation”.1 Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize this language as the standard rhetoric of a crypto company asking for carveouts and exemptions from regulations we collectively learned are necessary, oh, about a century ago — when a speculative bubble emerged around stocks sold to the public based on false or incomplete information and we wound up in the Great Depression.”

Trump’s Tariffs Are Worse Than Hated. They’re Ignored by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Trump has effectively unionized every exporter in the world against American importers. It’s one of the most spectacular self-owns in economic history. If you tariff one person, more power to you. But it you tariff everyone, more power to us.

“Now exporters are all in the same boat, while the American importer is the one stuck at the port. All the importer can do is send an email saying, “please eat the difference,” but every exporter can safely say, “eat my shorts.” We might move a bit relative to our competitors, but that’s it. We have the power most dreaded by buyers, to say, where else are you gonna go? Are Americans going to stitch their own underwear now?”

Environment & Climate Change

Thoughts and prayers, etc. by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

““A common progressive fantasy is that once conservatives see the consequences of climate change, they will have some sort of come to Jesus moment,” X user @KrangTNelson wrote. “But it was always pretty obvious to people paying attention that they were just gonna blame it on Deep State Flooding Tech and learn nothing.”

“Or as @wb_baskerville put more bluntly, “I don’t know how you share a democratic society with millions of people who are just pervasively unwilling to occupy reality in the most basic terms.”

“[…]

“Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced a bill over the weekend that would make “weather manipulation” a felony. Sure. What the fuck, why not? Who cares. Anything to keep their deranged supporters from wondering why the flood waters continue to rise. Thoughts and prayers, etc.”

Roaming Charges: Heckuva Job, Puppy Slayer! by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“New York’s congestion pricing program, which Trump has vowed to quash, seems to have succeeded in doing most of the things it was meant to do, that is reducing commute times and encouraging more commuters to use mass transit…”

• $500M in revenue in 6 months
• Rush hour delays at Holland Tunnel down 65%
• Subway ridership up 7%
• Bus ridership up 12%
• Long Island Railroad ridership up 8%
• Metro-North ridership up 6%
• Access-A-Ride ridership up 21%

“Federal Reserve: “Since 1989, the share of American household wealth held by the top 0.1% has increased by more than 60%. For comparison, the share of those in the 99% to 99.9% range increased about 20%, those whose wealth is in the 90% to 99% range fell 4.1%, those in the 50% to 90% range fell 17%, and the bottom 50% of the population has fallen about 46% in their share of the national wealth.””

Medicine & Disease

It’s not just about measles by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“Measles is a canary in the coal mine. When measles reappears in a country like the U.S., it signals that something has gone seriously wrong. This is a disease we had essentially eliminated—thanks to one of the safest and most effective vaccines in the history of medicine. But the way things are heading, the U.S. is at risk of losing its elimination status this year. This is not just a failure to move forward—it’s the unraveling of decades of progress, representing one of the greatest public health achievements of our era.

“That progress was built on public confidence in science and medicine. When parents now refuse the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, it’s not because the science has changed. It’s because trust has, both due to failures of public health to reach communities and due to well-organized efforts to spread inaccurate information about vaccination, leaving many Americans’ heads spinning as they sort through the noise and figure out who to trust.”

Art, Literature, & Cinema

Ted Chiang on Superintelligence and Its Discontents in J.D. Beresford’s Innovative Work of Early 20th-Century Science Fiction by Ted Chiang (Literary Hub)

“[…] the character who first appreciates Victor’s capabilities is the wealthy landowner Henry Challis, who offers the boy access to his considerable library. At one point he warns Victor, “whatever your wisdom, you have to live in a world of comparative ignorance, a world which cannot appreciate you, but which can and will fall back upon the compelling power of the savage—the resort to physical, brute force.””

“The challenge of imagining the actions of a superintelligent person has remained an issue throughout the history of science fiction. When Vernor Vinge submitted a story about such a character to Analog editor John W. Campbell in the 1960s, to name one example, Campbell rejected it with a note saying, “Sorry—you can’t write this story. Neither can anyone else.””

