Links and Notes for October 10th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

Africa Will Be Free When the IMF Stops Colluding to Steal Its Wealth by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“In 2011, the Canadian company SNC-Lavalin won a $50 million contract to build a mineral sands processing plant in Grande Côte. However, it was later revealed in the Paradise Papers that the Senegalese government had signed the contract with an entity known as SNC-Lavalin Mauritius. In other words, the Canadian company had become a Mauritian company (conveniently, there was a tax treaty between Senegal and Mauritius that exempted companies registered in Mauritius from paying taxes in Senegal). Due to this shift in jurisdiction, SNC-Lavalin was able to avoid paying at least $8.9 million in taxes to Senegal (SNC-Lavalin’s annual revenues are about $6 billion – a third the size of the GDP of Senegal, which has a population of 18 million).”

“The IMF showed its hand in the August 2025 staff report – it wanted to use the possibility of a waiver to extract concessions from the new government, including structural changes to erode whatever remained of Senegalese sovereignty. The Faye-Sonko government won a popular mandate to strengthen sovereignty. The IMF is using the Faye-Sonko government’s honesty about the previous government’s fraud to undermine it. What the IMF seeks is greater access to ‘strategic sectors’ (such as energy and agriculture) via multinational corporations, tighter fiscal discipline by the government (i.e., less social spending for the working class and peasantry), and a continuation of Sall’s 2014 Plan Senegal Émergent, which uses technocratic buzzwords to mask the drain of wealth into the hands of foreign multinationals and the Senegalese elite.”

“Governments favoured by Washington are slapped on the wrist while governments eager to develop a sovereign policy are punished.”

“Freedom can only come when the people of Africa assert sovereign control over their own resources and emancipate themselves from the indignities of capitalism and imperialism.”

The internet, a deep state technology by Yasha Levine (Nefarious Russians)

“The computer revolution didn’t start with Apple or Facebook or Netscape or even Silicon Valley. It started with paranoia and the quest for power. More than anything it started with the nuclear bomb.”

“It was the perfect setup — a cosmic gift. While everyone else suffered and destroyed each other far away from American soil, America developed the technology needed to fight this war, arming its competitors as they reduced one another to rubble.”

“For months leading up to nuclear attack, U.S. bombers had been systematically burning Japan’s cities to the ground. Those raids were calibrated to inflict as many casualties as possible — and they did their job, killing over a million people and laying waste to most of the country’s infrastructure. There was famine and so many people were incinerated in those conventional firebombing runs that American pilots could smell burning Japanese flesh all the way up in their planes.

“By the end, the Japanese people had lost their will to resist. And Japan’s emperor was ready to surrender.

“But these nukes were only partially about Japan.

“The nukes were a message.”

“Keep the Champagne corked.” by Patrick Lawrence (The Floutist)

“As I read of the ceasefire Israel and the Hamas government in Gaza formally accepted in the early hours of Thursday, my mind went immediately to that memorable thought Hannah Arendt shared with Roger Errera, a French free-speech advocate, shortly before her death in 1975: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.””

“How, I mean to say, can one possibly take Bibi Netanyahu at his word as he commits to putting into force the 20–point peace plan the Israeli prime minister and President Trump made public with flimsy fanfare at the White House late last month? With bottomless cynicism and treachery, the Zionist regime has broken every ceasefire accord to which it has agreed for the past two decades,”

The Saudi Arabia Comedy Fest Isn’t The Problem! by Lee Camp (Substack)

“But what I find most shocking about the tidal wave of condemnation is the laughable idea that Saudi Arabia is the only troubling country these comedians have performed within or for. Saudi Arabia — including all their executions and their complete decimation of Yemen — could never even HOPE to compete with the deal toll of the United States over the past 25 years. The US has killed somewhere between 4.5 and 6 million people with the Global War on Terror alone. Oh wait, that number came out in 2021. So it’s way higher now. Forgive me for getting that so wrong.”

“[…] the laughable idea that Saudi Arabia is the only troubling country these comedians have performed within or for. Saudi Arabia — including all their executions and their complete decimation of Yemen — could never even HOPE to compete with the deal toll of the United States over the past 25 years. The US has killed somewhere between 4.5 and 6 million people with the Global War on Terror alone.”

“Most of these comedians — Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, Bill Burr, Kevin Hart, Whitney Cummings, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari, Jo Koy and so many others — never dig into the truth behind the US empire. Through their entire careers their cultural commentary refuses to get deeper than some form of “being trans is crazy”, “Covid everything was nuts”, “I had a weird childhood”, “men are lunatics” etc. Even when it is a little more meaningful, like Chappelle’s stuff that addresses race in America, it steers clear of the fundamental realities of the US as a settler colonial capitalist shitshow.

“There are moments in some of Bill Burr’s specials when he’ll say something important but then he’ll immediately follow it with a line like, “I don’t read. I don’t.” That quick rejoinder is meant to give the audience permission to ignore the actual deeper analysis he dared have. As if he guided them too close to seeing through the Matrix and had to step back from the precipice. Put your goggles back on, folks. Ignore your lying eyes.”

There are very few comedians like George Carlin, or Bill Hicks, or Lee Camp.

“[…] most if not all of these comedians have been avoiding (either intentionally or through ignorance) telling the full truth about the US empire their entire careers. They are natives of and perform almost every day in the largest prison state in the world. The most deadly war machine state on earth. The country that is leading the way to damning humanity to extinction through climate change. And yet, for the most part, they haven’t noticed it or at least don’t wanna talk about it.

“That’s why they’re millionaires. Why they get Netflix, Hulu and HBO deals. Why many of them travel on private jets and helicopters. The criticism of their agreement to appear in Saudi Arabia misses the point and in fact just furthers US propaganda. Even Marc Maron — one of the comedians candidly criticizing his peers for taking “blood money” from Saudi Arabia — doesn’t care to understand his own role in US imperial propaganda. With his massive podcast, he has glowingly platformed war criminals like President Obama and propagandists like Rachel Maddow. Apparently taking that kind of blood money was not a problem for him.”

Mission Impossible by Seth Harp (Harper's Magazine)

“During the speech, Trump touted his proposed trillion-dollar defense budget, taunted the reporters in attendance, warned of hordes of immigrants coming from “the Congo in Africa,” denounced the protesters in Los Angeles as “animals,” ridiculed transgender people, and promised the troops a pay raise, even as he repeatedly strayed from his prepared remarks to praise the good looks of handsome service members who caught his eye.”

“Bradley troop carrier was parked at the intersection of two footpaths. This infantry fighting vehicle has been in service since 1981, and in spite of its myriad vulnerabilities and limitations, efforts to replace it have resulted in a series of billion-dollar boondoggles that have produced no viable alternatives, leaving the Army stuck with the Bradley, which is large, heavy, noisy, easy to target, and extremely expensive. It can’t maneuver well over rough terrain and gets stuck in dense soil.”

“These troops hailed from the 4th Infantry Division out of Fort Carson, Colorado. In May, seventeen of its soldiers were discovered at an unlicensed Colorado Springs nightclub during a Drug Enforcement Administration raid, some of whom were working as armed security. One of them was charged with trafficking cocaine. “Special thanks to our sponsor, Lockheed Martin,” the announcer said. The people around me laughed.”

“[…] the train of military vehicles that appeared was remarkably tame, a cavalcade of superannuated weapons platforms serving as a reminder of the degree to which the military-industrial complex, glutted with money and pampered by Congress, has run out of new ideas. The biggest pieces in the parade, the circus elephants of the menagerie, were Abrams tanks. These lumbered past with troops waving from the hatches, treads clattering, amid a horrible high-pitched din and the sweet reek of jet fuel. Like virtually all advanced U.S. military technology, the Abrams tank is notoriously high-maintenance, dependent on a complex supply chain, and exorbitantly expensive. The tank, introduced in 1980, reputedly performs poorly in rain and fog, and is vulnerable to cheap hobby drones fitted with explosive charges.”

“Throughout the day, I had spoken to various Trump voters and tried to sound out their opinions on Trump’s brand of militarism and his foreign policy. Rather than any ethos or ideology that could support the renewal of National Socialism in the United States, I found them to be motivated mostly by tired cultural grudges, xenophobic resentment, social-media memes, and civic illiteracy. Few were enthusiastic about defending Trump’s complete capitulation to Israel and the neocons.”

“This isn’t a sign of ascendant fascism so much as the nadir of late-stage capitalism, which depends on forever wars to juice corporate profits at a time of falling rates of return on investment. In its doddering senescence, the capitalist war machine is no less murderous than fascism was—witness the millions of Muslims killed by the United States and Israel since 2001—but it has considerably lower production values. In this soft dystopia, our military forces will not be destroyed in a cataclysmic confrontation with the armies of Communism, as befell Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. Instead, the defense oligarchs who own Congress will go on pocketing the money allocated to the military, just as they have been for the past forty years, until nothing is left but a hollow shell, a shrinking and sclerotic military so debilitated by graft, suicides, overdoses, and violent crime that it’s incapable of fulfilling its mission, and suitable only for use in theatrical deployments at home beating up protesters and rounding up migrants and the homeless.”

Vibe engineering by Simon Willison

“It can iterate on code, actively testing and modifying it until it achieves a specified goal, […]”

How is it testing? How is the goal formulated? This is the part that almost no-one is sure of how to do. It’s the crucial part, the part that determines whether you get something that “works” vs. something that might either not do anything or something that does something other than what you’d set out to do, but almost no-one can say how you formulate the goal or what tests the tool has to run in order to determine whether it has achieved the goal. It doesn’t know anything. It’s just a program. It’s a pretty good guesser but is also very likely to guess bland, mediocre formulations. This is great if that’s what you’re looking for. If you were looking for inspiration, or innovation, then you are extremely unlikely to get it. If you’re trying to fool a woman into sleeping with you because you seem more interesting and woke than you actually are, then a chatbot is the tool for you If you’re trying to write elegant, maintainable code that you—or others—will still understand a decade from now, then you’re going to have to put in more work.

“Your agent might claim something works without having actually tested it at all,”

How the f@&k would it test it? How does any of this hold up? It all hangs on a non-deterministic, gossamer thread of pretty-good that gets continually rounded up to certainty and it’s incredibly frustrating to read as otherwise disciplined people let their dopamine take the leash and leave their doubts by the wayside. It’s like watching a friend start doing heroin or join a cult. They seem so happy and you wonder whether you wouldn’t just be happier, too.

How to Change the World for Real by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“Those who wish to suppress free expression hope to be able to do so by scanning for key-words or key-slogans, not by actually doing any serious reading. In this respect, just like those who seem to be satisfied with waging resistance through uses of language that might just as easily be outsourced to machines, those who want to crush that same resistance are very much on a parallel track of human/AI convergence.”

That’s why they need this AI thing to work, to be believable. Thirty years ago, they couldn’t find the speech. Now they can claim to have found it and to have summarized it. I don’t know why they bother, though. They can also just invent what they want. It’s almost like they’re too scared to just go whole-hog and just lie about the people they’ve chosen to be their enemies. It’s like they still need to convince themselves that they’re the good guys, no matter how obviously fabricated, how wholly woven from whole cloth their justifications.

