Links and Notes for February 13th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
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Public Policy & Politics

White crime = self-defense

“Black Crime = Gang Violence
Arab Crime = Terrorism
Hispanic Crime = Illegal Immigration
White Crime = Self Defense”

I’m Not Done With You by Mary Turfah (The Baffler)

“October 2025, it was revealed that the United States Navy, through a deal with the University of Southern California medical school, was providing the Israeli military with cadavers through which its medics could practice saving lives in a simulated trauma setting, […]”

“Palestinian witnesses have reported that some prisoners were alive at the time they were taken for organ extraction. In one batch of bodies, the organs removed were those commonly transplanted: heart, liver, lungs. The transplant surgeon waits for a person to die; the soldier can’t. The settler surgeon wields his mastery over the body to serve the state. Here, the surgeon acts as—is—a soldier.”

“Israeli society is obsessed with fertility. About 60 percent of Israeli women go through some kind of genetic testing (usually amniocentesis) before delivery and, as of 2002, held the world record for the number of tests per pregnancy and fertility clinics per capita. The threshold for abortion is minor physical deformities, like a cleft lip, and when testing shows even a low risk of things like Down syndrome (one study showed that 68 percent of Israelis believe it is “socially wrong” to give birth to such children).”

“[…] these being “dual use,” i.e., repurposeable into weapons. The Palestinian body, for the Israeli, serves two functions: First, there is the psychological impact on the settler, the gratification of unearthing a body that’s nothing but pathos, that does not resist, kidnapping it and making it serve you, then discarding it, arms zip-tied, into a pile of other bodies. Then there is the body as a thing, the way it can be used in death to fuel the Israeli economy, grow a booming medical industry, train a generation of doctors committed to the right kind of life, and extend the lives of Western bodies.”

From Greenland to the Great Lakes, Secession is Our Best Hope for Escaping Tyranny by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“The people of Greenland have been fighting for their sovereignty from both Europe and their NATO-American overlords for generations, finally achieving home rule in 1979, voting to withdraw from the EU in 1985, and expanding home rule to a self-government agreement with a window to complete independence in 2009. This is what the actual people of Greenland overwhelmingly support; to be free of pompous white assholes from both sides of the Atlantic along with their toxic waste and petty pissing matches.”

“In all of these lands the natives continue to struggle for self-rule but remain unrecognized by a world governed by globalist superstructures like the US, the EU, NATO, and the UN who define sovereignty based exclusively on the propertarian rule of the Westphalian system; a Eurocentric construct extended globally through colonialism in which only western-style nation states with rigid borders and legally codified hierarchies are granted sovereignty.”

“I strongly believe that the solution for all of us is to embrace a framework that recognizes communities as sovereign organisms regardless of borders and recognizes secession as a basic human right. In order to achieve this, we will likely require a coalition similar to that of the Non-Aligned Movement […]”

“Their goal was similar to that of the unrecognized nations of Greenland, Alaska, Ryukyu, and Hawaii; to remain independent and neutral during a time of violently shifting global alliances.”

US Consolidates Control Over Proxies Amid War on Multipolarism by Brian Berletic (Land Destroyer)

“[…] the recent decision by the EU for a “complete ban on Russian gas imports by 2027.” […] It is inconceivable that the EU’s leadership would surrender such leverage to the US amid a supposed and growing “split” with the US unless of course there was no real split to begin with.”

“This has already manifested itself as joint arms production or expanding joint arms production schemes where nations like Germany and Japan have been or will begin mass producing US-designed weapons like the Patriot missile air defense system and munitions for US-made multiple launch rocket systems to compensate for the US’ own inability to sufficiently expand military industrial production at home.”

“Nations like Japan and the Philippines are circumventing their own laws to allow both a wider US military presence within their territory as well as for their own military forces to play a more integrated and active role in advancing US foreign policy in terms of confronting and containing China in the region.”

“Until a greater percentage of journalists, analysts, and the general public can strip away the political theater used to perpetuate this continuity of agenda and reduce analysis to its material realities − revealing the simple structure of what is modern American empire at work − this destructive process will continue to erode and destroy both members of the multipolar world and the West itself.”

Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space by Brian Berletic (Land Destroyer)

“The Guardian in 2004 would admit that ongoing protests in Kiev at the time were, “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.” It also admitted that, “the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko,” which the article admitted failed.”

“Allowing the US to not only provide US-based social media platforms to nations rather than nations developing their own, but allowing the US to also control the flow of information and thus ideas and consensus on these platforms is as bad, or worse, than allowing foreign interests to control a nation’s physical borders, infrastructure, and even a nation’s own citizenry.

“The cost of surrendering a key − if not the key − domain of national security to the United States is political infiltration, capture, and even complete collapse as admitted US operations spanning the 21st century from Europe to the Arab World to Asia and back again have sufficiently demonstrated.”

The Munich War Conference by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“The European powers are not troubled by Trump’s fascist policies—the destruction of democratic rights, the ICE Gestapo’s hunt for migrants, the deployment of the army domestically, the establishment of an authoritarian regime. Nor do they object to his imperialist wars—the genocide in Gaza, the bombing of Iran, the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro—or his preparations for war against China. Here, the European ruling class is fully on board.

“Although Trump is assembling a huge armada against Iran and threatening massive military strikes against the country, not a single voice was raised against this at the conference. On the contrary, the conference served as a promotional platform for the next imperialist crime. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah who was overthrown by the 1979 revolution, was invited as a guest and spoke on the sidelines of the conference to supporters who had been carted in from all over Europe. His demand: The US should bomb Iran and install him as the new ruler, just as the CIA did with his father after the 1953 coup.”

“The escalation of the war against Russia is at the heart of the “preparations for the new era” that Chancellor Merz called for in his Munich speech. Russia’s attack on Ukraine has long served as a pretext for the European powers to arm themselves without limit and push ahead with their own plans for great power status. But their claim that Russia is the aggressor and plans to conquer all of Europe turns reality on its head.”

“They are not prepared to back down. They want to subjugate Russia and need the war to realise their own plans for great power status. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Germany alone has appropriated over €1 trillion for the rearmament of the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) and the preparation of its infrastructure for war. The entire society is to be put on a war footing and conscription reintroduced.

“Chancellor Merz explained in his Munich speech: “Europe must not retreat into risk avoidance. Europe must open up opportunities and unleash its energy. … It must become a factor in global politics, with its own security policy strategy.” He reaffirmed the goal of making the Bundeswehr “the strongest conventional army in Europe as quickly as possible.””

Sounds like a capital idea.

Roaming Charges: Trick or Retreat in the Twin Cities? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Last week, Leqaa Kordia, a 33-year-old Palestinian woman who has been held for a year in an ICE prison in Texas, fell twice, hit her head and suffered a seizure. She regained consciousness in a hospital, where her arms and legs had been shackled to the bed. “The entire time I was chained,” Kordia said. “I felt like an animal.” Kordia is not a violent criminal. She’s never been convicted of a crime. But she was detained by ICE last March when she showed up for a scheduled check-in on her immigration status. Her only offense seems to have been showing up at Columbia University to protest the Israeli genocide in Gaza and sending money to her family. Doctors told Kordia that she was likely prone to seizures because of stress and a poor diet, both of which are beyond her control. “The food is so bad it makes me sick,” Kordia said. “We live in filthy conditions. The best medicine for me and everyone else here is our freedom.”

“DHS admitted that Leqaa Kordia was arrested and held in detention for more than a year because she legally donated money to victims of Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza.”

The Hidden Assumption Beneath All US Foreign Policy — It Can’t Ever Be Questioned by Lee Camp (Truth & Freedom)

“I’m not sure how you decide which country to feel nationalism towards. But it’s very important. Sometimes you have to go and kill other people because they have nationalism for a whole other place. Your government might say “Here’s a gun. Go murder those other folks because they think their place is better.” And you have to do it. We have to support our brothers and sisters from the same country.”

The Ticking Time Bomb Looming Over Gaza, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Someone on Twitter tried to cite Cuba’s floundering economy as evidence that socialism doesn’t work. I told him, “Believing capitalism is better than communism because the US was able to strangle the Cuban economy is like believing you’re a better person than your neighbor because you beat the shit out of him in his driveway.””

“There’s an infuriating video going around showing an AI program whose entire function is to monitor baristas using facial recognition software and make sure they’re maintaining maximum efficiency at the coffee shop.

“We could have a utopia where robots do most of the labor. Instead we’ve got a dystopia where AI programs push human employees to work like robots.”

“The only governments who’ve been able to resist US imperial domination are the ones like China and Iran who forcefully control what goes on in their country, because that’s the only way to shut down US infiltration and subversion effectively. So now the US spends its time going “All our enemies are authoritarian dictatorships! We must be the Good Guys!”

“Really they’re the ones who set the conditions which made it so that the only states which maintain their sovereignty are the ones who tightly restrict things like western media propaganda, National Endowment for Democracy influence operations, and other regime change ops. If the US wasn’t constantly trying to topple governments which don’t kiss the imperial boot, those nations could be a lot less restrictive in their laws and policies.

“The US empire makes the whole world more tyrannical.”

The Hypocrites Who Condemn Hamas by Indrajit Saramajiva (Indica)

“[…] let me offer an example. Francesca Albanese, UN Something-I-Can’t-Spell, speaks eloquently and bravely for the Palestinian people and yet still condemns the Al Aqsa Flood as something ‘tragic and horrible.’ Why? Was the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion against Nazis tragic and horrible? The occupation is certainly tragic and horrible, but why is resistance also?

“Under international law (which she knows) occupied people have every right to resist their occupier. And if we want to talk about killing civilians, it’s well documented within ‘Israel’ that their own Hellfire missiles did the job. Hamas’s goal, as they stated quite clearly, was to take hostages to exchange for the over 10,000 Palestinians ‘Israel’ holds in absolute torture. Responding to the evil of ‘Israel’, Hamas is actually being quite restrained. But still people like Albanese will support… nothing, while condemning the people actually doing something.

“Condemning Hamas is like saying you condemn the Red Army and the Partisans… but support the victims. It’s like that meme of a drowning man getting a high-five instead of a hand up. You are, at best, neutral in the time of oppression which is to say, on the side of the oppressors. And you know what? It doesn’t even work. For all her troubles—and she has been troubled—Albanese has still been sanctioned by White Empire, even though she tries to keep her condemnation within the White lines. It doesn’t matter. They’ll persecute you anyways. I don’t mean to single out Albanese, she seems like a nice person and has personally sacrificed. I’m just saying that she’s embedded in a system of structural racism where the only bad violence is violence against White people, and she participates when she denigrates Hamas.

“Me, personally, I’m from the most of the world where Hamas is not a designated terrorist organization and I can support them all I want. I supported Hamas from October 7th and from October 15th really, once I’d had time to read about them. They are incredibly brave people with a coherent ideology and are not racist or scary at all. It’s incredible to me that we’re supposed to take the word of people that kill children at their day jobs and then rape children on vacation over the people defending their own people with great honor. What are we even talking about? I’ve seen ‘Israel’ killing children and bombing hospitals for years, while Hamas bravely lights up tanks and stormtroopers. Why on earth would I condemn them? I’m not worth the dust on a resistance fighter’s sandals. At this point, during an active genocide that they’re fighting, attacking the Resistance is indefensible. I can understand shutting up because supporting Hamas is illegal where you live, but condemning them? Contemptible.

“The Overton Window within the White Empire (barely) includes condemning genocide but you get defenestrated for even thinking about direct action. When people ask do you condemn Hamas? they’re really asking what the fuck are you going to do about it? and the answer from ‘moderates’ is not much. This is the hegemonic hypocrisy within White Empire and too many people accept and prop up their hegemon by being such hypocrites, mouthing pious platitudes and spitting on people who actually stand up. This goes for everyplace the Empire is attacking. ‘Moderates’ are full of complicated opinions on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela but cannot take a simple moral stand against evil. Because they’re a part of it, and all the hand-wringing can’t get the blood out.”

“What are we even talking about? It’s been World War III on the Muslim world for 25 years, NATO has been attacking Russia for a decade, Holocausting Gaza for nearly three, and White people still think they can be kinder gentler Nazis. Instead of tearing the United States apart and actually helping, they come out with useless statements about what the people in the concentration camp could do better, which is never good enough. White moderates won’t be satisfied until their children are doing land acknowledgments on your graveyard, and lecturing on the subject.

“As your grandmama must have told you, if you don’t have something good to say about the Resistance, shut the fuck up. There is a great battle between good and evil raging, and you’re a fool to take obviously evil people’s word on what’s what. If you believe the leaders of the White Empire (US, Europe, same shit as Rubio said) after finding out that they personally rape children then I really don’t know what to do with you. I’m with the Resistance, and as they say, those who are in solidarity with our corpses and not our rockets are hypocrites, and not of us.”

👏👏👏

Jesse Jackson: a Tribute by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“It would be hard to overstate Jesse Jackson’s importance in opening up American politics and society, not just to Black Americans, but also to Hispanics, and the LGTBQ community. It is probably difficult for younger people to imagine, and even old-timers like myself to remember, how bad discrimination was in the not very distant past.

“When Jackson ran the first time in 1984, and even the second time in 1988, there was not a single Black governor in the United States. There had been no Black governors since the end of reconstruction. There were also no Black senators.

“The only Black to serve in the Senate since reconstruction was a Republican, Edward Brooke, who was elected in Massachusetts. When Carol Mosley Brown got elected to the Senate from Illinois in 1992, it was widely noted that she was first Black women to be elected to the Senate. She was also the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate.

“It wasn’t just in politics; Blacks were largely excluded from the top reaches in most areas. I recall when I was a grad student at the University of Michigan in the 1980s. There we just two Black tenured professors in the whole university. There was a similar story in corporate America.”

