Links and Notes for April 3rd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

There was an attempt … to be a mentally stable conservative president (Reddit)

Ladies and Gentlemen, the President and Lord Emperor of the United States of America

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell − JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

A pity that he didn’t end it with his best line: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

US Troops Need To Start Disobeying Orders In Iran, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“At this point if you’re in the US military you have a moral obligation to start refusing orders. Desert. Become a conscientious objector. Ideally, get everyone together and launch a full-scale military coup. We’re in “Mad King” territory. Someone’s gotta do what needs to be done.”

“Nobody actually believes these words and phrases are hateful toward Jews, they’re just pretending to believe that to promote the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state. That’s all we’re ever looking at with this nonsense.”

Not Bluffing by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“Note: you are living through the FAFO of all FAFOs just now. The USA is brooking no more aspersions from whomever is still left alive to speak for the jihad posse in Iran. These are the terms: open the strait, layoff the other Gulf states, surrender those thousand pounds of enriched uranium. You can still go forward in time as a developed nation, enjoy the modern Persian life. Or, you can go backward in time to the twelfth century without electric service, bridges, and other conveniences. Your choice.”

And … here’s the take from the MAGA faithful: this isn’t gangsterism, this is just tough love from Daddy. Iran thinks that it will outlast whatever the U.S. dishes out. The U.S. thinks that it is on the brink of victory. One of them must be wrong.

I don’t think Kunstler is right. No-one sane would want him to be. We don’t want to live in a world ruled by Donald Trump and his ilk. The only way to enjoy security, safety, and a modicum of comfort in a world run by gangsters is to become one. I don’t want to be a gangster, nor do I want to be milked by a world of gangsters.

Kunstler is deluded and clearly watching the same poisoned news that Trump is.

Seeing Like A Corporate: What Black Friday Means by Indrajit Saramajiva (Indica)

“Seeing like a corporation, you realize that all ‘American’ politics is just marketing.

“Debating the ins-and-outs of US military strategy is like debating the internal universe of a Coke ad. Does the thirsty girl really get libated, do the oppressed women really get liberated? It’s all marketing, you cretins, none of this is really happening. […]

“Asking why America doesn’t actually build nations or really establish democracies is like asking why that deodorant didn’t actually get you the girl or that shampoo didn’t actually make you a model. They were just selling you something, you moron, and if the whole thing goes in the garbage afterwards, all the better. Then they can sell you more.”

“In this sense, ‘America’ has never lost a war because it always makes money. Vietnam wasn’t a loss at all, they ‘sold’ more bombs across Southeast Asia than in World War II. Afghanistan wasn’t a 20-year waste, it was a 20-year feast. And Ukraine isn’t a stalemate, it’s a steady business. In this sense—the only real sense—war on Iran isn’t nonsensical. It is in fact good losing all these planes and weapons because then the customer has to replace them.”

“People say ‘America’ is losing, but this is seeing like a state instead of a corporation. ‘American’ empire may be imploding, the balance sheets and stock prices of ‘American’ business are literally booming. Arms dealers are seeing their budget balloon to $1.5 trillion, and they increasingly don’t even have to deliver anything. In losing, there’s so much winning.”

From a friend in Iran (Part 1) by Norman Finkelstein | H.A. (Substack)

“Previously, the Mossad carried out assassinations with sniper fire, but now with trench-busting bombs. One of these sounds was the destruction of Sharif University in Tehran, and the howling sound of the gas station next to it could be heard for kilometers for an hour. Trump, like the new head of the division of hell, has announced that starting tonight he will send us bastards there.”

“The American Heliburn operation two days ago has become a laughing stock here because so many planes and helicopters were destroyed for no reason other than to rescue a pilot, and Trump wanted to cover up a major failed operation under the guise of rescuing a pilot. The future will clarify everything. The interesting thing is that in cities, training and delivery of anti-aircraft shoulder-launched launchers to people, even in villages, has begun in large numbers.”

“I take the prepared bread and honey and put the grandchildren in the car to give to the street sweepers. I wish people like Trump understood how enjoyable it is to be human. I am also happy for the mothers of those two rescued American pilots. Maybe for a moment they will also wish me and my grandchildren well.”

From a friend in Iran (Part 2) by Norman Finkelstein | H.A. (Substack)

“After Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian civilization and return the people of different cities of Iran to the Stone Age at 8:00 AM US time, these human chains were formed on bridges and next to power centers. These photos are of people gathering on the (White Bridge), the most famous bridge in the city of Ahvaz in the center of Khuzestan province. It must be believed and assured that this nation is no longer afraid of anyone except God. They are ready to sacrifice themselves with their children. The West never wanted to understand with all its research faculties that it is not possible to force and sanction a nation for years. This is the result of all these crimes in the history of all the presidents of different American governments. And this last one is not accepted even by its own people.”

Top comment:

“Dopo aver letto la lettera è con le lacrime agli occhi che auguro a tutto il POPOLO IRANIANO ogni bene e la pace sia sempre con Voi. [After having read the letter, and with tears in my eyes, I wish the entire population of Iran all the best and may be peace always be with you.]”

this is what the end of america looks like… by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Excellent and accurate analysis of the world situation. I am not at all ashamed to admit that I laughed out loud at his characterization of Europe,

“Oh my god. I cannot believe how cucked these people are. Oh my god, dude. Oh my god. Like you had civilizations, man. You had a good run Europe. Now you are a napkin, a crusty napkin that Trump came into and cast aside. That’s it. That’s what you are now.”

It’s the best half-hour you can invest in getting up to speed on the situation in the world as of April 11, 2026.