“Just put humanity on display — your humanity, the humanity of others, the humanity of the people who would like to dehumanize you. Affirm the real existence of everything that is left over of the human, once politics is subtracted. Authoritarianism, practically by definition, does not want to find anything left over. It does not know what to do with that remainder. By contrast, it knows exactly what to do with another video, filmed by some impotent progressive American parked in her car, working herself into a delirious performance of anger over the latest grim news item that will be forgotten within the week. What they will do with this display namely is they will relish it, they will make it go viral, they will use the occasion of it to own you, a “lib”. And things will keep getting worse.”

OpenAI Is Good at Deals by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“This deal between OpenAI and AMD was obviously going to create a lot of stock-market value: The announcement of the deal would predictably increase the market value of AMD, and it’s not like it decreases the market value of OpenAI commensurately. Why not use that value to subsidize the deal? Schematically, OpenAI could buy AMD stock to predictably profit from the stock-price bump it created. Just going out and doing that in the market would be awkward — it might look like insider trading — but buying the stock from AMD is fine.”

“The warrants vest based on operational and stock-price milestones (some of them require the stock to hit $600 per share), but 160 million shares times the $213 price at noon today is about $34 billion. In rough numbers, OpenAI is getting back half of the value it created for AMD. I have to say that if I was able to create tens of billions of dollars of stock market value just by announcing deals, and then capture a lot of that value for myself, I would do that, and to the exclusion of most other activities.”

“[…] explains that sports gambling and the stock market are basically the same thing when you think about it:”

“I don’t know if customers define them as entertainment or not. You have people that are just staunch believers in companies. You’ve got people who are Tesla bulls. They believe in Tesla. With these prediction markets, on the sports side, it’s just a slight flip because you already have that affinity because you were a Jets fan with your dad.”

“Yep! You can be a Jets fan and bet on the Jets, or you can be a Tesla fan and bet on Tesla’s stock, what’s the difference really. I tend to think that capital markets have some purposes outside of gambling and fandom, but I recognize that that is an old-fashioned view.”

“Undeniable Qualities” – The John Coltrane Quartet’s Recording Of “My Favorite Things” by Charles Siegel (3QuarksDaily)

“Sixty-five years ago this month, the John Coltrane Quartet entered Atlantic Studios in Manhattan for three days of recording sessions, over the course of a week. It was the first time the band recorded together. The four musicians — Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophones, McCoy Tyner on piano, Steve Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums — remarkably produced enough material for three albums, and then some, in those three sessions. Some of the recordings are jazz classics — “Equinox,” for example, a Coltrane blues composition. Others include beautiful renditions of standards like “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Summertime,” and “But Not for Me.””

“The youngest member of the quartet, Tyner somehow was just 21 when it was recorded. But there is a lifetime of musical wisdom and authority in this solo. Most pianists could live to 100 and never record anything so lovely and evocative.”

“This waltz is fantastic: when you play it slowly, it has an element of gospel that’s not at all displeasing; when you play it quickly, it possesses other undeniable qualities. It’s very interesting to discover a terrain that renews itself according to the impulse that you give it. That’s, moreover, the reason we don’t always play this song in the same tempo.””

“There are shots of Coltrane, eyes closed, literally seeming to fight his saxophone to coax more notes out of it. Jones, dripping with sweat, is blasting away with unrestrained power, but maintaining the beat with precision. Jimmy Garrison, who had grown up in the Philadelphia jazz scene with Tyner and had become the quartet’s regular bassist in 1962, anchors it all. The images of him, deep in concentration, and the extreme closeups of the strings on his bass, are strikingly beautiful. He is the calm at the eye of the storm.”

“Coltrane was once quoted as saying that “overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe…. That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music.” Watching this footage, you can see him devotedly, intensely, doing just that.”

“I don’t worship John Coltrane. But when I lie on the floor and listen to “My Favorite Things,” it might be what for me could be called a religious experience. Some people say that nature is their cathedral. For me, those 13 minutes and 46 seconds, that four men recorded 65 years ago this month, might be something like that. When I enter them — especially the four-minute, 45-second interior chapel of McCoy Tyner’s piano solo — I do feel something close to the sublime.”

Dale Purves, the neuroscientist who makes sense of the brain by Asif Ghazanfar (Aeon)

“How we perceive elementary colours, ‘red’ for example, always depends on the amount of light, surrounding colours and other factors. In low lighting, the deep red washing down the sink might appear black. A yellow sink will make it look more orange; a blue sink may make it look violet. If, instead of through human eyeballs, we measured the wavelengths of light coming off the scene with a device called a spectrophotometer, then the wavelength of the light reflected off that ‘blood’ would be the same, no matter the surrounding colours. But our eyes don’t see the world as it really is because our eyes don’t measure wavelengths like a spectrophotometer.”

“His career is an instance of the claim Viktor Frankl makes in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946):”

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself…”

“There is even an example of a patient finally ‘seeing’ her mother but at a distance. Because of a lack of experience, she failed to understand the relationship between size and distance (forced perspective) that we learn from experience with sight. When asked how big her mother was, she set her two fingers a few inches apart. These types of experiments (which have been replicated in various ways) show just how important experience and learned associations are to making sense of the world.”

Everything Is Becoming a Bank by Luke Goldstein (Jacobin)

“Starbucks holds nearly $2 billion of customers’ money in its rewards program. That’s more than the total deposits managed by 85 percent of chartered banks, making the coffee chain one of the biggest financial institutions in the country.

“[…]

“Airlines are now little more than flying banks, given that they make more money from selling frequent-flyer points to credit card companies than they do flying passengers.”

“Upward of 40 percent of Americans now pay for basic items like groceries and health care using borrowed money — and this excludes credit cards. A third of younger Americans hold their savings on nonbank tech platforms like Venmo, and industries from retail to transportation derive anywhere from 14 percent to half of their profits from partnerships with credit card companies.”

Innovation!

“Most major corporations now aspire to become unregulated banks, opening up new avenues to make even more money hand over fist. Banks operating credit cards are the highest-profit-margin enterprises in the economy. Every company wants a share of the loot, amassed from high fees and low overhead costs.”

“Financial policy watchdogs warn that bankification is unleashing predatory and fraudulent practices onto consumers, workers, and smaller businesses. It may even lay the groundwork for the next financial collapse. After all, can a widget factory be trusted to manage customers’ money and make safe lending decisions without putting the entire financial system at risk?”

No, but neither could, apparently, banks. This is, of course, worse, since there’s no regulatory oversight at all. But it wasn’t good before.

““It’s the recipe for a subprime crisis 2.0. Why would we want to see that play out again?””

Because a handful of people were rewarded with a lot of money, as well as increased power and market share. Why wouldn’t they do it again?

“Once businesses dominate their market, monopolizing the heavy-industry sectors isn’t enough. Companies instead set their sights on acquiring the lifeblood of commerce: banking, where they can make money off of money by lending capital to be repaid with interest and collecting fees on financial transactions.”

“[…] giant commercial firms like General Motors and General Electric used a decades-old legal loophole to operate “industrial loan companies.” These largely unregulated financial arms made poor lending decisions, such as acquiring growing portfolios of risky subprime mortgages. The mass defaults of these mortgages ultimately contributed to their owners’ bankruptcies, requiring federal bailouts.”

Not requiring bailouts. It could have been nationalization or partial government ownership through stock purchase. Instead, it was a corrupt gift to those who bankrupted the company in the first place. It worked so well for them, and they don’t care about anyone else, so why wouldn’t they do it again? No-one went to prison, everyone they know got way richer. They have no idea that millions suffered or died, and they wouldn’t care if they knew. There’s no downside. It’s instead a very lucrative business model.

““Embedded finance” now appears in startup pitch decks and conference panels nearly as regularly as terms like AI and crypto, acting like a Pavlovian bell to get the attention of financiers for seed capital.”

“Andreessen Horowitz now holds substantial stakes in these ventures. The venture capital fund has estimated that adding financial services, from selling insurance product warranties on goods to speeding up the online checkout process by leveraging data collection, can boost companies’ revenues by two to five times per customer and generate $230 billion in added revenue by the end of this year.”

They are fucking demons. Burn it to the ground. Pitchfork that fat, egg-headed fuck.

“When money sits in a bank account, it’s usually insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), a federal agency that reimburses depositors’ money if it disappears during an event like a bank run. But funds sitting in a Venmo account or a stored-value account in Apple Wallet are not insured.”

“Amanda Fischer, a financial policy expert at the research organization Better Markets, notes that there’s also a taxpayer risk if these payment processing services collapse. With their current growth rate, tech giants’ banking footprints could become “too big to fail,” potentially requiring a taxpayer bailout to avoid a nationwide economic collapse.”

That’s exactly the point of every larger business. Get to the point of inevitability as quickly as possible, then raise prices, squueze money, collect rent, and get a 100¢-on-the-dollar bailout when it inevitably goes tits-up. Let everyone else absorb your risk and failure. Society exists, after all, to serve your entiteled and privileged ass.

“By identifying users’ purchasing habits, tech companies could exploit those tendencies to sell people more goods or keep them on the platform. What’s more, by controlling banking services, tech companies can also cut users out of the financial system for any reason, in a process called “debanking.””

People are endemically incapable of seeing how all of these technological tools are used not to benefit, but to bind them. They will always fall for the next scam because they are incapable of processing its complexity, they are naive and brainwashed, they think that they’re the ones getting away with a bargain, adeal, or a scam, or some unholy combination thereof.

“No sector is more dependent on its credit cards than the airline industry. Even though all of the country’s major airlines lost money on flying passengers last year, the companies still earned billions in operating profits — mostly from revenues they earned from unregulated frequent-flier programs they operate through branded credit cards.”

““Consumers think they’re getting convenience, but businesses get new ways to monetize your data and make revenue [off] you,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. “The trade-off in the end balances out to favor companies in ways many consumers don’t realize in terms of the security and privacy of their money and data.””

They’re so happy with themselves, though. They think they’re scamming the company. What a joke. Poor suckers.

“A significant portion of the clientele who sign up for these programs forget about their balances and never spend them. Customers have essentially placed their money in a savings account that accrues no interest, while giving these conglomerates an interest-free loan to use at the company’s discretion.”

Nice work if you can get it.

“At employers such as Macy’s and Kohl’s, retail workers’ compensation is reportedly dependent in part on hitting sales quotas for signing customers up for store credit cards. Such requirements have become the source of contract disputes during union bargaining at some stores.

“With their salaries on the line, retail workers are often forced to hawk cards to customers without adequate training to evaluate creditworthiness. For this reason, regulators have warned that the underwriting standards for retail cards are less stringent, which may be driving customers into bad deals and debt.”

What a shitshow.

“In some instances, the cards have been sold to patients whose procedures, unbeknownst to them, might have been covered by their insurance or nonprofit hospitals’ bill-forgiveness programs.

““We transcribed phone calls that we had with hospitals to kind of show how they’re softly nudging people toward these payment products,” said Eli Rushbanks, the general counsel at the patient advocacy nonprofit Dollar For, which submitted a public comment in 2023 calling for a government inquiry into the matter. “We took screenshots of websites that really blend the ideas of what’s Medicaid, what’s charity care, and what’s a payment plan under just sort of a nebulous umbrella of financial assistance.””