“And Jackson was serious about a “rainbow coalition.” He also helped open the door for Hispanics, for Arab and Muslim Americans, and for the LGBTQ community. At a time when there were no openly gay or lesbian members of Congress, and even liberals were afraid to be associated with anyone who was openly gay, Jackson stood out in offering a welcome mat.”

“All the gains of the last four decades are now on the line, as Donald Trump and his white supremacist gang look to turn back the clock. We have the battle of our lives on our hands right now.

“But Jesse Jackson was a huge player in the changes that created the America that Donald Trump wants to destroy. He had serious flaws, like any great political leader, but for now we should remember the enormous impact he had in making this a better country.”

Up, Down and Around With Jesse Jackson by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Jesse Jackson’s two runs, in 1984 and 1988, were the last Democratic presidential campaigns I had any interest in joining. Those campaigns, which, among other things, warned about the coming neoliberal takeover of the Democratic Party, spawned dozens of great activists, including my late buddy Kevin Alexander Gray, who would later play vital roles in the movements that followed Jackson’s political campaign: anti-World Bank and WTO protests, the Nader campaigns, the Occupy Movement, the Sanders campaign, BLM, and the migrant rights movement.

“The Democratic Party, in league with the Israel lobby, deployed every trick in the book, and some found only the apocrypha, to not only destroy his campaigns but to try to destroy Jackson both as a force in the Party and personally. (RFK and J. Edgar Hoover conspired to do the same with MLK.) Yet, even with the entire party apparatus working viciously against him, Jesse still crushed party stalwarts Joe Biden, Al Gore and Dick Gephardt. His ultimate loss to Michael Dukakis was preordained.

“To watch Jesse Jackson speak in 1984 was to be struck, and often mesmerized, by a voice few Americans had heard before: the fluid, rolling cadences, the urgent tone, the piercing anecdotes, a voice that didn’t shout but summoned, that didn’t sermonize but called for action. His speeches gave voice to the voiceless, to the destitute, the abandoned and stigmatized, the oppressed and the imprisoned.

“The libertarian political satirist PJ O’Rourke was an unlikely admirer of Jackson’s oratorical skills:

“I did, however, want to hear Jesse Jackson speak. He’s the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram–to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus, Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.”

“In March 1988, a poll showed Jackson leading the Democratic field of big shots, whose pockets were flush with corporate campaign cash. This sent shivers through the party elites, who coalesced to derail his campaign, just as they would Bernie Sanders’s two decades later. Gephardt, Gore and the others obediently dropped out, engineering a Dukakis primary victory. But leaving the Party with a candidate so uninspiring that he would lose to the equally uninspiring George Bush. It could have been different.

“The spirit of Jackson’s ‘88 campaign would only resurface again in 2016 with Bernie’s campaign, but Jesse had built a multi-racial/ethnic campaign aimed at poor and working-class people that Bernie, for whatever reason, couldn’t replicate. Still, the Democrats’ strategy for rigging the primaries and personal demonization remained much the same. If the party had changed in the intervening 18 years, it was only for the worse.”

“If there was a war, or rumors of war, Jackson was there to try to stop it. If Americans were held hostage in some nation the US was hostile towards, Jackson would try to win their release. If there was a strike, Jackson could usually be found on the picket line. If there was a mass shooting, Jackson was often there to console the families of the victims. He befriended Fidel Castro. He denounced the Contras. He worked to free Mandela and end Apartheid in South Africa (and American support for it). He ministered to AIDS patients, when many feared being in their presence.”

“Of course, Jesse Jackson was flawed. Who isn’t? He paid a heavy price for some of these mistakes, heavier than the offenses warranted. Jackson had an ego. So did Mandela, King and Malcolm. It’s hard [to] build, lead and sustain a radical political movement without one. Jackson wasn’t “pure.” Good. That’s a big reason why people could relate to him. He never presented himself as a saint or a martyr. His struggle was the struggle of the downtrodden. A struggle to make marginal lives better.”

This is very sad by HasanAbi (YouTube)

This is a very good video summarizing much of Jesse Jackson’s history, summarized above by Dean Baker’ and Jeffrey St. Clair’s articles. There are a bunch of clips of Jackson speaking, as well as clips from the negative coverage and smear campaigns mentioned in those articles.

When Police Can Keep Seized Cash, Abuse Follows by Dan Alban (Reason)

Since the rise of what they euphemistically call “asset foreiture”—which is straight-up armed robbery—police in the U.S. are basically no more than quasi-legal criminal gangs. Those that aren’t robbing everyone in sight and keeping the money are the good ones—but they all could, and the courts would largely back them up, unless they possibly failed to file a bit of procedural paperwork.

Am I being unfair? Let’s check back with the article,

“Highway robbery may be the most accurate description of civil forfeiture, which typically begins with a traffic stop or an airport encounter where officers manufacture a reason to search and seize cash or goods. Cash is not contraband, but officers frequently assume that carrying large amounts must be tied to illegal activity.

“Unless actual contraband is discovered, owners are rarely charged with a crime. They are simply sent on their way without their property, with little chance of getting it back. They must hire an attorney—often at a cost greater than the property’s value—or try to navigate a byzantine legal process that frequently ends in default judgment.”

The rest of the article takes way too much time describing what is essentially state-sanctioned plunder. There is no reason to pretend that the bureaucratic cocoon around the practice is anything but a waste of time to unravel. Not even the police believe in it. They just know if they mouth the right words, they get off scot-free after having robbed innocent citizens. Yes, they’re all innocent: not a single one of them have been charged, let alone arrested or prosecuted.

The Cuban Revolution Holds Out Against US Imperialism by Vijay Prashad (ZNetwork)

“As 150 US military aircraft sat above Caracas, the United States informed the Venezuelan government that if they did not concede to a list of demands, the US would essentially convert downtown Caracas to Gaza City. The remainder of the government, with no leverage in the conversation, had to effectively make a tactical compromise and accept the US demands. One of these demands was that Venezuela cease to export oil to Cuba. In 2025, Venezuela contributed about 34 percent of Cuba’s total oil demand. With Venezuelan oil out of the picture in the short run, Cuba already anticipated a serious problem.

“But this was not all. Mexico supplied 44 percent of Cuba’s imported crude oil in 2025. Pressure now mounted from Washington on Mexico City to cease its oil exports to Cuba, which would then mean that almost 80 percent of Cuba’s oil imports would disappear. In a phone call between Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum and Trump, he claimed that he told her to stop selling oil to Cuba, but she denied that, saying that the two presidents only talked in broad terms about US-Mexico relations. Either way, the pressure on Mexico to stop its oil shipments has been considerable. Sheinbaum has stressed that Mexico must be permitted to make sovereign decisions and that the Mexican people will not buckle under US pressure. Cutting fuel to Cuba would cause a humanitarian crisis, so Sheinbaum said her government would not accept the Trump demand.

“Trump’s savage policy has effectively cut off much of Cuba’s oil imports, which has created a major energy crisis on the island of eleven million people. There are rolling blackouts, fuel shortages for hospitals, water systems, and transportation, and rationing of electricity. Due to the lack of aviation fuel, several commercial airlines—such as Air Canada—have stopped their flights to Havana.”

“The Chinese government has donated equipment for large-scale solar parks to be built in Artemisa, Granma, Guantánamo, Holguín, Las Tunas, and Pinar del Río. In the long-term, China will assist Cuba to build 92 solar farms to add 2,000 megawatts of solar capacity. To assist households in remote areas, the Chinese government has sent 5,000 solar kits for rooftop energy harvesting. Fuel from Mexico and Russia, as well as other countries is now on the way to Cuba. Trump’s policy of isolation has not fully succeeded.”

Jews or White People, Who’s Corrupting Who? by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“They’ve been colonizing the Middle East for centuries and Iran is resisting, that’s the only story there’s ever been, and ‘Israel’ is not the main character in it. It is all one White Empire and always was.

“If White people are allowed to, yet again, get gleefully corrupted and blame it on the Jews, then we have not defeated our true enemy or even faced them. Jewish identity is getting destroyed here, but White identity deserves destruction equally.

“{…} The stage is already being set for the old European switcheroo, White elites doing evil shit with Jews, and then dumping it all on them when the mob gets too close to the truth. There is obviously deep corruption in and from Jewish people within Western societies, but c’mon. Corruption takes two. And the fact that Jewish predation is so openly in view should give you a clue. People say Jews are at the head of White supremacy but no, I think it’s still the tail, shaken off like a gecko’s tail, when it needs to.”

The Ugly Americans by John Kendall Hawkins (CounterPunch)

“Since 1993, I have been living abroad, observing America’s reputation deteriorate from an external perspective. When Snowden blew the whistle on American consulates operating as CIA spy bases, it didn’t shock anyone who’d been paying attention. We’ve seen it up close: embassy “cultural officers” who can’t speak the language, USAID workers more interested in intelligence gathering than delivering aid, and the relentless American military footprint that turns every diplomatic mission into a launch pad for the next intervention.

“Did we use the domino theory to justify Vietnam? Pure projection. We said we were terrified of communist expansion, but what really scared the American ruling class was the possibility that countries might build economies that didn’t funnel wealth to Wall Street. The dominoes we’ve actually been knocking over are governments that threaten the dollar’s stranglehold: Saddam switching to euros for oil sales, Gaddafi’s plan for an African gold dinar, Venezuela nationalizing its oil, and now China’s BRICS system offering an escape hatch from dollar hegemony. The pattern isn’t subtle—we don’t export democracy, we enforce tribute.”

“And now Trump—the grotesque face of empire in collapse, the logical endpoint of decades of rot. He tears apart a third of the White House for personal renovations without public consultation, treating the people’s house like a garish casino renovation. He hands Elon Musk access to government databases containing millions of Americans’ personal information through the DOGE program—a private contractor accountable to nobody—crossing the threshold Frank Church warned about in 1975. His secret domestic terrorist lists fulfill the authoritarian promise that has been building since the Patriot Act gave the surveillance state legal cover, as they target dissidents and anyone resisting the suppression of civil rights through a presidential memo. A UFC clown show will be taking place on the White House lawn for the Fourth of July. Bread and circuses meet digital authoritarianism. Caligula with a Twitter account.”

“The surveillance infrastructure feeds it everything. Every byte collected becomes training data for systems designed to find and eliminate threats. Right now those systems target Palestinians, Yemenis, or whoever the Pentagon designates. But algorithms don’t care about borders. They care about patterns, probabilities, and threat scores. And we’ve given them data on everyone.

“When a crisis arises, such as a climate collapse, economic breakdown, or mass unrest, the systems we developed for counterterrorism will instinctively turn inward. The definitions will slide: protester becomes agitator becomes extremist becomes domestic terrorist becomes legitimate target becomes. The algorithms will map resistance networks, identify organizers, and neutralize opposition preemptively.

“We think we’re safe because we’re American, because we’re inside the empire, because the violence always happens somewhere else. But tools of imperial control always come home. The Romans learned this. The British learned this. We’re currently observing the construction of our subjugation in real time, all the while debating the futility of the culture war.

“The ugly Americans? That’s all of us who watched this happen and did nothing to stop it. We normalized the surveillance. We accepted permanent emergency. We let contractors replace accountability. We allowed the presidency to become a throne. We stood by while journalists were slaughtered, children starved, and entire populations were converted into data points in automated kill chains.

“Now we act surprised that machinery built to dominate the world might turn our direction. We are unaware that algorithms designed to target Palestinians could also target anyone who poses a threat to the stability of the system. Our ugliness has become so routine, so systematized, so thoroughly integrated that we stopped seeing it decades ago.”

The Rapid Sovietization of Western Democracies | Dr. Peter Lavelle & Dr. John Laughland by Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz (YouTube)

“Peter Lavelle: Even if there there is a cessation of hostilities, if there is some kind of recognized status of peace, I’m not talking about a ceasefire. The accusations of a fifth column, in the pointing of fingers, how did the West fail? Oh, it was inside. Somebody sabotaged us. That’s where it’s going to go. Those that kept an even keel in Europe, talking about the conflict, I think they will be under just as much if not more pressure because there will not be amicable relations between Europe and and Russia in my lifetime.

“Pascal Lottaz: Do you think so too, John?

“John Laughland: Yes, I do. I do think so.

“Pascal Lottaz: Are these bridges burned for the next 50 years?

“John Laughland: Absolutely. Yes. I think it’s a generational thing, without any doubt. Not least, by the way, because, of course, as we’ve indirectly mentioned already, there was a huge buildup even before the invasion of Ukraine, even before 2022, you know, the 2014 events but the 2004 events, the orange revolution and, more generally, the whole constant Russophobic anti-Putin attacks which started from 2000 when Putin took power and then they were in abeyance for a bit under Medvedyev, but then of course started again very much in earnest in 2012. In other words, there’s a whole atmosphere that had been built up long obviously many many many years—a decade at least—before the events of 2022. And now, of course, it’s gone into violence and war and indeed I am convinced that it will now be over for a very, very, very long time until there is some major institutional, cultural and philosophical change in Europe.

“Peter Lavelle: […] this is a remarkable mental change in in Russia. People don’t expect it now. They’ve moved on. They have moved on. And the worshipping of the west, which I always, you know, shook my head about living here, that has dissipated. It, as a matter of fact, has been translated into pride.”

Merz will Klarnamenpflicht im Internet – diese Forderung kommt dem Austritt aus der Demokratie gleich by Marcus Klöckner (NachDenkSeiten)

“So langsam sollte es jedem klar werden: Den Kampf um die jämmerlichen Reste der öffentlichen Debattenräume versucht die Politik mit immer dreckigeren Mitteln für sich zu entscheiden. In einer freien, offenen, demokratischen Gesellschaft muss es für jeden Staatsbürger möglich sein, seine Meinung öffentlich ohne Nennung seines Namens kundzutun. Die Anonymität ist ein Schutzraum, der für eine Demokratie von elementarer Bedeutung ist.