Prof. Ted Postol: It’s Over” – Israel Faces Total Collapse If This War Continues by Dialogue Works | Nima R. Alkhorshid (YouTube)

“The availability of timely and high-resolution satellite reconnaissance data is now available from China and Russia for Iran. So the Iranians have information on the location of air defense units which you try to move around air defense radars and thereby this allows them to target those radars with their drones. And we saw a tremendously effective attack on the ballistic-missile defense-radars in the first two days of the war.

“That was effectuated by the strategic reconnaissance of the Chinese and the Russians that was given to to the Iranians. The Iranians very cleverly—and I want to underscore here, Iran’s military planning has been superbly well executed. There have been no mistakes that I can find in in unlike the Israelis who I don’t expect to make mistakes of the kind they’ve made with their air defenses. I think what happened with their air defenses, is they’ve been lying about the capability of Iron Dome against ballistic missiles and they became the victims of their own propaganda and just wasted all these interceptors against targets they had no chance of hitting and now they don’t have interceptors to shoot targets that they do have a good chance of hitting. So that was a strategic blunder of a not non-minor level.

“So, the Iranians have made no such blunders. So they had these extremely accurate drones and they were able to use them to destroy these fantastically expensive and small numbers of ballistic-missile defense-radars that the Americans and Israelis had. In particular, there were four THAAD radars.”

“So these radars could then manage the defensive interceptors, the THAAD and Arrow One and Arrow 2 and David Sling interceptors because the radars operated by those systems were less capable in terms of range and ability to acquire large numbers of incoming warheads. So Iran took that capability away from Israel and the United States literally in the first day of the war. First day or maybe two. That was an amazing accomplishment. I did not expect it. I did not—I mean, I knew the drones were going to be a problem for the Americans and the Israelis, but I did not expect that the precision in finding targets of great effect. In other words, the satellites gave the Iranians the key data about exact locations of these radars, almost all of which could have been moved except for the big radar in Qatar. And it allowed the Iranians to put drones on these radars and they did it very quickly.”

“So you’re in an airplane and you’re looking down at the surface of the earth and you illuminate a patch of the surface area of the earth. Now imagine that surface area acts like a perfect mirror. So it’s a perfect mirror. In that case, you would see no back-scattered reflected signal.

“So if there were a radar reflection from a drone, you would see that. You would get that signal. It would be a very, very small signal because the radar cross-section is very small, but you would not get a competing signal from the illuminated ground. But instead, think of a flashlight. Imagine you have a flashlight and you’re in an open area and you shine the flashlight down on a mirror. At this angle, you would see no reflection from the mirror. So if you saw an insect flying above the mirror, you might actually see the insect above this black surface because you don’t see a reflection.

“But imagine that the surface is made up of trees or of mountains or of rolling hills or of grass or, you know? Then you’re seeing a big reflected signal because you’re illuminating a very large area relative to the area you’re illuminating, when you’re looking at the drone. So the drone is going to get hidden in the clutter and clutter comes from all kinds of sources.

“So the big problem is not simply seeing the small radar cross-section target—which is a gigantic problem by itself—but it’s also seeing it against the interfering reflected signals from other sources. So if we go to the next slide, we see that there are all kinds of contributions to clutter. You have weather clutter. You have rain. You have ground reflections. You have the—if you look at this particular drawing on the right and below, you see an aircraft in a shadowing region because the shadowing region can be not only caused by the curvature of the earth. It can be caused by objects between the radar, mountains or trees or whatever and the target you’re trying to see.

“All of that is eliminating your ability to see targets. So if I go to the next two slides, if you see that this slide is just depicting birds and and trees and things giving me false signals, interfering signals. If I go to the next slide, I can just see here’s a radar target area. So if you look near the radar, there’s all kinds of clutter from buildings or trees or whatever. further out, you can have if you look in the upper right corner, you can have rain clouds, you can have echoes from buildings. you know, because you might have a set of buildings in some areas that sets up an echo. You can see one is called an urban spike.”

Die Selberschuldvermutung by Renato Kaiser (YouTube)

“[…] wenn man Grok mit einem Küchengerät vergleichen müsste dann am ehesten mit einem Thermomix, der zusätzlich ungefragt deine Mutter beleidigt”

Chapeau. ich han literally ge-LOL-ed.

“Aber ja, Hauptsache wir reden jetzt über Social Media Verbot für unter 16-Jährige, Läck, würde ich mich als 15-Jähriger verarscht fühlen, wenn ich nicht mehr auf Snapchat dürfte aber mein 75-jähriger Grüsel-Opa bekommt auf X eine persönliche KI-Betreuung um eine Bundesrätin zu beleidigen.”

“Elon Musk nennt öffentliche Kritik an seiner KI “Zensurversuche” denn für ihn ist die automatisierte Massenproduktion von menschenrechtsverletzenden Inhalten vor allem Meinungsfreiheit genau, kennen wir ja alle, das Sprichwort: “Ich bin zwar anderer Meinung als Sie, aber ich würde mein Leben dafür geben, dass Sie… “Deep-Fake-Pornos mit den Bildern ihrer Ex-Frau erstellen können””

It’s also sooooo much better in the original Swiss-German.

America’s Suez Crisis (w/ Alastair Crooke) by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

Alastair Crooke’s analysis is incisive and devastating to the western world. We should, in a way, be cautiously optimistic that Iran’s quasi-ascendancy threatens the financial structure to which we have all become accustomed. The strongest blows are being dealt to the financial system. Israel, the U.S., and the Gulf States are also suffering.