“Some of the probes led to new regulations, such as a 2024 rule that extended financial regulators’ supervisory authority to Big Tech payment platforms and regulated them as strictly as banks.

“That rule drew ire from the tech industry and was immediately terminated by the Trump administration, along with a host of other Biden-era financial reforms. Since then, one of the country’s top financial watchdogs, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has been systematically dismantled under the direction of the White House.”

It’s a fire sale.

America could still end the war in Ukraine by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The First 100 Days)

“[…] the president is clearly frustrated. Probably he thought the Russians launched the war because they wanted land, and were only complaining about NATO as a cover story. Actually it’s the other way around: the Russians wanted NATO out, and occupied land as a means to that end.”

“Kennan told The New York Times back then, speaking of the defense contractor-oiled Senate hearings. “Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. … It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia [to NATO expansion], and then [the NATO expanders] will say that ‘we always told you that is how the Russians are’ — but this is just wrong.””

“If Mexico had 12 enormous bunkers along the Rio Grande filled with hundreds of Chinese-trained black ops guys, who believed Texas had been wrongly stolen from them, and who occasionally slipped across the river in rubber boats to slit the throats of U.S. border guards, and whose official motto involved using a rock to bash in the head of every English-speaker — would Washington tolerate any of that?”

“We’ve seen thousands of ordinary Russians arrested and many receive long prison sentences simply for speaking out against the war. This suppression of dissent is commented on smugly in the West, as if it provided more evidence of Russian savagery. But imagine if American airports, apartment buildings, oil refineries and other infrastructure were being attacked by drones, month after month — even as China bragged publicly about having secret “Operation Goldfish” sleeper agents spread throughout our country to guide the drones to their targets. How well do you think the American government and people would respect civil liberties under such pressure?”

“In the weeks before the Russians invaded in February 2022, the Kremlin told President Biden that war could be avoided — and all President Biden had to do was open up a dialog, about Russian unease with NATO encirclement, and entertain proposals for a different international security system. Apparently, our reply was to refuse. We told the Russians we thought they were bluffing, and warned them to expect heavy economic consequences if they did invade.”

“The war was barely two weeks old and not going well when the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said Russia would cease military operations “in a moment,” if only Ukraine would declare neutrality — note the consistency of war aims — and also grant autonomy to the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk (of note, Russia was pointedly not annexing those regions — not then). Ukraine’s new President Zelensky also said then he was open to ditching NATO and agreeing to a peace.

“Moscow and Kyiv reached for conciliation after just two weeks of war? We ignored that in our media — you never heard about it — and we certainly did not enable or support that. Instead, behind the scenes we undermined it.”

“Why don’t we have a more vigorous debate about this in the West? Perhaps because if we start to ask even a few questions, it might quickly come apparent how NATO is a source of problems, not solutions — and how much better all of our lives could be without any NATO at all. For some in D.C., that’s a scary conversation indeed.”

Well, yeah. Their personal fortunes grow with nearly no work or risk, just vacuuming up free taxpayer dollars, exchanged for old weapons and empty promises.

NSA and IETF by D. J. Bernstein (blog.crypto)

“Ten SSH implementations support ECC+sntrup761. Today’s usage of post-quantum cryptography by browsers is approaching half of the connections seen by Cloudflare, where 95% of that is ECC+MLKEM768 and 5% is ECC+Kyber768.”

“Google already explained this back in 2016: “The post-quantum algorithm might turn out to be breakable even with today’s computers, in which case the elliptic-curve algorithm will still provide the best security that today’s technology can offer.” We’ve seen many breaks of post-quantum proposals since then, including the sudden public collapse of SIKE three years after CECPQ2b applied SIKE to tens of millions of user connections. The only reason that this user data wasn’t immediately exposed to attackers is that CECPQ2b encrypted data with SIKE and with ECC, rather than switching from ECC to just SIKE.”

“Try to put yourself in the mindset of NSA as an attacker. You have a massive budget to “covertly influence and/or overtly leverage” systems to “make the systems in question exploitable”; “to the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems’ security remains intact”. One of your action items is to “influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies”. Another is to “shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by NSA/CSS”.”

“The Supreme Court didn’t mince words in describing the anti-competitive power of standards-development organizations:”

“ASME wields great power in the Nation’s economy. Its codes and standards influence the policies of numerous States and cities, and, as has been said about “so-called voluntary standards” generally, its interpretations of its guidelines “may result in economic prosperity or economic failure, for a number of businesses of all sizes throughout the country,” as well as entire segments of an industry”

Citing a Supreme Court case:

“Only ASME can take systematic steps to make improper conduct on the part of all its agents unlikely, and the possibility of civil liability will inevitably be a powerful incentive for ASME to take those steps. Thus, a rule that imposes liability on the standard-setting organization – which is best situated to prevent antitrust violations through the abuse of its reputation – is most faithful to the congressional intent that the private right of action deter antitrust violations.”

“[…] a “standards development organization” is required by law to “incorporate the attributes of openness, balance of interests, due process, an appeals process, and consensus in a manner consistent with the Office of Management and Budget Circular Number A-119, as revised February 10, 1998”.

“That OMB rule, in turn, defines “consensus” as follows: “general agreement, but not necessarily unanimity, and includes a process for attempting to resolve objections by interested parties, as long as all comments have been fairly considered, each objector is advised of the disposition of his or her objection(s) and the reasons why, and the consensus body members are given an opportunity to change their votes after reviewing the comments”.”

“What happens if a standards-development organization issues a rule declaring that “general agreement” exists even when a quarter of the votes are in opposition? I haven’t found any court cases on point, but I would expect courts to reject this as being inconsistent with the plain meaning of “general agreement”.”

“Rolling out PQ is trying to reduce the damage from an attacker having a quantum computer within the security lifetime of the user data. Doing that as ECC+PQ instead of just PQ is trying to reduce the damage in case the PQ part is broken. These actions are compatible, so how exactly do you believe they’re contradictory?

“Here’s an analogous example of basic risk mitigation: there’s endless work that goes into having planes not crash, not hit turbulence, etc., but we still ask airplane passengers to keep their seatbelts on whenever they’re in their seats.”

“The chairs responded that “sufficient” means “that there were enough people willing to review the draft”. They added that “WGs groups have adopted drafts with much less support than this one received.” Gee, that’s confidence-inspiring.”

Nobel Prize for imperialist war and regime change goes to Washington’s Venezuelan puppet María Corina Machado by Andrea Lobo (WSWS)

“This hero of the struggle for a “peaceful transition to democracy” openly hails US military aggression and is directly collaborating with Washington on plans for post-regime-change repression of all those opposed to Washington’s intervention.

“As the New York Times acknowledged last week, “The group supporting the use of force is led by Maria Corina Machado.” The Times adds: “One of Ms. Machado’s advisers, Pedro Urruchurtu, said she was coordinating with the Trump administration and had a plan for the first 100 hours after Mr. Maduro’s fall. That plan involves the participation of international allies, he said, ‘especially the United States.’” One can be certain that those 100 hours would be every bit as bloody as those that followed the coups in Chile in 1973 and Argentina in 1976.”

“Recently, Machado went on Fox News to endorse the ongoing US military buildup in the Caribbean and extrajudicial massacres of fishermen accused without evidence of working for cartels allegedly tied to Maduro.

““I want to tell how grateful we are to President Trump and the administration for addressing the tragedy that Venezuela is going through,” she said. “Maduro has turned Venezuela into the biggest threat to the national security of the U.S. and the stability of the region.””

It’s nice how everyone is showing their true face all the time now. It somehow makes things easier when they don’t even bother with subterfuge. The Nobel Prize Committee is irredeemably in the tank for the U.S. administration. There is no doubt in my mind that the U.S. heavily influenced—if not outright made—the selection, having first ascertained that it couldn’t go to Trump. As Lobo writes,

“[…] they couldn’t give the award to the US organ grinder, they did choose one of his able monkeys in the person of Machado.”

“A defender of “free market” policies, above all the privatization of the state oil company PDVSA, whose public ownership has been upheld by a wide spectrum of bourgeois parties since the 1970s, Machado has endorsed Milei’s economic program of “shock therapy” in which “freedom” means the liberation of corporations to eliminate social spending and exploit the working class without any restrictions or regulations.”

I suppose she could expect a $20B “loan” from the U.S. government when those policies utterly and predictably fail to do anything but enrich herself, as Milei’s have.

This is nothing but a farce. Irredeemably stupid.

I’ll leave Lobo the last word,

“It is necessary to cut through the lying propaganda of “democracy” and “human rights” and reveal the ugly reality of bourgeois politics. The working class must reject with contempt the cynical use of the Nobel Prize to sanctify imperialist reaction. Only the unity of workers in Venezuela, with those of the rest of Latin America, the United States, and internationally—armed with a socialist and revolutionary perspective—can halt the march to world war and fascist dictatorship, and open the way to genuine peace, democracy and social equality.

“The anointment of Machado by imperialism is, above all, a warning: the ruling class is preparing for new crimes on a world scale.”

I just heard Chas Freeman say, near the end of the following excellent interview that, “I would have said that Francesca Albanese should have gotten a Nobel Peace Prize.” His interlocutor Jyotishman agrees, saying that “Absolutely. I mean, there there are many candidates. Some some said Greta Thunberg, some some said Francisca Albanese.” And that’s only sticking to female, white Europeans! I’m sure the rest of the world would have something to offer as well, were the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee to be interested in anything other than currying favor with the U.S. empire.

Chas Freeman: Why This Gaza Ceasefire Won’t Last by India & Global Left (YouTube)

Watch Samantha Power, a “notable” scholar on genocide word salad herself out when confronted with a Q on US hypocrisy over the genocide in Gaza.. by Abier Khatib (Twitter)

This video was posted on February 23, 2024, three months into the genocide. The effort was in its nascency but genocidal intent was expressed from the very beginning, at least in Hebrew. In English, it would continue to be denied where politically expedient. The actions speak much, much louder than words here, though.

Hannah: The U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza has really left us unable to be moral leaders on climate change and all the other pressing development and humanitarian issues those of us who work at USAID care so much about. How are you leading us to reckon with and overcome this hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy?

Samantha Power: [equivocating word salad that utterly fails to address the question]

Umm, well I think we have to go back, umm, to umm, the core challenge in what is happening in Gaza,

[note the passive voice, without agency]

which is, umm, I’ve already spoken to the humanitarian consequences,

[note the extremely clinical ameliorating language this purported champion against genocide uses]

umm, and our mobilization to try to … we need to get a humanitarian pause, where people will not be at risk of getting killed

[there’s that passive voice again, employed by this supposed denouncer of genocide to describe genocidal murder when perpetrated by a personal benefactor of hers]

from bombing

[who’s doing the bombing? Are these people being killed by accident? Or on purpose, you know, as part of collective punishment that is part of a genocide?]

will be able to access basic resources and dignity. Umm, that’s incredibly important.