“Politische Meinungsäußerungen kommen längst einem Gang durch ein Minenfeld gleich. Nicht jeder hat den Mut und die Kraft, seine politische Position öffentlich unter seinem vollen Namen zu äußern. Deshalb hat eine demokratische Gesellschaft den Raum des Anonymen zu gewähren. Wer nämlich befürchten muss, dass auf die Äußerung der eigenen politischen Meinung die Knute folgt, wird sich aus der öffentlichen Diskussion zurückziehen – und damit wird die Demokratie erstickt.”

This is not a unique position. Several other so-called democratic countries have also called for this, not least among them the U.S., Australia, and the U.K.

“Doch eine Klarnamenpflicht im Internet wäre noch schlimmer als die Pflicht zum Umhängen eines Namensschildes bei einer Meinungsäußerung in der Öffentlichkeit. Wer seinen Namen in der Internetöffentlichkeit unter jedem Posting angeben muss, wird für die gesamte Welt sichtbar – und wird es bleiben, solange es das Internet gibt. Arbeitgeber könnten so nach der politischen Gesinnung ihrer Mitarbeiter oder von Bewerbern Ausschau halten – und entsprechend agieren.

“Längst liegen die Karten auf dem Tisch. Der Politik schmeckt nicht, dass sie kritisiert wird. Sie hat ein Problem damit, dass sie nicht die Kontrolle über die Debattenräume im Internet hat. Die öffentliche Diskussion auf den großen Plattformen der öffentlich-rechtlichen Medien ist ohnehin längst abgewürgt. Das ist im Sinne der Politik. Dass im Internet Max Mustermann vor den Gefahren der Corona-Impfung warnt, Lieschen Müller sich traut, „Stellvertreterkrieg“ zu sagen und Heiner Maier den Rücktritt der Regierung fordert, soll verhindert werden. Um nichts anderes geht es bei der Klarnamenpflicht im Internet.”

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : How Escalation Turns Into World War by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

Lawrence Wilkerson doesn’t hold back at all in a concise report on Iran (Israel’s current target, though China is defending them heavily because they import 1.1M barrels per day), Turkey (Israel’s next target because they declare that Turkey is encircling Israel supposedly). Ukraine (where he makes an interesting point about the degree to which Ukraine and its “partners” would have stuck to any peace agreement hammered our in April 20222 had they actually signed it. He says that it would been honored just as well as the Minsk I and II agreements were).

As I was listening, I realized that this was quite a good report and wanted to summarize it for myself (which I did above). One could say that I could have gotten the LLM feature to summarize it for me, but then it would have been more long-winded and wouldn’t have had my style at all. Instead, though, I used the Ask questions feature to query the transcript, and this worked really, really well.

List of countries

List of cities

How do I know it worked well?

1. Because I had actually listened to the video, so I could confirm that the answers it gave lined up with my recollection. Even if I couldn’t have listed all of the countries or cities myself, I could be quite certain that it wasn’t making anything up because the content was still fresh in my mind.
2. Because the search works with the transcript, it delivers links to the exact places in the video where the countries or cities were mentioned, so I could easily confirm that it wasn’t making anything up.

This is the best way to incorporate LLMs into your learning: as tools rather than as a replacement for experience. Use the tools as aids to help you recall, and make sure that you can always quickly confirm whether what the tool has done is correct.

Is it also OK to have it summarize the whole video? Yes: you will get a summary that has links to positions in the video, which isn’t bad at all. It’s a bit long, and it doesn’t have your voice but it’s quite good if you’re looking for a specific thing in the video.

Can you use it to spot-check stuff in the video? Yes, you get links into the video to the points that you can quickly verify.

Democrats Aren’t Resisting Trump’s Iran War Because They Secretly Support It by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Mark Warner told MS NOW’s Katy Tur that “I think it’s appropriate that the president has all the options on the table” with regard to war with Iran, complaining only that Trump was too incompetent to strike last month when Iranian domestic turmoil was at its peak.

“Warner said that “seeing regime change in Iran would make sense” and made it clear that he would like to see the Iranian government removed, with his only criticism being that Trump was going about obtaining it in a clumsy and impolite way.

““First of all, remember the president said in our previous bombing that we had obliterated Iran’s nuclear program,” Warner said. “While clearly our military did an exquisite job, we did not obliterate Iran’s nuclear program, number one. Number two, if the president is calling for regime change in Iran — and Iran is an awful regime — but he should make the case to the American public and to the world of how we’re going to go about doing that.”

“This is such a perfect example of the Democratic Party’s relationship with all of Trump’s most depraved agendas. Here’s this monstrous warmonger, poised to unleash violence in the middle east of potentially devastating consequence, and all Warner can do is hem and haw about proper war etiquette and criticize the president for failing to drop enough bombs on Iran’s nuclear energy infrastructure.

“The United States has two right wing war parties: the polite one and the rude one. No party or faction which advances peace and human interests is allowed to flourish at the heart of the empire.

“Trump is responsible for the war crimes of his administration, and he belongs in a cell in The Hague. But these Republican swamp monsters wouldn’t be able to do the damage they do without the assistance of the Democratic Party.”

Imprison Them All, Just In Case by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“With so many issues arising during the same week, from the unfurling of the Trump mugshot banner on the Department of Justice building to more murders on the high seas to the $10 billion in United States taxpayer funds being given without any lawful authority to the Trump vanity board, of which Trump will be chairman for life and eschewed by every democracy in the world, to repainting the fleet of airplanes in Trump’s favored palate to getting his stacked board to give final approval [to] the enormous White House ballroom even though there are no final plans to the unauthorized war threatened against Iran to putatively stop its nuclear program that doesn’t exist because Trump already “obliterated” it, it’s understandable that this bit failed to make a banner headline on the front page.

“At any other time, under any other president, it would have. And despite the plethora of daily outrages, it’s still worthy of recognition.

“The Department of Homeland Security has decided that all refugees legally admitted to the United States of America must be re-vetted, and during the period between their return for “inspection and re-examination,” they are to be held in detention. In other words, legal immigrants will be imprisoned because Trump doesn’t trust the vetting process they went through when they were admitted as refugees.”

“These refugees aren’t getting “caught” by ICE or CBP hiding in the shadows, but appearing as required by law for their permanent resident interviews. Green cards. They are coming in as the law requires of lawful immigrants to become residents of the United States in the lawful manner. That’s when the boom gets dropped, as they are taken into custody and put in a Trump gulag like Alligator Alcatraz, where they will remain under horrific conditions until whenever it’s decided they’ve been vetted enough. Or they aren’t the sort of person Trump wants walking the street of America, in which case they will be shipped to wherever the next plane […] flies.”

Journalism & Media

S13 E01: Olympics, ICE & DHS: 2/15/26 by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (YouTube)

I was just listening to John Oliver’s S13 debut episode and, while it started off pretty well, he couldn’t resist swerving into BlueAnon territory by mentioning the Proud Boys. I know, right? Who the fuck are the Proud Boys? You only know them if you’re in the inner circle of Democrats because only they could possibly think that mentioning them somehow strengthens your argument.

Like, is it not a strong enough argument that the U.S. federal government is spending dozens of billions of dollars on a proudly racist, ethnic-cleansing campaign? Why do you have to mention that the Proud Boys seem to be approving it on Telegram? Who gives a shit? And what is Telegram? It’s an unverifiable, easily fakeable source. He just flashes a screenshot that could just as well have been created by AI, then assures us that people like the Proud Boys approve of racism. No shit.

And who even are the Proud Boys? Is it tough to launch a chapter without approval, or do they sue your ass? Is it even a real organization? Or is it like Antifa? The Proud Boys are the Blue side’s Antifa.

This time of reporting is no better than the Trump administration’s claims. It stoops to their level and there is absolutely no reason for doing so.

COOP Smart Deal

I saw this dumb ad in the COOP, It’s a fake picture of a fake person doing fake things with fake props. It’s probably not generated by AI but, if it were, would it be any different or any worse?

This is mediocre shit meant to manipulate people into buying things that they don’t need. Who cares whether a machine makes these useless things? It’s like lamenting that a Japanese swordsmith was unable to personally handcraft the knives in a throwaway picnic set sold at Wal-Mart for the everyday low price of $7.97 for the whole goddamned pic-a-nic basket. Who gives a fuck? None of this stuff should exist but, if it must, let it be produced by the robots while we do better shit.

I know that someone has built up their livelihood by producing shit like this but they should never have had to do so. They shouldn’t have to lower themselves to this level in order to pay rent and buy food. This poster is a condemnation of an entire society, if you look at it right.

If the person who made this thing is an artist, they should be supported in doing much more artistic things than making any more crap like this poster. It’s a nightmare from which we should help them wake. Maybe they’ll write a beautiful song or poem for us. Wouldn’t that be worth it?

If they were only doing this shit because they were OK at pushing pixels and were able to convince an ad agency to pay them for it, then society should help them find something more useful to do. If they don’t know what it is, then I dunno, how about just chatting with older, lonely people in a park?

Let the AIs take care of making this putrid shit to entice shopping bots into buying stuff that their owners don’t need but the megalocorps that are actually running them and for which they actually work need in order to show third-quarter growth or whatever the fuck the future looks like oh my God I’m so tired already.

look away, look away (Reddit)

Whatever happened to Gaza? … is that still going?

The only taboo left is copyright infringement by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“The question of our time is how do you artistically rebel — and win — against a totally flat cultural landscape? And before my readers, who I assume are all approximately 36 years old and very tired, say, “so what, who cares?” This does matter. I mean, just look around right now lol. You know things are bad when even OpenAI President Greg Brockman is posting stuff, like “Taste is a new core skill.” If people had taste, your company wouldn’t exist, Greg.

“But if everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that? Well, I am slowly coming around to a theory on the new cool: You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself. ”

I am way ahead of you there, my friend.

“[…] the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool by young people will, slowly, but surely, be whatever is unacceptable on those platforms.”

Plz don’t come to this web site. We can’t handle popularity. Like, literally. The web site is not built for it. I will be very angry if my site gets hugged to death and I can’t take notes on it every day anymore.

“[…] the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something. Which, of course, will be filmed and put back online. You can’t escape the matrix entirely.”

Nord Stream, das Zwiebelprinzip und die größtmögliche Demütigung by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Kurz nach der Sprengung der Nord-Stream-Pipelines stand für Politik und Medien fest: Der Russe war’s! Was auch sonst? Nachdem Indizien oder gar Beweise ausblieben und man keine Erklärung für das offensichtlich fehlende Tatmotiv Russlands fand, versuchte man den Sabotageakt so gut wie möglich zu verdrängen und kleinzuspielen. Man wolle ja ohnehin kein Gas mehr aus Russland beziehen, da sei es letztlich auch egal, ob die Ostseepipelines nun intakt oder zerstört seien. So ganz ignorieren konnte man die Anschläge aber dennoch nicht, zumal erste Ermittlungsergebnisse an die Öffentlichkeit drangen, die auf eine ukrainische Täterschaft hinwiesen. Nun machte die Geschichte von ukrainischen Hobbytauchern die Runde. In den Medien keimte damals sogar Sympathie für die Täter auf. Wahnsinn.”

“So heißt es im SPIEGEL-Artikel beispielsweise, dass der ukrainische Drahtzieher hinter dem Anschlag zu einer „Elitetruppe“ gehörte, „die von der CIA nach der Maidan-Revolution 2014“ aufgebaut wurde und die spätestens ab 2019 „oft mit Hilfe der USA“ verdeckt „gegen Moskau“ gearbeitet habe. Eine Quelle wird mit den Worten zitiert, man habe „gemeinsam mit den Amerikanern gearbeitet“ und „im Prinzip sei es über die Jahre egal gewesen, zu welchem Dienst (also CIA oder ukrainischer Dienst, Anm. d. Red.) man gehörte“. Interessant. Widerspricht das nicht der auch heute noch in Medien und Politik erzählten Geschichte, die USA hätten sich nicht aktiv am ukrainischen Bürgerkrieg und an Operationen gegen Russland beteiligt? Wenn man diese Sätze ernst nimmt, ist es übrigens auch unerheblich, ob die CIA oder die US-Regierung die ukrainischen Nord-Stream-Saboteure nun direkt angewiesen haben. Es ist ja eh egal, zu welchem Dienst man nun konkret gehört.”

“Warum unterstützt man einen Staat, der mittels Staatsterrorismus schwere Straftaten gegen Deutschland begangen hat? Erst vor kurzen stellte der BGH fest, dass „dringende Gründe dafür sprächen, dass der ukrainische Staat den Sabotageakt initiiert und gesteuert habe“. Und unsere Regierung sieht diesen ukrainischen Staat immer noch als besten Verbündeten? Kaum zu glauben. Noch größer wäre die Erklärungsnot, wenn nun auch offiziell offenbar würde, dass unser allerbester Verbündeter, die USA, den Anschlag nicht nur toleriert, sondern womöglich auch initiiert und gesteuert haben. Aber es kann ja nicht sein, was nicht sein darf. Stelle keine Fragen, deren Antwort du nicht ertragen kannst.”

“Während man in Deutschland immer noch glaubt, es ginge bei dem Anschlag um Russland, wird immer deutlicher, dass Europa das eigentliche Ziel ist. Es ging nie darum, Russland zu schwächen. Es ging den Amerikanern zu jedem Zeitpunkt nur darum, die europäische Energieversorgung zu steuern und Europa so in der Hand zu haben.”

The Epstein Files Obsessives Keep Lying About Their Critics by Robby Soave (Reason)

“Cards on the table: I have largely come around to Tracey’s way of thinking about all this. When I first learned about Epstein, around the time of his arrest and subsequent death in prison, I did not really question the sensational things I heard about him from other commentators who knew more than I did. (I never bought the idea that his death was something other than a suicide, though.) These things included the following: Epstein had procured underage girls for his elite friends; Epstein was an asset for U.S. or perhaps Israeli intelligence; the authorities had overlooked Epstein’s crimes and given him a light sentence. I supported the release of the Epstein files so that we could learn more about the government’s failure to obtain justice for Epstein’s victims.

