Links and Notes for February 6th, 2026

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Public Policy & Politics

The President of the United States and the dumbest motherfucker on Earth should be two different people

On Tilt by Jasper Craven (Harper's Magazine)

“Advocates are blunt about the crisis they see coming. Kobie West, the clinical director of the Dr. Robert Hunter International Problem Gambling Center, in Las Vegas, compares the present moment in gambling addiction to the days of blissful ignorance that allowed America’s opioid epidemic to spiral out of control. Both public-health crises, West argues, were fueled by rampant advertising and ease of access. He estimates that we will look back in several years’ time in horror.”

“Gambling addiction is, in some sense, also especially vexing to treat. You can’t quit money cold turkey, and it looms especially large in recovery, with gobs of it needed to climb out of gambling debt and reclaim stability. These conditions threaten relapse, keeping alive the fantasy of a lucky roll in a high-stakes room. As one gambling-addiction specialist explained: “I’ve never had a late-stage alcoholic say, ‘If I get drunk just right, my liver will heal.’””

“Ted passed along a helpful tip given to him by a former sponsor. He said that if an addict ever finds himself in a casino, he should ignore the buzzy slot machines and focus instead on the faces of the people playing them.”

“If Vegas represented a prosocial form of betting, every technological trend seems hellbent on moving us in the opposite direction, largely by offering ever more warped, addictive, and isolating versions of the casino for our phones. Social-media companies, much like the betting apps, have taken the allure of slots to the next level: endless scrolling feeds, hyperactive alerts, and special rewards. Today, the human body is so reliant on these dopamine hits that it often sends phantom signals to the brain simulating the buzz of a phone notification. Kids are further solidifying these neural links via video games, many of which now feature “loot box” games in which players pay for randomized upgrades.”

How Human Rights Watch Shattered Yugoslavia by Kit Klarenberg (Scheer Post)

“In November 1990, HRW founding member Jeri Laber authored a tendentiously-titled op-ed for The New York Times, “Why Keep Yugoslavia One Country?”. Inspired by a recent trip to Kosovo, Laber described how her team’s experience on-the-ground in the Serbian province had led HRW to harbour “serious doubts about whether the US government should continue to bolster the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Instead, she proposed actively facilitating the country’s destruction, and laid out a precise roadmap by which Washington could achieve this goal.”

“[…] financial aid would be withheld from the country’s constituent republics unless they all convened elections under US State Department supervision within six months. In a stroke, Belgrade’s central authority was neutralised, and the seeds of bitter, bloody wars of independence throughout the multiethnic, multifaith socialist federation were sown. Shockingly, Human Rights Watch was well-aware this was an “inevitable” consequence of terminating Yugoslav “national unity”.”

“Fast forward to December 2002, and Jeri Laber testified as an “expert” witness during Slobodan Milosevic’s ICTY prosecution. Under cross-examination by the indicted former Serbian and Yugoslav President, she exhibited an absolutely staggering ignorance of socialist Yugoslavia’s culture, history, legal and political systems, and much more besides. For example, Laber was unaware Tito, the federation’s founder and longtime leader, was – famously – a Croat. Her pronounced lack of local comprehension proved particularly problematic when Milosevic dissected an August 1991 HRW report, on the Croatian civil war.”

“Laber confessed to not knowing a single one of these inconvenient truths, fatally undermining the claims of every HRW report published on Yugoslavia under her watch – which inspired the ICTY’s formation, and prosecutions. Flailing on the witness stand, she resorted to arguing the countless flagrantly bogus assertions in HRW’s assorted Yugoslav investigations weren’t intended to be taken as her organisation’s own independent findings, or in any way rooted in reality, but merely reflected what some people locally had voiced to HRW researchers:”

“That Laber’s witless pronouncements informed and justified US policy, despite her ignorance of the most basic facts about Yugoslavia, is a disquieting testament to the woeful quality of ‘expertise’ routinely exploited in pursuit of Washington’s imperial goals. What the federation’s breakup would produce was entirely predictable, and indeed contemporaneously predicted by scholar Robert Hayden.”

Trump Still Can’t Find the Millions of Illegal Votes by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

This is a great article about how facially stupid the arguments of the administration can be. It’s not just this administration but their lies are so much bigger that you would think they would be easier for people to see through. Dean does what he can to help out.

“Trump keeps repeating the claim that millions, maybe even tens of millions, of undocumented immigrants are brought into the country to cast votes for Democratic candidates. His incredibly rich friend — and occasional sidekick — Elon Musk has made the same claim.

“[…] According to the Trump-Musk hypothesis, there is a network, presumably funded by rich Democrats (we know what the anti-Semites are thinking), that goes to countries like Haiti, Venezuela, Somalia and elsewhere and brings back millions — or even tens of millions — of people and pays them to vote Democratic in elections.”