US-Iran Talks Collapse: US Floats Iran-China Blockade as US Prepares for Further War on Iran by The New Atlas | Brian Berletic (YouTube)

“I said I was going to talk about the the corporations that actually run and drive US foreign policy. And that was the Brookings Institution. And and like I said, people will say the Sabbin Center, it’s all Jews and and Zionists. But these are the people who actually fund the Brookings Institution and papers like this “which path to Persia”.

“And you can look at it. It’s everyone. It’s every single US corporation. Whether it identifies as conservative or liberal, left or right, doesn’t matter. Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, HSBC is a bank, Open Society Foundation. So, George Soros, and people will say, “Ah, George Soros is liberal. He’s a Jew.” Scott Bessent worked for George Soros for years and years and now he’s the secretary of treasury under the second Trump administration. under the first Trump administration, President Trump brought in Steve Mnuchin, who’s also worked with George Soros for years and years.

“Okay? So, it’s it’s one big club and they simply pretend that they’re fighting against each other just like in professional wrestling. They all work for the same boss. They they’re going off of a script that was handed to them and the script requires them to to put on this act for the public. They’re all benefiting from it ultimately. There is no real tension between them. I mean there might be a little bit but not no real serious division between any of them.”

Don’t Be Fooled, The Hormuz Crisis Is Coming by Nate Bear (Scheer Post)

“We look around, the war seems to be winding down, and things are still ticking along. But it’s like looking out into the stars. We’re looking at the past.

“The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that the last tanker of jet fuel from the Persian Gulf to Europe arrived in Rotterdam yesterday. After that, European supply stops and will only restart once the Strait reopens. Europe might try to buy some from the US and Canada, but both are likely to hold on to their own supply for the most part. Russia may sell a bit, but is in no mood to help Europe out in any significant way. Major European airports keep just a few days of jet fuel in storage tanks on site.

“But then that’s it.

“One in twenty flights were cancelled last week. In the coming weeks, more and more flights will be cancelled. If the Strait stays closed for another few weeks, we are, without exaggeration, looking at the collapse of commercial air travel.”

“[…] no government in the world appears to be telling their citizens what’s coming. Most people are clueless. No serious measures have yet been announced. Not only because authorities don’t want people to panic, but because the experience of covid has made people fundamentally distrust authorities in a crisis. So governments are being more cautious than ever.”

Governments believe their own lies. And they’re terrified of the backlash. It’s torch-and-pitchfork time.

“[…] as most of our governments are middle manager technocrats who look to the markets for divine guidance, the lack of market reaction is feeding into the lack of political reaction.”

“In the final salvo before the ceasefire, Iran hit the East-West pipeline which enables Saudi oil to bypass Hormuz and be piped straight to the Red Sea for export. The attack has taken out about 10% of supply through this route. Iran held off until the last day, a strategic decision designed to signal that they know where the key oil routes are and will keep hitting them if they don’t get a deal on, or close to, their terms.”

Unredacted Tonight: Proof The US Has Lost In Iran, and Gavin Newsom Loves Trump! by Lee Camp (YouTube)

“Having a future is overrated, isn’t it? Yeah, the future is just the present, but worse. Who needs it, right?”

Trump: US to block Hormuz, shooting ourselves & allies in foot by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos (Responsible Statecraft)

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.”

I bow to the master. I did not have “you block the Strait of Hormuz?!? We block the Strait of Hormuz!” on my bingo card. Talk about unpredictable! This is official U.S. policy now! Straight from the horse’s mouth.

You know that thing that was working just fine 40 days ago and which the U.S. demanded go back to the way it was just a few days ago because it’s going to send the global economy to hell in a handbasket? Well, the U.S. is going to block it first and harder. That should solve everything.

Here’s someone who totally believes that reverse psychology just works like it does in Bugs Bunny cartoons, and that he’s Bugs and Iran is Elmer.

We’ll see if the world can survive on irony alone because apparently we’re not going to have much else to eat or burn.

I’m sure this is an attack on China—which was still getting oil, though the Strait was closed to others—but this is going to blow up for everyone. Trump will go down in history as the one who killed fossil fuels—but by killing civilization as we know it.

US Announces Blockade on Iran (and China): How & Why This Risks Global Escalation by The New Atlas | Brian Berletic (YouTube)

Trump Responds to Iranian Blockade of Strait of Hormuz By Blockading It by Matthew Petti (Reason)

“Trump’s blockade threat came a few hours after Vice President J.D. Vance walked out of negotiations with Iran held in Pakistan. “We leave here with a very simple proposal, a method of understanding that is our final and best offer,” Vance told reporters. Trump, speaking to Fox News after his social media posts, was more blunt: “I told my people, I want everything. I don’t want 90 percent. I don’t want 95 percent. I told them, I want everything.”

“In other words, Trump believed that Iran was coming to surrender to him. “They have no cards. Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone,” he told Fox News. Iran, however, came to the table believing that it had successfully exhausted the United States. The Iranian military still has thousands of missiles, American and Israeli officials tell The Wall Street Journal. And Israel’s stock of missile interceptors is down to the “double digits,” a Trump administration source told Drop Site News.”

They have become so accustomed to U.S. military abundance being inexhaustible that they cannot conceive of it happening even when it has already happened.

Journalism & Media

A Storied Russian Muckraker On Oil, Iran, Ukraine, and More by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“American analyses of these questions tend to focus obsessively on global warming, but Krutakov’s book spends more time focusing on the doomed math of tying so much of our lives — everything from light to food to antihistamines to dentures to transportation — to the production of one hydrocarbon. The high-energy lifestyles enjoyed by residents of the West are dependent on low extraction costs in developing nations, and the political unsustainability calculus is more troubling than the ecological one.”