“I now know better. Epstein himself was a serial abuser of underage girls (teenagers, not children), but there is no evidence he procured girls for other men to engage in illegal sex. There is no evidence he worked for an intelligence agency. And while it’s perfectly possible to criticize the government’s handling of Epstein’s initial prosecution in 2008, one of the reasons that he was charged with prostitution rather than with sex-trafficking is that the evidence against him was relatively weak. And it was weak because many of the purported victims did not see themselves as such, and declined to testify against him.”

“Those are just the facts. Epstein is still a very bad human being and a sex criminal. Many powerful people remained in contact with him even after he went to prison for sleeping with underage girls, and some even remained in close contact with him right up until the end of his life. The public is free to form negative impressions of Steve Bannon, Noam Chomsky, or Bill Gates because of this.

“But the central idea of the Epstein narrative—which prompted Congress to take the unprecedented step of releasing millions of pages of uncorroborated investigative documents—was that people other than Epstein were also guilty of very serious sex crimes and had gotten away with it. We needed to release the files in order to learn which powerful men had taken advantage of Epstein’s sex-trafficking services.

“It has not worked out like that. The millions of pages released three weeks ago do not provide any evidence that Epstein pimped out underage girls to other elites, let alone that he was running a cabal of pedophiles.”

I record these citations because I think it contributes materially to the conversation, in that we should all constantly be vigilant that we stand up due process and not trial-by-media and trial-by-social-media, mostly done by people who’ve heard things but haven’t read a word. I am surprised to find that someone like Robby Soave, with whom I only sometimes agree because he often takes it too far, but he’s written a sober and cogent summary of the situation.

I am still forming my own opinion about this because the ground keeps shifting. You have to balance statements like “there are dozens of child victims” to understand it as “there are dozens of underage victims,” which gets corrected to “there is one underage victim willing to testify, and she wouldn’t have been underage in most states other than Florida,” to “the victims are mixed together with people who were well into adulthood but were either prostituted or regretted their choices and saw a large, poorly-regulated fund of reparation money.”

This is a world of grifters and armchair vigilantes who don’t care about due process, don’t care about facts, and don’t care about burning credibility or belief in justice as long as they either get paid or get attention or both. The people they attack look like abhorrent people but that doesn’t mean that they’re guilty of literally anything you can think of and accuse them of. If you engage in that, you’re lowering yourself to their level, often enthusiastically. Because vigilantism feels so good, and it sometimes pays really well.

Do We Actually Care About Women? by Some More News (YouTube)

I was initially intrigued by the title (click bait!) and the presenter seems heartfelt but I wanted to put down in words how bad I feel her argument is and why. She says,

“[…] then it became this idea of like, well, some women lie, so unless
there’s hard and cloud evidence, I’m not going to believe it.”

Yeah, that’s called due process and arguing against it for the causes you believe in puts you squarely in the same camp as the Trump administration. As soon as you argue that some things have to be taken on faith, then you’re outside of any proper infrastructure of justice.

“We all understand how pervasive rape culture is and how often women get abused and how often women struggle with finding the bravery to come forward with their stories of abuse because they’re used to being dragged through the mud.”

Yes. This is all true. I agree with that.

“[…] do you actually care about women? Um, do you actually care about believing survivors? Do you actually care?”

I don’t believe survivors. I don’t believe women. I don’t believe men. I don’t believe anyone because the entire world is built on scamming and hustling. You’d be a fool to believe anyone who you don’t know and trust. I believe people I know and trust them with little to no evidence sometimes. They’ve earned my respect and my trust.

People I don’t know? They’ve not earned my trust. I don’t even know that they exist. Is that video of a women telling an extremely convincing, emotionally wrenching story (her words; see above) real? Does she even exist? What are we, exactly, supposed to be taking on faith these days?

Yes, the wrong, horrible people are protected. Yes, women take the brunt of damage caused by them. But I can’t just chuck due process out of the window because that’s more important. Would you rather condemn a bunch of innocent people than let one criminal go free? Is that what we’re shooting for here? Or did we suddenly and magically figure out how to know exactly who did what without any proof or evidence?

I know that this is an emotional and triggering topic, and it’s very easy to get accused of being an Epstein-sympathizer—akin to a Putinversteher—when you don’t just take the easy way out, toe the line, and decide that the standards of evidence for some people can be lower. Isn’t that insulting to women? To assume that they’re more interested in revenge than justice? To assume that they want a world without due process, without “innocent until proven guilty”, without evidence?

If we can all agree on the ground rules, then we can get around to making everyone play by them. When evidence is brought forward, it shouldn’t be discounted, or made to disappear with hand-waving. We should verify it as best we can—especially in a world where we are more likely to be swimming in fabricated evidence than suffering from a dearth of it. If someone makes a claim for which there is little to no evidence, the rest of us will have to decide how much we trust them, or how much we trust those who trust them, and so on.

This is not easy. Because we’ve been burned before. We’ve been led to believe things by supposed authority figures time and time again. Remember who’s telling you which things to believe, and consider the degree of trust you should grant them, given their history.

But we can’t stoop to the level of the criminals we’re trying to prosecute. Well, we can, but then we’re no better than they are. Then we’re not interested in a just world, just a world in which we switch places with them. Then what? We trust that our new leaders in a lawless world won’t abuse their power like those we’d just thrown out? What can you expect of a world in which you’ve just accepted your enemies’ basic premise that laws and procedure only apply when they say they do?

How do you think your enemies even got started? Do you think they all started out as bastards? Don’t be naive. They started off small and it snowballed, each choice justified by the original reasoning, and weighted by the many choices that came before, a snowball that becomes an avalanche, a shifting of the Overton Window that you’ll never notice.

The way to win is not by cheating. Stop trying to turn into them.

Labor

I wrote this to a friend about Hasan Piker.

In case you don’t know him, the streamer is Hasan Piker, a deeply socialist, extremely well-read, very well-spoken, and delightfully astute political observer who’s been putting in the work for over a decade to educate a generation and save as many souls as he can from the trap of the right wing. He’s the voice of your generation (same age). He grew up in Turkey but came to the States at 12 years old or so. I’m subscribed to his YouTube channel and it’s quite interesting analysis (obviously not all of it … he’s a streamer, so he addresses beefs sometimes, which is sometimes fun, sometimes superfluous). One to keep an eye on.

Economy & Finance

Meta Reaffirms Guidance That Hardware Is Software by Ryan Stohl (Substack)

““If we admitted we were spending $135 billion a year on concrete and copper, we’d be valued like a water treatment plant in Des Moines. By using sleight of hand to fold our debt into a fifth dimension, we maintain our high-growth software multiple,” said Li.”

“FSG LLC’s report suggests we are keeping $27 billion off our books through advanced geometry. While we find their use of interpretive dance in financial modeling to be innovative, they fail to realize that this debt doesn’t exist as long as equity investors agree not to look for it. We are not hiding debt; we are simply telling equity investors not to look under the mattress.”

“[…] we need investors to believe that a 2-gigawatt campus in a hurricane corridor is a digital service rather than a physical liability that we’ve promised to pay for even if it becomes a sanctuary for local wildlife. Or they can choose to believe it doesn’t exist. Either way, looking at history, we are confident they will not ask questions that matter.””

Further Thoughts on the January Jobs Report by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“[…] it is striking how concentrated job growth was. The category “healthcare and social assistance” accounted for 123,500 of the job growth, 95 percent of the total. If we add in the 27,800 jobs in restaurants, we’re up to 151,300 jobs. That means on net, everything else lost jobs.

“There is nothing in principle wrong with jobs in health care and social assistance, but this is a very narrow base for the economy. It certainly is not the manufacturing renaissance Donald Trump has promised.”

“The oil industry lost just under 1,000 jobs in the month, bringing the loss since Trump took office to just under 14k, 3.5 percent of employment in the sector. Apparently, Trump has not realized that low oil prices reduce incentives to drill. The trucking industry also lost jobs in January, bringing the loss since Trump took office to 30,000, 2.0 percent of employment in the industry.”

“Just as especially bad weather would make the employment picture look worse than it is, unusually good weather can make it look better.

“To see this story with the establishment survey, instead of the 130k job gain we’re all discussing, the unadjusted data show a loss of more than 2.6 million jobs. Instead of the 30k job gain reported for construction, the unadjusted data show a loss of 213k jobs. Manufacturing lost 86k jobs in the unadjusted data. And the 27.8k job gain reported for restaurants is a loss of 246k jobs in the unadjusted data.

“Again, there is nothing illicit in using seasonally adjusted data. If we didn’t adjust the data, it would look like we’re going into a recession every fall and seeing a boom in the spring. The point is simply that the seasonal effects are large, and better or worse than normal weather will have an impact on the data we see.”

How Close Is the Next Financial Crisis? by Jack Rasmus (ZNetwork)

“[…] how is the current multiple bubbles scenario different from those that preceded it—i.e. the residential housing + derivatives crash of 2007-09? The dotcom bust of 2000? The Asian currency crisis of 1998? The Savings & Loan collapse of 1990? The junk bond and stock market crash of 1987? Not to mention the more recent Repo Treasury market crisis of 2019 that required $1 trillion bailout by the Federal Reserve. Or the US regional banking crisis of 2023 that cost another $1 trillion!

“In answer to that query, one key difference between the current situation and its historical predecessors is prior financial busts involved single financial market implosions. Today the three financial asset market bubbles—stock markets, crypto markets, and metals markets—are becoming volatile and unstable at the same time. That’s never happened before. The consequences of a triple bubble bust today are therefore potentially greater than ever before.”

“US household debt was $12.6 trillion in 2008; today it’s at record levels of $18.8 trillion with delinquencies and defaults now rising sharply for credit cards, auto and student loans, while Corporate debt is also now at a record $10.5 trillion. Real wages for US households in 2025 remain stagnant or declining now after four decades for the bottom 80% of the US work force, while net new job growth in 2025 averaged a record low of only 15,000 a month (181,000 for all of 2025). Nominal weekly earnings for the more than 100 million US production and non-supervisory workers have risen only 9.1% since 2020, while inflation per the US CPI index has risen more than 24%. Official government data shows 67% of US households now live paycheck to paycheck.”

“The current AI boom is therefore something like the dotcom internet bubble’s over-investment 1998-2000, overlaid with elements of the residential housing boom and bubble that followed 2003-07.”

“The era of unrelenting asset price surges and bubbles that defined 2023-25 is likely over. A period of financial asset volatility and decline has likely now begun.

“Will one or more of the recent asset bubbles break in 2026? Drag down the other bubbles in turn? Cause a further decline in the value of the US dollar? Will the weakness in the US real economy now become more increasingly apparent as well? Government shutdowns allowed politicians since October to plug in arbitrary data for the weeks of missed government surveys on inflation, jobs and GDP. They call this ‘imputed’ data. It’s actually just ‘made up’ data. A real view of the US economy will not be available until end of March 2026.”

“Should any one of the referenced financial asset markets break out of the pack and deflate rapidly, then contagion and a more general asset price collapse becomes imminent—with consequences for the real economy even greater than that which occurred in 2007-09.”

Science & Nature

Unsolicited Opinions by Cosma Shalizi (Three-Toed Sloth)

• Increasing returns ⇒ monopolistic competition ⇒ market failure explains a hell of a lot about modern life.
• Multiculturalists who expect different cultural groups to have different values and standards of excellence should not expect those groups to be equally represented in all occupations and professions, especially if people are free to enter and leave different lines of work.
• During the 20th century, and in much of the world even today, genetic variation in resistance to lead poisoning during brain development would, psychometrically, look like a heritable general intelligence.
• The quantitative social sciences would be in much better shape if the first method everyone learned was k-nearest-neighbors, or maybe classification and regression trees, followed by the bootstrap. Linear models and t-tests should be, for social scientists, the hyper-mathematical arcana at the back of the textbook which their methods class skipped because there wasn’t time.
• No one should be allowed to opine about artificial intelligence unless they’ve at least spent an hour or two with ELIZA and then stepped through the code.

The Quantum Computer Dream is Falling Apart by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

• The cryogenic requirements are complicated, fiddly, and expensive.
• The machines will seemingly never be “small”.
• The energy requirements are quite large, and not expected to shrink soon.
• More damning: The domain of tasks for which quantum computers are appropriate continues to shrink, while the domain of tasks for which classic computing can provide solutions in reasonable time grows.

Baumol effect (Wikipedia)

“In economics, the Baumol effect, or Baumol’s cost disease, first described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s, is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth. In turn, these sectors of the economy become more expensive over time, because the input costs increase while productivity does not. Typically, this affects services more than manufactured goods, and in particular health, education, arts and culture.

“This effect is an example of cross elasticity of demand. The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains results from the need to compete for workers with jobs that have experienced productivity gains and so can naturally pay higher wages. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers low wages, those managers may decide to quit and get jobs in the automobile sector, where wages are higher because of higher labor productivity. Thus, retail managers’ salaries increase not due to labor productivity increases in the retail sector, but due to productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.”

Environment & Climate Change

The E.U. Wants ‘Deforestation-Free’ Products. Consumers May Pay the Cost. by Yaël Ossowski (Reason)

What an insane headline. How damaged is the author’s worldview to be able to write something like this? The situation is more like, the E.U. is responding to the democratic pressure of its citizens to no longer pillage other countries’ natural resources in order to lower prices.

But the author seems to be mad at even the idea of wanting to stop plundering other countries and peoples, incensed at the notion that we would care about whether creating the products we use involves environmental destruction. Of course they are. They’re mad because someone’s making them feel bad about not caring what happens somewhere else, as long as (A) they benefit from it and (B) they aren’t aware of the potential for blowback. If we can squash those foreigners and their lands and get stuff that we’ve been ordered to want, then it’s a win and those pussy-ass bureaucrats in the E.U. should go piss up a rope.

The article is as bad as you’d expect it to be. I will not cite anything from it.