“So, there is this massive industry of people involved in recruiting immigrants and smuggling them across the border, but Donald Trump and Elon Musk could not find even one person involved in the process. And this is despite the fact that Donald Trump commanded the full power of the federal government for five of the last nine years.”

“Anyhow, the Trump-Musk claim is that millions of undocumented immigrants have been consistently ignoring the law and voting anyhow. Here again we have to ask how incompetent the Trump gang could possibly be? It would be understandable if a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand, non-citizens could vote and slip under the radar, but millions?”

“An extensive audit by the state of Utah of more than 2 million voters came up with one non-citizen, who apparently never voted. Florida found 144 non-citizens among the 13.6 million people on its voter rolls, or 0.001 percent. Texas reported that there may have been 1,930 votes cast by non-citizens among more than 18 million votes cast, which comes to 0.01 percent.”

“If people want to buy the Trump-Musk story of a massive conspiracy to get millions of illegal votes cast for Democrats by immigrants, they must think this duo is pretty damn incompetent since they can find no evidence after years of trying. It’s hard to believe that we can have someone this incompetent in the White House. It’s maybe even harder to believe that people would freely choose to invest their money with someone as apparently incompetent as Elon Musk.”

Even those guys can’t be that incompetent. The reasonable conclusion is that they don’t believe their own story either. They’re just hoping that you do. They are lying for their own benefit.

Panteion University of Athens − November 12, 2025 by Norman Finkelstein (YouTube)

Malignant Dawn by Bill Murray (3QuarksDaily)

“How would the United States handle the rise of the rest? The debate was usually about what the US would do to keep things steady – to maintain equilibrium. No one saw the US as the disruptor. But as it turns out, it’s the chief enforcer who is changing the script.”

It is flabbergasting to read something like this from an author I’d thought to be somewhat better informed. Obeisance to the myth that the empire tells about itself is a mind virus. As usual, those who were victims of the mind virus but upon whom the realization is now—slowly and after incredible repetition of the obvious—dawning that the U.S. might not always be the good guy, they have to characterize their previous unquestioning fealty to the empire’s myth as a mass hypnosis that was shared by all and that the willful and deliberate ignorance of which was clearly not a moral failing.

There were a bunch of us who knew exactly how the U.S. would react to multipolarity. It was not a mystery. We’d watched 75 years of cold war. We’d watched the empire expand. We didn’t ignore it all because our investments were likewise expanding, because the rising tide of the empire happened to be lifting our boats. We didn’t look away from the atrocities supposedly committed in all of our names because we were under the umbrella. No, some of us walked away from Omelas the minute we got wind of what was going on.

Journalism & Media

Princeton University cancels discussion by Norman Finkelstein on the ongoing Gaza genocide by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“By invoking the “new University policy” to cancel a talk by one of its own graduates, Princeton has signaled that its campus is not a place for free speech about the crimes of US imperialism and its allies but an institution of ideological discipline aligned with the war aims of the Trump administration in the Middle East and beyond.”

Something Very Strange Is Happening To London by Evan Edinger (YouTube)

This is an excellent analysis of the state of AI-generated content as used to generate false narratives that are politically advantageous to the elites. Evan focuses on accounts and influencers that promote the narrative of an increasingly lawless and violent London that use completely fictitious, AI-generated content and which benefit personally tremendously from the advertisements shown on their “engaging” content.

The locations in the videos either don’t exist or they’re in completely different towns that are nowhere near London. They are probably not even real people or real accounts. They peddle lies to generate anger, then harvest attention to advertisements. Evan argues that the monetization should be disabled immediately. It’s a good idea but it will never happen. He further recommends to get outside, to experience life in the city to see that there’s no truth to anything that you’re seeing online.

This tactic is the same as that used to manipulate public opinion about the violence in any of a dozen U.S.-American cities, none of which actually exists, but which prompted the Trump administration to send in national troops, and to which the president continues to refer to this day. None of it is real but it has real-world consequences.

Labor

Epstein and the Professors by Stephen F. Eisenman (CounterPunch)

I didn’t read the article but did notice, when it took a bit longer to load, that the photo, shown below, had a weird filename.

Supposedly Chomsky and Epstein talking on a plane

The photo is labeled as “Undated photograph from collection of Jeffrey Epstein. Photo: House Oversight Committee.” Is it, though? Why is the filename two-men-sitting-in-chairs-ai-generated-content-ma.webp, though? That is disturbing journalistically. I thought that I’d seen this photo before but was I just remembering another, similar photo? Or was the photo that I remember the same one? Was that one real? Or had it also been AI-generated? Is it possible that this photo, which has cemented people’s idea of Chomsky’s relationship to Epstein, is fake? Why the filename? Is that the accident? It’s fishy as hell.

