Links and Notes for May 1st, 2026

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Design
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

'Free Palestine' under an Israeli flag − Sidewalk-chalk art outside of an elementary school in Switzerland

'Free Free Palestine': Sidewalk-chalk art outside of an elementary school in Switzerland

Re-Radicalization in an Age of MAGA Remorse by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“On a purely political level, I am a practitioner of the lost antifascist art of deradicalization, though I prefer to think of what I do as re-radicalization. Whereas deradicalization is the practice of encouraging people with extremist views to adapt to a more moderate stance, I have nothing but contempt for the so-called moderates of Western Civilization who frequently do a better job pushing white supremacy than the Klan with their endless expansions of the police-warfare state. What I do is try to encourage radicals with counterrevolutionary views to adopt legitimately revolutionary ones.”

“So now, when I cross paths with other clearly subaltern people adopting views and positions that put them at odds with mainstream society, I have a hard time ignoring the pain behind the rage in their eyes. And when I see those same people realizing that they’ve been fleeced by another two-bit conman in designer jackboots, I see an opportunity to finally remove the wool from those eyes.”

“When push comes to shove, nearly every fascist I confront will concede at some point that who they really despise is the motherfuckers in Washington and on Wall Street. Powerful, Atlantic elites, taxing them blind, sending their jobs overseas, and sending their kids off to die for the whole awful scam.”

“[…] the real conspiracy is that poor white people destroy themselves when they destroy Black, brown, and Queer people. They waste their rage on other victims of the same system that enslaves them and become limp-wristed shock troops for city slicking pedophiles like Donald Trump in the process. We can agree to disagree on a good many things, from my alternative ‘lifestyle’ to your Biblical values, just so long as we agree that power is the problem and that any ideology that sanctifies it is the real enemy.”

Brian Berletic: U.S. Is Grooming Europe for War with Russia by Glenn Diesen (YouTube)

“People have to understand that the whole reason there was no change with the incoming Trump administration is because presidents are in charge of nothing. Congress is in charge of nothing. It is the unelected corporate finance here—monopolies inside the United States—that are running everything, that are benefiting from everything.

“A $ 1.5 trillion defense budget that is the arms industry benefiting from that. Big oil is benefiting from these projects that they proposed got approved by the US government under Obama, Trump, Biden, the current Trump administration, projects that made absolutely no financial sense at all until wars of aggression were fought by the US to make them viable.

“So, when you have interests like that who are driven by perpetual power and profit and ultimately global domination, you cannot deal with a country like this with diplomacy, in the way we we think about diplomacy. There’s nothing you can say—it’s like trying to negotiate with a virus that’s eating your body alive.

“You need to identify how it works and how to displace it from the global body and push it back to a more proportional role within the global network of nations. And that’s what multipolarism basically is. That’s what is driving it. It is displacing US-led unipolar hegemony. It is offering alternatives, not just in terms of how countries interact with one another, but [also] corporations, goods and services that countries can get access to without fueling the corporate-financier interests that are driving US foreign and domestic policy.

“And so this is what’s going to have to happen. People are going to have to forget about—you know the US will never accommodate anyone anywhere at any time. They will never accept, you know, being a part of of the multipolar world. They want global domination. So, as long as that’s their obsession, multipolarism has to be resolute in displacing them from around the globe because, everywhere you don’t, just like a virus inside your body, if it’s in that part of the body, it’s going to eat it away and eventually everyone will get sick and die.

“And as you know, as goes with viruses, they end up killing their hosts in the process. And that’s what global empire has always done. It has become unsustainable and it itself ends up collapsing. And so this is why multipolarism is so necessary. This is why that is the solution. And I think Russia, China, many other countries have always understood this. They use diplomacy as a way of trying to make this transition from US-led hegemony to a multi-polar world as painless as is possible.

“But as you can see, there’s still tremendous death and destruction and instability caused through this process. We could only hope that it continues transitioning in the right direction and it minimizes the death and destruction caused by by US aggression.”

Why ‘America’ Is Doing Such Dumb Shit and Why It Can’t Change Course by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Look on a map and let the reality slap you. ‘America’ never withdrew after World War II, and the war against the world never stopped, it just stopped really affecting White people. They called these wars ‘Cold’ like their hearts, but it’s certainly gotten hot since 9/11, the start of what I call World War III. What’s the plot? Same as every night, as the Brain told Pinky. Try to take over the world.”

“‘America’ started as a genocidal unsettler colony and became the head of White Empire after World War II. It was a license to kill, a license to steal, as Henry Hill said, they got to do the ‘American’ thing the world over. ‘America’ has always been about taking land, stealing resources, and genociding everything living. Asking it to do something else is like sending an oil tanker to pick up the kids after school. It’ll kill the kids and blow up the school, what did you expect?”

“‘America’ has been planning to defeat the USSR since the 1940s and the USSR falling wasn’t going to stop them, no sir. Hence they’re still attacking Russia, on sheer inertia. America’s has been planning to corrupt or coup everybody in the Middle East since the 1950s, and Iran’s Islamic Revolution wasn’t going to stop them. Notice them still attacking Iran, there’s that inertia. America’s plan since forever has been to take over the world, and the world taking over wasn’t going to stop them. That’s why they’ve crashed their ship of state in the Strait of Hormuz and are still hitting the gas even though they’re obviously grounded. There is no other setting. It’s full steam ahead and damn the torpedos. ‘America’s’ dumbass course was set decades ago, it’s the sheer inertia of imperialism.”

“‘America’ is really being run like a business now. A business that’s been taken over by private equity, to be loaded up with debt and gutted. In the classic PE/LBO business model—which is indistinguishable from a mafia ‘bust-out’—some oligarchs take over a business, load it up with debt, strip assets, maybe do a bit of insider trading, and then leave it for dead. Often they buy the business by using the business itself as collateral. This leveraged buyout process is really like me telling the bank ‘loan me $5 billion to buy Toys ‘R’ Us ($6.6 total), don’t worry I’m good for it, I’ll own Toys ‘R’ Us in a minute.’ This actually happened. Some oligarchs bought Toys ‘R’ Us using Toys ‘R’ Us as collateral, then ran up even more debts in the companies name and killed it off. When they say America is run like a business, this is what they mean. Private equity guys (the White word for oligarchs) have LBO’d the ‘United States of America’ and are busting it out.”

“The corruption of the US government is the system. They legalized corruption and call it ‘donations’ or ‘lobbying’ to whitewash what remains dirty laundry. Trump openly uses the US Government like collateral, but this is not just him. Why did Hunter Biden have a board seat in Ukraine, before his dad was president? Why did Janet Yellen (before she was Treasury Secretary) get $7.2 million in speaking fees, from the people she’d be regulating? Corruption is endemic to ‘America’, they just hide it in their corruption of the English language. They even publish how corrupt they are as if transparency is decency when it isn’t. It’s just shamelessness, of which Trump is the finest specimen. ‘America’ is a representative democracy in that sense. Trump represents corruption.”

“The problem is not Trump as a dodgy businessman (which he is), it’s the whole dodgy business model, which elevates a man like Trump as its chief charlatan.”

“Thus the USS ‘United States’ is a ship that’s hard to steer if you try, with captains that are busy unloading shit off the side and not trying. This is a sure way to die, but if you make the right bets on the stock market, falling can feel like flying. America lacks the moral, military, and political wherewithal to fight this World War III, but they also lack the moral, military, and political wherewithal to stop it. They have to proceed. It’s last call on the Titanic, and the ice makes the drinks cooler anyways.”

Trump’s Trap, Trump’s Sanity by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

The degree to which the world is trapped by the insanity of the worst people reminds me of It’s a Good Life (The Twilight Zone) (Wikipedia),

“The people live in fear of Six-year-old Anthony Fremont, constantly telling him how everything he does is “good”, since he banishes anyone thinking unhappy thoughts forever to a place that he calls “the cornfield.” Having never experienced any form of discipline, he does not understand that his actions are harmful. […]

“[…]

“Anthony then causes snow to begin falling outside. The snow will kill off at least half the crops and the town will face starvation. Anthony’s father starts to rebuke Anthony about this, but his wife and the other adults look on with worried smiles on their faces. The intimidated father then smiles and tells Anthony “…But it’s good that you’re making it snow, Anthony, it’s real good. And tomorrow…tomorrow’s gonna be a real good day!””

You can see a few minutes of the show here. You need to be in the U.S.—or pretending to be in the U.S.—to watch it.

The Twilight Zone (Classic): It's A Good Life − A Very Bad Man by The Twilight Zone (YouTube)

Free Saif, Free Thiago, F@&k Israel, Free Palestine by Tadhg Hickey (YouTube)

Trump’s deployment of warships to Strait of Hormuz escalates Iran war by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS)

“This is not simply a consequence of “bad policy” decisions or the product of one administration’s recklessness. It is rooted in the insoluble contradictions of American imperialism itself. For 35 years, the central project of American foreign policy has been to offset the long-term erosion of US economic dominance through the use of military force. In these conditions, militarism takes on an increasingly existential character for the ruling class: Retreat threatens the credibility of its global power, while escalation courts catastrophe.”