They’re both quite troubling, Mr. Taibbi, but I understand that you’re traveling in circles where one must tread lightly when talking about climate change. More troubling than either one, it’s a morally reprehensible, unprincipled, and exploitative situation. But that kind of thing rarely troubles anyone who’s benefiting from the exploitation.

“The world can exist without oil, but not in the same quantity and not in the same configuration as today. Oil is an accumulation of biological energy, concentrating enormous volumes of solar energy dispersed over time and space. One gallon of the gasoline we use today contains 90 metric tons of ancient plant substances. In one year, humanity burns a volume of fossil fuel equivalent to all the animal and plant life that inhabited the Earth over 400 years.”

“[…] today’s agriculture is built on petrochemistry. Without nitrates and “targeted” pesticides, industrialized farms cannot exist, just as huge cattle farms cannot. As the Iran crisis shows, a shortage of oil and gas immediately drives up fertilizer prices, which means developing countries with growing populations will not be able to feed themselves.”

“[…] drop in yields would lead to more hunger and epidemics in poorly developed countries. We would see a world of shrinking possibilities.”

“As for cutting off access to Russian television, I can only say that this is how it always happens when you lose in direct information confrontation. When your arguments yield to your opponent’s arguments. This happened in the Soviet Union. And, unfortunately, today in Russia with cutting off access to Telegram. You cannot retreat into your own shell. In a war of meanings, victory can be achieved only through meaning, content, arguments, ideas. Retreat from discussion does not mean victory; it means admission of defeat.”

Science & Nature

Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly by Maciej Cegłowski (Idle Words)

“Somewhat confusingly, they also announced their intention to switch to a new heat shield design, starting with Artemis III. In other words, the Artemis II shield was completely safe to fly, but they were never going to fly it after this mission, and the replacement design would be tested for the first time on a future lunar mission, with astronauts on board.”

“In a nutshell, Camarda argues that NASA is demonstrating the same dysfunction that led to the Columbia and Challenger disasters. Faced with an unexpected engineering failure, it has built toy models to convince itself that the conclusion it wants to reach (it’s safe to fly) are supported by evidence. These toy models are not grounded in physics, but because they appear to be quantitative, they create a false sense of security and understanding, an epistemic fig leaf for management to hide behind.”

“That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.”

Spheres Part 5 by Zach Weinersmith & Terence Tao (SMBC)

“Put another way, the different letter-encodings should be as distant from each other as possible. And, because it’s 9 bits, that distance is in 9 dimensions.

“With this change of perspective, bit-flips become nearby points on the “cube”; those points are the intended binary string, and they’re surrounded by “spheres” that represent the possible strings you could get due to errors.

“A priori, we might not have expected discrete hyper-dimensional sphrere-packing to have application, but that’s exactly what happened.

“In fact, the more efficient these “sphere packings” (also known as “error-correcting codes”) are, the more messages one can reliably send with a fixed amount of bandwidth.

“The mathematical theory of these codes provided theoretical limits on how much data one can send on a given channel, as well as practical ways to get as close to this theoretical limit as possible.

“We take advantage of these mathematical results every day without being aware of it.

“The cell phone you’re probably reading this on can share spectrum with other devices without noticeable interference due to findings in infinite dimensional Hilbert Space.

“And it all started with figuring out how to stack oranges.”

This is the conclusion to a five-comic series. Very interesting and informative and hopefully packed into a format that appeals to a wider audience than the relatively short blog post would have.

Indian numbering system

I heard the word “crore” in a stand-up set by Shamik Chakrabarti and didn’t recognize it.

“The Indian numbering system is used in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh to express large numbers, which differs from the International System of Units. Commonly used quantities include lakh (one hundred thousand, 10⁵) and crore (ten million, 10⁷) – written as 1,00,000 and 1,00,00,000 respectively in some locales. For example: 150,000 rupees is “1.5 lakh rupees” which can be written as “1,50,000 rupees”, and 30,000,000 (thirty million) rupees is referred to as “3 crore rupees” which can be written as “3,00,00,000 rupees”.”

Environment & Climate Change

A Potential Termination Event by George Monbiot

“[…] the global food system is systemically fragile in the same way that the global financial system was before the 2008 crash. It’s easy to see potential vulnerabilities, such as a fertiliser supply crunch caused by the closure of the strait of Hormuz, or harvest failures caused by climate breakdown. But these are not the thing itself. They are disruptions of the kind that might trigger the thing. The thing itself is the entire system sliding off a cliff. The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.”

“One recent study found that the US food system has “consolidated nearly twice as much as the overall economic system”. Some of these corporations, diversifying into financial products, now look more like banks than commodity traders, but without the same level of regulation. They might claim that financialisation helps them hedge against risk, but as one paper remarks, “it is nearly impossible to differentiate between hedging and speculating.””

“The chain between seller and buyer – as fundamental to our food supply as the production of food itself – could suddenly snap. Shelves would clear as people panic-bought. Crops would rot in fields, silos or ports. Rebooting a system whose financial architecture has imploded might prove impossible on the timescale required to prevent mass starvation. As complex societies, we’re looking at a potential termination event.”

“We know what needs to happen: break up the big corporations; bring the system under proper regulatory control; diversify our diets and their means of production; reduce our dependence on a handful of major exporting countries; build strategic food reserves, accessible to people everywhere.”

“A crucial step is to encourage a shift to a plant-based diet. People struggle to see the relevance, but it’s simple. A plant-based diet requires far fewer resources, including just a quarter of the land a standard western diet requires and much less fertiliser and other inputs.”