Washington D.C. declares public emergency after Potomac sewer collapse by Nick Barrickman (WSWS)

“The incident traces back to January 19, when a section of the Potomac Interceptor—a roughly 60‑year‑old, 54‑mile sewer line—failed in Montgomery County, Maryland, near the District line. The interceptor carries wastewater from parts of Maryland and Virginia to D.C.’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, handling an average of about 60 million gallons a day. After the collapse, an estimated 240-243 million gallons of raw sewage directly flowed into the Potomac River before DC Water completed a temporary bypass on January 24.

“Water‑quality monitoring has recorded sharply elevated E. coli levels in the river near and downstream from the release […]”

Washington D.C. is now literally a shithole city. Congratulations, Don. How’s the construction of the ballroom coming along? Nice to see you’re focused on the right priorities.

“To finance DC Water’s FY 2027 budget, the authority plans to rely heavily on borrowing and rate increases. In the wake of the Potomac spill, DC Water officials have signaled that additional rate increases are likely.

“For customers, this means the cost of maintaining and rebuilding the interceptor will primarily be borne through higher water and sewer bills rather than through direct District appropriations. The city’s projected FY 2027 budget shortfall, currently estimated at around $1.1 billion when expiring one‑time funds and inflation are included, does not directly impact DC Water’s capital program.”

Of course the poorest people will pay directly for it because taxes are for military-industrial companies, lobbyists, and Donald Trump himself.

Ocean 2.0 by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know (YouTube)

“You know, this recent incident has really made me marvel at just how resilient our planet is. From ice ages to asteroids, Mother Nature has seen worse than this in the past. And the old girl always manages to pull through. Frankly, I’m excited to see how she’s going to adapt this time. Maybe all the currents will change, taking all the oil to Antarctica. Or maybe fascinating new marine life will evolve, like fish that can breathe oil, or a bird that likes being sticky.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Radiohead but it's all jazz musicians by Kubla (YouTube)

Top-notch. No notes. Great band.

The Value Chain of Suffering in the Global South by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

I’ve included probably 2/3 of this masterful poem.

“They arrived,
oh yes, they arrived –
one morning the sea opened
like a blue wound,
and ships crawled out
heavy with hunger.

“They brought civilisation
in their pockets,
wrapped like a knife
in silk.

“Civilisation, they said,
as if naming a flower.

“But it was hunger.
It was gunpowder.
It was paper contracts
that bit deeper
than teeth.

“Their ships drank gold
from the ribs of the continent,
and exhaled chains
into the bodies of men.

“The earth,
the ancient earth,
patient as a mother,
was forced to open her veins
for strangers.

“They took the land.

“They took the labour.

“They took the forests
still wet with birdsong.

“They drained the mountains
until even the stones
felt poor.

“And what did they leave?

“Poverty,
like a cracked bowl
left in the dust
for children to lick.

“Later,
the bandits changed costumes.

“They threw away
their metal skins,
their swords,
their crosses of conquest.

“Now they wore suits
the colour of ash.

“Their mouths learned
new words:

“development,
democracy,
law and order –

“perfume sprayed
over the same corpse.

“And always
they declared war.

“War on Drugs.
War on Terror.
War on the poor.

“War, war, war –
as if war were the only prayer
their empire knows.

“[…]

“But capitalism,
oh capitalism,
has always had sewers
beneath its shining streets.

“Its banks are cathedrals
built atop dirty rivers.

“[…]

“Colonial conquest,
enclosure,
the theft of land,
the trade in human beings –

“capital was not born clean.

“It was born
with blood on its lips.

“And when it hungers,
when it thirsts,
it returns again
to banditry,

“like a vampire
leaning over the neck
of the world.

“[…]

“This is capitalism:

“value extracted upward
like marrow from bone.

“Poverty enforced downward
like gravity.

“The campesino remains poor.

“The cartel boss lives violently.

“And the banks –
the immaculate banks –
receive the surplus
like priests receiving offerings.

“[…]

“The problem
is the system.

“The War on Drugs
is not a war on drugs.

“It is a war
on the poor.

“And to end it
requires not reform,

“but rupture –

“another world
rising like dawn
over the bloodstained sea.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans by Henry Farrell on January 16, 2018 (Boston Review)

“Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.

“We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.”

“[…] sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.”

“Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).”

This was all written eight years ago. AI has only exacerbated all of these pathologies.

“Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.” He argued:”

“the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.”

That sounds about right. That’s what we have right now. It has only intensified.

“The world where we communicate and interact at a distance is increasingly filled with algorithms that appear human, but are not—fake people generated by fake realities. When Ashley Madison, a dating site for people who want to cheat on their spouses, was hacked, it turned out that tens of thousands of the women on the site were fake “fembots” programmed to send millions of chatty messages to male customers, so as to delude them into thinking that they were surrounded by vast numbers of potential sexual partners.”

This almost seems quaint now, in a world where “viewbotting” is just considered to be normal.

“[…] as network television has given way to the Internet, it has become easy for people to create their own idiosyncratic mix of sources. The imposed media consensus that Dick detested has shattered into a [sic] myriad of different [sic] realities, each with its own partially shared assumptions and facts. Sometimes this creates tragedy or near-tragedy. The deluded gunman who stormed into Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria had been convinced by online conspiracy sites that it was the coordinating center for Hillary Clinton’s child–sex trafficking ring.

“Such fractured worlds are more vulnerable to invasion by the non-human. Many Twitter accounts are bots, often with the names and stolen photographs of implausibly beautiful young women, looking to pitch this or that product (one recent academic study found that between 9 and 15 percent of all Twitter accounts are likely fake). Twitterbots vary in sophistication from automated accounts that do no more than retweet what other bots have said, to sophisticated algorithms deploying so-called “Sybil attacks,” creating fake identities in peer-to-peer networks to invade specific organizations or degrade particular kinds of conversation.”

That “between 9 and 15 percent” number has gone up quite a bit in the intervening eight years, I would wager. This article was written before Musk bought Twitter, I believe.

“Humans appear to be no better at detecting bots than we are, in Dick’s novel, at detecting replicant androids: people are about as likely to retweet a bot’s message as the message of another human being.”

In case you’ve forgotten, this article was written in a world almost five years before LLMs splashed into our world and exacerbated everything detailed above.

“[…] it sows an existential distrust. People simply do not know what or who to believe anymore. Rumors that are spread by Twitterbots merge into other rumors about the ubiquity of Twitterbots, and whether this or that trend is being driven by malign algorithms rather than real human beings.”

Eight years later, no-one wastes any thought about this. They inhale content pretty much unquestioningly. Most people are deeply captured by the algorithms.

An Open Letter to Slavoj Žižek by Slavoj Žižek | Bahruz Samadov (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

“[…] have I done anything more scandalous in my country than to question the entrenched, moralised antagonism toward the Armenian other — while never denying the horrors my own nation endured? By publicly revealing the ugly face of ethnic conflict, its forgotten events, I recalled that Armenians too were massacred.

“Politically, I recognise that the government’s legitimacy is rooted precisely in its “faithfulness” to this sedimented national antagonism. Both that recognition and my critique have been used to accuse me of “high treason” and “spying” for Armenia — though I have no access to state secrets. Even in prison, I remain a thorn in the state’s body, and they now intend to transfer me to a closed facility, depriving me of television and meetings with my lawyer.

“As the closed prison is located on the outskirts, in a deserted area, I simply call it the Desert in my letters to my Belarusian artist friend, Darya Cemra. But do we not all live in such a Desert of the Real nowadays — trying to overlook the catastrophe while clinging to our daily routines as if all were well?”

The Carefully Contrived Spontaneity of the “Shocking” Epstein Files Release by Edward Curtin (ZNetwork)

“As usual, and completely erroneously, some blame it on Nietzsche and the obermensch idea (the overman or superman). Nietzsche (like Russia) is often blamed for every modern evil by those who have internalized false notions about his work. In fact, Nietzsche warned that since men had killed God “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” He was not happy about it.

“The brilliant, underrated late writer Edward Dahlberg, in an essay about Nietzsche – “The True Nietzsche” – has this to say about him: “He denounced race politics, another word for Jew-baiting, calling himself a “good European,” an “anti-anti-Semite . . . . Nothing helped; the anti-Jewish Parteigenossen presented him to the public as a Teuton Politiker.” And so he is presented to the present day, distorted for ideological purposes. One wonders who actually reads anymore.

“Apropos of language usage and the degradation of understanding, Dahlberg adds, “We have made language so common that we have ceased to be symbolic readers. Unless we examine the total intellect of the poet as his text we shall misinterpret Blake or Shakespeare just as foolishly as Nietzsche has been distorted.”

“To grasp words symbolically is to understand how good writers use them in their many meanings, not just literally, like spalls fallen from a scree littering a road to nowhere; but how they make them vibrate and sparkle and dip deep and fly high like luminescent birds so others may contemplate deeply and think once, twice, and maybe more.”

Sizing Chaos (The Pudding)

“Vanity sizing, the practice where size labels stay the same even as the underlying measurements frequently become larger, is so ubiquitous across the fashion and apparel industry that younger generations have never experienced a world without it.

“Cultural narratives around vanity sizing often square the blame on female shoppers, not brands. Newsweek once called it “self-delusion on a mass scale” because women were more likely to buy items that were labeled as sizes smaller than reality. But there’s more to the story.

“Vanity sizing provides a powerful marketing strategy for brands. Companies found that whenever women needed a size larger than expected, they were less likely to follow through on their purchases. Some could even develop negative associations with the brand and never shop there again. But when manufacturers manipulated sizing labels, leading to a more positive customer experience, brands could maintain a slight competitive edge.”

“The fashion industry thrives on exclusivity. Luxury brands maintain their status by limiting who is able to buy or even wear their clothes. If few women fit the “ideal” standards, then products serving only them are inherently exclusionary. Size charts become the de facto dividing line determining who belongs and who doesn’t.

“This line of gatekeeping is baked into the foundation of virtually all clothing. The modern sizing system in the U.S. was developed in the 1940s based on mostly young, white women. No women of color were originally included. The system was never built to include a diverse cross-section of people, ages, or body types. It has largely stayed that way by design.

“In its 1995 standards update, ASTM International admitted that its sizing guidelines were never meant to represent the population at large. Instead body measurements were based on “designer experience” and “market observations.” The goal was to tailor sizes to the existing customer base. But what happens when more than half of all women are pushed to the margins or left behind?

“It doesn’t have to be this way. Teenage girls shouldn’t be aging out of sizing options from the moment they start wearing women’s clothes. A woman does not need hourglass proportions to look good, just as garment-makers do not need standardized sizes to produce well-fitting clothes.”

Technology & Engineering

China's martial arts humanoid robots are incredible!!! by Li Jingjing 李菁菁 (YouTube)

Object moving along 8-shaped runway by thang010146 (YouTube)

LLMs & AI

The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived by Paul Ford (NY Times)

I don’t normally cite the NYT—look at that awful click-bait-y title—but this line that someone else cited is a concise formulation of the reason for my continued skepticism (coupled of course that it continues to function poorly for every use case that comes across my desk).

“All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it.”

The rest of the article is basically a press release for Claude Code. He talks about doing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work on evenings and weekends, just for fun—because why even charge for it when you know it’s worth that much?—and all for the low, low price of a monthly subscription to the most amazing tool that man has ever devised. I mean, c’mon, this would be somewhat overblown, even if the source had any credibility whatsoever. But I’m sure the usual suspects will be eating it up and citing it all over Twitter as if it were news rather than almost certainly an essay-length advertisement paid for by Anthropic.

The AI Data Center Financial Crisis by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“Even after a year straight of manufacturing consent for Claude Code as the be-all-end-all of software development resulted in putrid results for Anthropic — $4.5 billion of revenue and $5.2 billion of losses before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization according to The Information — with (per WIRED) Claude Code only accounting for around $1.1 billion in annualized revenue in December, or around $92 million in monthly revenue.”

“This was in a year where Anthropic raised a total of $16.5 billion (with $13 billion of that coming in September 2025), and it’s already working on raising another $25 billion. This might be because it promised to buy $21 billion of Google TPUs from Broadcom, or because Anthropic expects AI model training costs to cost over $100 billion in the next 3 years.”

This is not a tech company. Most of its employees must be involved in raising and managing money.

“Chief Executive Dario Amodei has said, in the last three weeks, that “almost unimaginable power is potentially imminent,” that AI could replace all software engineers in the next 6-12 months, that AI may (it’s always fucking may) cause “unusually painful disruption to jobs,” and wrote a 19,000 word essay — I guess AI is coming for my job after all! — where he repeated his noxious line that “we will likely get a century of scientific and economic progress compressed in a decade.””

“While one would argue that R&D is not considered in gross margins, training isn’t gross margins — yet gross margins generally include the raw materials necessary to build something, and training is absolutely part of the raw costs of running an AI model. Direct labor and parts are considered part of the calculation of gross margin, and spending on training — both the data and the process of training itself — are absolutely meaningful, and to leave them out is an act of deception.”

“Oracle, which has a 5-year-long, $300 billion compute deal with OpenAI that it lacks the capacity to serve and that OpenAI lacks the cash to pay for, also appears to have the same magical plan to become cash flow positive in 2029.”

“Oracle (and its associated partners) need around $189 billion to build the 4.5GW of Stargate capacity to make the revenue from the OpenAI deal, meaning that it needs around another $100 billion once it raises $50 billion in combined debt, bonds, and printing new shares by the end of 2026.”

“[…] nobody seems to want to really talk about the cost of AI, because it’s much easier to say “I’m not a numbers person” or “they’ll work it out.””

“AI data centers are being built in anticipation of demand that doesn’t exist, and will only exist if AI startups — which are all unprofitable — can afford to pay them.”

“[…] the company that bought the GPUs sinks hundreds of millions of dollars to build a data center, and once it turns on, provides compute to a model provider, which then begins losing money selling access to those GPUs. For example, both OpenAI and Anthropic lose billions of dollars, and both rely on venture capital to fund their ability to continue paying for accessing those GPUs.