Economy & Finance

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else (Hacker News)

“It’s hard to comprehend the scale of these investments. Comparing them to notable industrial projects, it’s almost unbelievable. Every week in 2026 Google will pay for the cost of a Burj Khalifa. Amazon for a Wembley Stadium.

“Facebook will spend a France-England tunnel every month.”

“ As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?”

“I just made a LLM recreate a decent approximation of the file system browser from the movie Hackers (similar to the SGI one from Jurassic park) in about 10 minutes. At work I’ve had it do useful features and bug fixes daily for a solid week.”

Sure, bro. I guess you need to have recreated a file-system browser from a movie for pure fun, and with no effort on your part, than people need hospitals of medical care. This is fine.

That is the trade-off. People keep claiming that these tools will eventually turn around and solve all of the other problems, which is why it’s absolutely sensible, patriotic, and moral to put all of our eggs in this basket this time. It will be different this time. There is no way this will turn out to enrich all of the usual suspects, leaving the rest of us with nothing. No way. This is the one. This time it’s real.

“Is it the beginning of the star trek ship computer? If so, it is as big as the smartphone, the internet, or even the invention of the microchip. And then the investments make sense in a way.”

Keep telling yourself that, buddy. This is the one. Can’t miss.

The same assholes who already own everything are recruiting you into their propaganda campaign to increase their fortunes. Let’s just do this thing first, then we’ll get to all of the things you need. Don’t worry, we won’t forget you.

Hey, look. Lucy’s holding a football. Go kick it.

The Dollar is a Reserve Currency, Not “the” Reserve Currency by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“One of the great myths that has formed the basis of endless conspiracy theories is that oil must currently be traded in dollars. A popular story of the rationale for overthrowing Saddam Hussein was that he was going to start selling Iraq’s oil for euros.

“This is absurd for two reasons. First, there was nothing ever stopping Iraq or any other country from selling oil for euros or any other currency. There is no international law that requires oil to be sold for dollars. If any country finds it more convenient to sell oil for yen or renminbi, as is sometimes the case, they use the alternative currencies.”

That is 100% true but also completely irrelevant because he’s making “convenient” do a lot of work here. E.g., it would be “inconvenient” to be economically sanctioned or militarily invaded for using any other currency but, of course, the country can choose to do so. Baker uses the example of Saddam Hussein, a ruler deposed for completely fictitious official reasons.

Was the real reason the petrodollar? Maybe? It’s not as ridiculous as Dean makes it seem. For God’s sakes, Dean is writing from a country that has kidnapped another country’s leader and has bombed eight countries in the last year, but sure, everything is done according to logical reasons easily perceived by economist Dean Baker, who sometimes writes articles like these, that make it seem like he just work up from a 40-year nap.

Environment & Climate Change

You are being misled about renewable energy technology. by Technology Connections (YouTube)

“We should stop growing corn to feed to cars.” This is an excellent movie-length discussion of how inefficient it is to continue to subsidize fossil fuels, which are disposable fuels. He discusses “opex” (operational expenditures) vs. “capex” (capital expenditures). Over the medium- to long-run, an energy infrastructure with lower “opex” will win out.

He discusses how modern solar panels no longer use hazardous materials, being composed primarily of materials derived from quartz. Even the batteries can benefit from the existing nearly closed loop already established for recycling car batteries. Modern batteries can be used for 15 years, day-in, day-out, before they start to degrade. Fossil fuels can be used once. Even degraded batteries still contain all of their original materials—they’ve just been moved around within the battery to suboptimal positions. These can be recycled and made into new batteries. This means that, once we have a certain number of batteries, we no longer need to dig up the materials to build them.

From the last half-hour, which goes into other topics,

“Launching satellites into space to make rural broadband happen is an admission of laziness and defeat from both Big Telecom and the government. It’s a solution a billionaire could provide and happily monetize, but it’s not necessarily the best solution, is it?”

00:00 Intro
07:35 Some opening notes
10:14 Cars and all the oil they use
15:38 Photovoltaics and electric cars
18:59 A cost and opportunity comparison
22:33 Solar farms
30:35 A discussion of land use
38:29 A diversion on wind power
41:17 The materials in solar panels
50:52 What about the batteries?
1:02:41 The reasons I made this video
1:10:16 The reason I am who I am
1:16:35 Who the liars are and what we need to do about them.

Utuqaq by Field of Vision | Iva Radivojević (Vimeo)

“In the Arctic, ice is both all around and constantly disappearing. “Utuqaq” explores climate change from the perspective of this beautiful and vital element, as four researchers embark on an expedition to drill ice cores in subzero temperatures.”

It’s about 30 minutes. It’s quite relaxing. It’s sometimes difficult to read the subtitles but I almost feel that they did it on purpose, so it’s kind of charming.