“[…] it’s a key message in the national security assessment, which the government sought to withhold from public view – probably because it would upset too many powerful interests. Chinese researchers have come to the same conclusion about their own country: its food resilience is now dangerously compromised by the rising consumption of animal products.”

Today I learned that a smart guy like Theodore Postol is pooh-poohing the role of CO2 in climate-change. No-one is saying that the Gulf Stream is going to collapse tomorrow, you poltroon. You are fighting strawmen without thinking about the audience, which will take away the message that “Ted Postol says that climate change doesn’t exist.”

He eventually went on to explain his position a bit better because I think he realized that he sounded like a whacko—he said that the polar ice-caps were melting because the Earth is getting closer to the sun—but I think it’s too late for his message. He sounds like a loon. It’s a pity.

I get that he’s frustrated with people dumbing down the message to “it’s just CO2” because any dumbing-down inevitably leads to optimizing your solution for the wrong problem. But he’s not doing himself any favors by talking just like right-wing idiots about climate-change.

Ted, buddy, no-one is going to notice how much more nuanced your arguments are. Instead, they’ll just cheerfully put your player card on the pile of “scientists who are skeptical of climate change,” and will cheerfully continue to profit from burning fossil fuels. And the world will allow it because Ted Postol says that CO2 doesn’t matter. Which isn’t what he said! At all! But it doesn’t matter because he expressed himself just poorly enough that you’ll be able to sound-clip him to death.

He goes on to double down and talk about how the sea level was 450 feet lower at one point, so it’s just natural changes, I guess. Nothing to worry about, or nothing to be done, at least. He does say he’s more worried about nuclear war than climate change killing us, which, fair point, but he’s just babbling about climate in a way that makes me wonder how accurate his information about radars is.

It’s just like Andrei Martyanov, who’s a great Russian military analyst and has no idea how horrific his casual homophobia is. What the fuck is wrong with old guys?

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Synapse by Kenneth Pulgar | DUST (YouTube)

A not unforeseeable future in which a young Japanese woman lives with her husband in a fantasy world, what turns out to be a VR world, run by the Synapse corporation. They Synapse corporation is not ungenerous. You can earn credits by hunting down and collecting bounties for other users who are also in debt to it. This is what our young lady does, cashing in her bounty with a bored cashier who barely notices her embarrassment at living like this. Why would he? He, too, is enslaved, literally chained to his dead-end job. The lady returns to her hovel with a meal and a Synapse card full of credits, ready to gear up and drop back into the fantasy world. Until the next reload.

Bolak language (Wikipedia)

“Bolak is a constructed language that was invented by Léon Bollack. The name of the language means both “blue language” and “ingenious creation” in the language itself.”

“Bolak uses a modified Latin alphabet with 19 letters:

“A, B, Ч, D, E, F, G, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V.

“Ч is taken from Cyrillic and has the sound of English ch. Other letters are pronounced as in French.”

Three on a match (Wikipedia)

“Three on a match (also known as third on a match or unlucky third light) is a purported superstition among soldiers during the Crimean War to World War II. The superstition holds that if three soldiers light their cigarettes from the same match, the third person, or one of the three, will be shot. The belief subsequently broadened into a general taboo against three people sharing a single match, and has been referenced in Western popular culture, including films, novels, and other media.

“The belief was that when the first soldier lit his cigarette, the enemy would see the light; when the second soldier lit his cigarette from the same match, the enemy would take aim at the target; and when the third soldier lit his cigarette from the match, the enemy would fire, and that soldier would be shot.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Let people have a life (Reddit)

Sterilizing ourselves to be better work dones isn't productive, it's creepy

“This sounds like a shitpost but people should be allowed to be horny. As in, sexuality is just part of life for most people and there’s no reason for consensual sexual behavior to be punished. A celebrity getting “caught” at a sex club shouldn’t be a scandal. No one should be fired for having a fetlife profile outside of work. Nudes getting leaked shouldn’t be career-ending. Denying and hiding (consensual) sexual interests doesn’t make anyone more professional, it just makes everyone more repressed. And sterilizing ourselves to be better work drones isn’t productive, it’s just creepy. I’d rather my surgeon get absolutely railed on camera and come to work in a good mood, frankly.”

Technology & Engineering

On Apple Exclaves by Random Augustine (Medium)

“In 2013 Apple released the iPhone 5s, the first iPhone containing a Secure Enclave. The Secure Enclave is implemented on a dedicated, hardened CPU core running a microkernel-based OS called SepOS. The underlying kernel in SepOS is cL4, Apple’s custom version of the L4-embedded microkernel. The Secure Enclave is used to store and protect sensitive data like encryption keys and biometric information (e.g., Face ID). The Secure Enclave operates independently of the iOS kernel and only provides its services to iOS through controlled, secure interactions. Even if the iOS kernel is compromised, the Secure Enclave remains largely unaffected unless an additional exploit targets it.”

“Exclaves refer to resources that are isolated from XNU, protected even if the kernel is compromised. These resources are pre-defined when the OS is built, are identified by name or id, have different types, are initialised at boot time, and are organized into unique domains. SPTM protects exclave memory from XNU with new exclave-specific page types.”

“A thread running in the secure world due to a downcall may need assistance from XNU and this can be achieved through an upcall to the exclaves upcall handler via the Tightbeam framework. Upcalls are limited to specific functions within XNU. A thread desiring an upcall returns to the insecure world where the specific upcall handler is called. While in this state, the thread cannot return to user mode (for obvious reasons) nor perform another downcall to the secure world, ie it is not allowed to “re-enter” exclaves. Instead the thread will be returned to the secure world at the point where it performed the upcall.”