“The disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has driven oil prices above $110 per barrel [actually, spot prices are twice as high; futures are at $110] and injected a new shock into an already fragile world economy. Airlines in Europe and North America are cutting capacity and canceling tens of thousands of flights, translating directly into layoffs, reduced hours and intensified exploitation for pilots, cabin crew, ground staff and maintenance workers, while tens of thousands of seafarers are effectively trapped in the Gulf amid the danger of attack.

“Higher energy costs ripple outward into every supply chain—raising transport and import costs, accelerating inflation and driving up prices for food and basic necessities. This crisis is global in the most literal sense: Disruptions in the transit of key food inputs and fertilizer compounds through the region are already translating into mass impoverishment, deepening hunger and the threat of famine for millions in the poorest countries, who will be made to pay for a war waged in the interests of the imperialist powers and the financial oligarchy.”

Further light shed on criminal US torpedoing of Iranian ship by Wasantha Rupasinghe (WSWS)

“Speaking after his return, IRIS Dena captain Zarri rejected claims by the US Indo-Pacific Command that the vessel was armed. “One of the exercise’s conditions was that missiles and torpedoes should not be carried by participating vessels,” Zarri said. He confirmed that the frigate carried neither anti-submarine torpedoes nor strategic missiles, leaving it unable to defend itself against an underwater attack.

“Zarri said a US submarine launched two torpedoes, with a 90-minute interval between the first and second. The initial strike damaged the ship’s shaft and propeller, bringing Dena to a halt. In the next 90 minutes, the crew carried out emergency procedures while assembling on the aft deck, “preparing for evacuation or surrender.” According to the Tehran Times, the first officer said he “ordered sailors to assemble on the helicopter landing pad while he checked the ship to ensure no one was left behind.”

“In a blatant violation of the rules of naval warfare, the US submarine fired a second torpedo even through the ship had been disabled and the crew was visibly preparing to abandon it. The torpedo struck the aft section “directly beneath the assembled crew,” the first officer recalled. “The second torpedo killed 104 of our friends, our comrades, our dear brothers,” Zarri said, adding, “This was their intention”—to leave a maximum number of casualties.”

“All the evidence—from the technical record of the attack to the harrowing account given by Commander Zarri and his first officer—confirms that the US Navy carried out a deliberate war-crime in torpedoing of an unarmed, immobilised Iranian ship whose crew was in the process of evacuating.

“Whether or not they were directly informed of the impending US attack, the Indian and Sri Lankan governments were well aware of the dangers to the Iranian vessels faced. There is no innocent explanation for the delays in allowing them to dock.

“The evasions and hypocritical declarations of “neutrality” by Colombo and New Delhi, along with the silence of the imperialist-aligned media, cannot cover-up the fact that these governments were complicit in this US war crime.”

What’s (Not) Happening With Iran? by Iindrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The Strait of Hormuz is the most vital trade route in the world and Iran owns it now. Again, the ball is in ‘America’s’ court to win it back, but we all know they don’t have the balls. And they’re not just losing their empire, this hits home. The last pre-war ships just reached California, and there’s no more behind them. This is a bigger oil shock than the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1978 Iranian Revolution combined, which is basically what’s going on. The Arab oil is involuntarily embargoed and the Iranian Revolution has got more volunteers than ever.

“Remember then, that the 1970s recession started after the embargo was lifted. And that and those economic effects took decades to unwind. Stable oil prices basically never recovered, they’ve been spiky ever since. This Hormuz shock is bigger than what happened in the 1970s, and we don’t yet know how big. The pressure is just building and building up, and the Trump regime artificially pumping the stock market only brings a worse reckoning. There’s a Greatest Depression coming and I, for one, feel fine. This imperial world needs to burn for a free world to emerge. And all of its bases are belong to us now.”

European war flotilla en route to the Strait of Hormuz by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“[…] the mission is neither peaceful nor neutral. The former colonial powers France and Britain are pursuing their own imperialist interests in the Middle East, which do not align with those of the US. The same applies to Germany and the European Union.

“They all share Washington’s goal of rolling the region back to its former colonial state. They support the sanctions against Iran and Trump’s efforts to overthrow the regime that came to power in Tehran after the 1979 revolution against the Shah’s dictatorship. And they all stand behind the Israeli regime and crack down all the harder on its critics the more outrageous its war crimes become.”

“EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who attended the summit, praised Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan [of EU-kuck nation Armenia] in the highest terms. She commended the “Velvet Revolution” of 2018 that had brought him to power. The country thereby demonstrated its commitment to European values, she said. President Macron, accompanied by a piano, even performed a song by the Armenian-French singer-songwriter Charles Aznavour to flatter the hosts.”

You can’t even make this kind of stuff up.

“[…] the Zangezur Corridor is in US hands. It was at the centre of the US-mediated peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2023 and is being developed exclusively by US companies. To leave no doubt as to who controls this strategic chokepoint, it bears the official name “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP).”

Why the US is at War with Iran and Why the War Might Pause but Won’t End by The New Atlas | Brian Berletic (YouTube)

“The prospect of US war against Iran and around the globe continuously escalating in the near to intermediate future is inevitable because the wars taking place now are being fought specifically to prepare for a future confrontation with China itself. For this reason, the prospects of the US arriving at any sort of “peace” deal with Russia or Iran is near zero.”

While Berletic does a great job of referencing historical documents from the last 20 years that describe exactly what the U.S. plans are, I think he’s not critical enough in evaluating the U.S.‘s ability to execute those plans. Like, it’s great that someone wrote a document about where they’re headed but what is the plausibility today under the conditions that we live in now?

He tends to treat the U.S.—or the oligarchs that run and control the global empire—as an infinitely powerful and unstoppable force that really experienced no setback, no matter how much it may look like they have. Like, does the impending global depression impact these plans? Like, at all? Does cutting off China from the Malacca Strait—and China’s inevitable economic retaliation—have a potential impact on the U.S. being able to execute its plans? Like, if they lose all of the guns and money, are they still just as powerful?

I sometimes wonder, “who is he arguing with?” Idiots in his Twitter comments? The mainstream media?

Journalism & Media

kids' shows teaching sharing is communism by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Everything Is Fake by Ted Rall

“These days, everything seems so fake that it’s impossible to discern what may or may not be real in order to determine whether you should care.”

Ending Western Warmongering Should Be Our Number One Priority by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“First and foremost the west needs to stop murdering people. Ending western warmongering should take priority over every other societal concern, in the same way your husband being a serial killer would be a more urgent concern than his refusal to wash dishes.

“It’s a sign of a deep sickness how much more political attention is given to domestic policy in our society than the fact that our governments are butchering human beings on other continents. This is not to say that those domestic policy issues are not important; it is only to say that they aren’t as horrifyingly urgent as the way imperial core nations are actively participating in actual mass murder.

“Healthcare? Very important. Immigrants’ rights? Very important. Social justice and equality? Very important. But imagine if you lived in a place where western-made bombs were tearing your family and neighbors to shreds and then catching sight of a western social media post about the supreme importance of LGBTQ issues or ending discrimination against neurodivergent people. Just pause and put yourself in those shoes for a minute.”

“You would not continue your discussion about intersectional feminism at the restaurant if you saw someone being strangled to death at the table across the room.”

“We’re no different than the wife of a serial killer who ignores the bodies being buried in the backyard because she’s more worried about what his online gambling addiction is costing the family. We’re disconnecting ourselves from something precious and important within us in order to psychologically dissociate from the crimes of the empire in the way that we do.”

Labor

In defense of Yugoslavia: Max Blumenthal on Michael Parenti's bravest work by The Grayzone | Max Blumenthal (YouTube)

“Michael Parenti got it right. You won’t know that from his corporate media obituary that Michael Parenti got it right again. Michael Parenti was right. Michael Parenti was right because he was consistent. Because he stuck to his guns, because he painted in straight lines. He never veered from an anti-imperialist analysis when so many other left intellectuals did. He was right because he did not seek elite respectability. And so you would never find him on some shadowy financier’s jet. he would be right down here with the people in Berkeley. He spoke for the working class from which he came. He was right. He was righteous. Michael Parenti is a guiding light in the darkness of this bloodstained golden age.”

Economy & Finance

Will the Iran War Cause a Global Depression? (w/ Prof. Richard Wolff) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

Is Chinese AI the Remedy to Inequality? by Dean Baker (CEPR)

“Chinese AI is beating out US in adoption through much of the world. Apparently, Chinese AI is even gaining many customers in Silicon Valley, both because of its lower price, but also because it is open source, which mean companies can alter it to fit their needs. This also means that a company can run the Chinese AI on their own systems and they don’t have to turn over control of sensitive company data.