Anaiyyun: Prayer for the Whale by Kiliii Yuyan (Vimeo)

“[…] the story of an Iñupiaq whaling crew, living where the vast plain of ice meets the waters of the Arctic Ocean. During whaling, their lives are interminable periods of silent observation, punctuated by moments of terror. The ice hides its dangers—desperately hungry polar bears hunting humans, massive icequakes when sheets of ice collide.

“Here on the sea ice, the Iñupiaq wait for the whale. When the whale does offer itself, it will take the courage and skill of the whaling crew, riding on the icy waters of the Arctic by a skinboat, to catch it. But in the long moments standing on the ice, protected from the wind inside a fur-lined parka, a timeless gratitude develops. In those moments, the patient act of waiting transforms into a prayer for the whale.”

Medicine & Disease

Dark Knowledge by Matt Bivens, M.D. (Substack)

“Purdue and its Sackler family owners made billions by methodically and scientifically getting ordinary people across the country addicted to opioids; they did this over more than 20 years, despite repeated and serious warnings. The consequences for them? Few worth mentioning. Sure, over the next 15 years the Sacklers will, per the bankruptcy plan, now have to grudgingly give back some of the billions they’ve gathered. And as a family they’ve been publicly shamed. But they remain billionaires, free to travel the world, apparently unrepentant.”

“Personally, I’d have preferred to see every Purdue building torched to the ground and the earth beneath plowed over and salted. I’d have also welcomed seeing corporate executives and Sackler family representatives do jail time, which is what we usually insist upon when we roll up an organized crime ring that’s killed a bunch of people..”

“[…] the Justice Department’s $225 million fine — the price the Sacklers paid not to be criminally prosecuted — represented perhaps 1% of the billions the Sacklers have enjoyed. Put another way, it left untouched 99% of the Sackler family’s ill-gotten opioid gains. But it was enough to resolve Federal allegations that Sackler-run Purdue had made billions illegally slinging dope; and that the Sacklers had then hurriedly siphoned its final billions off in “fraudulent transfers … made to hinder future creditors.””

“We let the Sacklers keep their freedom and their billions, but we did also yell at them on Zoom.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Point Dume by Hinternet Editorial Board and Daphné Tamage (The Hinternet)

See also the English translation

“La conversation touchait à sa fin. Mon père saturait. Je me suis quand même levée pour aller chercher l’exemplaire de Mon chien stupide que j’avais tenu à relire dans l’avion, et je suis restée debout pour lui déclamer un passage. ”

“Je savais pourquoi je voulais ce chien. J’étais las de la défaite et de l’échec. Je désirais la victoire, mais j’avais 50 ans, et il n’y avait pas de victoire en vue, pas même de bataille, car mes ennemis ne s’intéressaient plus au combat. Stupide était la victoire, les livres que je n’avais pas écrits, les endroits que je n’avais pas vus. La Maserati que je n’avais jamais eue. Les femmes qui me faisaient envie, Danielle Darrieux, Gina Lollobrigida, Nadia Gray. Stupide incarnait le triomphe sur d’anciens fabriquants de pantalons qui avaient mis en pièce mes scénarios jusqu’au jour où le sang avait coulé. Comme mon bien-aimé Rocco, il apaiserait la douleur, panserait les blessures de mes journées interminables, de mon enfance pauvre, de ma jeunesse désespérée, de mon avenir compromis.”

“En dehors de cette incongruité qui avait capté son attention, je ne savais pas si mon père comprenait le souffle qui se logeait dans cet extrait, sa vitalité. Est-ce qu’il mesurait l’espoir délirant que cet homme mettait soudain dans son chien? Le pouvoir de changer non seulement son futur, mais aussi son passé? Mon père comprenait-il comment la littérature venait sublimer la vie?”

The Soul of the Soul of 1960s Soul by Mary Cadwalladr (The Hinternet)

“Just listen to the Staples’s version of “Uncloudy Day”, which reportedly first woke Bob Dylan up to the full reality of music’s mystery, and, they say, drove him to propose marriage to a confused Mavis (1939—present, God bless her). I am increasingly convinced that this is both the most beautiful and the most consequential recording in postwar musical history. The restraint of it! The power! Yet when the Staple Singers are remembered at all these days, they are mostly remembered as fellow-travelers of MLK in the likewise retroactively secularized Civil Rights movement. They were indeed right there beside him, but their artistic sensibility was not limited to an aspiration to justice — it was shaped by an awareness of the inescapable tragedy of human existence, of the sort that a strictly secular imagination strains to comprehend.”

“A clear example of this may be found in the repeated imperfect execution of the splits by various performers on the show. This move might appear merely ornamental to the uninitiated, but in truth it is one of the most enduring signatures of a tradition of musical performance, of which Prince (1958-2016) was the last major representative, that reaches back at least to the vaudeville era and that comes with an expectation of what you might call total talent. Here is Prince doing the splits, repeatedly and perfectly; here is James Brown doing them majestically too, in Zaire in 1974; here is Jackie Wilson doing his perhaps even more impressive variant, a faint shadow of which we often see in Elvis.”