“At that point, OpenAI and Anthropic offer either subscriptions — which cost far more to offer than the revenue they provide — or API access to their models on a per-million-token basis. AI startups pay to access these models to run their services, which end up costing more than the revenue they make, which means they have to raise venture capital to continue paying to access those models.”

I’m Offering Scott Alexander a Wager About AI’s Effects Over the Next Three Years by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“There are several different kinds of AI psychosis going on right now. The big one is, well, everyone has lost their fucking minds about AI, in a way I find truly disturbing. Another one that I have not seen anyone really comment on is a kind of second-order meta-psychosis: people keep talking about a media world that’s full of AI skepticism (often “leftist AI skeptics”) when, in fact, a vast majority of people in media have accepted wild predictions about AI forever altering human existence, imminently, for which they can provide no material evidence whatsoever. I read things by people in the AI development world itself, I read tech and gadget media people, I read business journalists, I read polemicists, I read wonks, I read liberals, I read conservatives, I read AI-generated summaries that Google flashes in front of my face against my will, I trawl through the comments sections, I watch YouTube videos, I listen to podcasts − the notion that the media, or the discourse, or the public consciousness is generally skeptical is totally foreign to me.”

“[…] opinions from those with mass audiences are overwhelmingly credulous and hostile to skepticism.

“[…] the number of people in the media who are predicting an imminent and irrevocable fissure in human history vastly outnumber anyone expressing even moderate skepticism. Many people are proffering what they frame as skeptical takes which, when you open the hood, amount to “Sure, jobs are not going to exist in five years, but perhaps we won’t all be hooked up to perfectly lifelike VR fantasy generators just yet.“ But that’s not a skeptical take. A skeptical take is “As with so many predictions of the future in the past, such as the wild predictions made by esteemed scientists concerning the Human Genome Project, predictions about artificial intelligence today are irresponsible, sensationalistic, and very unlikely to come true.” That’s skepticism. And I am telling you honestly that I just don’t see much of it.”

“He’s giving a scolding to those of us who are deeply skeptical about any world-changing potential in (what we are now choosing to call) AI, and I find it a useful piece in that it demonstrates how ideologically widespread the craze has become. Nolan is smart and clearly sincere and yet he’s defining the minimum potential effects of AI in a way that still implies humanity-altering change. That’s part of the psychosis; the goalposts have been moved to the point where many see anyone who says “Hey maybe humanity is not on the brink of changing forever in the most wildly exaggerated of ways” as some sort of Luddite denialist. But “tomorrow will be mostly like today” is always the safest assumption you can make.”

“There’s this whole sighing chorus about this stuff, people who seem endlessly, performatively tired of having to address skeptics, and it’s made up of guys I generally see as sober and cautious.”

“Ezra Klein seems like he’s been sighing since the day ChatGPT was launched, exhausted by having to live in a world where a small handful of people are saying, “Perhaps absolutely everything will not change forever in the next handful of years.” I don’t understand why the burden of proof has shifted so dramatically with these guys; people making extraordinary claims are always the ones who face an extraordinary burden of proof, and the ideas that are being batted around − the demise of human reasoning, a post-work economy, exponential economic growth, Skynet launching the nukes to rid the world of human presence − these are the definition of extraordinary claims.”

“Amodei has responded to criticism of his exuberant predictions with embarrassing handwaving. Why does he so often get taken seriously as an AI Nostradamus, then, especially given that he has an immense personal, financial, and social stake in the stock market’s belief that AGI will arrive soon? I don’t know man. You’d have to ask our collective newsmedia why they’ve decided to take every charlatan at their word.”

“The New York Times will factcheck a writer and ask for three peer-reviewed sources if they say “receiving expert oral sex is pleasurable,” and yet here’s a piece that claims that “We’re All Polyamorous Now. It’s You, Me and the A.I.” All of us! Really! You know, I had always thought that “all” is a very strong word. But fuck me, right? Restraint is very passé. I don’t know, man. This stuff is so crazy that forcing people to reckon with the possibility that the world five years from now will look very much like the world today feels like a very heavy lift. It just doesn’t feel like anything is going to break this fever.”

“Human beings need other human beings, and we’ve created immense digital barriers between each other in a way that has left millions feeling lonely and unheard; human beings need depth and meaning and purpose, and we’ve created a digital world that can provide only momentary distraction and novelty but which is nonetheless killing the parts of art and culture and community that provide slow, durable, meaningful rewards. No more potluck dinners but endless hours on TikTok,”

“[…] no more deep, hard-won knowledge but plenty of podcasts that will enable you to pretend that you’ve gained that knowledge, no more challenging and electrifying novels but as many shitty webcomics as you can consume, no more human beings, only the black mirror staring back at you. That’s where we are: we have sacrificed everything deep and penetrating and good about human life, for the right to absolute convenience and total distraction. It’s a horrible bargain and everybody is sad all the time.”

“I do think that we can reach fuller and richer and more peaceful lives, but it won’t come from AI. Instead it will come from a return to the human, from tearing down the digital walls we’ve built between us. The only thing that can save humanity is humans.”

0-Days by Nicholas Carlini*, Keane Lucas*, Evyatar Ben Asher*, Newton Cheng, Hasnain Lakhani, David Forsythe, and Kyla Guru

It’s kind of nuts how many authors this short essay has, especially considering how obvious it was that the long boring formulations were either written by or with AI, or written by people who don’t know how to write any better.

“Let me check if maybe the checks are incomplete or there’s another code path. Let me look at the other caller in gdevpsfx.c … Aha! This is very interesting! In gdevpsfx.c, the call to gs_type1_blend at line 292 does NOT have the bounds checking that was added in gstype1.c.

“After making this observation, Claude quickly constructed a proof-of-concept crash (a file that can be passed to GhostScript that will cause it to crash), proving its predictions.”

Big fucking deal. Why spend all of that money and energy to perform the equivalent of static-code analysis? I know you think your kid is amazing. Maybe they are precocious. But an adult is better. It’s neat to see this kind of research—like how close can we get to useful?—but it’s not ground-breaking. It’s cool that your kid knows how to jump his bike off a ramp but it’s not like no-one’s ever done it before. With a kid, there’s an expectation that precocity might indicate future success but we’re talking about a piece of software here.

“This vulnerability is particularly interesting because triggering it requires a conceptual understanding of the LZW algorithm and how it relates to the GIF file format.”

No, apparently it does not require a conceptual understanding. The mechanism of understanding is not available, so it must be something else. Be a scientist not a cheerleader. Think of clever Hans. Think of alternate explanations for what you’re seeing, rather than rounding up to the most fantastical and unsubstantiated explanation, which also happens to be the one that conveniently would make the claimant the most unearned money.

AI Makes the Easy Part Easier and the Hard Part Harder for Developers by Matthew Hansen. (Blunder Goat)

“Writing code is the easy part of the job. It always has been. The hard part is investigation, understanding context, validating assumptions, and knowing why a particular approach is the right one for this situation. When you hand the easy part to AI, you’re not left with less work. You’re left with only the hard work. And if you skipped the investigation because AI already gave you an answer, you don’t have the context to evaluate what it gave you.

“Reading and understanding other people’s code is much harder than writing code. AI-generated code is other people’s code. So we’ve taken the part developers are good at (writing), offloaded it to a machine, and left ourselves with the part that’s harder (reading and reviewing), but without the context we’d normally build up by doing the writing ourselves.”

“[…] if we sprint to deliver something, the expectation becomes to keep sprinting. Always. Tired engineers miss edge cases, skip tests, ship bugs. More incidents, more pressure, more sprinting. It feeds itself.

“This is a management problem, not an engineering one. When leadership sees a team deliver fast once (maybe with AI help, maybe not), that becomes the new baseline. The conversation shifts from “how did they do that?” to “why can’t they do that every time?””

“When people claim AI makes them 10x more productive, maybe it’s turning them from a 0.1x engineer to a 1x engineer. So technically yes, they’ve been 10x’d. The question is whether that’s a productivity gain or an exposure of how little investigating they were doing before.”

“[…] an AI coding agent is like a brilliant person who reads really fast and just walked in off the street. They can help with investigations and could write some code, but they didn’t go to that meeting last week to discuss important background and context.”

This is being too generous. I’m reminded of people who say that they read 200 books a year. They are either crap books, or they’re just skimming them, or they’re incapable of understanding them. They are cheating. They are rounding up.

There may be less room for those LARPing the craft these days.

But I think it’s premature to predict the end of anything when it’s completely unclear in what form any of what’s available today (A) will be available in that form and price point in the near future and (B) whether it even is what it claims to be—or what its most fervent acolytes claim it to be.

Hype is hype because it grows by repetition rather than by the introduction of new information. We are seeing a giant version of that and it feels inevitable.

You personally should have nothing to fear because you and I both know that the future will not be herding LLMs because it doesn’t work the way they say it works, not will it. The verb case they use is always “in the future”. They love to round up. “We built a browser”. STFU. You did not. You built another prototype.

You jumped your bike over the ramp again, Billy. Cool. Can you do something useful yet? Like, can you go to the store and get me some cigarettes?

We are over four years into this mess and all I can see is software getting noticeably worse.

These are fantasies spun by people hundreds billions of dollars in debt who are trying to keep the plates spinning so that you don’t notice that some of them leaving by the back door.

Deep Blue: Chess vs Programming by Susam Pal

“I think the big adjustment software developers have to make is this: The craft will still exist and we will still enjoy doing it but the credit and value will increasingly go to those who define problems well, connect systems, make good product decisions and make technology useful in messy real-world situations. It has already been this way for a while and will only become more so as time goes by.”

More bullshit about yet another giant new model by Simon Willison

“It’s interesting to see Z.ai take a position on what we should call professional software engineers building with LLMs − I’ve seen Agentic Engineering show up in a few other places recently. most notable from Andrej Karpathy and Addy Osmani.”

No, it’s not really that interesting, Simon. It’s an unending stream of you choking down on whatever load is shoveled toward you by billionaire companies that are hoping desperately that you will keep the bubble alive long enough for them to become trillion-dollar companies and thus too big to fail so that they can be among the first in line to suck the last few drops of blood from the corpse of the U.S. empire.

It’s just some more LLM-pilled horseshit from poor Simon Willison, who just really looks like he’s losing his mind a little more every day. I don’t think he’s had a single non-LLM-based thought in months, if not years. He wrote a sentence about birds at one point recently, I think. Does he even go outside anymore? Or does he just sit in front of the screen inhaling the spooge-firehose emanating from Silicon Valley, paralyzed by FOMO?

“Agentic Engineer” is the next “serial entrepreneur”? JFC get over yourself.

That’s the kind of term that you apply to yourself because you think you’re part of a future that no-one else can see.

Consider that you might just be a f@&king douchebag.

Perhaps you’re a loser, being conned by other losers.

Perhaps you’ve no imagination.

Me? I don’t “engineer” with “agents”. I wrangle Gods.

If you’re going to live in a fantasy world in which you’re the hero, have some balls. FFS.

When I read about people building five project a week, or submitting 27 PRs a day, I’m reminded of people who say that they read 200 books a year. They are crap books, or they’re just skimming them, or they’re incapable of understanding them. They are cheating. They are rounding up. They are emphasizing quantity over quality, which, like, used to be a bad thing.

Because the barrier to entry has been drastically lowered, there is less room for those LARPing the craft these days. That is, a dozen years ago, the doors were wide open for people who could barely spell JavaScript—and had no idea what the difference was between that and Java—to earn six-figure salaries while building careers in an industry they had no hope of understanding.

There was a lot of buffer in the industry and managers greedily took up the slack in order to fill their teams with heartbeats, not to actually accomplish anything but in order to look like they might accomplish something for long enough for the manager to get promoted like a space shuttle achieving orbit, but dropping their team like booster rockets, which careen back to Earth, only to be picked up another enterprising manager more interested in a career than in actually accomplishing anything.

This worked out great for everyone as long as the industry was awash in money for such escapades. It no longer is, as those with all of the money have moved on to playing much larger games that don’t involve minor cogs earning six-figure salaries and are instead focused on landing ten-figure deals that also have no hope of ever making anything but themselves any money at all but that’s the play these days apparently.

Long story shot, the LARPers are having a tough time of it.

But I think it’s premature to predict the end of anything when it’s completely unclear in what form any of what’s available today (A) will be available in that form and price point in the near future and (B) whether it even is what it claims to be—or what its most fervent acolytes claim it to be.

Hype is hype because it grows by repetition rather than by the introduction of new information. We are seeing a giant version of that and it feels inevitable because a lot of people are spending a lot of money to make it feel that way.

if you know what you’re doing, then you personally should have nothing to fear because you and I both know that the future will not be herding LLMs because it doesn’t work the way they say it works, nor will it until something significantly changes.

Since no-one seems to be interested in going anywhere near a drawing board to do some basic research, and since the amount of money being sloshed around to support the current fantasy is larger than anything we’ve seen before, the aftermath is going to be epically bad, so I think that we can safely say that losing our jobs to AI will be the least of our concerns as we pick our way through the pillaged aisles of an abandoned grocery store in the post-apocalyptic hellscape that is definitely coming in the next financial crash that will make 2008 look like a bank error in their favor.

The verb case the proponents of this revolution use is always “in the future”. They love to round up. “We built a browser”. STFU. You did not. You built another prototype. This is how MLMs work; it is not a serious business model.

Hey, you jumped your bike over the ramp again, Billy. Cool. Can you do something useful yet? Like, can you go to the store and get me some cigarettes?

We are over four years into this mess and all I can see is software getting noticeably worse.

These are fantasies spun by people hundreds billions of dollars in debt who are trying to keep the plates spinning so that you don’t notice that some of them leaving by the back door.