This isn’t exactly new but I just wanted to record it in my notes that it’s a good example of why Samantha Power has always been a despicable human being, sailing without principle toward her own personal success, blown by the winds of the self-adulation of her mythos as a crusader for humanity. She sucks ass. Always has.

It also points up the difference between working at USAID and being in charge of USAID. The people in charge of USAID—people like Samantha Power—definitely wield it as a weapon to promote the aims of U.S. empire.

They convince a lot of good people to work there as a moral shield to be able to claim that all of this money is being spent on “foreign aid.” Those poor people are good people but they’re also patsies. These patsies see and celebrate the good that their individual work is doing but they fail to see how much cachet their work lends to the myriad other horrific deeds, whose impact far outweighs the good that they do.

The countries they work in and for, the people they want to help, are being bent over for empire. They are the lube.

This Indiana City Doesn’t Have To Pay an Innocent Mom $16,000 After Police Wrecked Her Home, Court Rules by Billy Binion (Reason)

“In June 2022, a group of law enforcement officers arrived at Amy Hadley’s South Bend home, where they launched 30 tear gas canisters, smashed windows, ransacked furniture, destroyed security cameras, ripped down a panel and a fan, and punched holes in the walls. They were searching for a suspect, John Parnell Thomas, who they believed, based on his IP address, had accessed the internet from Hadley house. They would not find him, however, because he had never been there.

“In addition to the structural damage, Hadley’s personal possessions, like her clothing and beds, were ruined by the tear gas. She and her son slept in her car for several days after the raid.

“Yet her luck would continue to sour. After Hadley asked the government to compensate her for $16,000 in damages, it came back with a strange response: No. In that vein, she joined a growing list of innocent people whose property was damaged by law enforcement, only to be told they must shoulder the financial burden of that individually.”

This is how it works in an authoritarian, olligarchic state. If you have power, the police kowtows to you; if you don’t those who have power use the police against you. It’s completely predictable that the police are allowed to do these things; they are trained to hate the people. This is a far cry, of course, from the police actually protecting and serving the people, which was always a bullshit marketing ploy.

This is how America has always been for certain segments of society. The thing that’s changed the most is that the state is casting its net wider. Now that net is catching more than just the classically “othered” people—people of color, people with alternative lifestyles, people with uncomfortable politics—and sweeping up anyone and everyone, in a clear attempt to terrorize people into compliance and complacency.

To avoid getting your house raided, you better either get rich enough that you control the police, or start turning people in right and left in order to curry favor with them. Only the first plan is bulletproof, though it’s much harder to achieve; the second plan is a recipe for self-hatred and disappointment, as you give every principle you had and still get fucked in the end—because you’re not really one of them, no matter how hard you try.

Trump’s Sham Peace Plan by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate. Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.”

“Of the myriads of [sic] peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious.”

“Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?

“How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?

“How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?

“Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?”

“Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.

“This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.

“The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.”

Because it’s a sham, as the title states.

Trump Could’ve Ended The Genocide Anytime − But He Didn’t by Lee Camp

“[…] the only difference between today and a month ago or two months ago or six months ago is that Donald Trump finally got off his ass and decided to “issue a sharp rebuke of Israel” and offer “a security guarantee”. Both of those unspectacular things could’ve been done at any time during Trump’s reign (and could’ve been done at any time by the Biden administration as well).”

“Whether this tenuous ceasefire/ peace holds or not, do not make Donald Trump out to be a peacemaker. Do not herald his grand achievement. Do not shower him with accolades or view him as a grand dealmaker. He could’ve saved tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of lives if he gave a shit back when he first took office for the second term. Joe Biden could’ve done the same.”

There’s nothing special about what Israel’s doing. It’s utterly mundane. They’re just the latest pipsqueak version of the dying art of colonialism—of white Empire—of wanting to just eradicate the other for their own benefit. The only thing that’s different is that it’s 2025 and we’re all temporarily pretending that some forms of plunder are not OK.

That’s just really nothing special about it at all. The US did it with the entire continent of North America. Australia did it. The Germans did it in Africa. The Portuguese did it in Angola, which is what triggered this thought.

I’m listening to the third episode of blowback season six it’s just so bloody evident. This is just so utterly banal. The Israelis aren’t special. They’re just in the spotlight right now. Deservedly so, because what they are doing is inhumane, is a war crime, is inexcusable. But it’s not new. Nearly every ruling power, every elite has done something very similar to get where it is. It’s only surprising that they think it can work for them right now. Read the room. Maybe they thought they had.

For Militarization Against Trump by Slavoj Žižek (Žižek's Goads and Prods)

“Vladimir Putin signed the law on Russia’s withdrawal from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The formal decision is one more step in Russia’s complete disengagement from its international commitments and clearly demonstrates Russia’s disregard for the protection of human rights. It has not allowed any monitoring visits to places of deprivation of liberty.”

While this is obviously not a good thing, I can’t help but think that Žižek’s anti-Russian lens is blurring his interpretation here. Why in God’s name would Russia want to continue to be part of anything European when the EU has all but declared official war on Russia? Is Žižek just being deliberately thick here? Has he reached an age where he’s just going to be another right-swinging, war-loving, cantankerous old man who not inconsiderable intellectual clout will be channeled into supporting Europe’s march to war?

He writes and cites reports from the U.N. and Europe as if these organizations haven’t completely lost the plot, haven’t completely killed any credibility they might have? We’ve just watched Norway grant its Peace Prize to a woman who has screeched for military intervention and calls on Trump to save us all. This is also what Europe is doing. Does Žižek support his as well? I have not subscribed to his Substack and have read only the public part. That has not encouraged me to give him money to find out more.

The Travesty of the Nobel Peace Prize by Partha Banerjee (ZNetwork)

“We rarely ask: Who nominates the nominees? Who controls the information pipelines through which candidates are judged? Most members of the Nobel Committee come from elite political or academic backgrounds—precisely the circles most insulated from the consequences of war.

“A true peace prize would emerge from the victims of war, not its administrators. It would ask the children of Gaza, the farmers of Colombia, the miners of Congo, and the refugees of the Rohingya camps whom they consider peacemakers.

“If that were to happen, we might hear names like Medea Benjamin, Arundhati Roy, or the activists of Doctors Without Borders—not the polished diplomats of the same states that build bombs by day and hand out prizes by night.”

The Onus Is On Israel And Its Allies To End The Genocide, Not Their Victims by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“[…] it has never been legitimate for Israel to withhold humanitarian aid into Gaza. Debating whether Israel is right or wrong to withhold aid under these specific circumstances tacitly assumes that it could ever be right to withhold aid under any circumstances.”

“It has never been legitimate to shoot noncombatants because you decided they crossed some sort of line into a forbidden zone. It has never been legitimate to shoot noncombatants at all.”

“The onus for stopping a genocide is on the party committing the genocide. The onus is not on the victims of the genocide to end it by meeting certain conditions. This should not even need to be said.

“[…]

“The world shouldn’t be bending over backwards to ensure that the state which is committing genocide is happy with the terms by which the genocide is ended. The world should be aggressively punishing the state that is committing genocide until it stops. That would be true peace. What we are seeing now is just a bad joke.”

Journalism & Media

Israel Foreign Ministry Falsely Claims Palestinians Tore Apart A Beached Whale by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Israel’s Foreign Ministry falsely claimed the animal was a “whale” because “starving civilians eat a fish” does not make for good propaganda if you’re trying to frame them as loathsome barbarians.

“Whales, unlike fish, can survive for hours or even days if they become stranded on land because they breathe air. The post is crafted to convey the image of a bunch of uncivilized subhumans ripping apart a sentient mammal while still alive in order to pull at the heart strings of western environmentalists.

“There is no such thing as a “stranded” fish; there are fish in the water and there are dead fish. The whale shark in the video was dead, and had probably been dead for some time.

“To be clear, the Israeli government did not innocently misidentify a species of fish as a whale. The Israeli press had already reported that a whale shark had been butchered for food on the shores of Gaza, after having previously reported on sightings of the animal off Israel’s shores weeks earlier.

“They knew it was a dead shark, and they made the cold, calculated decision to circulate the lie that a whale had become beached on Gaza and met an agonizing end at the hands of the locals there.”

Labor

Thinking of AI as a Social Problem by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“Though AI thus far has not proven to be a reliable profit-driver for businesses that use it (rather than build it), the flood of investment in its development will continue for the time being—both because the potential prize is so large, and because the costs already sunk into the industry carry an incredible economic momentum, regardless of whether or not they ultimately prove to be unwise.”

Even those who build it aren’t making any money.

“AI, in general, has not proven itself to be as good as human employees in most fields. But it doesn’t have to be. It only has to be good enough to convince the employers in these fields that its lack of quality is more than made up for by its potential to lower labor costs.”

“With no intervention from government or another countervailing force, what is likely to happen is: The gains from automating those jobs will be full privatized, captured both by employers and by the AI companies, resulting in a large number of newly unemployed people whose job skills are no longer able to get them a job. This is bad, from the perspective of society. It is good from the perspective of investors in and management of these specific companies. In other words, a widespread and potentially devastating economic change that harms many people will be balanced by a very large economic gain for a much smaller number of people. Inequality—America’s most pressing underlying economic problem—will increase. The richest people and the richest companies will get richer.”

“When you think about it this way, it is clear that, at the very least, we need to plan for a way to socialize the economic gains that AI creates for corporations. That could be higher corporate taxes to fund a social safety net for laid-off workers, or it could be regulation to ban specific abuses of AI (are automated nurses as good as real ones? Etc), or it could be straightforward tax-the-rich policies, or it could be some form of nationalization of AI as a public good.”

“I am not even suggesting that UBI is the best policy response—I’m just making note that the will to bring it about seems to have dried up at right about the same time the AI gold rush that might make it a necessity got going in earnest.”

“We are walking down a path that is virtually guaranteed to supercharge economic inequality—the trend that has already eroded American society to the point that our democracy’s continued viability is in question. Is that a good idea? No, it is not. AI is not just a technology. It is a social problem. There is zero reason to allow it to run us over without a plan to mitigate its completely predictable negative effects.”

Economy & Finance

Life Inside China’s Gig Machine by Benjamin Y. Fong / Hu Anyan (Jacobin)

“Chinese working conditions are, by American standards, often excessively grueling and precarious. But they are widely tolerated against the backdrop of rising living standards brought about by rapid industrialization. And when the conversation turns to unions, the concept seems so alien that the exchange takes on a comic air. As relatable as Hu’s writing is, it also points to marked differences in context that indicate the difficulty of international working-class solidarity.”

“From around 1990 to the present day, China has undergone a period of extremely rapid ascent, achieving tremendous success in economic development. While it cannot be said that this success has been entirely fairly distributed, most people’s overall living conditions have undeniably improved. As a consequence, most Chinese people today, including most of my former colleagues, genuinely feel life has become better rather than worse. However, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, labor remains exceptionally cheap.”

“People tend to be more understanding of others when they themselves have leeway. But when they are under strain too, they mostly lack the capacity for tolerance and compassion.”