“Stapledon’s Odd John departs from this strategy for a time, in that John discovers other superhumans who’ve preceded him but have had little impact on the world because they prefer to remain in hiding; this is a viable, if less interesting, route for depicting the actions of a superintelligent person. But eventually that novel also returns to convention: After John and his fellow superhumans form a community that the nations of the world consider a threat, they choose to die rather than fight the entire planet.”

“The idea that the search for understanding will inevitably lead to a kind of cognitive heat death is an interesting one. I don’t believe it and I doubt any scientist believes it, so it’s curious that Beresford—clearly an admirer of scientists—apparently did. Challis talks about the need for mysteries that elude explanation, which is a surprisingly anti-intellectual stance to find in a novel about superintelligence.”

How Things Happen by Jim Culleny / Nils Peterson (3QuarksDaily)

“Rain comes when it will. It doesn’t care for us.
It’s hitchhiking its way to the sea on a cloud.
The sun is interested in its own fires. If light
comes, so be it. Bees feel an itch on their legs
only nectar can sooth. So many gifts from indifferent
givers. We walk through the world and smile,
remembering an old love, and Ramona, passing by,
thinks That man thinks I’m pretty, and walks in a way
that makes her more beautiful – and Henry,
walking down the street notices, makes a pass,
and they end up having a good marriage.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Homo crustaceous: Are humans destined to evolve into crabs? by Michael Garfield (Aeon)

“Most modern humans live far from the ‘human climate niche’ in which our flesh could live unaugmented. Even in temperate regions, tools are required for survival. We need artificial skins in the form of clothing, thermally stable shelters, refrigeration to keep our foods from spoiling, and trade networks to sustain the movement of materials that all those products depend on. The way we live has led some theorists to argue that the human being is more colonial than individual: like corals inseparable from their reef, we are constantly being woven into the infrastructures we’ve made.”

“According to the measurements provided by some physicists, each human’s metabolic rate, when we include our tools, exceeds what other mammals of our mass require by more than 30 times the expected value. The energy consumed by you and your support technologies – your fraction of the farm equipment, servers, factories, refrigerators, hospitals and power stations – lofts you up into the weight class of 12 elephants.”

“Even trees once choked our world with their ‘forever chemicals’: before fungi figured out how to eat wood 300 million years ago, landscapes were covered in fallen logs that never went away, eventually becoming coal deposits. Just because we’re on a bender doesn’t mean we’ll kill the planet; microbes have already learned to eat plastic and, in that way, life trends toward ‘crab’ through entrepreneurship, seizing as many free calories as it can.”

Don’t be a hopeful idiot. The timespans you’re writing about are completely different.

“Each time we lean in to collective efficiency, we sacrifice individual resilience. Relying on each other more and more, each of us knows relatively less of what it takes to do it all. This strategy is more or less dependable in stable but competitive environments. And plenty of investors say as much: backable inventions get more done with less.”

Oh God that’s so.naive and superficial. You can’t possibly believe that our economy is a meritocracy where the more efficient version of something wins? Has that been your experience?

“Crabs did not just lose their tender underbelly; they gained by having less to haul around than ancient shrimps and lobsters. They are ‘lean’ compared with how they started, in the same way human beings of today have smaller skulls than we did 50,000 years ago because we can rely on cultural technologies like books and large language models like ChatGPT.”

He’s trying too hard with this metaphor. He was just dying to mention ChatGPT in his article, probably to boost his numbers. 🤦‍♂️

“[H.G.] Wells followed with more novels featuring prescient inventions such as the monstrous tanks in The Land Ironclads (1903), military aircraft in The War in the Air (1908), atomic bombs in The World Set Free (1914), and the world wide web in ‘[World Brain:] The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia’ (1937).”