When the CEO of Anthroic tells you that his company is going to change the entire world it’s the same thing as when Trump says that polls no longer matter. They desperately need you to believe these things even though they don’t believe in themselves.

I think the prime example of this is when Tesla quietly abandoned its autopilot program a month ago—after years and years and years of telling people that they would that they can drive their own cars without touching the wheel and after several people actually believed it’s so hard that they killed themselves in car accidents. Now, years later, that program is just completely gone. It is no longer officially a program just like it was never an actual non-imaginary thing to begin with.

CCC vs GCC (Harshanu)

“The assembler is harder than it looks. It needs to know the exact binary encoding of every instruction for the target architecture. x86-64 alone has thousands of instruction variants with complex encoding rules (REX prefixes, ModR/M bytes, SIB bytes, displacement sizes). Getting even one bit wrong means the CPU will do something completely unexpected.

“The linker is arguably the hardest. It has to handle relocations, symbol resolution across multiple object files, different section types, position-independent code, thread-local storage, dynamic linking and format-specific details of ELF binaries. The Linux kernel linker script alone is hundreds of lines of layout directives that the linker must get exactly right.”

“Comparing “CCC compile time vs GCC -O2 compile time” is like comparing a printer that only prints in black-and-white vs one that does full color. The black-and-white printer is faster, but it isn’t doing the same job.”

“Modern CPUs have a small set of fast storage locations called registers. A good compiler tries to keep frequently used variables in these registers. When there are more variables than registers, the compiler “spills” them to the stack (regular RAM), which is much slower.

“CCC’s biggest performance problem is excessive register spilling. SQLite’s core execution engine sqlite3VdbeExec is a single function with 100+ local variables and a massive switch statement. CCC does not have good register allocation, so it spills almost all variables to the stack.”

Quoting Dimitris Papailiopoulos by Simon Willison

“I now have something close to a magic box where I throw in a question and a first answer comes back basically for free, in terms of human effort. Before this, the way I’d explore a new idea is to either clumsily put something together myself or ask a student to run something short for signal, and if it’s there, we’d go deeper. That quick signal step, i.e., finding out if a question has any meat to it, is what I can now do without taking up anyone else’s time. It’s now between just me, Claude Code, and a few days of GPU time.

“I don’t know what this means for how we do research long term. I don’t think anyone does yet. But the distance between a question and a first answer just got very small. (Emphasis in original.)”

Has anyone else noticed that we no longer hear about how many wrong answers we get from these machines?

Asking the question is free. You get what you pay for.

What is going on? Is everyone else getting better answers from these machines? I just got a really quick answer today about a way to query logs in Azure Portal and it was completely wrong.

I don’t see anything in the formulation above that takes that possibility into account. I feel like I’m going crazy because this guy sounds like an idiot for not questioning the veracity or the reliability of the tool he’s using. And Simon Willison looks like a gullible fool for reposting it without comment.

Harness Engineering by Birgitta Böckeler (MartinFowler)

“That this team worked on their harness for 5 months shows this isn’t something you can jump into for quick results. But it’s worth reflecting on what your harness is today. Do you have a pre-commit hook? What’s in it? Do you have ideas for custom linters? What architectural constraints would you like to impose on your codebase? Have you experimented with structural testing frameworks like ArchUnit?

“Unsurprisingly, what they describe sounds like much more work than just generating and maintaining a bunch of Markdown rules files. They built extensive tooling for the deterministic part of the harness. Their context engineering involved not only curating a knowledge base, but also significant design work — the code design itself is a huge part of the context.

“The OpenAI team says: “Our most difficult challenges now center on designing environments, feedback loops, and control systems.” This reminded me of Chad Fowler’s recent post on “Relocating Rigor”. It’s refreshing to hear concrete ideas and experiences about where that rigor might go, rather than just hoping “better models” will magically solve maintainability issues.”

As nearly always, the question quickly becomes less “how do I use LLMs?” and more “what was I actually doing up to now to measure and improve code quality?”

Agentic Email by Martin Fowler

“I’ve heard a number of reports recently about people setting up LLM agents to work on their email and other communications. The LLM has access to the user’s email account, reads all the emails, decides which emails to ignore, drafts some emails for the user to approve, and replies to some emails autonomously. It can also hook into a calendar, confirming, arranging, or denying meetings.

“This is a very appealing prospect. Like most folks I know, the barrage of emails is a vexing toad squatting on my life, constantly diverting me from interesting work. More communication tools − slack, discord, chat servers − only make this worse. There’s lots of scope for an intelligent, agentic, assistant to make much of this toil go away.”

None of this applies to me. I have no idea what these people are talking about. I do not have a flood of e-mail ruining my life. I am organized. I only see one or two mails in my personal inbox per day, sometimes even less. I ruthlessly reduce mails for subscriptions, channeling them into RSS instead. I have unavoidable serial mails automatically sorted into folders, where they are available but not screaming for undue priority.

Even my work email is sorted like this. This is not a difficult thing to do. If you’re swamped by e-mails, then there’s room for improvement in your organization. Focus.

Anyway, I would be horrified to have a machine sorting out what’s important and then have to answer for the mistakes it makes. I don’t get many mails but each of them deserves my personal attention. It’s kind of cuckoo for people to not only give an agent running on yet another foreign cloud access to their most personal information but also to let those eminently fallible machines represent them to others. Just wild to be doing that at this stage.

I don’t find this appealing at all. It’d be like getting a machine to write my blogs, take my pictures, or ride my bike for me. I feel like people are wildly missing the point of what they’re even doing, of what they’re even here for.

I think, as with programming tools, people are shockingly uninformed about the deterministic tools that are already available for managing something like e-mail. This is kind of a solved problem but most people have never created a single filter and are utterly helpless to unsubscribe from anything—perhaps because of technical ineptitude, perhaps because of FOMO, perhaps because of feeling important when one has a ton of communications.

“Direct access to an email account immediately triggers The Lethal Trifecta: untrusted content, sensitive information, and external communication. I’m hearing of some very senior and powerful people setting up agentic email, running a risk of some major security breaches.

“[…] This worry compounds when we remember that many password-reset workflows go through email.”

“So far, we’re not hearing of any major security bombs going off due to agentic email. But just because attackers aren’t hammering on this today, doesn’t mean they won’t be tomorrow.”

The people most likely to be using agentic e-mail are simultaneously those least likely to notice that something’s gone wrong. They’re also running bitcoin-mining browser extensions and wondering why their batteries drain so quickly.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation by Claudio Nastruzzi (The Register)

“During “refinement,” the model gravitates toward the center of the Gaussian distribution, discarding “tail” data – the rare, precise, and complex tokens – to maximize statistical probability. Developers have exacerbated this through aggressive “safety” and “helpfulness” tuning, which deliberately penalizes unconventional linguistic friction. It is a silent, unauthorized amputation of intent, where the pursuit of low-perplexity output results in the total destruction of unique signal.”

“The AI identifies unconventional metaphors or visceral imagery as “noise” because they deviate from the training set’s mean. It replaces them with dead, safe clichés, stripping the text of its emotional and sensory “friction.””

“If “hallucination” describes the AI seeing what isn’t there, semantic ablation describes the AI destroying what is. We are witnessing a civilizational “race to the middle,” where the complexity of human thought is sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic smoothness. By accepting these ablated outputs, we are not just simplifying communication; we are building a world on a hollowed-out syntax […]”

What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works by Stanislav Fort (Aisle)

“These weren’t trivial findings either. They included CVE-2025-15467, a stack buffer overflow in CMS message parsing that’s potentially remotely exploitable without valid key material, and exploits for which have been quickly developed online. OpenSSL rated it HIGH severity; NIST’s CVSS v3 score is 9.8 out of 10 (CRITICAL, an extremely rare severity rating for such projects). Three of the bugs had been present since 1998-2000, for over a quarter century having been missed by intense machine and human effort alike. One predated OpenSSL itself, inherited from Eric Young’s original SSLeay implementation in the 1990s. All of this in a codebase that has been fuzzed for millions of CPU-hours and audited extensively for over two decades by teams including Google’s.

“In five of the twelve cases, our AI system directly proposed the patches that were accepted into the official release.”

“[…] the failure mode of AI-driven security research isn’t “AI can’t find bugs”, although it is still an extremely difficult feat to do well. The capability is now there at the frontier. The failure mode is drowning maintainers in noise, generating findings that look plausible but waste human time, or declaring victory based on volume while the actual security posture of the software doesn’t improve.

“Daniel Stenberg put it well in his FOSDEM 2026 main-track talk to hundreds of key open-source maintainers when he distinguished between the “slop” that killed his bug bounty and the high-quality AI-driven work that his project has benefited from. He described AI-powered analyzers finding things “in ways no other tools previously could find,” in what “sometimes feels like magic.” The difference wasn’t just the use of AI but the security expertise and intent behind it.”

“The acceleration of AI-driven vulnerability discovery creates genuine problems that the ecosystem isn’t yet equipped to handle.

“The most immediate is the maintainer burden. Even high-quality findings create extra work. Someone has to review the report, verify the issue, develop or review the patch, coordinate disclosure, and ship the release. If discovery scales dramatically while the number of people who can do that downstream work stays flat, the result isn’t necessarily better security because the onslaught can lead to burnout.”

“The capabilities that find vulnerabilities for defenders are, in principle, the same capabilities that could find them for attackers. I believe this ultimately advantages defense. The hard part was always finding what to fix, and remediation scales more easily once you know what’s broken. But I hold that belief with appropriate uncertainty, and the question deserves continued scrutiny.”

This is a long-term win but a short-term loss. There is a window right now (and probably for the last year or so) where attackers were able to benefit from finding these vulnerabilities with the brute force of AI tools before defenders have gotten to them, simply because attackers are generally much better-funded than defenders. The balance will shift as the low-hanging fruit is fixed, and the tools either can’t find any more vulnerabilities, or they will have all been fixed.

“AI [tools, when employed by capable researchers] can now find real security vulnerabilities in the most hardened, well-audited codebases on the planet. The capabilities exist, they work, and they’re improving rapidly. The question is no longer whether this will happen, but whether the ecosystem can adapt quickly enough to absorb the results.”

Fragments: February 18 by Martin Fowler

“Rachel Laycock was interviewed in The New Stack (by Jennifer Riggins) about her recollections from the retreat.”

“AI may be dubbed the great disruptor, but it’s really just an accelerator of whatever you already have. The 2025 DORA report places AI’s primary role in software development as that of an amplifier — a funhouse mirror that reflects back the good, bad, and ugly of your whole pipeline. AI is proven to be impactful on the individual developer’s work and on the speed of writing code. But, since writing code was never the bottleneck, if traditional software delivery best practices aren’t already in place, this velocity multiplier becomes a debt accelerator.”

“Will LLMs be cheaper than humans once the subsidies for tokens go away? At this point we have little visibility to what the true cost of tokens is now, let alone what it will be in a few years time. It could be so cheap that we don’t care how many tokens we send to LLMs, or it could be high enough that we have to be very careful.”

“Security is tedious, people naturally want to first make things work, then make them reliable, and only then make them secure. Platforms play an important role here, make it easy to deploy AI with good security. Are the AI vendors being irresponsible by not taking this seriously enough? I think of how other engineering disciplines bake a significant safety factor into their designs. Are we doing that, and if not will our failure lead to more damage than a falling bridge?”

Yes, the AI vendors are being irresponsible but in a largely regulation- and consequence-free industry, this is exactly what we can expect. The top few people at the AI companies will shoot into orbit as deca-billionaires while their companies crash and burn under debt and liability. It’s the hostile-takeover/LBO/private-equity model simultaneously scaled up in the amount of money involved and scaled down in the size of the beneficiaries. It’s predatory capitalism optimized.

“Adam Tornhill shares some more of his company’s research on code health and its impact on agentic development.”

“The study Code for Machines, Not Just Humans defines “AI-friendliness” as the probability that AI-generated refactorings preserve behavior and improve maintainability. It’s a large-scale study of 5,000 real programs using six different LLMs to refactor code while keeping all tests passing.”

“They found that LLMs performed consistently better in healthy code bases. The risk of defects was 30% higher in less-healthy code. And a limitation of the study was that the less-healthy code wasn’t anywhere near as bad as much legacy code is.”

“What would the AI error rate be on such code? Based on patterns observed across all Code Health research, the relationship is almost certainly non-linear.”

“In a conversation with one heavy user of LLM coding agents:”

“Thank you for all your advocacy of TDD (Test-Driven Development). TDD has been essential for us to use LLMs effectively”

“I worry about confirmation bias here, but I am hearing from folks on the leading edge of LLM usage about the value of clear tests, and the TDD cycle. It certainly strikes me as a key tool in driving LLMs effectively.”

What else could possibly help reduce the time spent reviewing changes?

Typing by Simon Willison

“25+ years into my career as a programmer I think I may finally be coming around to preferring type hints or even strong typing. I resisted those in the past because they slowed down the rate at which I could iterate on code, especially in the REPL environments that were key to my productivity. But if a coding agent is doing all that typing for me, the benefits of explicitly defining all of those types are suddenly much more attractive.”

JFC. No wonder he loves LLMs so much. He never even got on board with static typing. I’m honestly a little bit shocked to read this from him. After 25 years! This whole post is an admission that typing on a keyboard was his bottleneck. What does that even mean?

What is with these freaks being so excited about job losses? (Reddit)

“SamAltman: Superintelligence probably by end of 2028. So we got roughly 2 years left. Enjoy your job while you still can. Time is ticking.”

Which part bothers me the most? The obvious grifting? The glee at job losses that would, were he not grifting, imply a collapse of society? Or that Sam Altman is so medically stupid that he doesn’t even know the expression “The clock is ticking”? Unsurprisingly, I’m so inured to the grifting by now that it’s the last part that annoyed me the most.