“It seems obvious to me that China’s exponential e-commerce growth is closely linked to its efficient, cheap, and well-developed logistics network. Indeed, I see complaints online from Chinese students abroad saying that courier services in Europe, America, or Australia are far slower and less efficient than in China and yet significantly more expensive.”

“[…] the company provided us with a device and a software system that monitored our daily workload, progress, and earnings, while also tracking historical records. We were constantly tapping away at these devices while waiting at red lights, queuing for lifts, or even walking — all while organizing delivery to our next customer. It was precisely because of this sophisticated system, and our constant checking of it, that over time those stark impressions of time and money triggered a response in our brains. The concept of “time cost” emerged.”

“Work may dominate a certain period, but it shall not consume my entire existence. While it provides the material foundation for survival, my aspiration is to pursue genuine personal values beyond it — a kind of spiritual substance that distinguishes me from others, lifting me from being merely a tool to an end in myself. This is the essence of the “freedom” I express in my writing. I am merely a memoirist, not a public intellectual. When I write about “freedom,” I am articulating my own aspiration, not debating universal values.”

Chapter 6: Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Innovation? by Hilary Allen (FinTech Dystopia)

“There’s no one single cause of, or explanation for, this kind of techno-solutionism. It might come from an almost religious belief in the power of technological innovation (a belief often encouraged by the media). Or it could be prompted by an ideological aversion to government solutions – an aversion so strong that even the most unrealistic promises from the private sector seem appealing by comparison. Or it could spring from what we might call an “extreme engineering” view of the world that sees everything as a technological puzzle waiting to be solved. At a more fundamental level, our brains sometimes conspire against us to naively embrace technological solutions that don’t actually make a whole lot of sense.”

“We’re also told that the benefits of innovation are so valuable that we should never take any action that might threaten innovation (we’re supposed to somehow embrace the paradox that any attempt to stomp out bad innovation would be futile, and also that stomping out bad innovation is dangerous because it will stomp out good innovation).”

“When we’ve reached the point that someone like Elizabeth Holmes, who had no biomedical expertise and didn’t care to listen to anyone who did, can be feted for her vision for Theranos’ disruptive blood testing innovations – well, it’s clear that innovation worship has jumped the shark. The first requirement for disruptive innovation is an enabling technology that, you know, works, but those who want to see the receipts are often accused of being “anti-innovation.””

““won’t somebody please think of the innovation?” pleads with us not to do anything that might mess with our feelgood sense of innovation and the seemingly inevitable improvements that come with it. But a question I’ve posed again and again in this book is, whose values decide the matter? When it comes to innovation, who gets to decide whether it is, in fact, an improvement?”

“I’ve certainly been told that the amount of money invested in bitcoin proves it’s a good innovation – and I’ve also quietly wondered whether, by the same logic, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme should also feature in the innovation hall of fame. Do we judge an innovation by whether it cornered the market? In that case, the Sacklers innovated an excellent way of delivering opioids to the American people: Oxycontin has been described as a “commercial triumph, public health tragedy.””

Dark but I’m here for it.

“[…] we need to start asking what other public tragedies are being perpetuated under the guise of innovation.”

“in their book The Innovation Delusion, Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell talk a lot about the weaponization of “innovation speak,” which they describe as a “sales pitch about a future that doesn’t yet exist” that is “built on the hidden, often false premise that innovation is inherently good.” They argue that although this kind of rhetoric “is often cast in terms of optimism, talking of opportunity and creativity and a boundless future, it is in fact the rhetoric of fear. It plays on our worry that we will be left behind.” This innovation speak can be deployed to attract investment, juice adoption, and to discourage regulators from intervening, even when a technology can’t deliver on its hype. As tech columnist Charlie Warzel put it, “the greatest trick of a faith-based industry is that it effortlessly and constantly moves the goal posts, resisting evaluation and sidestepping criticism. The promise of something glorious, just out of reach, continues to string unwitting people along. All while half-baked visions promise salvation that may never come.””

In much fewer, though less flowery, words: SCAMS.

“[…] as economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson note in their book Power and Progress, “if everybody becomes convinced that artificial intelligence technologies are needed, then businesses will invest in artificial intelligence, even when there are alternative ways of organizing production that could be more beneficial.” Weaponized innovation worship is directed particularly keenly at regulators (we innovators alone can save the world, so don’t you bureaucratic fuddy-duddies get in our way!), and it can make regulators’ already difficult job of protecting the public inestimably harder.”

“As writer Nathan J. Robinson put it, “in industry standards and regulations, [Rush] does not see the accumulated wisdom of many generations of engineers, but a lot of pointless paperwork…I’ve heard variations on this story over and over…and it’s a core part of the libertarian story of the world.””

This part is about the imploding submarine that killed five billionaires. RIP.

“[…] if your goal is to show that government is useless, then it is very useful if people believe that private sector innovation will always provide a better solution than democratically elected governments. The relationship between libertarianism and innovation worship works the other way as well: if someone firmly believes that technology is magic, that with enough money, data, and compute that anything is possible, then an explanation will be needed if it turns out the technology can’t ultimately deliver. Admitting the fallibility or limitations of the technology would require that person to rethink their ideological priors, and we humans hate doing that. An easier path is to find another reason why the technology has not been able to live up to its full potential – a reason like, say, innovation-killing government regulation.”

“[…] voicing his aspirations to be the “net landlord” that takes a little cut every time someone clicks on content. May I remind you that Ullman’s book was published in 1997? There is nothing particularly new (nor dare I say it, innovative) about these techno-libertarian fantasies.”

Well, no. Adam Smith was yelling about rent-seekers as the greatest enemy of society. Later, it would be Marx. There will always be people who want to plunder, to get more than they given, to be lazy. And they will tell whatever story they think you will believe to get you to help them make it happen, to make themselves not only not the villain but the hero of the story.

“Back in Chapter 4, I mentioned David Golumbia’s book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, where he concludes that “Bitcoin and the blockchain technology on which it rests satisfy needs that make sense only in the context of right-wing politics.” In 2024, the president of a conservative Super PAC went on the record with her agreement, stating that “ideological strands unite the crypto industry and founders with the [Republican] party itself.”

“The rampant regulatory arbitrage associated with blockchain that we documented earlier in the book can only be justified if you believe that whatever bad things the crypto industry does beyond the reach of the law are far preferable to what a democratically elected government or central bank might do.”

People don’t think of it in these terms, of course. The Overton Window takes care of making people completely forget how far from any principle they might have once held they’ve come, as they cheer on the most blatant criminality that’s almost certain to sweep—or, even, has already swept—them up its maw, while clinging to the by-now pale and well-worn shadow of a belief that literally anything else would be even worse, especially GUMMINT INTERVENTION. This generally takes a lot of media-intervention, usually in 2-to-4-hour injections of hate-filled and incandescently manic vitriol.

“Ellen Ullman offers excellent insight into this kind of perspective in Close to the Machine: it’s really worth reading her whole book (which flows like poetry and has the added virtue of being short).”

“I’m married to an engineer who’s a born optimizer, but I wouldn’t call him a techno-solutionist because he is keenly aware of the limits of what he can optimize. Many of his fellow optimizers are also very aware that their technical expertise only goes so far. Many of them also focus their work on maintenance – driven to fix what is obviously broken with tools they know can do the job, rather than eternally seeking out new problems to fix with shiny technological toys.”

“Messing with any existing system to accommodate new and unfamiliar technologies will inevitably increase the complexity of that system, and increased complexity tends to create unanticipated fragilities. Often, pressures to overengineer don’t come from the engineers themselves, but from their bosses (like King Gustav), who have a specific vision and don’t want to hear about the fragilities overengineering is creating. Those bosses can also set arbitrary deadlines that can rush a project, limiting time for carefully thinking through and testing for resulting fragilities.”

“In The Innovation Delusion, Vinsel and Russell argue that this critically important maintenance work is being devalued and delayed because of our societal fixation on new innovation. Because maintenance can never lay claim to being the sexy new thing, it is often neglected; when promises of future innovation are dangled as a solution to existing technology problems, maintenance is particularly likely to be ignored until underlying problems have metastasized into an emergency.”

“(one industry study conducted in 2022 concluded that about three-quarters of all lines of code in use at that time were open source). Open-source code has therefore been compared to other kinds of critical public infrastructure, like roads and bridges, that allow the economy to happen.”

“Kahneman explains that in one experiment, “people who had received a message extolling the benefits of a technology also changed their beliefs about its risks. Although they had received no relevant evidence, the technology they now like more than before was also perceived as less risky.””

“The media plays a particularly important role in perpetuating this techno-solutionism through its breathless and often uncritical coverage of supposed tech breakthroughs – some journalists go as far as simply publishing lightly-edited industry press releases. How many headlines have you seen about the impending AI revolution, for example? Now how many of those stories mentioned basic facts about how costly AI is to run, its inaccuracy problems, or environmental damage?”

“Kahneman and Tversky came up with the term “hot hand fallacy” to describe our tendency to incorrectly interpret past success as predictive of future success. We have seen enormous strides in tech innovation in the last few decades, and so we assume that Silicon Valley’s growth will always continue apace – even though it’s entirely possible that Silicon Valley, at least in its current modus operandi, has already solved most of the problems it is well-suited to solving.”

“Many of us have assumed that technologies that have succeeded commercially must be superior to alternative solutions, and that the people who developed those technologies must be superior to other kinds of people. But if other things explain those successes (things like luck and privilege and the types of subsidies and lobbying we’ll talk about in coming chapters), then our brains are fooling us when they extrapolate from past successes to predict that a future techno-solution will succeed in fixing a problem.”

“How did it get so bad? How did a technology that promised liberation and personal empowerment turn into this…a never-ending spectacle…a vampire, a hall of mirrors, a global apparatus of extraction, scraping the earth for energy and rare minerals and strip-mining our time and energy? Was there a moment went it all turned bad? Or was this outcome predetermined? What I mean to ask is: Was this tech always an evil force?”

They’re just trying to earn a buck by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

““How can Snapchat stay in business?” sounds like a Snapchat problem, not a you problem (unless you work there or own its stock). Snapchat isn’t a charity. It’s a venture-backed, for-profit entity listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. In a just world, we’d say that the public has the right to advocacy and protection from the state that is accountable to it, and companies that make bad decisions about their business models can eat shit and be bought out of bankruptcy by smarter people who don’t blow up their own balance sheets.

“If you want to live in a better world, then shut up that nagging, neoliberalism-trained reflex that treats corporations as charitable enterprises and “consumers” as the secret legislators of the market and the ultimate authors of all its dysfunctions.”

“Ultimately, I just don’t think neoliberal economists believe in what they’re selling. They don’t want a market of “demand-signals” that can be used to guide allocations. They just want to help the greediest, worst people on earth screw you as hard as they can, all day long. And then blame you for it.”

Why doesn’t Cards Against Humanity print its game in the US? It’s complicated. by Nate Anderson (Ars Technica)

“Complex board games today may feature cardboard creations like constructible dice towers, custom-shaped and painted wooden markers, multicolored jewel pieces, plastic bits of nearly every possible variety, custom-printed component bags, molded miniatures, cards in multiple sizes, metallic coins, dry-erase boards, fancy box inserts, massive dual-sided playing boards, and long manuals. The only manufacturers capable of doing all this work are generally in China or central Europe (Germany still has good manufacturing, and there are also sites in Poland and the Czech Republic [sic]).”