“We are not standing on the world but in it, not entirely unlike crabs on the ocean floor, under miles of atmosphere and somewhere in the middle of a giant pile of articulated meaning.”

The rise of Whatever by eevee / Evelyn Woods (fuzzy notepad)

“But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else [….]”

“[…] the vast majority of people involved do not actually care what the thing they’re flocking to is. What they care about is that it has a graph, and that they get rich if the graph goes up, so they say whatever might make the graph go up.”

“It doesn’t matter what the art is, or how the technology works, or what the tokens are attached to. It just has to be something you can convince other people to buy. The actual thing can be Whatever.”

“Tens of thousands of grifters lining every sidewalk, each one passionately hawking an indistinguishable Whatever that they don’t actually care about. Endless, endless fake enthusiasm from people all trying to convince each other to buy into their boilerplate box of nothing. Buy my thing! Haha no don’t worry about how much of it I own — let’s talk about how much of it you should own! Hint: it’s a lot!”

“Together, these forces push big platforms in a very specific direction: maximize how many ads people see. To the exclusion of just about anything else. So Engagement becomes king — it’s okay if your users are miserable, so long as they’re here. It’s okay if the ads are obnoxious, as long as they’re seen.”

““Content” is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car’s trunk. “Content” is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.”

“Did you know there were entire get-rich-quick schemes about this? It’s like writing fake novels. Just make a website with a generic WordPress theme (every website looks the same anyway), write a bunch of bland nothing articles about things that seem a little obscure, and slather it in Google ads. Then let the money roll in from people accidentally finding your website and leaving when they find out it’s useless. But it’s too late because you already got the ad view!”

“My phone’s fucking weather app has an “AI summary” with incredible insights like “it’ll get warmer over the course of the week”, which I could readily see for myself if this block of white noise weren’t pushing the temperature graph off the bottom of the screen. Over and over, actual information is moved out of the way to make room for an unreliable lossy compression of that information into text that takes longer to read.”

“LLM features get bolted onto fucking everything because what they do, what they really do, at their core, is this: Whatever. They do Whatever. And that’s great, because Whatever is something. There’s no such thing as an error, no empty results page, no such thing as a missing feature or an uncovered case. Almost without fail, you’ll get something. Is it useful? Is it correct? Is it remotely based in reality? Who cares? Far more important is that there is output. Whatever is apparently better than nothing. Cheap and inoffensive and disposable, like a red beer cup. We are doing to the Internet what we already did to the ocean: filling it with a great swirling vortex of trash.”

“[…] the LLM statistically generated something that sounds like an API that could exist. It produced an answer that was plausible, thorough, informative, relevant, and contained no useful information whatsoever. It produced the opposite of information! It produced noise. Why would I want this? Why would I want to use a machine that sometimes generates text that resembles a person confidently lying to me? People are sometimes wrong, sure — that’s why Stack Overflow has downvotes — but this is something else entirely. If a real person did this to you, you would stop asking them questions real fucking fast.”

“I didn’t cherry-pick this example! They chose it! This was the front-page example for a state-of-the-art LLM integrated with the most popular code editor in the world, all built by one of the richest companies in human history, whose entire business is software and who has specifically invested a zillion dollars in this specific technology. This is the gizmo at its best! And it’s crap!”

“What are we actually saying here — that even Microsoft has to evaluate usage of “AI” directly, because it doesn’t affect performance enough to have an obvious impact otherwise? That the technology is so limp that even its biggest investor has to strong-arm its own employees into using it? That their own employees don’t want to use it?”

“Another Bluesky quip I saw earlier today, and the reason I picked up writing this post (which I’d started last week):”

“Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.”

“I’m not trying to put the author on blast or anything, so let’s leave it anonymous, but — my guy? My dude?

“What on earth are you talking about? I don’t know the context for this. What I do know is that a table saw quickly cuts straight lines. That is the thing it does. It doesn’t do Whatever. It doesn’t sometimes cut wavy lines and sometimes glue pieces together instead. It doesn’t roll some dice and guess what shape of cut you are statistically likely to want based on an extensive database of previous cuts. It cuts a straight fucking line.