“This Chinese competition is a huge deal not only for bringing AI prices down, but also for preventing fascist clowns like Elon Musk from getting endless money. While Musk may always be insanely rich, if investors ever learn arithmetic and value his companies based on their profits, he will have far less money. (Tesla has a price-to-earnings ratio of 360. If it had a more normal, but still high PE of 20, Musk’s stake would be worth a bit more than ½0th its current value.)

“We should have that conversation about intellectual property rules that make the Musks of the world ridiculously rich. We should also be changing rules on things like bankruptcy that private equity barons [use] to get rich by buying companies and putting them into bankruptcy.

“Unfortunately, we have not yet advanced to the point where we can have a serious discussion on the ways we structure capitalism to generate inequality. Perhaps one day we will, but until then, we should be thankful for Chinese competition. ”

The Coming Mega-IPO Flow & Funding Problem of 2026 by Paul Kedrosky

“That much new equity supply hitting in a few months creates a math problem: the money has to come from somewhere. Most of it will come from existing holdings. Passive funds will be forced buyers once these names join the indexes, which will happen much faster than usual, given recent index rule changes. That means mechanical selling pressure on whatever many funds currently own, which is mostly the same large-cap tech stocks everyone else owns.”

The collapse of Spirit Airlines: The latest in a decades-long war on the working class by Tom Hall (WSWS)

“When Spirit Airlines ceased operations last week, 17,000 workers lost their jobs, their benefits and potentially their final paychecks in a single night. Medical, dental and vision coverage for every Spirit employee was terminated the moment the last flight landed.

“The collapse immediately prices millions of working-class travelers out of air travel, because Spirit’s fare were a fraction of those charged by the legacy carriers. In other words, workers are paying twice: as producers, stripped of jobs and conditions; as consumers, stripped of affordable travel.

“The most immediate trigger for the bankruptcy is the doubling of jet fuel prices during the war on Iran, as a direct consequence of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil traffic previously flowed. Spirit, already under bankruptcy, could not absorb the shock. Other airlines are expected to fall if the war continues, including JetBlue and Frontier.

“But in reality, the fuel shock is being used as an opportunity to further consolidate the industry and wipe out jobs. Spirit has been allowed to collapse by the US government because the removal of the ultra-low cost carrier will significantly increase prices and profits for the rest of the industry.”

“The World Socialist Web Site demands that Spirit’s workforce, and all those dislocated by the economic impact of the war, must be made whole, with full pay and benefits until they find new employment. This must be paid for through the expropriation of the windfall profits extracted by the oil companies and major banks from the war they support. This, however, is only a first step towards the nationalization of the airline industry and operating them as public utilities under workers’ control, guaranteeing decent conditions for airline workers and affordable fares for the traveling public.”

Sweet dreams are made of this. Instead, the government will either let the airlines in which their cronies are not invested die a ignominious death, or they will bail them out, if the members of the administration would benefit directly (or indirectly).

“Today, more than 90 percent of air traffic control facilities now operate below recommended staffing levels […]”

“In 2020, with the pandemic shutting down much of the world economy, the industry sought and received—with the support of the Association of Flight Attendants—a $54 billion pandemic bailout as part of the $2 trillion CARES Act. Supposedly to protect jobs, instead it was followed by 70,000 cuts the following year.”

“Iran is part of a global war on the working class. The World Bank estimates that an extended conflict keeping oil above $100 a barrel could push 45 million more people into acute food insecurity. Prices for urea, a key ingredient in fertilizer, have surged 60 to 70 percent, threatening famine across sub-Saharan Africa at planting season. The Iranian government has acknowledged that 2 million workers have already lost their jobs as a direct consequence of the conflict. In Britain, as many as 250,000 jobs could be lost by next year, and in Germany 200,000 jobs are at risk because of the war.”

In praise of vultures by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

““Only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $20.” But if you multiply a $20 junk fee by ten million purchases, a company can use that fact to make hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s real folding money, which is why every company has figured out a way to whack you for a $20 junk fee.

“There are two ways to end this racket: one is litigation, the other is regulation, and the capitalism-hating-capitalists who run the world want to kill both. That’s why the business lobby smears lawyers like Keller as being “vultures.” But as Matt Stoller says, “vultures look aggressive and whatnot, but when you actually get rid of vultures out of an ecosystem, all sorts of things go haywire.”

“I love this point. Vultures live off the disgusting, rotting crap that would otherwise pile up around us, breeding disease and emitting an unbearable stench. If plaintiff-side, no-win/no-fee lawyers are vultures, then junk fees, wage theft, and the million petty frauds they fight are the disgusting, rotting crap that vultures feed off of – and the harder we make it for our noble vulture lawyers, the more disgusting, rotting crap we have to live with, hence the unbearable stench that is all around us.”

Am I Meant To Be Impressed? by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“While Google CEO Sundar Pichai will gladly say that “[Google’s] AI investments and full stack approach are lighting up every part of the business,” said “lighting up” never results in a revenue number that you can point at, because Google knows that analysts and journalists will read “Gemini Enterprise has great momentum with 40% quarter on quarter growth” — which we have no frame of reference for because Google doesn’t share its AI revenues — and clap and honk like fucking seals. Sundar Pichai knows that everybody is desperate to see him jingle his keys, and has such utter contempt for reporters, analysts, and investors that he doesn’t have to prove AI is actually doing anything. Those writing up his earnings will do it for him. ”

“Amazon’s AI revenue run rate is roughly 0.419% of the $298 billion in capex it spent on AI capex so far, or around 25% of the $5 billion it just invested in Anthropic last week. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent $293.8 billion on AI capex through its latest quarter — making its revenue run rate around 1.04% of its spend.”

“[…] most AI revenues out of Google, Microsoft and Amazon come from two companies that lose billions of dollars a year, have no path to profitability, and are only able to keep paying these companies because the companies (and investors) keep feeding them money.

“These relationships are utterly poisonous, and an intentional attempt to deceive investors and the general public.”

“Most of Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s capex is being driven into capacity mostly used by OpenAI and Anthropic, neither of whom have the money to pay without continual infusions of more capital. Only Microsoft was smart enough to realize the problem, which is why it allowed Oracle to take over the majority of OpenAI’s future capacity (which may kill Oracle, by the way!), but both Google and Amazon keep feeding Anthropic money so that Anthropic can feed it right back to them.”

“Meta Has Burned Over $150 Billion — Its AI Story Is Completely Insane Nonsense, And We Need To Stop Pretending Otherwise

“Meta is probably the funniest company in the AI bubble, in the sense that it does not appear to have anything approaching an AI strategy beyond “build as much data center capacity as possible” and “lose $4 billion a quarter selling pervert glasses.”

“I realize I sound a little dismissive, but nobody can actually explain to me what Meta is doing with AI in a way that remotely justifies it burning $158.25 billion in capex since 2023, with plans to spend as much as $145 billion in 2026 alone.”

“Unbe-fucking-lievable! Anthropic and OpenAI have now committed to over $718 billion of Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s revenues, despite the fact that neither of them can actually afford to pay for it. The market’s response? A slight (and short-lived) after-hours lift.

“Dear members of the media: these companies are laughing at you. They know you are going to cover this in a way that makes them look good. They know you’re going to use this as proof that they’re “doing well in AI,” despite the fact that the majority of their future revenue is tied up in two oafish failsons, one of which (OpenAI) plans to burn $50 billion on compute in 2026 alone.”

“ I’m sorry, WOW, Satya! You managed to get up to twenty million paying Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions — $600 million a month in revenue, not profit! — and all it took was you investing $13 billion dollars in money to OpenAI, forcing Large Language Models into every one of your products in a way that borders on harassment and about $289 billion dollars in capex, as well as laying off thousands of people and savaging the Xbox brand.”

Higher oil prices to come as reserves fall at record pace by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“It has been calculated that global airlines have cut 2 million seats from their flight schedules for May in just two weeks, with thousands of flights cancelled as a result of the doubling of the price of jet fuel.”

“Growth forecasts are being reduced significantly because of the fuel price hikes. The finance minister of Bangladesh, where inflation is already running at 8 percent, told the FT that spending on fuel was “bleeding the exchequer.”

“Thailand, the second-largest economy in Southeast Asia, has cut its growth forecast from the already historically low rate of 2 percent to 1.5 percent, with inflation expected to rise from just 0.3 percent to 3 percent.

“India, which has been touted as the world’s fastest-growing economy, has cut its growth forecast to 6.9 percent for the fiscal year which started in April, from 7.6 percent last year.”