“[…] these kids must have been practicing, even further from imperfection, in front of the family television set, when Jackie or other of the greats appeared on Ed Sullivan. It is the imperfection, I mean, that reveals the collective fantasy that sustains the highest expressions of this tradition’s genius. Both Prince and Michael Jackson turned 8 the year this show aired; we must picture them, too, glued to their family TV sets, practicing in their living rooms, boiling over with phantasms of their own individual potential for greatness, and, at once, of the collective genius through which this potential might hope to find its way out.”

“[…] often, in gospel and country traditions, the work of music-making is a multigenerational family affair (the Carters, the Staples, the Warwick-Houstons…). In our present century, when art has been nearly entirely absorbed into a hyperfinancialized celebrity system, for children to enter the line of work of their creative parents usually invites the “nepo baby” slur. But until yesterday art was practically by definition a family affair, something passed down from the elders, and the artistic form of life was to this extent highly heritable, like the Roma family circuses that still tour Europe, still moving from town to town in their caravans.”

“By 1966 the social and economic realities of urbanization, along with the culture-industrial imperative of unrelenting novelty, were of course triggering significant and artistically very interesting transformations, in Black American music as in every other domain. These transformations appear far more vividly in the acts that have come down from Chicago than in those that have come up, say, from Beaumont. But tradition is still living here — Prince will be its Ishi (Wikipedia).”

“My method, here as in my reflections above, is what JSR sometimes calls “deep listening”, wherein you listen so fully, with such complete focus of soul, that not only does the music’s inner essence reveal itself to you, but, through the music, the truth of history and the structure of reality as well. I find when I follow this method —unlike JSR, who at least has never explicitly mentioned having such an experience— I am sometimes able to inhabit the music so fully as to come to feel I am the one performing it — I can feel it as if it is coming out of me, and not merely as a passive recipient.”

“[…] she comes back with a spontaneous comic variation on the same, which as near as I can make out runs:“Tell your mammy / Tell your pappy / Gonna send you back to Arkansappy” I don’t know if I’m getting it right, and I certainly don’t know what Arkansappy is. But what I can say is that this improvisation vividly attests to the way an artifact such as this Ray Charles hit, at the time only 7 years old, gets passed down as a living and dynamic thing, not yet fully an “autographic” work, in Monroe Beardsley’s sense, as the recording industry sought to ensure our popular hits could only be, but rather as a sort of communal good.”

“[…] just go watch the whole great oeuvre from start to finish. Thank Rachel Cummings, whoever she may be, for having put these rich historical documents on YouTube; and thank Willie Nelson for having saved them, if that story is true, in the first place. If any of you have the technical competence, please consider archiving these recordings in a secure and permanent way. They really should be in the Library of Congress, and the souls that feature in them really should be memorialized in some sort of national Pantheon — so far only Josephine Baker, from among America’s true bards and prophets, has made it into one of those, but it’s the Panthéon of the wrong damned country! When I watch them I can’t suppress the thought that there’s something here, yet, to anchor the civic life and communal identity of what could be a beautiful country… if only that country knew what it was. If only all the forces of power and money were not now rallied to hide from us what it is.”

Ishi (Wikipedia)

“Ishi (c. 1861 – March 25, 1916) was the last known member of the Native American Yahi people from the present-day state of California in the United States. The rest of the Yahi (as well as many members of their parent tribe, the Yana) were killed in the California genocide in the 19th century. Widely described as the “last wild Indian” in the United States, Ishi lived most of his life isolated from modern North American culture, and was the last known Native manufacturer of stone arrowheads. […]

“Ishi, which means “man” in the Yana language, is an adopted name. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave him this name because in the Yahi culture, tradition demanded that he not speak his own name until formally introduced by another Yahi. When asked his name, he said: “I have none, because there were no people to name me”, meaning that there was no other Yahi to speak his name on his behalf.”

A Comforter in the Storm by Edward Curtin (Scheer Post)

“I was reminded of this scene the other night as I looked out my New England window at the blizzard burying everything in sight. It was bitter cold and the wind was howling. Lucky to have a warm abode and far from being a child, it wasn’t the blizzard that frightened me. It was its message. Chaos coming, madness in the saddle, people losing their minds, leaders drunk on power, war, hatred, murder in the streets. Lost souls. Lost, lost souls.

“Such sentiments have been uttered before, so I don’t want to exaggerate. Yet I feel certain we have entered a new “reality,” one based on phantoms and methods, a digital world spun out of the nineteenth century’s so-called “death of God,” or God’s murder. The murder of God also meant the suicide of man, with both finally resulting in rule by algorithm and artificial intelligence and our time when everything has become unsettled, doubtful, and frighteningly farcical, all a deadly parody – in Nietzsche’s prescient words: “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.”