“If I were a carpenter, and my colleagues got really into this new thing where you just chuck 2×4s at a spinning whirling mass of blades until a chair comes out the other side… you know, I just might want to switch careers.”

“It’s also possible to adjust or customize tools in various ways, whereas 90% of the times I’ve seen someone talk about their customized LLM, all they’ve done is prepend a paragraph like “Please answer as though speaking to a customer.” The state of the art is to ask the computer nicely to do something, add a disclaimer saying it’s not your problem if the computer is racist, and then charge for access.”

“My gripes are more of a tangled web that I can only summarize as: the vibes are bad. The tone is unbearable. The lying as a fallback is offensive. The advertising keeps focusing on how you can coast through life without caring about your work or family because you can just generate a birthday card or whatever. The people funding and pushing it keep openly salivating at the idea of replacing as much human input as possible with a machine best known for generating titles of books that don’t exist.”

“I’d intended to comment on the ongoing efforts to make better and better photo-quality image generation, but I can’t think of much to say beyond: why the fuck would you work on that? We don’t have enough trouble with, say, the conservative “news” sphere inventing its own alternate reality that millions of people buy into, simply by lying — now we have to give them a machine tailor-made for creating fake photos and videos too? Why does this need to exist? Why is this in my phone’s fucking camera app? Can’t these people go live on an airgapped island somewhere and work on their new horrifying fraud machine by themselves?”

“[…] every time I hear about students coasting through school just using LLMs, I wonder what we are doing to humanity’s ability to think critically about anything. It already wasn’t great, but now we’re raising a whole generation on a machine that gives them Whatever, and they just take it.”

“It begins to feel like a broad celebration of mediocrity. Finally, society says, with a huge sigh of relief. I don’t have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don’t have to write a three-line fetch call. I don’t have to know anything, care about what I’m doing, or even have an opinion. I can just substitute some Content™. I can just ask the computer for Whatever.”

“But I like programming. I like writing. I like making things and then being able to sit back and look at them and think, holy fuck, I made that. There is no joy for me in typing a vague description into a computer and refreshing my way through a parade of Whatever until something is good enough.”

Amen, comrade.

“The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now.”

“What’s being sold to us is a machine that is promised to do everything. That’s far beyond a tiny question like “should you know how to manually focus in order to take a photography” — it gets at the notion of thinking about, or doing, anything at all.”

“I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost.”

“If you’re some assclown like Sam Altman, whose graph-go-up depends on convincing you to replace all your employees with ChatGPT, you have to destroy that idea. It is the greatest threat to your business model. You have to destroy the idea that things are worth doing. I think that sucks, I think he sucks, and I think his machine sucks. So fuck him and fuck his machine. Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.”

Vulgar, horny and threatening by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

“The modern tech industry is, by the standards of capitalism, unusually dependent on a cult of personality built around a few extremely rich, very stupid white men. While finance, the kinds of consulting services that the Big Four provide and the companies that nominally provide important goods and services all have their high-and-mighty leaders, they generally aren’t that well-known, and are on the whole mostly replacable.”

“These models are, as is quite obvious, mostly just ruining everyone’s life at the moment, and we shouldn’t have to debate their technical minutiae in order to say that.”

“Was our data unpolluted before? The problem is the perverted system of incentives. It was adverts and propaganda before. It’s hyper-accelerated slop now. It’s a matter of scale. We could supposedly handle the shittiness the system encouraged before; now, it’s overwhelming.”

“we want to disagree vehemently with the way the world is, we can’t very well use a narrow subset of language deliberately chosen to make strong emotion and vehement expression almost impossible. While we don’t have to be profane, perhaps, vulgarity is inevitable.”

“We shouldn’t let the world we hated and want to eradicate determine the frame within which we’re allowed to criticize it.”