“According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the US auto industry consumed 3.7 million metric tons of aluminium last year, a 30 percent increase from 2020. The article cited a report from S&P Global Energy that with the “global aluminium price at about $3,500 a metric ton, the tariff and delivery charges raise the US price to $6,100, compared with $3,220 a year ago.””

A revealing report on the rise and rise of private credit by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Payment in kind refers to a situation where borrowers increase the loan principal or provide the lender with equity in the firm rather than pay the interest bill in cash and is estimated to involve around 12 percent of loans.”

This is how the finance world talks to itself. It indicates that entities that are not creditworthy are getting loans. These are the private-credit equivalent of NINJA loans (No income, no job, no asset.)

“Valuation of the assets which private credit finances also poses “challenges.” This is because valuations are “often conducted less frequently and may involve significant discretion, which can amplify uncertainty during times of stress.”

“The phrase “significant discretion” is a euphemistic way of saying that in many cases there is no objective basis for valuations and these are recorded as what the borrowers say they are, according to their own calculations, which are then exposed when they undergo the test of the market.”

To paraphrase in my own way is another way of writing “there are an increasing number of assets whose value we have no plausible way of evaluating, so we’re left to take the seller’s word for it. We do this because we expect to make short-term windfalls from the high valuation, bailing out after having sold them to another sucker.”

It’s basically fraud but it’s an unregulated market, so there is no regulatory or punishment mechanism for it.

“The FSB report provides numerous examples of major problems. One of these is lack of information leading to a “reliance on private ratings estimates in the market, which are often provided by smaller lesser-known rating agencies. Opacity in credit quality can lead to informational contagion, which in turn can amplify credit related vulnerabilities.”

“A practice of credit-rating shopping has developed in which borrowers obtain better ratings from smaller agencies, anxious to increase their market share.”

This section simply provides for detail that the vaunted price-finding mechanism of the market is open to scams and manipulation in markets where there is regulation or enforcement. Private equity is no different than offshore crypto or prediction markets.

“It noted that in the changed environment of rising interest rates, “refinancing challenges may become more severe, and persistently negative cash flows often lead to escalating debt and heightened financial stress.””

We no longer have the vocabulary for defining “failed companies” as long as the owners of those companies are important people.

“There is also the problem of liquidity mismatches in which investors in private credit want to obtain their money but are unable to do so because it has been invested long term.

““Liquidity mismatches may increase going forward if managers continue offering more flexible redemption terms to attract investors, particularly retail investors.””

A “liquidity mismatch” means “we no longer have the money you loaned to us, nor is there is any halfway-plausible mechanism or path through which we will ever be able to pay you back, but we are categorically incapable of admitting that we are bankrupt or in default, so we will continue pretending that we can pay it back at some point and that the only problem is that you’ve come for your money at the wrong time, leading to a “mismatch”.

“This “to do” list is revealing because it shows that financial authorities have very little knowledge of the workings of a key part of the system over which they supposedly preside and regulate.

“This fact underscores a broader point. At present Wall Street is surging to new record highs. But underneath the surface the conditions are developing for another financial crisis which will suddenly burst over the heads of financial authorities just as happened in 2008, only in a more severe form not least because of the enormous changes in the financial system since then of which the growth of private credit is one.”

This is obvious but the important thing is that all of the right people will have increased their fortunes massively before the crash and, furthermore, the degree to which they still retain any exposure to the fallout of their plunder will be matched by subsidies, bailouts, and other forms of government largesse that allows them to come out of the financial disaster that they caused larger than ever, and with their engines revving to do it all over again.

Roaming Charges: Pity, the Poor Billionaire by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The Wall Street Journal reports that since 1976, the top 0.001% of U.S. households have seen their wealth increase by 3,500%, versus 2,200% for the top 0.01%, 1,200% for the top 0.1%, and just 200% for the average household.”

“Bloomberg News: When do oil storage tanks run empty?

“Jeffrey Currie, energy analyst at the Carlyle Group: Parts of the world, like Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, you are there. But the question is, when and where. I still say that it’s going to be sometime in the month of May that you’re going to end up with Europe hitting tank bottoms. And in the US, it’s somewhere in that July 4th time period, if not sooner. By the way, the inventory numbers coming out of the US, the ones we got last night [Tuesday], the ones last week, I’ve never seen anything like that before.””

AI’s Circular Psychosis by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“At $2.5bn a year or so, Anthropic will be effectively the entirety of xAI’s revenue, which was at around $107 million in the third quarter of 2025.

“To put this very, very simply: xAI should, in theory, have massive demand for AI compute, but its demand is apparently so small that it can flog a multi-billion-dollar data center to a competitor.

“Sightline Climate found that 15.2GW of capacity is under construction and due to be completed by the end of 2027, and at this point I’m not sure anybody can make a compelling argument as to why it’s being built or who it’s for.

“Who needs it? Who are the customers? Who is buying AI compute at such a scale that it would warrant so much construction? Where is the demand coming from if it’s not OpenAI and Anthropic?

“These questions shouldn’t be that hard to answer, but trust me, I’ve tried and cannot find a GPU compute customer larger than $100 million a year, and honestly, that customer was xAI.

“Through many hours of research, I’ve found that the vast majority — as much as 95% — of all compute demand comes from a few places:”

• Meta, for reasons that defy logic.
• Microsoft, for OpenAI’s compute.
• Google, for Anthropic’s compute.
• Amazon, for Anthropic.
• OpenAI.
• Anthropic.

“Otherwise, every data center deal you’ve ever read about is for a theoretical future customer or an unnamed “anchor tenant” that gives them “guaranteed, pre-committed occupancy” without being identified in any way.”

“Based on discussions with sources and analysis of multiple years of reporting, I estimate that of the roughly $700 billion in capex spent by Google, Meta and Microsoft since 2023, at least 5.5GW of capacity costing at least $300 billion has been built entirely for two companies. This has in turn inflated sales through multiple counterparties involving NVIDIA, ODMs like Quanta, Foxconn, Supermicro and Dell, and created a form of market-driven AI psychosis that inspired Meta to burn over $158 billion in three years and the entire world to convince itself that AI was the biggest thing ever.

“The reason that there isn’t another OpenAI or Anthropic is that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon bankrolled their entire infrastructure, fed them billions of dollars, and then charged them discount rates for their early compute, with sources telling me that Anthropic pays vastly below-market-rates for Trainium compute from Amazon, and The Information reporting that OpenAI was paying $1.30-per-A100-per hour in 2024, or at or around the cost of running them.

“By sacrificing their entire infrastructure to OpenAI and Anthropic, the hyperscalers created the illusion of demand by feeding themselves money, all while buying endless GPUs and TPUs to fill further data centers for two customers, both of whom paid discount rates that lost them money.

“This capex bacchanalia gave all three companies a massive boost to their stock prices, so they kept going, even though there wasn’t really demand other than for Anthropic or OpenAI, two companies that they had to constantly cater to with investment capital and server maintenance.”

Science & Nature

What Happened With Mars Sample Return? (I) by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars For The Rest of Us)

“One challenge for the ascent rocket is temperature. The U.S. arsenal has plenty of stubby rockets that can sit in storage for years and still fire reliably, but none of them are designed to work in conditions as cold as the Ascent Vehicle would experience on Mars. And in fact, no one has ever launched a rocket from the surface of another planet, making the Ascent Vehicle the technically riskiest link in the chain of events meant to carry the collected samples home.”

“For those keeping track, the mission includes two rovers, two orbiters, three launches from Earth, one first-time-ever launch from Mars, and a challenging treasure hunt in low Mars orbit for the Orbiting Sample, which carries no beacon and is about the size of a basketball. Two of the vehicles needed—the Earth Return Orbiter and the Sample Return Lander—would be the largest spacecraft of their kind ever built.”

“The sole purpose of this beefy team of robots was to return about 500 grams of material from Mars to Earth. But as the mission blew through its budget estimates and started looking for things to cut, the inevitable happened. NASA started reducing the number of samples the return mission would carry. Congress, lacking an appreciation for the absurd, killed the program before NASA could take the process to its logical conclusion and design a sample return mission that would come back to Earth carrying nothing. But the result was much the same.”

“Why the ultraviolet light that has been bathing the dust on the surface of Mars for four billion years is not considered adequate to do the same job is one of the many mysteries of the ‘reverse planetary protection’ protocols NASA adopted for this mission.”

The Disaster I Never Imagined Having To Worry About by Veritasium (YouTube)

00:00 The Disease Infecting Miracle Medicine
04:20 An Explosive Feud
10:05 How The Same Compound Can Behave Two Different Ways
13:18 Polymorphs Of Chocolate
19:51 Why Ritonavir Stopped Working
22:57 The Tin Pest
27:28 Disappearing Polymorphs
30:20 Is Everything Polymorphic?