““We actually tried diversifying our suppliers by working with a US factory several years ago, but they were twice as expensive, three times slower, and much lower quality—something like 20 percent of games were unsellable due to production errors,” said a spokesperson for the company.”

“In the end, though, it’s not just about dollars and sense. It’s also about relationships and trust. CAH has “used the same factory in China since 2010, and they’ve grown alongside us from a small business to a huge operation,” I was told. “They do great work, we like them, and we feel a moral obligation to stand by them through Trump’s insanity.””

Honestly? Bravo. Chinese are people too. FFS.

AI has a cargo cult problem by Gillian Tett (Financial Times)

“[…] ten lossmaking AI start-ups — such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI — now command a collective valuation of close to $1tn, while venture capital has poured $161bn into AI overall this year.

“More startling still, few of these entities expect to turn a profit anytime soon — and these valuations are being boosted by variants of cross-cutting vendor financing, like recent deals between OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, AMD and Broadcom.

“The net result is a pattern of circular flows that echo some of the hairball of interconnections that emerged between banks and insurance companies via credit derivatives before 2008. And those, remember, resulted in unseen concentrations of risk — and subsequent contagion when the bubble burst.”

“We are probably living through a replay of the 19th century railway mania, which crushed many investors when the bubble burst — but did at least install the track network that benefited later generations.

“Indeed, it is possible that the only way American capitalism can ever amass the scale of investment needed to create this type of ambitious infrastructure is via such manias.”

The only way the U.S. knows how to do anything is to feed the oligarchy and claim that a social benefit might appear as a side-effect. Essentially, the masters of universe will gorge themselves but will probably let some crumbs fall from the table. They won’t bother bending over to pick them up, so the teeming hordes below will benefit from them. This is a stupid system for us to accept. But accept it we will, because everything that we see and hear tells us that this is the only way to run a society. It’s unfortunate but every other way would be a pipe dream. Media capture was the oligarchy’s greatest invention.

“[…] even if this “risk-splitting” model does eventually justify itself. we cannot forget the “cargo cult” problem — or the casualties that will arise when the bubble bursts and magical thinking ends.”

I like how even in the most sympathetic article on the FT, it can only bring itself to put the word “risk-splitting” into quotes, suggesting how we are to interpret this disingenuous description of “fucking over the poors once again with risk from which they will never, ever benefit while benefitting the oligarchs with an upside no matter the direction their play takes. If it tanks, they are bailed out; if it succeeds, they reap rich rewards.” That is what “risk-splitting” means; it means “shifting risk onto unwitting saps.”

Science & Nature

Nuclear fusion: it’s time for a reality check by Luca Garzotti (Guardian)

“Before we start talking about nuclear fusion via magnetic confinement as a commercially viable source of energy, five main challenges have to be met by the scientific community, each one of them a potential showstopper. We have to demonstrate:”

1. That we can run a burning plasma for hours (if not in steady state) with Q=40 (Q being the ratio between power coming from the fusion reactions and power used to heat the plasma) without disruptions. If all goes well, at some point in the future, the ITER fusion project your article mentions will run a burning plasma with Q=10 for about 10 minutes.
2. That we can handle and exhaust the heat escaping from such a plasma and impinging on the first wall of the confining device.
3. That we can breed in the blanket of a power plant more tritium than we burn in the plasma. (Tritium is not readily available in nature and must be produced.)
4. That the materials used to build such a plant can withstand the neutron fluence coming from the burning plasma without losing their structural properties and without becoming excessively radioactive.
5. That a fusion reactor can be operated reliably and maintained by remote handling, minimising the downtime needed for maintenance.

“These are massive scientific and technological challenges, the solution of which (despite progress being made) is not in the near future. The reward for finding a solution will be immense and therefore research must continue with humility and tenacity, but there is no room for overoptimistic or triumphalist statements, which can only undermine the credibility of the scientists and engineers working on the problem.”

The genius logic of the NATO phonetic alphabet by RobWords (YouTube)

23 minutes of interesting information about why the words were chosen.

A Once-in-a-Century Proof: The Kakeya Conjecture by Quanta Magazine (YouTube)

“A simple question about a spinning needle has haunted mathematicians for more than a century. It led to the Kakeya conjecture, a cornerstone of modern analysis connecting geometry, fractals, and the behavior of waves. Now, mathematicians Hong Wang and Joshua Zahl have cracked the 3D case — a once-in-a-generation breakthrough that could reshape how we understand the Fourier transform. (Also featuring Terence Tao and Jonathan Hickman.)”

Medicine & Disease

Bailing Out Pfizer Won’t Lower Drug Prices by Veronica Riccobene (Jacobin)

“Trump and Pfizer also promised patient savings on a new government-sponsored direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical sales website, TrumpRx, which is expected to go live in 2026. Such DTC sites have grown popular — you might recognize sports billionaire Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs — as a way to circumvent price-gouging middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers.

“TrumpRx, however, will simply serve as a front to funnel patients to Big Pharma’s already-established DTC drug platforms. The arrangement comes at a good time for Donald Trump Jr, who serves on the board of BlinkRx, an online pharmacy, which just months ago announced its own DTC service.”

TrumpRx is a real thing.

This is a real thing. A government service offered under the Trump brand

Art, Literature, & Cinema

Only One Performer Has Won Three Best Actor Oscars. Is It Fair That He’s Also a Joke? by Isaac Butler (Slate)

“In Omar and Johnny’s first scene together, Johnny and his gang are harassing Omar and his family when Omar recognizes him. He runs up to Johnny, smiling, and simply says, “It’s me!” It takes Day-Lewis seven seconds to reply, seconds during which he surreptitiously checks Omar out, looks at him with an almost wolfish hunger, smiles charmingly, and looks away, putting his hard-ass mask back on to say, “I know who it is.” The whole character and the dilemma he will face over the course of the film is right there in those seven wordless seconds.”

“[…] a former colleague of Strasberg’s named Robert Lewis sold out a theater for multiple nights delivering a series of lectures called “Method—or Madness?” Lewis, who was a Stanislavksi devotee, but also a lover of opera and a firm believer in style, had much to say about the problems caused by the new vogue for inner truth. Two of his warnings turned out to be especially prophetic. One is that the emphasis on big moments in acting class leaves actors incapable of doing the basic, everyday actions that make up 80 percent of playing a role—pouring water from pitchers, walking across a room, opening and closing doors, looking at and listening to another person, and so on. The other is that there was a swiftly developing fetishization of pain among young actors. The greatest mark of truth was being able to cry. The only parts of the human condition people felt like assaying were the worst ones. Actors were becoming so trained in going to extremes, it was all they could go to.”

“Having climbed many of acting’s highest peaks, it turns out the unmapped terrains for Day-Lewis are the foothills, the cobblestone streets, and the wooded parks of his craft.”

“The man is hilarious. Everyone I spoke to mentioned his wry wit, and that, although he takes the work seriously, he is far less precious about himself. During Last of the Mohicans, he and co-star Madeleine Stowe played escalating practical jokes on each other, culminating in Day-Lewis staging a phony road accident complete with fake blood. Sally Field told reporters that, while Day-Lewis asked to be spoken to as his character in Lincoln, he also texted her dirty limericks signed “Yours, A.””

I mean, he’s Irish. There was always going to be a good chance that he knows how to take the piss, especially out of himself.

Sunday Poem: American Sermon by Jim Harrison / Jim Culleny (3QuarksDaily)

“She’s been
keeping records of all the wildflowers
on the never-tilled land down the road,
a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed
since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries
with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being
taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down
to Lansing where Dad has a job in a
bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.”

Actress Diane Keaton dies at 79 by David Walsh (WSWS)

“When all is said and done, however, the most substantial film in which Keaton appeared, the one with the most enduring and valuable influence, was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).”

Yes! My review in 2018 specifically mentions Diane Keaton’s amazing performance.

“Keaton’s obituary presents certain difficulties for the contemporary American media. She remained close to and defended until the end of her life “Disgraced Director Woody Allen” (in the words of a People magazine headline this week). As Patrick McGilligan wrote in his recent biography of Allen, “One woman who remained steadfastly by Allen’s side was Diane Keaton. … Keaton’s loyalty never wavered.” She termed the allegation that Allen had sexually abused his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow “absurd … There’s no way Woody would ever abuse anyone, much less his seven-year-old daughter. To be falsely accused is horrible and as his close friend of many years I really feel for him.”

“On top of that, Keaton co-starred in a film sympathetically and compellingly dramatizing the life and times of a witness to and chronicler of the Russian Revolution, and one of the founders of the Communist Party in the US (or one of its organizational predecessors). The media has tended to step gingerly around these disturbing realities.”

“Keaton told Vanity Fair in 2006:”

“This movie meant so much to him [Beatty], it was really the passion of his professional life—it was the most important thing to Warren. Completely, absolutely. I understood that then, and I understand now, and I’m proud to have been part of it.”

“Keaton went on to appear in dozens more films, in some of which she had amusing or insightful things to say or do, but Reds was surely a high point. Actors are not in charge of what they are offered or the general conditions of the film industry.

“The fact Keaton was involved in some of the meaningful work of the time was not an accident. Her artistic abilities, enthusiastic nonconformism and genuine feeling for life prepared her for that.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Horse Sense: Clever Hans and the Crepuscule of Equine Telepathy by Hinternet Editorial Board (Hinternet)

“Human intelligence and reason block the sense of the subliminal. To be more precise, reason intervenes and obstructs the successful transmission of subliminal intuition, except, for example, in the case of those mathematical prodigies who can accomplish impossible calculation without really engaging their intellect. The subliminal and the mathematical —perhaps even the unknown future— exist on a plane outside and beyond intellection.”

“It was Jolie’s belief that thousands of men walked away in the wrong direction, changed their names and remained forever lost, dead even at the end of a long life under another name. He points to strange but subtle swellings of population in certain distant cities at the edges of peacetime Europe. Millions died, Jolie agrees, yet perhaps some thousands or even millions of survivors simply chose never to go back. Some cool evening of the war, in the later months perhaps, they slipped the tether, walked down the ravine, and strode away into the night.”

Technology & Engineering

Chat control in Europe, an open letter to the Irish Minister who wants to scan all our messages by Maria (Crooked Timber)

“Over the years I have heard so many government ministers imply or just say outright that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. However, that’s simply not true; conversations and messages about topics like internal party decisions, government discussions, gossip, speculation, shared photos and memes, and even harmless flirtations can be incredibly damaging when taken out of context.”

“Hundreds of cybersecurity experts have given their expertise and testimony on this. But yet again, the justice ministries who want to weaken encryption for everyone are relying on bedtime stories about technologies to weaken encryption “just for government use” that simply do not exist.”

“Chat control is pre-emptive surveillance of everybody’s phone forever. It’s the most extreme surveillance proposal I personally have seen in any democracy. It will be used against journalists, politicians, activists, judges, teachers, lawyers – everyone who increasingly authoritarian governments want to crush.”