“But then there was this as well in the night, brief as it was. Strangely, the storm cracked its shell at one point, the clouds parted serenely for a brief glimpse of what seemed like a few stars, and I could see the snow settling softly on the ground like a diaphanous large bird with its wings a massive white comforter. The menace turned to tranquility, a sense of peace entered my heart, and just as quickly the storm roared back with the air smoking with snow and the ephemeral vision of hope gone.”

““Sitting still,” said Nietzsche, “ is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.”

“For not flying is a way of lying, but art is a letting go.”

The Staple Singers − Uncloudy Day (1956) (YouTube)

Jackie Wilson 'Lonely Teardrops' (May 27, 1962) on The Ed Sullivan Show (YouTube)

Animation About Memory, Identity & Nature | Monsoon Blue by Jay Hiukit Wong, Ellis Kayin Chan (YouTube)

Family gets trapped on an island during a family picnic | Summer 96 by Mathilde Bédouet (YouTube)

Please Mr. Nixon by Canned Heat & Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown (YouTube)

This is from the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973. Magical.

James Brown Live Zaire 1974 by Soul on Top (YouTube)

James Brown was an absolute force of nature. He dances frenetically nonstop, shuffling his feet in blinding moves, dropping into splits, sweating profusely, singing his absolute heart out. He’s on stage in a too-tight jumpsuit, pretty obviously wearing a girdle, and it doesn’t matter one bit, so overwhelming is the man’s voice and charisma. He has a cummerbund that spells out GFOS (God-Father Of Soul) and a collar with JB on the front. And the man’s band, good Lord, those bass lines, the horns, the bongos.

“Don’t bury me while I yet live. […] The best of James Brown is yet to come.”

Birdsong: the dying whistled language of the Hmong people in northern Laos (Vimeo)

“Exploring the whistling traditions of the Hmong people of northern Laos, whose language straddles the boundary between music and speech, this film witnesses a collision of ancient tradition with modern urban life. With urbanisation and the advent of modern technology rapidly replacing this culture, Hmong whistling is dying out. Following the stories of three individuals from Long Lan village, they reflect on their experience as practitioners of a vanishing musical language”

They play on what they call a “leaf”, an instrument that you can fashion out of a blade of grass but also one that we watch an artisan create out of wood, to make a queej. The notes are words. It’s utterly fascinating.

“Wake up soul, we are going now.
You shall take a sword with you
You shall take an arrow with you

“The rooster will crow and show you the way
You shall follow its call

“You have already faced the nine black mountains,
and the eight dark valleys,
deep in the forest

“If you hear the rain falling and the thunder rumbling,
don’t be scared

“These are just the sounds of your siblings
As they play the queej and drums for your last rites”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

How China’s Counterculture Went Online by Daniel Cheng (Jacobin)

“Clinton praised the emancipatory potential of tariff-free trade of information technology products, going as far as to claim “liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem.” Clinton’s comments here were a part of a broader ideology that came to be known by a German phrase, “Wandel durch Handel”: change through trade. Free trade with China, the argument went, would also lead to a liberalization of its political system since free-market capitalism and authoritarianism were incompatible. According to this view, private capital and tech companies would be the harbinger of China’s liberal future.”

Is the author not going to mention that things went in the other direction? That the so-called bastion of freedom became more authoritarian? China’s firewall is starting to look like a good idea, as one country after another starts banning social media for under-15 and under-16 year-olds.

mental health: a critical perspective on social media by Meditations for the anxious mind (YouTube)

Technology & Engineering

How Spotify changed song structure by Etymology Nerd (YouTube)

“Because Spotify will count anything over 30 seconds as a stream and you don’t get paid more for longer songs, artists are incentivized to make shorter music, which is exactly what’s happening. At the same time, album track listings are getting longer because it’s better to cram in a bunch of short streams than a few long streams.

“[…] It’s kind of normal for music to evolve around technological constraints. Before the 1980s, the length of song was limited by the amount of space on vinyl records. When CDs became popular in the ‘90s, sound-mastering engineers started optimizing for loudness to make their songs stick out more on the radio or in the club.> Finally, with the advent of digital interface, song titles started getting shorter because they needed to fit on your iPod screen or in the Spotify track listing.

“Spotify is only pushing the music that makes them the most money. Ambient. short, scattered recommendations also make it easier to slip in AI music, which is more profitable for the platform.”

LLMs & AI

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It by Simon Willison

“This captures an effect I’ve been observing in my own work with LLMs: the productivity boost these things can provide is exhausting.

“[…] I’m frequently finding myself with work on two or three projects running parallel. I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted.”