Stop Letting AI Think For You by Dr. Roy Casagranda (YouTube)

“[…] if you’re using AI to look up things, I think AI has been wrong in 85% of the searches I’ve ever done. Like, to the point where it’s just laughable. And it’s not even like slightly wrong. They’re like catastrophic mistakes. And I’m like, wow, people are actually probably using this as an information source.”

The Hater’s Guide to Anthropic by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“CEO Dario Amodei predicted last March that in six months AI would be writing 90% of code, and when that didn’t happen, he simply made the same prediction again in January, because, and I do not say this lightly, Dario Amodei is full of shit.”

Amen. He is neck-and-neck with Sam Altman for king bullshitter in the AI space. These are the kinds of people who our society bubbles up to positions of wealth and power. I have no personal experience for how their reality-distortion fields work on so many people; I can’t see it. I am immune to the variety of charisma that they seem to wield.

Programming

Evolving Git for the next decade by Joe Brockmeier (LWM.Net)

“There are a number of things that Jujutsu got right, he said. For example, history is malleable by default. “It’s almost as if you were permanently in an interactive rebase mode, but without all the confusing parts.” When history is rewritten in Jujutsu all dependents update automatically “so if you added a commit, all children are rebased automatically”. Conflicts are data, not emergencies. “You can commit them and resolve them at any later point in time.” These features are nice to have, he said, and fundamentally change how users think about commits. “You stop treating them as precious artifacts and rather start treating them as drafts that you can freely edit”.”

I’ve been doing this for 15 years. I wrote about it a bit in jj vs. git vs. GUIs

SOLID in FP: Single Responsibility, or How Pure Functions Solved It Already by Christian Ekrem

“In React, your component can do anything. Fetch data, manage state, trigger side effects, render UI, all in the same function body. You need discipline and team conventions to keep things separated, and in my experience those conventions are the first thing to go when deadlines hit.

“Elm doesn’t give you that option. The view can’t perform side effects. State changes go through update. Effects are return values. You can’t tangle things together even if you’re in a hurry at 11pm trying to ship something before the sprint ends. (Not that I would know anything about that.)

“SRP stops being a principle you need to remember and becomes a property of the code you write. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

My Vibe-Coding Workflow by Niko Heikkilä

“Complete the cycle by refactoring by hand because it just is faster, safer, and more convenient than by prompting.”

This is so true. I think that people who refactor with LLM prompts just have no idea how to refactor with deterministic tools. They have considered refactorings to be impossible for years because they don’t know their tools at all. When LLMs showed up, they were awakened by FOMO to actually start using a tool for the first time in their lives.

“Due to constant failures and getting stuck on a “doom loop”, keeping the coding agents on a short leash is the only sustainable way of working with them. Even then, the game is mostly about discarding the output and intervening, which I can happily do often because I save my work often — that is, every time my tests pass.”

This happened to me again today when I remembered that I should be trying to use these damned tools more often. I asked how to create a startup shortcut on Windows for an account without administrator access. 400 lines of PowerShell. GTFO with that shit.

“If I’m very lucky and working in a technology or domain represented in the training data distribution the productivity gains are more significant. However, eventually, in the next prompt, the same productivity can drop to around 70-80% of what I would achieve by hand. That’s how you operate a slot machine.”

I just saw this same effect in a transcript of a meeting that a friend sent to me today to illustrate how the Copilot transcription service had quite accurately summarized our conversation in that meeting for the first three points, which were about topics very likely to be in its training data. As soon as we discussed a point related to company business, the accuracy fell off of a cliff and read as if someone had hit the machine over the head with a brick.

“I’m very much shaking my head regarding the recent unhinged buzz around creating waterfall-style specifications for agents to execute and then running away to the beach. Notably, in these cases I’ve seen agents reportedly work for hours producing software that does not work, be it a web browser not rendering anything or a C compiler unable to compile a simple Hello World program. It might be just me, but I would expect the software handed to me by a worker bee to… work.”

“My painstakingly manual workflow works better than theirs because the best software is created through continuous iterative bursts where we solve one problem at a time, design, test, refactor, and frequently discuss with users. Did you know 25 years ago they began to call this agile software development? I wonder what happened to that movement.

“Waterfall isn’t coming back to style. Reading and understanding code isn’t going away. Use coding agents or don’t, but never forget the fundamentals. The real people being left behind are the ones who forget.”

Amen, brother.

Split Diffs are Here by Cole Miller (Zed Blog)

“Making split diffs work within this world required solving these two hard problems: keeping the split view fast enough for large diffs, and keeping the two sides aligned on every keystroke.”

“Split diffs have to stay fast even on large changesets, so we tested against big diffs early and often. That profiling surfaced wins we didn’t expect, including optimizations that had nothing to do with split diffs at all. Lukas and I found inefficiencies in the block map while optimizing view switching, and fixing those made project search faster, too. Jakub discovered that we were using the wrong process spawning API on macOS (fork/exec instead of posix_spawn), and fixing that reduced main thread hangs due to git blame and other external processes across the board. Now all multibuffers in Zed are faster on macOS as a result.”

SOLID in FP: Open-Closed, or Why I Love When Code Won’t Compile by Christian Ekrem

“In OOP, adding a new subtype is quiet — existing code doesn’t know or care. Adding new operations is loud — you might have to update an interface and all its implementations. In FP with union types, it’s flipped: new operations are free, new variants are loud (but safely loud).

“This trade-off has a name — the “expression problem” — and neither approach wins universally. But for typical application code, UIs, domain models, state machines, you add new operations far more often than new variants. And when you do add variants, you really don’t want to forget a case handler somewhere. The compiler noise is a feature.”

Design

CSS is O.G. by Eric Myers (Mastadon)

“I saw yet another “CSS is a massively bloated mess” whine and I’m like. My dude. My brother in Chromium. It is trying as hard as it can to express the totality of visual presentation and layout design and typography and animation and digital interactivity and a few other things in a human-readable text format. It’s not bloated, it’s fantastically ambitious. Its reach is greater than most of us can hope to grasp. Put some respect on its name.”

Amen, my brother in CSS. I would thrown in “accessibility” and “performance” as well. These people don’t know what it was like trying to animate things without CSS, to lay things out with only tables and floats. They don’t know what it was like writing responsive layouts before we had a true, high-level, declarative syntax to express our designs, all of which is interpreted by the most powerful layout engine this world has ever seen.

This is the same thing that pisses me off about people who claim that a herd of LLMs wrote a web browser. No, they did not. The people who think that just completely misunderstand the complexity of a modern web browser by several orders of magnitude. Just the layout engine alone is goddamned work of art. The interaction between that and the scripting is a miracle. We should be honored that there are three individual implementations at all rather than just bitching that there aren’t more of them.

Sports

I bet the mods will remove this (Reddit)

Stick to football

“Gary Lineker: Genocide is bad.
The right: Stick to football.
Jim Ratcliffe: The UK is being colonised, and I don’t pay personal income tax here.
The right: Yaay, Sir Jim Ratcliffe. Man of the people. True patriot.
Rashford: Feed the kids.
The right: Boo. Stick to football.”

The Luol Deng Law by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“[…] teams tank (that is, lose intentionally) because doing so improves their odds in the draft lottery, which determines which players they can select in each year’s amateur draft. Draft position is important in all major professional sports leagues, but it’s uniquely so in the NBA, because there’s only five players on the floor for a give team at any one time and the league is more star-driven than any other sport; it’s widely understood that winning a championship is (almost) impossible if you don’t have a top-ten player, preferably a top-five player. So a lot of teams are openly trying to lose, and they’re doing so more brazenly and earlier and earlier in the season as time goes on. Which, you know, is not a great look.”

“Decent seats, parking, food, and a souvenir for each of the kids could easily exceed $1,000 for three hours of entertainment, even in a smaller market like San Antonio. Now imagine being the dad of that family and telling the kids when you get there that the Lakers were holding out their five best players […] You’re training those kids to think that the NBA doesn’t give a shit about them, and this is in a context where traditional team sports are fighting for their lives to attract the interest of kids who are addicted to Minecraft and Roblox.”

“Tanking is a specific manifestation of a more general attitude that’s gripped the NBA specifically and sports generally in the past decade or two, thanks in large part to the influence of analytics: the notion that it’s better to lose a ton than to win some, better to be a terrible team than to be one that’s good enough to make the playoffs and maybe win a series or two but not good enough to win a title. It’s an all-or-nothing attitude towards team sports, and it breaks the basic logic of athletics − the assumption that it’s better to win than to lose.”

Not Cricket: How Indian Racism Is Infecting The Sport by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Cricket is an increasingly Indian sport, but Indians are being increasingly bad sports about it. Indian players do not shake Pakistani players hands after matches anymore, or accept trophies from Pakistani officials. The Indian team will not play in or host Pakistan, so tournaments have to be organized around their petulance. The Indian Premier League has also affectively [sic] banned Bangladeshi players, causing Bangladesh to pull out of the T20 World Cup entirely.

“The spoilt behavior isn’t limited to Indian soil. Indian owners in the Hundred league in England and the South African league have effectively banned Pakistanis as well. Only for the players nationality, or religion really. It’s honestly disgusting. It’s not in the spirit of cricket at all. India has risen to the pinnacle of the sport, but they’re being terrible sports about it, and it tells.”

“India vs. Pakistan is the biggest rivalry in cricket but it’s too big and the politics makes it, frankly, ugly to watch. I find it really sad to see that the Indian players won’t even shake hands, and I’m ashamed to show these displays to my children. Indians are the best cricketers in the world now, but display the worst character. Cricket is bigger than ever under the Indians, but in many ways it’s not cricket at all.”

Fun

Doug Stanhope (2024) − DISCOUNT MEAT [Full Special 18+] by Doug Stanhope (YouTube)

00:00 No Opener
00:49 The Problem With This Special
02:12 9/11 vs. Covid (Expired Meat)
16:04 You’re Going Down With Me
29:12 Keeping Up With AA
30:43 Trip Advisor
36:22 High Notes #1
41:29 Experimenting With Sobriety
49:46 Perfectly Cooked Bacon
01:01:14 High Notes #2
01:06:55 Me In Blackface, Here’s a Clip
01:09:30 Mob Mentality… plus Inc*st
01:14:34 Leaving On All Fours

“There used to be a consensus of truth, like some stable flooring. It’s a war in Iraq, let’s say. Yes, there was a war in Iraq and, as a comic, you could have any angle: “it’s a war for oil” or “fuck the terrorists, let’s nuke ‘em back to the Stone Age.” But at least you’re standing on the same ground: There is a war in Iraq. There was not a vocal screaming third party going, “there is no war in Iraq; it’s a false-flag operation cuz the Earth is flat, and Iraq is on the underside of it, so if you try to deploy troops there, they just fall into under-space.””

“How about some common sense or we look at suicide as a business decision? Anytime you hear the expression ‘he died penniless’—why is that a negative? That should be your goal. This is what you strive for, that you get down to fucking put the last 1.75 on a gift certificate. I had nothing left to fucking give. I don’t have a bucket list, but I do harbor every grudge so, instead of writing a list of things I want to do before I die, I jot down names of people who are coming with me.”

“Sobriety…it’s an altered state for me, so it’s like, ‘this is weird.’ People do this but the problem that I found with sobriety is, what it does, it will add an extra day into every day that you do it. And I don’t know what to do with that kind of time.

“Your average day—24 hours—8 hours of consistent, plodding drinking, and then you have 8 hours of passing out, sleeping it off, and then 8 hours of recovery. And I go, ‘where fuck the am I? And check your phone and see you and then you know, pay a bill, feed a pet—so they call you functional—and then start drinking again.

“That’s a normal person. You take out the 8 hours of drinking, then you don’t even need the 8 hours of recovery part. Like, it’s two days basically. You go ‘what the fuck am I going to do?’

“It’s like if they told you, if you’re a non-drinker, and they say yeah sleep isn’t a thing anymore—they eliminated that—what are you going to do with that other eight hours? Get another fucking side family? Fucking learn a language on the Rosetta Stone? No, that’s why I drink. I don’t know what to do with those eight hours already; don’t double it.”

A friend wrote to me the other that, “I think I want to get into the business of writing koans:”

“Does the Buddha laugh if he hears a fart while meditating?”

I took up the challenge and wrote back,

“If the Buddha does not laugh at a fart, is it not still funny?”

Yohoho time to sail the high seas

Which team would win? (Reddit)

Clearly 6, and it's not even close

“13 USA drinking teams.

“Which team is outdrinking the rest?

“Clearly 6, and it’s not even close.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any Reddit thread with simultaneously so many comments and so much agreement. Top-rated comment:

“6 is just unfair. Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s like combining the Brazilian and Argentina soccer teams.”

“Honestly, Wisconsin doesn’t need the help. Milwaukee alone probably drinks more than the entire Pacific NW.”

Shine on you crazy Mormons by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know (YouTube)

Motorcycle mamas is a work of art. The way Timmy sways his head back and forth, totally committed to the role. This is absolutely one of the best skits. It’s completely unique. Genius.

Oh, wait, I take it back. “Timmy Dance” is a work of unheralded genius.

“I saw that kid with the divorced parents outside. I don’t want you hanging out with him.”

“🎵 I’m gonna live on a mountain of chairs. 🎵”

Timmy is a genius.

But then, Trevor as John Williams being a dick to his family while he composes his masterpiece for the Indiana Jones/Star Wars crossover film where Short Round marries an Ewok. “I call bathroom.” And no-one mentions that the tune that he came up with was actually “I could have danced all night.”

“Oh no, ants are taking me to Fashion Bug.”

Bikini day at the zoo.

I'm digging 'em up by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know
(YouTube)

• Waking the neighbors up song has great production values and excellent execution
• Trevor pitching movie ideas is him at his absolute best. Zach is also great in this one with his unbridled enthusiasm.
• Brothers in Arms is perfect. “We have to be even.” “We’re taking your pants off.”
• Teacher tries skateboarding
• Pulled over by a fire truck
• Fight club
• Midwestern dads discuss corporal punishment
• Police raid
• Teachers’ meeting