“How would they be used against you, Minister? What perfectly ordinary, lawful things have you put in your own private messages that would be negatively life-changing if they became public? We are all in the same boat. But that’s the world we will all be living in shortly, if Ireland supports these deeply anti-democratic, authoritarian policies.”

“Don’t think about how you would use these powers, Minister. Think of how your enemies would use them against you. Because that’s the boat we will all be in, if Ireland supports this outdated and authoritarian law. Please take this last chance to defend our individual and collective security.”

Entre nous in Italian

This is just another reminder that you don’t need to be using a Chatbot or GPT directly to search or translate. Just throw it in a serviceable search engine and it’ll do the rest. No tokens, no waiting. In the query above, I was trying to remember how to say “between us” in Italian.

An MVCC-like columnar table on S3 with constant-time deletes by Simon Willison

“~$3/day for ingesting 6TB of data is pretty fantastic!

“Watch out for storage costs though − each new TB of data at $0.023/GB/month adds $23.55 to the ongoing monthly bill.”

Of course it does. That’s a good business model. Treat the one-time cost of data-transfer as a loss leader to encourage storage of more data because storage costs are not only higher but recurring.

People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads by Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)

“The smart displays have also started showing ads for Alexa+, the new generative AI version of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. […] ads sometimes show when the display is set to show personal photos. She reported seeing ads for “elderberry herbal supplements, Quest sports chips, and tabletop picture frames.” […] Users are unable to disable the home screen ads.”

+1 for dumb devices. There is no need to put up with this nonsense.

ILM Visual Effects Artist Breaks Down Hidden VFX by Todd Vaziri / Vanity Fair (YouTube)

00:00 Todd Vaziri
00:57 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
05:15 Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
09:00 Star Wars: Skeleton Crew
14:07 Star Trek Into Darkness
19:03 Transformers
23:02 Star Wars: Episode VII − The Force Awakens

After showing many, many instances of how he’s built effects through combinations of VFX, built-out sets, and physical objects dropped into VFX scenes (e.g., a bungie cord that is made to act as a rope that had been forgotten in a render), he talks about how using VFX isn’t cheating in a new way, really.

At 18:30, he pulls the camera back on the studio in which he’s filming the episode to show how much lighting and cameras and “bounce cards” (to reflect light), probably makeup, and so on are involved just in a “real” scene.

“It just reminds me of behind the scenes photos. You see of some of your favorite movies and how jarring it is sometimes to see 50 crew members just inches away from an actor’s face. Even something like this, where it’s just a person behind a desk, there’s so many things that have to happen in order to get the desired lighting effect. There’s bounce cards everywhere, there’s lights, there’s a crew just a couple feet away, there’s microphones. I mean there’s a lot of things that are being done to cheat reality in order to get the artistic effect across that we’re trying to do. And the exact same thing happens in visual effects. Movies, it’s all about cheating.”

I was around for a lot of the evolution of 3D video-game engines, avidly reading so much of the literature about how “realistic” graphics were made. At the beginning, it was all cheating. Nothing was rendered in any way approaching reality. Shadows were approximations; lighting was pre-rendered or faked with colors; environment-mapping was non-existent; mirrors? You’ve got to be kidding me. Game engines used to make a distinction between environment and character models. Character models were dynamically lit and unable to cast shadows on themselves. The Doom engine was the first commercial-grade engines to have 100% dynamic rendering of lighting (and, correspondingly, shadows) and to have all geometry—environment and character—in a single “tree”.

The art of making movies, the art of filming has always been about manipulating the viewer with fakery. It’s comforting as long as it stays within reasonable bounds, as long as it seeks to deceive in the way that it has declared it will deceive—e.g., that vehicles exist that can go faster than light, that people live on other planets, that a spaceship can rise out of water, etc.—and not in others that would break the pact—e.g., portraying the perpetrator as the victim in a current event.

Todd Vaziri’s final thoughts,

“Digital visual effects is just like any other step in the filmmaking process. There’s really not a lot of fundamental difference between, say, what the costume designer does, what the editors do, what the set designers do. We’re all trying to work together to solve problems and tell the story using light and images the best we can within the time that we have. It takes a lot of coordination to get all of this stuff done and sometimes hundreds and hundreds of digital artists working behind the scenes. There’s a perception out there that digital effects are a black box, that it just gets shipped off and the directors are just handed this work. Couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Apple's terrible, terrible screen-sharing UI for FaceTime

Try to ignore the New York Times Spangram in the background—I was ill and Kath and I were playing games together via FaceTime, even though we were in the same apartment—and focus on the utterly idiotic UI choices made for screen-sharing. When you start screen-sharing, FaceTime shows the controls in the middle:

• Share This Window
• Share All Application Windows

Why can’t I share the whole screen? Where did that option go? Has it been renamed to Share All Application Windows? When I selected that, though, it was an odd-feeling feature that wasn’t at all what I wanted, so I canceled it. It was only when I started screen-sharing again that I saw that there were two more buttons in the top-right corner of the screen that offered to let me Share Entire Screen.

Why in the name of all that is holy is this in a different spot? How can a trillion-dollar company not make a consistent UI in one of its most-used apps that barely has any functionality? How many people work on that team? Do they even have a product owner? A designer? WTF? How can this even happen? This app is at version 36, for God’s sake. How do you f@&k this up this badly?

Why We Need SIMD (The Real Reason) by Nicholas Wilt (The Parallel Programmer)

“When Intel was building MMX, they had aspirations to create a similar pipeline for 3D rendering; and if their CPUs had been performance-competitive with dedicated hardware, they might have succeeded. For example, if Intel had been able to build a fast OpenGL implementation that rendered triangles with MMX, then further improvements to the SIMD instruction sets (SSE, AVX, etc.) would have delivered transparent performance improvements to OpenGL applications and neither the developers nor the end customers would have needed to know what enabled those improvements.”

“I knew software rasterization was dead for sure, the day Intel delivered a Pentium 2 (the first chip that featured both the Pentium Pro’s superscalar core and MMX instruction support), and it ran half as fast as a lowly S3 ViRGE GX, the least expensive and slowest graphics chip money could buy at the time.”

Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)

“Basically the attacker renders something transparent in front of the target app, then using a timing attack exploiting the GPU’s graphical data compression to try finding out the color of the pixels. It’s not something as simple as “give me the pixels of another app showing on the screen right now.” That’s why it takes time and can be too slow to fit within the 30 seconds window of the Google Authenticator app.”

“Pixnapping is useful research in that it demonstrates the limitations of Google’s security and privacy assurances that one installed app can’t access data belonging to another app. The challenges in implementing the attack to steal useful data in real-world scenarios, however, are likely to be significant. In an age when teenagers can steal secrets from Fortune 500 companies simply by asking nicely, the utility of more complicated and limited attacks is probably of less value.”

LLMs & AI

The Demonization of DeepSeek by Eric Hartford

“NIST’s recent report on DeepSeek is not a neutral technical evaluation. It is a political hit piece disguised as science. There is no evidence of backdoors, spyware, or data exfiltration. What is really happening is the U.S. government using fear and misinformation to sabotage open science, open research, and open source. They are attacking gifts to humanity with politics and lies to protect corporate power and preserve control. DeepSeek’s work is a genuine contribution to human knowledge, and it is being discredited for reasons that have nothing to do with security.”

“They made it possible for anyone to reproduce their work and run a frontier-scale model locally. And to recreate it all from scratch. That is one of the biggest contributions to open AI research in years. The U.S. government’s response? A report labeling them “adversary AI” and implying espionage.”

“DeepSeek models are less polished. They spent less on development. Of course they have rougher edges. Chinese models are competitive enough to worry about. If they weren’t a threat to market share, this report wouldn’t exist. The U.S. is terrified of losing AI dominance. This was explicitly commissioned under Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The Commerce Secretary’s statement makes it clear—this is industrial policy, not neutral evaluation.”

The Programmer Identity Crisis: On AI, Creativity, and Craft by Simon Højberg

“I can’t imagine (though perhaps I’m not very imaginative) that Prompt, Context, or Specification “Engineering” would lead to a bright and prosperous profession for programmers. It reeks of a devaluation of craft, skill, and labor. A new identity where our unique set of abstract thinking skills isn’t really required; moving us into a realm already occupied by product managers and designers.”

“There aren’t enough swear words in the English language to adequately describe how frustrating computers and programming can be, but we have at least always been able to count on them for precision: to perform exactly as instructed through programming. It is perhaps because of our reliance and trust in the precision of computers that we seem so primed to believe chatbots when they gaslight us into thinking they did what we asked of them.”

“A review or synopsis of a book can never replace the experience of reading it yourself: contemplating ideas for hours and 100s of pages as each sentence is carefully consumed. In the same way, skimming summaries of completed AI tasks robs us of forming a deep understanding of the domain, the problem, and the possible solutions; it robs us of being connected to the codebase. Taking the plunge into the abyss of one’s ignorance to reveal, learn, and understand a topic and its implications is both gratifying and crucial to good software. Ownership, agency, and deep, fulfilling work have been replaced with scattered attention spent between tabs of Agents.”

It can if it’s a shitty book.

“Peter Naur explores this same concept in his work, “Programming as Theory Building.” Naur’s “Theory” embodies the understanding of a codebase. How it operates, its formalisms, and its representations of the real world. A context and insight that is only gained from immersion. Naur describes the “Theory” as the primary outcome of programming, the actual product, as opposed to the software it resulted in. Only with a well-developed “Theory” can one effectively apply extensions and bug fixes to codebases. With the ambivalent glances at code that comes with vibing, building such a theory is difficult. Naur would deem it impossible, I’m sure.”

“[…] it’s only when we write repulsive and repetitive code that we realize that there is a better, more succinct, elegant, compositional, and reusable way. It causes pause. A step back to think about the problem deeply. Start over. Rinse repeat. Diametrically, AI Agent work is frictionless; we avoid alternative solutions and can’t know if what we accept is flawless, mediocre, terrible, or even harmful. Quality is crafted by iteration—how else might we imagine good designs if we never explore objectionable ones?”

“Code-reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.””

“Meddling managers and penny-pinching execs are pushing (hopefully unknowingly) for fewer human interactions on teams. Isolated and bereft of connection, we are now empowered and encouraged to build walls around our work experience. Reaching for LLMs rather than people when we need a pair programmer, someone to ping pong solutions with, prototype, sketch architectures with, or help answer expert questions about esoteric parts of the codebase. We no longer require onboarding buddies, mentors, or peers; instead, we can talk to machines. With LLMs, avoiding human contact is so easy that it might just become the norm. The future really is bright…”

Signs of AI writing (Wikipedia)

“This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is meant to act as a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia. This list is descriptive, not prescriptive; it consists of observations, not rules.”

On the one hand, this guide is a wonderful style guide that has excellent advice for reading, editing, and evaluating text, not matter its provenance. For example, the section on superficial analyses writes,

“While these words are strong AI tells on their own, the real tell is how the LLM applies them to facts, events, or other abstract concepts. A person, for example, can highlight or emphasize something, but a fact or event cannot. The “highlighting” or “aligning” is not something that is actually happening; it is a claim by a disembodied narrator about what something means. Such comments are generally unhelpful, as they introduce synthesis, unattributed and/or misattributed opinions.”