All of this cocaine I’m doing has doubled my productivity but I can only work a quarter of the day.

“I’ve had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they’re finding building yet another feature with “just one more prompt” irresistible.”

My friend, you are describing addictive behavior. This was no different before LLMs. This is how it has always been. When you get older, you learn that just leaving it be, instead of staying up two more hours, and finishing it in five minutes in the morning is the better solution. But, sure, let’s pretend that it’s unique to LLMs.

“I think we’ve just disrupted decades of existing intuition about sustainable working practices. It’s going to take a while and some discipline to find a good new balance.”

“We’re doing too much cocaine, right?”

Programming

14 More lessons from 14 years at Google by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“The teams that maintain both velocity and reliability don’t do it through heroics. They do it by treating reliability as a first-class product feature with its own roadmap, its own metrics, and its own advocates.

“You wouldn’t ship a feature without product review. Don’t ship a system without some kind of reliability discussion.”

“Make the normal path the default. Document the system. Spread the knowledge. Design for the average Tuesday, not the exceptional crisis. Heroes should be unnecessary, and if they’re necessary, you should be working to make them unnecessary.”

“A feature without telemetry is a liability in disguise.

“If you ship a feature without knowing how it behaves in production, you shipped uncertainty.”

“Logs, traces, dashboards, and alerts aren’t “ops work.” They’re how you learn. They’re how you know whether the thing you built actually works for real people doing real things in real conditions.

“The best engineers I know treat observability as part of the definition of done. Not “I wrote the code” but “I wrote the code and I can see it working.””

“I’ve seen migrations estimated at one quarter stretch to years. Not because the technical work was wrong, but because nobody accounted for the human work: convincing teams to prioritize your migration over their roadmap, supporting the long tail of edge cases nobody knew existed, and maintaining two systems in parallel while the old one refuses to die.

“The technical plan is the easy part. The hard part is designing for coexistence. You will run old and new simultaneously for longer than you think. You will discover that the “legacy” system encodes decisions nobody documented and workflows nobody remembers designing but everyone depends on. You will need a adoption strategy that doesn’t require every team to drop what they’re doing at once.”

“Use AI to explore options fast, then apply judgment ruthlessly. The engineers who thrive in this environment won’t be the ones who generate the most. They’ll be the ones who curate the best.

“Production is cheap. Editing is expensive. Selection is everything.”

Sports

Super Bowl LX was underwhelming. At 36 of 60 minutes played, Seattle had three field goals and the German moderators were wondering out loud whether a kicker had ever been MVP. “Naja, wenn er der einzige ist, der Punkte gezielt hat?” At this point, the Patriots had 4 first downs and had punted 7 times. That is either pathetic or a testament to the Seahawks’s defense.

Bad Bunny’s half-time show was amazing. It was a revolution. It was a masterpiece, equal to or possibly better than Prince’s masterpiece from 2007 (YouTube). It is not easy to make a show for such a huge arena. Bad Bunny put together a giant series of music videos with incredible sets. It was like a mini-musical. The vibe was a plea for love, not hate, but also a call for revolution.

It was a call for unity and an obvious call to fight for justice and equality. It was revolutionary in the sense that what it presented was so obviously a better alternative to the hateful, mean, and overarching military face we’ve seen lately. In a world determined increasingly by hate, preaching love is revolutionary.

Big Bunny introduced himself a couple of times throughout by his real name—Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—launching into his quick Spanish rapping as he wandered through a sugar-cane maze on a plantation. I’m not a big fan of this style of rapping but the man oozes charisma. He’s an incredible showman. This, despite his Spanish being nearly impenetrable for me. He sang only in Spanish except when he said “God bless the USA”.

They turned the whole football field into a celebration of Latin culture: there was a giant sugar-cane field, a taqueria, a geladería, a bodega, a house, living rooms, a dance floor, all through which he wandered, singing and greeting people; there was a separate concert area on top of the bodega, from which Lady Gaga belted out a tune, accompanied by a huge Latin band.

Ricky Martin was there. He looked pretty good, if not amazing! It’s heartening to think of people reacting viscerally to his oozing machismo and good looks, thinking that he’s intent on stealing their wives, and whose wives would absolutely be packing their bags if they didn’t know that he’s as gay as the day is long. Which, like, 🤯 for just the right kind of benighted son-of-a-bitch.

This was a jubilant jab in the eye those sons-of-bitches but only because they’re such snowflakes that it has rendered them incapable of acknowledging game. It’s only offensive if you hold offensive opinions. This is a lesson in culture: This show is just as American as trucks and country music. It’s just as American as Kendrick Lamar and rap music. It’s just as American as Prince. None of those cultures are the one I personally know as an American, but it’s blindingly obvious that they all belong to the amalgam of America. It’s reductionist and racist to fight it. Just stop trying. You won’t win in the end. You’ll just cause a lot of needless misery to others and, ultimately, to yourself.