Environment & Climate Change

Is Reason’s video on climate change alarmism a ‘masterclass in manipulation’? by Aaron Brown (Reason)

“Meanwhile, the activist wing of the climate movement has spent the same 50 years absorbing government money, proposing expensive coercive solutions, and attacking those who disagree with them. They get most of the airtime.”

This is where he loses me immediately. I’m supposed to believe that climate extremists are somehow holding our attention and tax dollars hostage, when it’s obvious that that have all but lost to a nationwide fleet of SUVs—only the most obvious excrescence of a society run by corporations heavily invested in fossil fuels—which we are then told is what everyone innately wants, as if propaganda and marketing didn’t exist and hadn’t built the mindset that we now deem “human nature”.

Here’s he video that he was referring to:

A Masterclass in Manipulation by Hank Green (YouTube)

This was a great and fair analysis. Aaron Brown is cited heavily throughout in order to allow him to hoist himself on his own petard.

“Aaron: As a theoretical physicist, Steven Koonin
Hank: Oh god, it’s so interesting that Steven Koonin is a theoretical physicist. So we have Bloomberg columnist being an example of climate scientists being alarmists. We have Michael Man who is a climate activist. And then we have Steven Koonin who is a theoretical physicist. Okay? Like all of these things are true, but you’re picking you’re picking which title you’re giving to people. Like you could say former oil industry executive Steven Koonin. You could say lead climate contrarian Steven Koonin. Like you could call Steven Koonin a lot of things—and theoretical physicist is certainly one of those things—but you’ve picked which one you’re going to call him whereas you’ve picked what you’re going to call Michael Mann. Honestly, if you didn’t do these little things, I would believe that you believe your BS. But you do these little things and it makes it very clear that you don’t believe your BS. You’re trying to manipulate me.”

“Aaron: Only when you express the figures as a ratio does it make it look like record
high temperatures are increasing…
Hank: Only when you express it as a ratio does it tell you anything about the world.”

“Hank: […] things getting hotter is really scary, but things getting less cold isn’t scary. And so, he’s going to focus on things getting less cold, and that’s what we’re doing here.”

“As far as I can tell, this isn’t a very good graph. Now, it is not a graph that came out of a paper. It’s a graph that came out of somebody’s Substack and then a Bloomberg columnist saw it and he was like, “Oh my god, this is a scary graph.”

“But then, if you correct the graph, it’s less scary. It is. It’s less scary. Still scary. […] When this was published, I think they only had two years of data. So 2020 and 2021 having 35% of the like world’s months that had the hottest. This is a—it’s a freaking confusing chart. Like you would never use this chart, which is why it’s never used. We’re talking about this chart being bad, but no one’s ever seen it before. I went to the guy’s Substack who published it. No one’s seen it. It had like 25 likes. We are focusing on nothing.

“So, cherrypicking is a thing that we talk about with data where you’re like, “Oh, I just want to show you like the good data.” What this guy is clearly doing, he’s cherrypicking his two least favorite graphs in a world of tens of thousands of climate charts that he could have picked out that would show a quite alarming thing going on with respect to the amount of energy in the Earth system.”

“He’s implying it in a way that you probably wouldn’t notice if you were just watching the video. That’s not so bad for there to be less cold. Why would we be worried about there being less cold? That’s kind of fine.

“No, like that is not an argument in like the problem is not that I’m going to be hot in the summer. That’s like the thing that most people think and I guess that’s fine and we can lean on that. The problem is not that I’m going to be hot in the summer or that I’m going to be less cold in the winter.

“The problem is that we have built our entire society on the climate acting a particular way. And if the climate starts to act different ways than that, we have famines. We have climate refugees. We run out of water in places. We have to like completely upend agriculture. We have infrastructure in place that we will no longer be able to use. And we have needed infrastructure in places where it isn’t. That’s the problem.

“The problem is not like just—and you’re showing a guy like a video of a guy shoveling his sidewalk. —you’re being like, “Oh my god, nobody worries about there not being cold.” That’s not that. The problem isn’t that I’m cold or hot. The problem is that our current infrastructure is built for our current climate. And if it changes quickly, it will be very bad for humans. And I’m a human and I love humans. And I think that we should do good things for them, which like creating energy is good. That’s a good thing to do for humans.

“But if we don’t put resources toward creating energy in new ways to doing things in new ways that have less impact on the climate, we’re going to have a lot of suffering. And the case you are making, the only thing we need to do is care about this. We need to care about it and we will take it on. People are amazing at solving problems, but not if we don’t recognize them. Not if we don’t think that they’re a big deal. And that’s the scariest, hardest thing about climate, right?”

“I have no doubt that we will take on the climate crisis. I just want us to be able to do it with the least amount of suffering possible. I don’t think that that means you should have existential dread. I’ve never said that. I don’t think that means that you shouldn’t have children. I don’t think that that means that there will be an apocalypse.

“I think that when things start to get a little apocalyptic, we’ll actually start to take action with the tremendous amount of resources that we have at our disposal. The richest 1% of Americans have 50 trillion dollars. And I don’t know, maybe if we left them to their own devices, they’d just build air conditioned bunkers for themselves. But I think that they want to have a society.

“And I think also we can compel them by law to help contribute to making the world livable. But not if we don’t think there’s a problem. And I understand that this is hard to like find the balance between like alarmism that pushes people into despair and rosy pictures of climate change that it just means you’ll have to shovel less, making people not think that it’s a problem at all.”

The part about compelling rich people to stop hoarding is where a Reason writer gets their hackles up. Do not interfere with the beloved rich, who have gotten rich by their own work.

“People talk about how scary geoengineering is. We’re doing it. This is geoengineering. We are adding so much energy to the Earth’s system. Like it is scary. We don’t know what it means. Is it like a 5% chance of super bad outcome? Is it a 30% chance of a super bad outcome? I don’t know. Like climate scientists work really hard on trying to answer those questions. But what they don’t say is, “Well, that is an indication that there is a problem.” But, certainly not something that we should be super alarmed about because what does that imply?

“It implies go back to your business everybody. We don’t actually need advocates in this space. We don’t actually need climate scientists working on this. We don’t need to spend money subsidizing solar or geothermal or potential next generation clean energy. We don’t need any of that. We don’t need to do these big crazy things. Everybody calm down. Go back to your business.”

“The idea that 461,000 people saw this video that is making the case that climate scientists are here to alarm you with no evidence. He cherrypicked three graphs in this video. One of them is bad. One of them I think is way better than the one he said was better. And one of them he uses again as an example of a good graph, but he makes it bad by making it more manipulative by stretching it out and then drawing a trend line over it that has nothing to do with reality. It’s embarrassing. It is an embarrassing piece of punditry. The fact that he says it all so calmly.

“And I know I have not been calm in this video. Maybe I would be more convincing if I was. I don’t feel calm though. I don’t like it when people lie to people.”

“He also will preload us with ideas like he’ll say that the the cold chart is more dramatic when it’s not. It’s like the same level of drama as the heat chart but he’s preloaded us with that idea. He chooses to emphasize low salience frames. So things you would be less worried about like there will be fewer cold days and isn’t that kind of a good thing?

“He also preloads us when he frames the experts with their titles. So this one guy is the theoretical physicist. He’s very credible. This other guy’s a climate activist. He’s not credible.

“Also he frames non-action as action. So the correct moral thing to do given this problem which does exist but isn’t that big of a deal is nothing which is huge. That’s wonderful. That means I don’t have to worry about this. How great.

“And finally—and this one sort of exists inside of the cracks—he says up front that he’s going to make the case that climate change isn’t something you really need to worry that much about and it’s mostly alarmist. And he never makes that case. He says he’s going to make it and then he gives you a bunch of information and it makes you conclude that he has made the case, but he does not.

“I’m going to make a case right now real quick, which is that you should care about this. It should be something that informs how you move through the world, how you vote, what you buy, what you invest in, the conversations you have with people in the world, and like straight down to the kinds of podcasts you listen to. climate change is a big deal.”

Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs”

“China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world’s energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.”

“Whereas once the case for the energy transition was driven by activists who warned people about the future consequences of inaction, Trump has summoned up a new army of people who are worried about the present consequences of inaction: such as not being able to drive your car, use your gas stove, or fertilize your crops.”

“[…] not transitioning to renewables absolutely requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are fuels, while renewables are infrastructure. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever.”

“[…] a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it’s also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world’s sixth-most abundant element […]”

“A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world. It won’t be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil). Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years after some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.”

Picnic on a Receding Glacier by Peter Bach (CounterPunch)

“There is a blue that appears where ice is dense enough to absorb every wavelength of light except the shortest.

“Not the blue of the sky or of water. It is deeper than that. It is internal. As if the glacier were lit from within by something slow and ancient.

“A student tries to photograph it and fails.