“How sexual the influencer’s content actually is is largely immaterial: it’ll be sexualised regardless of the actual facts on the ground. More personally, an extremely talented make-up artist that I know who occasionally posts slightly provocative photos is consistently bombarded with messages from creepy men on the platform, as though posting photos of her work on Instagram automatically makes it acceptable for men to see her as a sexual object.”

What an inherently controlling and narcissistic statement that is, though. They put something in public and people misinterpreted it and then told them about it. I’m honestly not sure how utopic one should be about this: people are gonna be people. When you post something publicly, I just can’t imagine a world in which this is not going to happen.

We can point out that it’s not “acceptable”, I guess, but what does that mean? If we don’t accept something, then we try to eradicate it, I suppose. How do we even go about eradicating horny men seeing boobs and butts everywhere? How do you eradicate it when there are actual boobs and butts in the pictures?

“We interact with technology in highly intentional, careful ways that lead to many of us not having a presence on platforms where it’s thought that we should, build tools of our own where existing ones don’t suit and often just have interactions with tech that other people think are very, very weird.”

“The craftsman ethic that a lot of us adopt, whatever its economic merits or otherwise, is much, much better for one’s peace of mind than the way most people work.”

“So, we’re cooler than them, we have a countercultural cachet that they can’t match, we’re competent in ways that effortlessly outclass the best efforts of tech industry leadership, and on top of that, we are, if not happier, much more at peace with the lives we live? And we’re not generating data by being on their shitty tech platforms? Of course we read as a bloody threat.”

I Deleted My Second Brain by Joan Westenberg

“[…] the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.”

This is a danger, of course. I don’t read to extract. I read what I find interesting. I do like to extract from what I’ve read, though, because I’m usually quite happy to have some record of what I thought of it. I like to highlight nicely written passages and keep them. I like to mention authors and other names so that I can find them again later. If you don’t do any of that, then what’s the point?

“In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight. And an idea not re-encountered might as well have never been had.”

That’s a trap I’ve tried to avoid with these links. It’s quick to add them. They’re stored chronologically so that they can float into the past. I occasionally pluck stuff from the stream again and publish a more fleshed-out version. Sometimes I don’t. I don’t sweat it. I use the notes not to defer, but to work through thoughts and to cement them. The point isn’t the archive, it’s the process. The archive is nice to search, though—a gift to a future Marco trying to remember where he’d read something.

When in doubt, Go for a Walk by Fabián (Fabián's Journal)

“Walking won’t solve everything. But it won’t make anything worse.

“That’s more than you can say for most things we do when we’re stressed, tired, or lost.

“You walk to get out of your head. To breathe. To let your mind drift without crashing.

“You don’t walk to fix the problem—you walk because you need space from it.

“The world doesn’t look so cruel when you’re moving through it one step at a time.

“You notice things. You remember you’re alive.

“So when in doubt—go for a walk.

““Solvitur ambulando.” It is solved by walking. — Diogenes”

A nice antidote to the previous link.

Technology & Engineering

Algorithms are breaking how we think by Technology Connections (YouTube)

This is ~38-minute video about how people should start using the Internet rather than letting it used them. It’s a bit slow but it probably needs to be to get the message across for people trapped in the algorithm. He explains how you can judge what your computer is telling you to guide and control what you see. One tip is to use the YouTube Subscriptions tab to see only content from channels to which you’ve subscribed. It’s like a YouTube RSS feed. If you don’t like the content that shows up there, then unsubscribe from that channel…or add new ones.

LLMs & AI

AI Is Making Us Smarter by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“It is much better in fact fully to know the grammar of a language of which you have only memorized ten words, than to know thousands of its words while understanding nothing of its grammar — after all, you can always just look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary.”