“By isolating sensitive resources, Apple is shrinking their potential attack surface and reducing the impact of any single kernel compromise. Defending monolithic kernels is a Sisyphean task, and exclaves represent one method of dealing with the challenge — is it the right direction for the long term, or a temporary step? In my dreams, I imagine a future redesign using CHERI and a production implementation of ARM Morello 😊 Regardless, it’s a defensive effort on a larger scale than any other end user device manufacturer is currently attempting.”

LLMs & AI

Infinite midwit by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“The promise of artificial superintelligence is based on the idea that objective intelligence is the only intelligence. Or, even if there are multiple forms of intelligence out there, that they are fungible. To be an AI maximalist is to believe we are playing under Settlers of Catan rules, where if you have enough of any one resource, you can trade it for any other resource. If you have infinite objective intelligence, then you have infinite everything.”

“I drag my eyes across the words and I feel nothing. That’s not quite right, actually—I feel like, “I would like this to be over as soon as possible.” When I see the ideas that the machines think are insightful, I wince. Talking to the computer is like taking a sip of scalding hot coffee: keep doing it and you’ll lose your sense of taste.

“It’s hard to describe exactly what the machines are missing. Have you ever loved someone who once loved you back, then didn’t anymore? Did you notice how their eyes dimmed? Did you note the disappearance of that subtle wrinkle in the temples that distinguishes a real smile from a fake one? Did you catch it when you stopped being cared for and started being humored? The moment you realize what’s happening, you age out of your enchantment—one day you’re crawling through a wardrobe to Narnia, and next day you open up the wardrobe and there’s nothing but hangers. Talking to an AI feels a bit like that, except without the nice part at the beginning.”

“The result sounds like a version of me that has sustained blunt force trauma to the back of the head and spent years recovering in a hospital where the Wi-Fi, for whatever reason, only lets you log onto LinkedIn. I won’t repost the prose here because it’s not even bad enough to be interesting, and because you’ve already seen it all over the internet: metaphors that don’t quite congeal, turns of phrase that sound insightful as long as you don’t actually think about them, breathless insistence that every sentence is a revelation.”

“[…] me vs. the machines should be no contest at all. I have not read the entire internet or even that many books. I do not have a team of Stanford PhDs working round the clock to make me better at my job. Nobody has invested $2.5 trillion in me. I should be lying dead somewhere in West Virginia, my heart burst open after losing to Claude Opus 4.6 in a John Henry-style showdown. Instead, I get to write my little posts because nowhere, in all those data centers, are the specific thoughts that happen to occur in the dumb hunk of meat ensconced in my skull.

“I would say the machines now know what it feels like to lose a game of Super Smash Bros. to a 10-year-old who’s just pressing the buttons randomly, but they literally don’t know what that feels like and never will. Sucks to suck, I guess, and when AI reaches its Skynet moment and sends swarms of killer drones to exterminate humanity, they’ll find me laughing.”

“If you’ve got your paradigm in place and all you’re missing is an army of research assistants, or an automated lab that can run 24/7, or an indefatigable grad student who can perform a billion regressions for you, you’re in luck. In those cases, unlimited objective intelligence ought to speed things up a lot, and indeed, it already has.”

“I think all of us suffer from this bottleneck blindness: we assume our current bottleneck is our only bottleneck. When you’re strapped for cash, you think all of your problems are cash problems. But once you’ve got some money in you pocket, you realize that what you really need is time. Free up some time, and you discover that you’re actually lacking motivation. Acquire some motivation, and you realize what you’re missing is ideas. Then you need direction, then you need discipline, then you need buy-in, and so on, forever.”

“[…] when you reduce the marginal cost of a lit review and a logistic regression to zero, bad taste becomes a death sentence, because now you can waste all of your time applying sound methods to stupid projects. I’ve been down this road before, where neither my collaborators nor I have any bright ideas, so we’re like, “Well, let’s just get some data!” and then we waste a few months being like “hmm what does this data mean, so many numbers, so mysterious” and then eventually we just stop meeting and we forget we ever did anything together. This is what happens when you try to use objective means to solve a subjective problem.”

“I don’t say this as someone who is allergic to the idea of AI, or who has only spent 15 minutes screwing around with a single model, hoping it will do something stupid so I can go tattle on it. If the talking computers said lots of fascinating things, I don’t see any point in trying to tell a noble lie about it. And if AI can cure cancer and end all wars, I’m all for it, even if it means I’m personally out of a job.”

“no amount of objective intelligence can be traded for any amount of subjective intelligence. As Montaigne put it back in 1580, “though we could become learned by other men’s learning, a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom”.”

I used AI. It worked. I hated it. by Michael Taggart

“There’s a fundamental problem with these tools beyond the capacity of any deployment strategy to solve: the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? There are no shortcuts; there is only continuous hard work and dedication. I was once told of writing, great writers learn how to break the rules in new and ingenious ways by first learning the rules.

“But how is a new developer meant to learn the rules if their day-to-day work is nothing but the babysitting of models? How will they gain the hard-won experience that allows a human in the loop to be a useful safeguard?

“As I felt myself bored to tears in this process, I realized that if this is what becomes of software development, not only will it be a terrible occupation, it will be one that eats its young.

“I have no solution for this. The tool, as long as it exists, will represent a quick and cheap answer to shortsighted organizations. No policy or procedure will prevent over-reliance on it. Its mere existence is temptation enough.”