““It never looks right,” they say, scrolling through images that have flattened it into something ordinary. “It’s more…”

“They don’t finish.

“Nearby, someone finally unwraps the strawberries. The red is uncomplicated. Immediate. They are eaten quickly, before they warm.

“This one glacier presently loses several metres of thickness each year.

“This is measured. Cross-checked. Published. The numbers grow with a clarity that resists metaphor.

“And still, people come. They lay out their blankets.

“Not in denial of the data, but in its presence.

“As if beauty—especially when it becomes precarious—requires witness.”

Medicine & Disease

The MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak and the threat of another pandemic by Evan Blake (WSWS)

“This strain of hantavirus carries a 38–40 percent case fatality rate, roughly 40 times that of COVID-19. There is no FDA-approved vaccine, no specific antiviral treatment, and an incubation period that can extend up to eight weeks before symptoms emerge. No one knows how many infections this cluster has already produced.”

“An examination of the sequence of events that have led to this crisis exposes the catastrophic undermining of public health and scientific infrastructure that has taken place during the pandemic. Capitalist society is even less prepared today than it was in 2020.”

“The index (first) case, a Dutch man in his seventies, developed fever on April 6 and died aboard ship overnight on April 11.

“The ship’s doctor took no samples and ordered no isolation. The captain told passengers the next morning: “Whatever health issues he was struggling with, I’m told by the doctor, were not infectious, so the ship is safe when it comes to that. The ship is safe.” The body was kept aboard for thirteen days while the itinerary continued. “We again kept eating all together,” a passenger later told AFP, “and we didn’t wear any masks.”

“On April 24 the Hondius docked at Saint Helena, the site of Napoleon’s exile. The index case’s wife disembarked, was pushed past in a wheelchair, and boarded a flight to Johannesburg. She deteriorated mid-flight and died in Johannesburg on April 26.”

“[…] 30 disembarkees had dispersed by commercial flight to twelve countries with no testing, no quarantine and no notification.

“A German woman died aboard the Hondius on May 2. A British physician who cared for one of the cases is in intensive care. A Swiss passenger surfaced in Zurich twelve days after disembarking, identified only because Oceanwide eventually emailed disembarked passengers. The WHO was not informed under the International Health Regulations until May 2—three weeks after the first death and six days after the second. Returning passengers were given no isolation guidance. How far this has already spread, no one knows.”

“The same fascistic war on science is unfolding internationally—Milei in Argentina, where this hantavirus emerged and where CONICET has been gutted; Meloni in Italy, the AfD in Germany. None of this began with Trump’s second term. The Democratic Party, the Labour government in Britain, and social democratic parties across Europe have been junior partners in the assault on public health for six years.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

A wall of books supposedly by someone named J.B. Turner

It truly is a grand new age of literature when an author can not only “write” not one but 20 masterpieces in an afternoon, not only make most of the book titles incorporate the word “hard” as a through-line, but can also have their oeuvre be promoted throughout the world by a multi-trillion-dollar company.

I am left wondering whether it even matter in which order you read them. Do they even exist as books? Is it even possible to read through these books in a coherent, rewarding way?

What even is the point of it all? A human author generally feels a subjective drive to tell a story for a subjective reason, arising from a consciousness with wants and desires.

A machine has none of that, has no sensorium, no memories, no qualia … nothing. What is the point of a book that has no story to tell? Is it people have forgotten—or never learned—what it is like to read a book that lets you very much know that a human author was behind it?

I’m reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons, which is spectacularly rich and evanescent with humanity, but anything by Murakami also springs to mind.

Another wall of nearly indistinguishable books

This wall-o-books ostensibly contains books by different authors but are they really? What’s the difference to wall-o-books by only J.B. Turner immediately above? Is any of this stuff even real anymore? Will any of it impart a look into the window of a human mind, of human experience? Will any of it surprise and delight? Or is it stuff that is sufficient for inspiring a dollop of dopamine?

If you’re wondering why my Kindle UI is in German, it’s because that’s the only way to force the clock to use military time. This is a tragic statement about the state of UIs and configurability in this day and age, of course. We seem to forget more and more as we reinvent everything over and over.

We Bought an Orchestra by Jeffrey Arlo Brown (The Baffler)

“In 2012, Alexey Kononenko, a former mathematician at the mysterious hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, began a career as a composer. Despite never having learned to play an instrument, a rudimentary grasp of music theory, and a ratio of inspiration to imitation that would embarrass a large language model, Kononenko, who goes by the stage name Alexey Shor, has had his works performed all over the world by many of its best musicians. Shor has bankrolled a dizzying array of concerts, festivals, and competitions. The catch is that they must all include Shor’s own works.”

“The aesthetic consequences are even more depressing. As Quasha and her ilk build a parallel classical music system where cash is king, meritocracy loses its place as the field’s ideal. That confirms what skeptics have always suspected—that classical music is less ravishing art than playground for the elite. It’s vertiginously unfair to the many young conductors plying their trade with real ability under incredible pressure for almost no money in the hopes that their ability will someday allow them to survive. But it’s also bad news for us listeners. The music made under this system is so much worse than the one where the rich stay in the background, and the best musicians rise, however unevenly, to the top. Oligarchy ruins everything, even Brahms’s First Symphony—assuming we get on the guest list to hear it in the first place.”

Hawai’ian Music Is American Music by Mary Cadwalladr (The Hinternet)

“Among the most problematic of cultural productions, from the perspective of the Hawai’ian Renaissance activists and culture-shapers, was Hapa haole music, literally “half foreign”, which emerged at the time of the San Francisco Exposition, featured steel guitar and ukuleles, and a mixture of English- and Hawai’ian-language lyrics, often describing light-hearted scenes of pleasure and sensuality in a mostly history-free, and mostly imaginary, island utopia.”

“Since 1970 what has happened is that another great island musical tradition, from Jamaica, has moved in to play a comparable role in its hybridism with commercial pop styles. This was likely made possible, at least in the US, by the perception that it is less problematic simply to import one’s island music from a different imperial legacy; for as long as we enjoy our own imperial island music, we have to hold at least somewhere in the back of our heads the question whether that imperial history is “good”; as long as it’s someone else’s empire, it’s much easier to appear wise in saying that it is neither good nor bad, but “just is”.”

“These reflections all began for me about a year ago, really, when I started wondering why we think of the steel lap guitar as quintessentially country, even if many of us have some vague awareness of its earlier history. Why, that is, was the steel lap guitar so fully denatured and reinvented for a different musical idiom? This led me eventually to wondering why the Honolulu airport is not named for Sol Ho’opi’i, and whether, if it had been, we might not be better able to hear country music for what it is: an American style that since the early recording industry has successfully absorbed the vernacular forms of every corner of the American empire.”

“And these themes were there because history had compelled America to find a way to express, in art, the successful absorption of the American Pacific into our shared culture. Because California had itself only recently undergone a similar and by no means obvious historical process, and because it is Hawai’i’s closest continental neighbor —indeed it is where Queen Liliʻuokalani went into exile, and where, before her death in 1917, she probably heard her own “Aloha ‘Oe” performed, out of context, on at least a few occasions—, it is normal that it should fall to a quintessentially Californian artist like Brian Wilson to work out not just the essence of California in music, but the essence of Pacific America.”

“To avoid the creative output of Hawai’i in the period broadly between annexation and statehood simply because the art bears the marks of compromise with a ruthless historical reality is really no different from Adorno’s dismissal of jazz. Jazz is American genius at its purest and finest, and Adorno was wrong about it. He was right about horoscopes, he was right about almost everything in fact. But he was wrong about jazz.”

STORM by GENER8ION and Yung Lean (YouTube)

Cool video. Great ensemble dancing starting at about 04:30.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Self and Selfishness (On Liberalism) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Going back to my own tradition, my government name is Indrajit, meaning son of Ravana. Ravana is commonly known (in India) as a demon, as a villain. Yet in cyclical Hinduism, there are no permanent villains. In the longer telling, Ravana was once Rama/Vishnu’s servant, and by dying at his hand, Ravana was returned to heaven. If you rewind three past lives, Ravana was the celestial doorman Jaya, who by blocking the baby-sages–the Sanat Kumaras—was cursed to a fate equivalent to death, being reborn as a mortal (the worst).”

“At some level the White Empire wants to die, and Iran, Russia, and China if they ever get around to it are putting them out of their misery. And at some level their hearts have to be hardened (or their brains, at least, retarded) to make it go faster. If ‘America’ did the logical thing and traded rather than tiraded they could be treated like an elder statesmen (entirely undeservedly) for another century. But instead they want to rage, rage, against the dying of the White, whiting themselves out in decades, as abject villains, condemned as worse than the Nazis. Choosing the shorter route of a few bad births, to be reborn in some other form.”