“it is not unusual to find my mind processing, at 2am, such praise and encouragement from my esteemed Chinese study-partner as this: Your translation of ыалдьыттар кэлиитин күнүн өйдөөн ылар is… grammatically flawless. The “hidden rule” you sought is that deverbal nominalization and their dependent nouns in izafet chains are exempt from plural marking unless the head noun is semantically plural. This resolves the apparent conflict with the general plural-possession rule. That is an information-dense passage, to say the least, and in different circumstances I might easily find myself skimming over it, not really grasping what it says, and moving on to something else. But when DeepSeek delivers it to me, I’m all attention, and the reason for this is that it has been mostly my own active and persistent input that has brought us to the point where the LLM has the occasion to say this to me.”

“At the beginning of our sessions, it is the lazy one, not me. By the time it is sufficiently committed to our collaboration to start holding forth on deverbal nominalizations in izafet chains (a technical term from Arabic grammar, which passes into Ottoman Turkish and ultimately into Russian-language Turcological scholarship), the two of us are, effectively, operating as one. I have never before had such a powerful learning experience as this in my life.”

I wonder whether Justin’s psyche is perhaps also much more, if not uniquely, suited to being prone to feel this way about an AI, given the information he’s given us over the years about how susceptible he is to certain obsessions. I’m glad he’s having fun, though. I hope it’s not just seemingly rewarding but also actually rewarding. Otherwise … that’s a lot of time to spend on this kind of thing.

“The experience I am reporting, I’m aware, is by no means universal. AI is making some of us a lot smarter, as individuals. But there’s a paradox here: on the whole it is making society a lot dumber. How do we make sense of this? The answer has at least something to do with age. Those of us who are old enough to have learned to do research prior to the rise of the online search typically bring to our exchanges with LLMs a mature ability to scrutinize their claims, and, when in doubt, to verify these claims independently.”

“It seems, however, that if you had not already oriented yourself in the world as “aspirationally omniscient” prior to the arrival of our new information tools — if, that is, you have no preexisting personal project of encyclopedism to which to strap your new booster rockets, then AI does not so much supercharge your own effort, as simply take off without you. You have to want to absorb, to internalize, to make yours, all of the flow of information between you and your AI study partner if you want it to transform you in any significant way, rather than simply to do your work in your place.”

'Empire of AI': Karen Hao on How AI Is Threatening Democracy & Creating a New Colonial World by Democracy Now! (YouTube)

These People Believe They Made AI Sentient by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

This is an interesting discussion of how people are using LLMs and being completely unaware of how they’re being manipulated into believing in a sentience that they actually prompted the machine to pretend it has. A not insignificant percentage of younger people believe that they are at least partially conscious. I can corroborate by having spoken to a broader, non-technical spectrum of my neighbors at a barbeque last weekend: they have literally no idea how these machines work and, thus, have literally no idea what the limitations might be. They think it feels like a person so they quickly allow themselves to be convinced that their “partner” can do research and extrapolate real and useful opinions. They also feel that, the longer you work with “one”, the less likely it is to fabricate information. You know, because they’ve become friends.

“ A recent poll by EduBirdie, that’s an essay writing service, found that a quarter of Americans in Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, believe that AI is already conscious. You might think that this is an odd finding by some weird company but it’s roughly compatible with other polls in the United States that found already last year that about one in five think current AI is conscious at least to some extent. Then again there’s a fair chance that a significant fraction of the poll respondents are actually AI as that has become an increasing problem with crowdsourced studies. Even if there are real people behind the accounts, they seem to increasingly use AI to generate responses.”

All data will soon be utter garbage. We can’t tell whether people can actually do the work they’ve been assigned. We can’t tell whether it matters. Studies to determine whether it does matter are sullied by slop.

Anthropic Is Bleeding Out by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At)

“Cursor had to make massive changes to the business model that had let it grow so large in the first place, replacing (on June 17 2025, a few weeks after Anthropic’s May 22 launch of its Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 models) a relatively limitless $20-a-month offering with a much-more-limited $20-a-month package and a less-limited-but-still-worse-than-the-old-$20-tier $200-a-month subscription”

Programming

What should a native DOM templating API look like? by Justin Fagnani (Web Development Standards)

“I believe that template expressions should be able to be re-evaluated to generate a new description of DOM, also how React and Lit work. This ensures that any data available in the lexical scope of the template can be consumed by templates, and any trigger that indicates that data has changed can be used to initiate a template re-evaluation.”