On the other hand, this is the world that these billion-dollar sinkholes—AI companies and their trillion-dollar benefactors—are building for us, with the enthusiastic participation of millions of people who think they’ve rounded their inadequate writing skills to something passable and, possibly, undetectable in an attempt, at absolute best and in the most generous interpretation, to contribute something but, most likely and more realistically, to get credit for something that they haven’t done themselves—or probably even read—because they believe that writing is the act of putting words to paper when it is an expression of thought, of creative and critical interpretation, of what perhaps started as an instinct, a flair, a talent, but which doesn’t become a skill without being well- and laboriously honed through an investment of blood, sweat, tears, and time. You can’t skip levels, kids. If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.

In a similar vein, Andrea Lobo (cited above) had accused the Nobel committee of having used an LLM to write their statement announcing María Corina Machado as its Nobel Prize Winner. I was skeptical that a tool like ZeroGPT could work, so I tested several of my most recent hand-written, artisanal texts. I was unable to move the needle off of 0% GPT-generated for any of the texts I’d written. However, when I tested the body of Keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness, ZeroGPT determined that “Your Text is Most Likely Human written, may include parts generated by AI/GPT”, estimating that 38% might have been provided by a GPT, highlighting the sentences it considers to be suspicious. To reiterate: it didn’t highlight a single word on any of my texts or similar length. Not one.

ZeroGPT reports a strong suspicion of GPT-assistance

Coding without typing the code by Simon Willison

“spend a day working on real production code through prompting alone, making no manual edits yourself.

“This doesn’t mean you can’t control exactly what goes into each file − you can even tell the model “update line 15 to use this instead” if you have to − but it’s a great way to get more of a feel for how well the latest coding agents can wield their edit tools.”

No, it would be like learning how to masturbate with an oven mitt on. F@&k that whole stupid idea.

Programming

The Big Gotcha With @starting-style by Josh Comeau

“[…] the CSS declarations within keyframe animations are promoted to their own collection. This collection has the second-highest priority, just below !important. This means that our keyframe animations will almost always work. We don’t have to worry about any of this stuff when we use CSS keyframes.

“But the same can’t be said for @starting-style! Unlike keyframe animations, the styles inside the @starting-style block aren’t promoted. This means that the standard specificity rules apply.”

“[…] When we set a style in JavaScript like this, it gets applied as an inline style, which is much more specific than the initial position, set in a CSS class (.particle). As a result, the starting styles never actually get applied to the particles.”

There is a solution with @starting-style that is quite elegant but subtle, and is therefore also brittle because any other change may inadvertently break it.

“In our JavaScript file, we create two new CSS custom properties (also known as CSS variables), –x and –y. We can then reference these values in our .particle class styles!

“As a result, our two transform declarations have the same specificity, and since the @starting-style is placed underneath the end transform declaration, everything works the way we’d expect.”

In fairness, though, relying on the cascade is 100% standard practice in CSS and it’s always brittle: copy/pasting a style to another location can break any specificity fix, not just the one detailed above.

Comeau recommends using @keyframes instead, which, as noted above, is designed to work as expected in nearly all situations.

Cancelling async Rust by Rain (Sunshowers)

This article a nicely written discussion about what it says, replete with examples, but one odd thing is that it seems to have been written by someone with a lot of experience writing code for Rust and nearly no experience of the terminology, concepts, and syntax of other programming languages. This isn’t the first time I’ve noted this nearly pathological level of insularity in Rust blogs. It makes me wonder whether they think they’re inventing everything for us poor schlubs, who’ve never heard of async/await, or of what they’ve chosen to call panic-unwinding but which the literature has called exception-unwinding (part of SEH (Structured Exception Handling) for many decades. But they have to call it that, don’t they? Because everyone knows that Rust doesn’t have exceptions and, if it starts handling panics, that can’t be the same thing because it would break that tenet. So, we cheerfully start to referring to panics as “sometimes handled” and live on blissfully in our exception-free world, unaware that we’ve just muddled the concepts of panics and exceptions just like the worst languages.

Then you start writing things like, “in other languages like Go, JavaScript, or C#. In those languages, when you create a future to await on, it starts doing its thing, immediately, in the background” This is not true in C#, as you can very well create tasks that encapsulate work to be done without running them. This is in fact what happens for any method returning a Task. Someone has to call Task.Run() somewhere.

The article completely ignores that the .NET API actually has an extremely rich cancelation API. But it would, wouldn’t it? Anything that’s not in the Rust world doesn’t exist, so we’re free, as Rust developers, to cheerfully reinvent wheels all over the place, because, really, what is even the likelihood that anyone who’s not a Rust programmer might have done something clever or useful?

The author seems quite clever and logical. Their analysis of cancel-safety and “cancel correctness” is very good but it’s no different in any other language where your ability to cancel an asynchronous task is directly contingent on the degree to which that async task allows itself to be canceled, e.g., how often it checks whether it’s been canceled. The notion of “cancel safety” boils down to how fastidiously the task has been written to clean up its external and system resources in the eventuality of a cancelation, or exception—sorry, unwindable panic—for that matter. Some of the contortions that the analysis has to make are only necessary because Rust doesn’t have try/catch/finally constructs in its language or runtime.

Their suggestion to use APIs like write_all_buf, which are carefully written to perform work in batches, which form natural cancelation boundaries, is a good one. Many APIs in C# are written like this, returning an IEnumerable of chunks of whatever so that the caller can decide when to cancel. If the chunks are generating using asynchronous calls, then you might still have to pass in a cancelation token but … the higher-level the API, the more likely it is that you’re going to incur some complexity.

But I can’t help but thinking that they author would benefit greatly from expanding their reading a bit. Then they might see that at least some—is not most—of the myriad loopholes that they quite rightly point out exist in the myriad async libraries available in Rust have been addressed or made impossible in other libraries, languages, and runtimes and that, perhaps, the Rust community might just learn something from non-Rust sources rather than thinking that it has to invent everything itself in an otherwise benighted and miserable world to which it is desperately attempting to bring its light.

Finally,

“The last thing I want to say is that this sucks!

“The promise of Rust is that you don’t need to do this kind of non-local reasoning—that you can analyze small bits of code for local correctness, and scale that up to global correctness. Almost everything in Rust, from & and &mut to unsafe, is geared towards making that possible. Future cancellations fly directly in the face of that, and I think they’re probably the least Rusty part of Rust. This is all really unfortunate.

“Can we come up with something more systematic than this kind of ad-hoc reasoning?”

Yes we can. Maybe others already have. If only others had already tried. 😏

This kind of programming-language solipsism is a shame because it wastes the minds and time of a lot of bright developers, architects, and language, runtime, or library designers. Sometimes, they’ll hit on something no-one’s ever thought of before but even Newton admitted he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and academia in general involves getting the lay of the land first. You don’t have to copy things…please don’t! But you should at least be able to explain why other things don’t work for you. In doing so, you may find that … they actually do. And then you’ve saved everyone—including yourself—a lot of time and effort and gotten the solution you were after, to boot.

It reminds me of how C# was introduced without generics in version 1. OK. In version 2, they showed up, with several covariance concessions in arrays left dangling as legacy baggage that we still have today, a quarter of a century later. When Go adamantly refused to include generics 15 years later (more or less, I dunno and I’m not going to look it up because this is a rant, not a dissertation) seemed positively bullheaded. They watched their users write boilerplate and convoluted type-handling code for a decade before they finallly conceded and added generics. If you don’t like exceptions, fair point. There are great discussions about alternative error-handling schemes out there (search for Joe Duffy’s Midori) but to end up pretending that you aren’t backing into having exception-handling by using different names for things is kind of sad.

I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong (Nikita Prokopov)

This is a great discussion of syntax-highlighting. I’ve largely ignored the hyper-rainbow, dark-themed stuff that the next couple of generations of developers have glommed onto. This article explains good reasons why I’ve done so. The author has an Alabaster highlighting scheme that I quite like.

In the example below, Alabaster is on top. The bottom example shows a pretty standard rainbow-like, color-everything theme.

Alabaster vs. Dark Rainbow

Sports

I had an NFL football game on in the background the other weekend and I heard Coach Esumu (Wikipedia) say the name Amon-Ra St. Brown (wikipedia)…and my ears perked up. He plays for the Detroit Lions and he was being interviewed on German TV in German. What the hell? The dude speaks very, very serviceable German! An American, living in America! How?

“St. Brown was born to mother Miriam (née Steyer), who is originally from Leverkusen, Germany, and father John Brown, who was a bodybuilder in the 1980s and a two-time amateur Mr. Universe. He grew up in Anaheim Hills, California, and has two brothers: Equanimeous, who currently plays for the San Francisco 49ers in the National Football League (NFL); and Osiris, who played college football at Stanford. Along with his brothers, St. Brown has dual American and German citizenship. In addition to English, he also speaks German and French.”

Well, I’ll be. So cool. You don’t hear about bilingual Americans from German backgrounds that much. Mandarin? Korean? Spanish? Tagalog? Mexican? Hindi? Malayalam? Telugu? Tamil? Urdu? All of those, sure. I guess those are the more recent waves of immigrants, who haven’t had several generations diluting the second language out of existence.

Fun

Drive Through Rich Neighborhood Exposes Dad’s Shortcomings As Provider (The Onion)

“[…] “Why are all these houses so big if there’s just one family living in them?” said Lothan’s 7-year-old son, Theo, while his 9-year-old daughter, Riley, sat silently with her forehead pressed against the window, seeing three-car garages, in-ground pools, and manicured lawns on the well-maintained street and beginning to grasp in a real way her father’s numerous inadequacies. “What does that family even do with three satellite dishes, Dad? Do they have more than one TV? And look, those kids are playing on a full basketball court. All these houses have nice circular driveways, too. Why don’t you want us to live in a place like this, Dad?” At press time, Lothan reportedly made a weak attempt to assure his dubious children that “money isn’t everything” as they pulled up to the faded split-level that served as a physical representation of his failure as a man.”

Video Games

Battlefield 6: Official Launch Live Action Trailer (YouTube)

What even are video games these days? This claims to be a live-action trailer, which I assume to be in-engine, but it looks like a movie I mean, not a great movie but the actors look live, there is so much destruction and fragments and smoke and dust and realistic-looking environment that it really feels like something new here. The facial and body animations are nothing like I’ve seen before. They’re completely convincing. How many bones are they modeling in those rag dolls? The flopping bodies are pretty perfect. The clothes, the explosions. Wow. The first hint that something is not “real” is the self-building walls that they set up.

So I’m calling bullshit. When I search for actual gameplay videos, I see what looks like a much more standard-looking shooter without the hyper-realistic visuals featured in this trailer. Too bad. That would have been kind of awesome.

Have gamers actually gotten accustomed to game trailers looking like this while the gameplay looks, quite frankly, completely different?

They seem to be using something called the Godot engine, so it’s nice to see that there is still some good competition in this space (with the Unreal engine having taken the lion’s share of adulation and attention in the last couple of years). Even if it is just for pre-rendered trailers.