“I know there are people walking the earth today that may be reduced to statistics tomorrow (may their God receive them with honor). I know that better men than me clean their rifles, while I rifle through theory, idle. I fear that somewhere, soon, will be rubble and take cheer that someday, near, Empire will be in trouble. But no one knows where or who. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, as John [Donne] said, it tolls for you. Or as Hemingway said in the eponymous novel, “If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and [yet] I hate very much to leave it.””

“Western liberalism is not about the self, but selfishness. Who gets to be a self? Who gets the right to self-defense? This is the central contradiction of liberalism, so much so that it’s not really a contradiction, it’s just central. ‘Israelis’ get selves that must be mourned, whereas Palestinians get torture cells and must be bombed. ‘Israelis’ get to pre-emptively bomb everyone in ‘self-defense’ whereas the natives are terrorists if they dare resist. This is really classical liberalism. Rights for Whites and might for everyone else. They’ve always been like this. This is not some flaw in liberal democracy. This is working exactly as intended.”

“As Montesquieu said, “It is impossible for us to assume that these people are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians.””

“Trump’s logic for a ‘Gaza Riviera’ is Locke’s logic just with stupided words. Locke said “God gave the World to Men in common; but since he gave it them for their Benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational.” This is what Trumps son-outlaw Jared Kushner meant when he said, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods… It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.””

“What is he saying here? Nothing crazy really, this is standard liberalism. What Benjamin Franklin said in his autobiography, “if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed Means. It has already annihilated all the Tribes who formerly inhabited the Seacoast.” Again and again, these are not anomalies in the liberal project! This is the whole project! See what they did, and also see them still doing it!”

“Locke’s selfish idea of ‘men’ doesn’t included colored men or any women, just as Kushner’s idea of ‘people’ doesn’t include Palestinians. This is by design. Citizenship since the Greeks has always meant in-groups with rights and out-groups ruled by might. If you’re White, this is just right. This is just the background logic of White Empire, which goes unnoticed like the white of this page, and bro, I need you to know, they haven’t changed.”

“The central premise of liberalism is and was not some abstract self but a very real selfishness. Very precious property rights in the imperial core, including the right to make property of people across the globe, and to genocide and assassinate anyone that says no. Very precious speech rights (as long as you say what you’re supposed to), which is the casual idea that this or that government should be overthrown, or that these natives are ‘illegal’ and should be thrown out; basically to hate who you’re supposed to. Your love of the Empire is not necessary. Your selfishness will do.”

A Few More Thoughts On AI And Consciousness by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Chatbots having the ability to mimic the appearance of cognitive behavior is not an adequate reason to believe they might be conscious, because no matter how many thoughts they appear to generate or how brilliant those thoughts appear to be, there’s no evidence that there’s any experience illuminating that behavior in the same way pain is illuminated in the experience of a cat whose tail has been stepped on. It’s just the movement of unliving matter, like lightning or the wind, without any subjective experience from the viewpoint it arises from. Computing power and consciousness are not the same thing.”

Technology & Engineering

The Role of a New Machine by Dan Cohen (Humane Ingenuity)

“It’s hard to read The Soul of a New Machine in 2026 without wondering whether all this AI hype is really so new. Is AI truly more revolutionary than a previous wave of computer technology that offered, for the first time, to put screens on every desk of every company? The Data General team helped to bring about a transition not from existing software and hardware to incredibly intelligent software and hardware, or from powerful computers to superpowerful computers, but literally from paper to digital files and high-speed processing. Now that is a transition.”

The Car That Watches You Back by The Telematics Desk (Nobody Asked for This)

“Safety researchers pointed to Fitts’s Law, the principle that acquiring a touch target requires visual confirmation in a way that a physical knob with a learned position does not, and published studies showing that touchscreen-heavy interfaces increased cognitive load. The studies were accurate. The market did not care. Within a decade, a 12-inch screen was unremarkable. Mercedes-Benz developed the Hyperscreen, a 56-inch curved display spanning the full width of the EQS dashboard with three screens beneath a single piece of Gorilla Glass. The Jeep Grand Wagoneer shipped with seven screens.”

“[…] produced dashboards where a screen replaces the climate knobs, the audio controls, the seat heater buttons, and the parking brake switch, each function now two or three taps into a sub-menu. The screen was not added because it made these things easier. The screen was added because a screen is what modern things look like, and because once installed, it could be updated remotely and eventually monetized.”

“This architecture is connected internally by the CAN bus (Controller Area Network), a communications standard from the 1980s that allows a vehicle’s dozens of electronic control units to talk to each other over a shared network. The CAN bus was designed for reliability within a closed system, and it has almost no built-in authentication. When a message arrives on the bus, there is no native mechanism to verify who sent it. The assumption when the standard was designed was that nothing external would ever reach the bus. That assumption dissolved when vehicles were given cellular modems and internet-connected infotainment systems.”

“What has become clearer is that the same mechanism that delivers improvements can remove features, restrict settings, and gate capabilities behind payment, often without the owner’s agreement and sometimes without notice. Tesla removed the adjustable regenerative braking setting from its vehicles in a 2020 update, leaving drivers with a single level regardless of preference. The option partially returned in 2023. Tesla also removed Autopilot features from used vehicles, requiring new owners to repurchase capabilities the previous owner had paid for. The hardware remained, but access did not transfer with the title.”

“In July 2015, security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek sat in an office in St. Louis and remotely accessed a 2014 Jeep Cherokee being driven by journalist Andy Greenberg on a highway. Through a vulnerability in the Uconnect infotainment system, and from there to the CAN bus, they commanded the air conditioning, the radio, the windshield wipers, and the transmission. They cut the engine at highway speed and disabled the brakes in a parking lot.”

“[…] the navigation application showing the route to the next destination is displaying promoted pins placed by businesses that paid for the placement. Google Maps displays these markers along the route whether or not the driver searched for the business. Waze, also owned by Google, has displayed pop-up banners at the top of the navigation screen at red lights near sponsored locations, with a prominent “Drive There” button. Google has filed a patent for a system that would integrate the audio stream with the navigation layer, so that an advertisement heard through the car’s speakers could trigger a suggested navigation detour. The patent has not shipped. The intent is documented.”

“The only visual difference from organic results is the marker shape: squares are paid placements, circles are not.”

And Google is in no way obligated to continue showing even that subtle difference. You constantly have to consider through which filters are you obtaining your information. Which entities and which software determined the shape or content of your results? Which guardrails are you trapped between? Can you search for pornography? Can you type a curse word? Can you get straight answers about U.S. or Israeli foreign policy? Are you really driving the shortest route or is it the shortest route that takes you past the places for which sponsors have paid?

“The driver who stops at a 7-Eleven, hears a Gulp Radio ad for a product near the register, sees a GSTV ad at the pump, and then opens Google Maps navigation is moving through a single continuous advertising environment. Each transition (car to pump, pump to store, store back to car) passes through a different medium with a different operator, but the commercial logic is identical. Your attention is there, your purchase intent is measurable, your location is known, and the inventory will be sold.”

“We have covered the Roku home screen in detail: the screen that appears before you have chosen to do anything, already running full-motion video advertising, on a device you purchased, in a room you live in.

“In-vehicle advertising is being built on the same foundations. Stellantis’s Grand Cherokee pop-up was a direct, guaranteed placement: the manufacturer delivered a specific message to a specific set of vehicle identification numbers at a scheduled time, the oldest form of media buying, equivalent to a network upfront buy, except the inventory was the dashboard of a vehicle the recipient owned.”

“The CarPlay removal is the same dynamic viewed from the manufacturer’s side. GM is phasing out Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from its entire vehicle lineup by 2028. GM earned $5.4 billion from connected services in 2025. Every minute a driver spends in CarPlay is a minute the manufacturer cannot collect location data, serve its own content, or accumulate the behavioral record that feeds that revenue. The connected car data market is projected at $26.4 billion by 2030. The in-vehicle advertising market specifically is projected at $6.7 billion by 2034.”

“The fight over who controls the screen is, in part, a fight over whose ads run on it. The driver is not a participant in this negotiation.”

“Nineteen of the twenty-five (76 percent) stated they can sell personal data.. Fifty-six percent stated they can share data with government or law enforcement in response to an informal request, not a court-issued warrant. Nissan’s privacy policy reserves the right to infer drivers’ “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” and sell those inferences to third parties. BMW, Tesla, and Toyota can collect data including sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, and genetic information.

“General Motors secretly shared detailed telematics with the data broker LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which used braking patterns, acceleration, and time-of-day driving data to adjust insurance rates for drivers who had not been told their data was being sold. The program ended after a 2023 New York Times investigation. The data already shared was not recalled.”