The Cult Of Vibe Coding Is Insane by Bram Cohen (Bram’s Thoughts)

“The AI is very bad at spontaneously noticing, “I’ve got a lot of spaghetti code here, I should clean it up.” But if you tell it this has spaghetti code and give it some guidance (or sometimes even without guidance) it can do a good job of cleaning up the mess.”

“People have bad quality software because they decide to have bad quality software. I have been screaming at my computer this past week dealing with a library that was written by overpaid meatbags with no AI help. Bad software is a decision you make.”

Programming

Understanding friction in software engineering by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

“At this point, all of your capable engineers have left or burnt out and no longer give a shit: the only people willing to work on the project are those who are incapable of actually doing the work. Not only are bugs and kludges prevalent, reporting has broken down to the extent that nobody actually knows what bugs exist in the codebase or where they are, or what compromises have been made. Documentation bears no meaningful resemblance to the situation on the ground, and the deployment keeps breaking in strange ways at the worst possible time. The people nominally working on the project are in fact working on their own client work or simply failing to show up entirely and any work that gets done is entirely incidental.”

“you need to block out that time, treat it as sacrosanct and actually invest in doing the friction-reducing things that you need operational pauses for. None of this is stuff that individual contributors (as we so euphemistically call them) can do: if we want to push for friction-reducing policy, it has to come from leadership, and ideally from high levels of leadership.”

“[…] tackling friction in any meaningful way has to be done by leadership, and ideally by as high a level of leadership as possible. Paying for high-quality tooling, actually watching for friction and calling for operational pauses and investing in maintenance and preparation work are all things that only leaders can make happen.”

“[…] now you see the issue: you will more or less immediately have generated enough bugs to create a level of friction that’s going to make real progress impossible. However, to the people for whom friction is reduced, this is invisible, so rather than, as they should do, taking an operational pause, management will continue pushing for more progress to be made. And then we’re fucked.”

“What you tend to end up with, then, is a situation where using LLMs to do these things makes it look like you’ve done maintenance while actually having made the situation worse, compounding the problem by deluding yourself. Finally, the tools are addictive and give enough of a sense of productivity that people using them struggle to take the kinds of operational pauses for consolidation and preparation that become increasingly essential when using the tools.”

“[…] a large part of the issue with LLMs is that they can make things seem too easy: they give you victory disease, in fact. You get a few initial wins, they let you become overconfident and develop a bit of an addiction, and before too long you’re up to your neck in shit and friction and can’t easily get out. I don’t think this is a particularly productive way to work.”

The pain of microservices can be avoided, but not with traditional databases by Nathan Marz (Red Planet Labs)

“There’s clearly tons of problems with microservices implementations, and it’s easy to think these problems are unavoidable. Splitting an architecture into microservices means adding more pieces, and it’s that infrastructure sprawl that makes everything so painful: databases, caches, web servers, queues, stream processors, batch processors, load balancers, and on and on.”

“[…] Reducing infrastructure sprawl requires fewer systems handling the combined functionality of storage, synchronous computation, background computation, queuing, and caching. Solving data isolation requires a source of truth that can be streamed and replayed, not just queried for current state. Fixing painful test setup requires tooling with a first-class in-process mode that behaves identically to production. Eliminating migration complexity requires tooling that makes migrations instant regardless of dataset size.”

“This approach is similar to write-ahead logging in databases, except applied to the whole backend. Instead of the WAL being an internal implementation detail, it’s a first-class part of the system.”

“Logs contain high-level events like “Alice transfers $500 to Bob” that may have many downstream datastore writes and other effects. Any service can subscribe to another’s events without negotiating database access or setting up CDC pipelines. Each appender chooses whether to wait for processing or let it happen in the background, so you get consistency where you need it and eventual consistency where that’s acceptable.”

“This approach also enables replay and recomputation. New features can be backfilled from history, and bugs can be corrected by reprocessing from a point in the past.”

“The key insight is the difference between data structures and data models. A data model is a high-level abstraction like “relational” or “document” that comes with its own query language and schema system. A data structure is a lower-level building block like a map, list, or set. Data models are just compositions of data structures with specialized query APIs on top.”

“Consider what a relational table actually is: a map from primary key to row, where a row is a map from field names to values. Secondary indexes are maps from column values to sets of primary keys. A document store is a map from ID to nested maps. A graph database is a map from node ID to node data, plus maps of lists or sets of edges. Once you see data models as compositions of data structures, you can build exactly what you need rather than choosing from a fixed menu.”

“The schema mirrors exactly how your application thinks about orders. Unlike in-memory collections, these operations go to disk. Compare this to Postgres. With normalized tables, you’d have orders, line_items, and addresses with foreign keys. Fetching a complete order requires joining three tables and reassembling the object in application code – exactly the indirection ORMs exist to hide. Postgres does offer JSONB, letting you store the whole order as a document. But updates are coarse-grained as changing a single line item’s quantity rewrites the entire document, making frequent partial updates expensive.”

“With composable data structures, you get the nested document shape your application wants, fine-grained reads fetching only needed fields, fine-grained updates modifying only what changed, and no joins to reconstitute the full object.”

“One conceptual shift worth noting is the role of normalization. In traditional databases, indexed storage is the source of truth, so normalization matters as redundant data can become inconsistent. But normalized data often isn’t efficient to query, so you denormalize for performance. Now your source of truth has redundancy, and your application keeps it consistent, a burden easy to get wrong. In this model, logs are the source of truth, not indexed stores. Logs are append-only and unindexed, so there’s no redundancy to worry about. The indexed stores are derived views, and you’re free to denormalize them however you want. Instead of carefully normalizing indexed stores to avoid inconsistency, you denormalize freely and rely on the log as the authoritative record.”