This was a call to stop the madness. It was anti-ICE without saying it was anti-ICE. It was pro-U.S.-Latin culture, celebrating the details we all recognize. There was a giant truck in a field; there was a bodega; there was a barbershop; there was an actual wedding; there were workers in the cane fields; there were workers on telephone poles; there were probably a dozen little things I didn’t even notice because it’s not my culture. I barely understand Spanish.

It didn’t matter if you understood Spanish. It was clear that this all said: we are not who they say we are. We eat ice cream and fried foods. We get married. We sing. We dance. We drive trucks. We are you. You are us. We are the same. What the hell are we fighting about?

So much dancing. So much joy. Hundreds of joyous dancers and singers parading with all of the flags of South and Central America, with the U.S. flag in the lead, but only one of many, as Bad Bunny recited all of the country names. He holds out a football with “Together we are America” written on it. “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” is emblazoned all over the stadium. He took the opportunity with both hands and ran with it. The exuberance, joy, and revolution was palpable.

You’ll be able to tell whether someone’s a butt-hurt whiner if they start counting American flags, or if they point out that only Lady Gaga sang in English, or any of a dozen things that I am not even equipped to notice because my mind isn’t small enough. None of that matters—especially for someone from a country like Switzerland, where you’re expected to understand four languages when watching the Olympics—what matters is that (A) it was a hell of a show and (B) it was a hell of a message.

Even the haters from the other side—who will complain that Bad Bunny couldn’t possibly deliver a revolutionary message from within the constraints of one of the most capitalist celebrations, the Super Bowl—should sit this one out. Bad Bunny says “toma mi cerveza”. Do not listen to them. Listen to this half-time show. Sway to the beat. Feel the joy. Reject the hate. Build your community. Join the revolution. It shouldn’t end here. This should be a beginning.

Back to the game. It’s the end of the third quarter. It’s still 12–0. Ten seconds left. Quarterback sack of Drake Maye—the 20th in this postseason, a record—and … a fumble, with Seattle recovering.

In the fourth quarter, we quickly get the first two touchdowns, one for Seattle, then a quick one for the Patriots.

Maye makes up for it by throwing an embarrassing interception, which Seattle can’t quite capitalize on, but their kicker gets his fifth field goal, cementing, for me, his MVP pick for the game. He has 16 points! It’s a Super Bowl record!

Maye eats another huge sack but then makes a good, long pass to make up the ground again.

Another sack. Fumble. Touchdown Seattle.

Replay shows that it was actually an interception because the ball never touched the ground. The sacker deflected it, then another guy caught it on the fly and ran it into the end zone for a touchdown. Seven sacks. So far.

It’s now 29–7 with 4:27 left to play. The Patriots have collapsed.

They get one more touchdown with a no-look pass by Maye that’s so bad that the back catches it with his fingertips, a mere centimeter or two from the turf. The German moderators noted that they’ve never heard a touchdown celebrated less. 29–13 (they failed to make the two-point conversion, to no-one’s surprise).

Fun

English proficiency tests by Victor Mair (Language Log)

Battery was dead in my beat this morning

Understanding this sentence definitely requires the cultural knowledge generally only obtained by natives or by sustained immersion.

“Battery was dead in my beater this morning. It’s a sick, so I Flintstoned it down the drive and popped the clutch.”

Top comment:

“Did that give him enough juice to turn it over or did he need a jump?”

To my future husband by Caroline Baniewicz (YouTube)

“<When we’re trafficked by the AI overlords to be their slaves that satisfy their every need, will you still love me?

“Will you remember that my favorite flower is tulips and to get them for me on my birthday?

“Even after they skin you alive and use it to make the cyborgs look more like humans so that the powerful algorithm can continue to take over the world as the human race deteriorates?

“I wonder how many kids we’re going to have. A boy? maybe a girl? I might even have a robot baby when I’m sold into slavery and abused by the robo masters.

“I just can’t wait to meet you.”

The Jizzle by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know (YouTube)

RC Cola: The Incandescent Beverage by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know (YouTube)

Brothers in Arms by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know (YouTube)

“We have to be even.”

“We’re taking your pants off.”

Valentine's Day Sucks. Prove Me Wrong. by Ronnie Chieng (YouTube)

“Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate love.

“So the other 364 days, they can just go fuck themselves?

“What other day do you wake up and think about love?

“Well, if you’re a good person…every day.”

Light Hearted | | Starring Gillian Wright & Simon Greenall by DUST | Sye Allen (YouTube)

Joy uses an AI service to bring her cantankerous husband back from the dead in order to get the password to their joint retirement account. It turns out she’d remembered it correctly but she doesn’t know how to spell “hydrangias”.

Light Hearted (IMDb) (2024)