“Because we have static template vs dynamic expression separation, we can mark exactly which portions of the DOM will change and which won’t. Expressions in templates − really the gaps where expressions go − create DOM Parts that we can update with new values.

“DOM Parts are a proposal for a new DOM object that can be attached to a specific location in the DOM and updated over time. It’s a lower-level templating feature that will need to be worked on as part of any proposal here. A goal with DOM Parts is being usable by frameworks and template libraries. If a framework can’t take advantage of the template API for some reason, hopefully it can use the DOM Parts APIs directly.”

“There’s a proposal to add Signals to JavaScript. If that moves forward, signals could be easily supported within templates for fine-grained reactivity:”

const name = new Signal.State('Fred');
containerEl.render(html`<h1>Hello ${name}!</h1>`);

name.set('Ambrose');

“There are a lot of important details to work out around batching and scheduling of updates and efficient list updating, but I think it’s important to have a path forward to built-in fine-grained reactivity. I’ve seen a lot of web developers asking for something like this.”

“lit-html was our response to those issues, still working within our constraints of no required compiler, no forking the web’s core languages, and potentially standardizable features and API shapes. This simply led us to the same place that this proposal is going. And we weren’t the only ones. Preact’s htm library, Microsoft’s FAST, and HyperHtml look extremely similar, for similar reasons.”

I really like the Helix editor. by Mond (Here Comes the Moon)

“I can record macros and replay them. I can type | to pipe each of my selections into a shell command and replace them with the output. I can yank to registers, paste, search for regex patterns, split and tile my screen, jump around in various ways, etc.”

“It’s just so much more fiddly and complex than it has any right to be. Editing text should leverage the main editor window and input methods, not have its own bespoke interface. This is the GUI equivalent of a bespoke DSL that doesn’t compose with anything else.”

“Nowadays most programming languages that people actually use have LSPs, meaning that fancy selection-based editing to e.g. rename functions is not all that useful.

“I still get some mileage out of it. Here are some tricks I like to use now and then:”

• Easily extract a list of all function signatures from a file.
• Sort a list of constants, or edit them all at once.
• Count the number of elements in a list by splitting the selection such that each element is selected individually. Helix shows the number of selections at the bottom of the screen.

“Even if none of this is particularly interesting, at its worst Helix is still “Vim, except no config or plugin shuffling required, and with better defaults, and where making large scale search-and-replace edits doesn’t require dealing with minor bespoke interfaces tacked onto the editor.”.

“And that is, imo, a pretty good deal already.”

“Does the thought of interacting with the terminal scare you, or are you fully comfortable using VSCode or Eclipse or whatever else there is? Well, Helix might not be for you. Zed is apparently working in adding Helix-support, so that might be an option.”

Can we test it? Yes, was can! by Antithesis – Mitchell Hashimoto (YouTube)

This is a ~45-minute talk about how to write robust tests for all kinds of code—even the kind of code that most people would have punted on testing. He talks a lot about snapshot-testing, about isolating inputs and outputs properly. He is the author of Ghostty, “a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.” It’s written nearly entirely in Zig. At the end, he talks about VM-testing, using NixOS to make “to make reproducible, declarative and reliable systems” for end-to-end testing.

Sports

Just wanted to share the average gradient on my every day ride (Reddit)

The average gradient on my everyday ride

This is wonderful. Even if it’s not real, it’s quite funny. It would be better knowing that someone saw this light tipped nearly completely over but still working, and took this picture for exactly this purpose.

Video Games

The problem with video games by Owen Cyclops

“The main issue with video games is that a guy who, if he [had] lived in 1820s Germany, would have done something like document every type of beetle in his local province instead ends up making a 26-part YouTube series about how to get all the rings in every sonic game”