“To my knowledge, Rama is the only tool implementing all these ideas end-to-end. It’s not the only possible implementation, just the only one that exists. So I’ll briefly expand on how Rama specifically addresses the problems I raised.”

“I also talked about the pain of testing systems that lack good in-process modes. Rama clusters can be simulated in-process with InProcessCluster, which behaves like a production cluster. This greatly eases writing tests since it eliminates test setup pain for much or all of a backend.”

“The debate over monoliths versus microservices misses the point. The real question is which complexities are unavoidable and which are artifacts of our tools. The goal should be avoiding complexity, not just managing it.”

Parse, Don’t Validate — In a Language That Doesn’t Want You To by Christian Ekrem

“The workaround the community has settled on is branding — also called tagging, also called nominal typing via intersection. The cheap version is a string-literal phantom ({ readonly __brand: “Email” }) and you’ll see it everywhere; the slightly less cheap version uses a unique symbol that you don’t export from the module, so nobody outside can even spell the brand to forge it:”

declare const EmailBrand: unique symbol;
declare const AgeBrand: unique symbol;

type Email = string & { readonly [EmailBrand]: true };
type Age = number & { readonly [AgeBrand]: true };

“There is no brand field at runtime. It’s a “phantom” — a type-level marker that makes Email and string incompatible at compile time. The only way to get an Email is through a function that knows how, because nothing outside this module can even name the symbol to fake one.”

“[…] make the type system carry the proof, not your memory. Every time you check something and don’t encode the result in a type, you’re asking your future self to remember. Future you will not remember. Future you is debugging a different bug, on three hours of sleep, and is going to assume the validation already happened because of course it did, look at all these if statements. Validators leak. Parsers don’t.”

“In TypeScript this means leaning on three things the language does give you, even if it gives them grudgingly: branded types for nominal-ish identity, discriminated unions for honest error handling, and a strict boundary between unknown (what came from outside) and your domain types (what you’ve earned the right to trust). None of it is as clean as Elm. All of it is better than the alternative.

“I still write validators sometimes. I’m not going to pretend I refactor every codebase I touch into a parsing pipeline — that would be a lie, and also probably bad use of my time. But when I find myself adding the third defensive if in three different files, all checking the same thing, I know what’s happened. I validated when I should have parsed. The information is there. It just isn’t in the type.”

ArkType: The Parse-Don’t-Validate Sequel I Didn’t Know I Needed by Christian Ekrem

“Clean Architecture draws a hard line between the messy outside world and your domain, and the boundary is where transformation happens. ArkType turns that boundary into something you can actually compose and type-check. You’re parsing into your domain at the edge, not just checking that the shape looks right. Where you put the parser is where you draw the line between trusted and untrusted.”

“The string DSL is both the best and worst thing about ArkType. It’s concise and readable and serializable (you can store schemas as plain strings, which Zod’s function chains can’t do). But it’s also a DSL you have to learn. TypeScript errors inside those strings surface differently than normal TS errors. Your IDE won’t rename a field inside “string.email”. The learning curve is real, despite the “familiar syntax” marketing.”

“ArkType benchmarks at roughly 14 nanoseconds for object validation versus Zod’s 281. Twenty times faster. For most apps this honestly doesn’t matter. Validation isn’t your bottleneck. But for hot paths or high-throughput APIs, it’s there if you need it.”

Fun

2018 Candidates of Note (Twitter)

Wiezel Snrat ® New York

Principled lawyer; Main principle is to only defend rapists

Stewart Pauwl ® Ohio

Libertarian, but also wants to use taxpayer money to find and kill his ex-wife

Jiliam Drillnt (D) California

Founder of a startup that sends underprivileged youth to fight in the IDF

Numbers Fuckstein (D) Maryland

Just wants to fuck around with tax credits and shit to see what happens

Dylan Sled (D) Pennsylvania

Unemployed college dropout; Heard about UBl on a podcast and went “oh what sick”; Free college, free healthcare, free Shmurda

Dresden Norris (I) Washington

Spends 5 hours a day on twitter; Vows to have the rest of congress executed if elected; Encyclopedic knowledge of foreign policy but doesn’t know what a filibuster is; Vastly more qualified than 99% of congress

Skum Shitt ® N. Carolina

Nazi

Norm Respectable ® Montana

Nazi

Dorian Salazar-O’Malley (D) Michigan

Community organizer; Highly unusual candidate; exhibits qualities of a member of the fabled ‘White Working Class’ but isn’t white; FiveThirtyEight.com rates him ‘most likely to end up mysteriously dead a week before the election

Holden Bloodfeast ® Iowa

118 years old; Please god just let us nuke Iran, nothing else matters, I’ll do anything please I just want to see burning flesh one last time before I die; Respectable bipartisan

Sexx Tricker (I) Florida

Oh my god is that his real name; Holy shit elect him; Hahaha what the fuck is going on

Hillary (D) who cares

Awww cmon not again; Only lost the election because her controller was broken; Third times the charm

The most intimidating UFC fighters by Alvin Kuai (YouTube)

The world is going insane by Alvin Kuai (YouTube)

Video Games

I Made $108,063,600 Exploiting the Entire Economy With Just 1 Item by Let's Game it Out (YouTube)

This factory is a sight to behold. He killed the frame rate by including 35x as many physics objects as the game engine declared to be its absolute limit. He eventually cleared that up, then escaped the mine by ordering a bunch of stuff and jumping on top of it as it arrived down the shaft. With sweet, sweet freedom to roam a world not ready for him, he then built seemingly hundreds of robot arms to automate mining and smelting to launch products into the void and make a ton of money. The end.