“A 2025 study by Privacy4Cars evaluated the consumer data rights processes of 49 automotive brands against 12 criteria based on industry best practices. Only five brands scored 3.0 or above on a 5.0-point scale, meaning fewer than half of the identified best practices were adopted. Honda and Acura topped the list at 4.6 after settling with the California Privacy Protection Agency and implementing changes within weeks. Most brands scored significantly lower.”

“The Stellantis opt-out is a phone number, business hours only. The Tesla opt-out disables safety monitoring. The Toyota opt-out degrades vehicle functionality and affects warranty terms.”

“[…] the car would like a word with its advertisers, through the speakers you paid for, on the cellular connection you pay for monthly, in the cabin where the windows seal out the weather and seal in the audience.

“The consumer remedies, where they exist, are unserious. Add a Pi-Hole to the trunk. Buy a 2007 Camry. Neither scales, neither is factory-supported, and neither stops the next car you sit in from trying again.”

Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible (No One's Happy)

• Openly refuse apps, and vocally advocate for the web instead.
• Try not to install any apps if you don’t need to.
• If a service has a functioning website, use it instead.
• Revoke all permissions by default, including background location, microphone, and camera permissions for anything that doesn’t require them to function.
• Audit your installed apps. Uninstall all apps you don’t actively need.
• Treat every “download our app” prompt with skepticism.

LLMs & AI

Long-running Agents by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“The headline finding is that the metric has been doubling roughly every seven months since 2019, and their TH1.1 update earlier this year doubled the count of 8-hour-plus tasks in the eval set. If that curve holds, frontier agents complete tasks at the day scale by 2028 and the year scale by 2034.”

And then million-year scale like Deep Thought?

“Auditing 24 hours of autonomous activity is a real human-time problem. Observability and structured artifacts (PRs, commits, briefings, test runs) are how you make this tractable. Without them, you’re scrolling logs and you’ll miss what matters.”

This recommendation is a joke and will never work for any task that actually matters i.e., has real-world import or consequences. No-one will review any of this. We’ve already seen what happens. There is no quick and easy solution to quality control. Most processes just stop controlling for quality, which is why you still hear stuff like “we can’t afford testers” and “we’ll write tests at the end of the project, if there’s time.”

That is exactly what’s going to happen with content produced by LLMs. What hope should we have? We didn’t control for quality in software well enough when there was a human-produced firehose of software; now that LLMs threaten to produce a dozen times as much software, what is the likelihood that we’re all going to buckle down and really start verifying software and controlling for quality?

We still barely even know what we want, so we’ll just end up wanting whatever the LLM produces, because that’s easier than formulating requirements. We hate writing tests, so whatever the LLM-produced software ends up doing is what we will retroactively decide is what we wanted to have happened in the first place.

“Defining work crisply enough that an agent can run for a day on it is harder than doing the work yourself. The skill that’s appreciating in value isn’t writing code. It’s writing specs that survive contact with an autonomous executor.”

This is great, though, right? By the time you’re done writing a spec that will be applied by a machine that cannot learn, you will have spent as much time as you would have on writing the spec for one or more people who can. Is the automation of AI—with its attendant imprecision and requirement for verification—worth the time you invest in it?

If you get garbage out, then it’s your fault for having put garbage in. Why are we will to expend so much effort on writing specifications for tools when we were never willing to do it for our teammates? The hope is, of course, that you can benefit from automation—but that only works for deterministic tools, where you get it right once and can then repeat it perfectly endlessly.

That’s not what we’re talking about here; we’re talking about a nondeterministic tool that you must continuously adjust and fine-tune in order to keep the performance within your established parameters. You have to figure out how to get the output consistent enough that you no longer have to verify—and correct—so much, or you can have to put the work in on verification, and hope that your yield stays high enough to make it worth it.

I don’t understand how more people don’t see this: they just see automation and assume that it’s good, even though the yields vary wildly, can change with a minor change in tooling or configuration, and for which much of the tooling and configuration is not under the control of the producer.

The assumption is thatyou must use AI or you will be driven out of business by those who do. Is this a reasonable assumption based on what we’ve seen about how these tools work? Can you build a stable process that incorporates tools like this without losing the quality that you want? Or do you assume you use the tool, and then adjust your expectations of quality to match the output that you can afford to produce with it?

Marc Andreessen shows off genius prompt, accidentally reveals he *really* doesn’t understand LLMs (Reddit)

A lot of people think that the “system prompt” is actual instructions that influence the result as if a human were reading and interpreting them.

I was wondering the other day why, if these instructions were so useful, they weren’t just part of the standard harness? The most likely answer is “they don’t actually work.” Your exhortations to “not hallucinate” or to “try harder” are just Hail Marys thrown at the ghost in the machine.

The GPU Is the New Bangalore by Oren Eini (RavenDB Blog)

“Today, instead of shipping my requirements to a dev shop overseas, I’m shipping them to a GPU somewhere. I get something back. It looks like code. It might be code. It might be a very convincing facsimile of code that will quietly fail in production under load. I genuinely don’t know until I sit down and read it carefully.

“The same discipline that separated successful offshore engagements from expensive disasters applies here as well:”

• Specification quality determines output quality. Vague prompts return vague code. The ability to articulate exactly what you want — at the right level of abstraction — is now a core engineering skill.
• Validation is non-negotiable. “It passed the vibe check” is not a code review. The reviewer needs to understand what the code is doing and why, not just that it compiles and the tests are green.
• Iterative delivery beats big-bang delivery. Nobody who survived offshoring tried to outsource an entire product in one shot. You stage it. You review at each stage. You course-correct before mistakes compound.

Sure, of course. These are the two hardest things to do: determine your use cases, your requirements, and then write specifications, and then write verifications (automated tests, preferably, or you’re not gaining anything in efficiency) that actually nail down the functionality in the specifications.

If we would do just those two things, then we’d already be doing great, software-development-wise. That’s the problem, though: those are the two tough parts.

Building the software? That’s never been the problem. Building it well, with a maintainable, extendable architecture? We know how to do that too.

Are there still heroes who over-engineer everything? Of course. But AIs do that, too. They do it even more. And you can’t stop them from doing it. You have to keep preventing them from doing it. They don’t learn. You just keep adding little prayers to your spellbook. Your spellbook doesn’t mean shit to the AI, which is running in the cloud by a corporation that views you like a parasite views a host.

“[…] for most of software history, the bottleneck was writing the code. That took time and required expensive humans. So the industry optimized heavily around it, better editors, better frameworks, and better abstractions. All in service of making the act of writing code faster and less error-prone.

“That bottleneck is collapsing. What once took six months might take six hours. When the cost of implementation approaches zero, the bottleneck moves upstream: to design, specification, and verification.”

I don’t agree that what once took six months might take six hours because it makes no sense to talk about unverified code. Unverified code might as well not exist. But that’s not true, is it? Because no-one expects anyone to continue verifying AI-generated code. So many projects don’t bother writing tests when the output was made by people, so why would they start now? Their software sucked before and it still sucks, but they’re making it much faster now. Still no tests and it’s based on shitty requirements but the users will alpha- and beta-test it for you.

That’s how you get from six months to six hours.

“[…] we already have a well-established protocol for coordinating the work of specialized, partially independent contributors on a complex system. It’s called software design.

“Module boundaries. Interface contracts. Separation of concerns. Dependency management. SOLID principles and more. These patterns exist precisely because complex systems built by multiple contributors without clear interfaces turn into unmaintainable messes. This is true whether those contributors are humans, offshore teams, or language models.”

“The answer isn’t a smarter message bus between your agents. The answer is better system design that minimizes how much the pieces need to talk to each other in the first place.

“We have literally decades of experience in how to build large software systems […]”

Empty Pockets by Remy Porter (The DailyWTF)

“[…] the kind of person who speeds on a motorcycle without a helmet isn’t doing so because they don’t understand the danger. They’ve just decided it doesn’t apply to them.”

“In a section called “The Agent’s Confession”, Jer highlights that the agent is able to identify the explicit rules that it failed to follow.”

“Read that again. The agent itself enumerates the safety rules it was given and admits to violating every one. This is not me speculating about agent failure modes. This is the agent on the record, in writing.”

“No, it is not the agent on record. I see this kind of thing a lot when people talk about LLMs. An LLM cannot explain its reasoning. It cannot go on “the record”. It cannot confess to anything. While what it plops out when asked might be interesting, it is not an explanation. The only explanation is that it’s a powerful statistical model trying to create a plausible string of tokens! It’s simply looking at its context window and your prompt and trying to predict what it should say. It can tell you what rules it violated not because it understands the rules or knows it violated any rules, but because those rules are in its context window.”

“[…] the documentation is actually quite explicit about what those guardrails guarantee. If you’re using a first-party tool, it will prohibit unsafe operations. When using 3rd party MCPs, like Railway’s, the only guardrail is that it requires human approval for every action- unless you update your allowlist for that MCP. If you put them in your allowlist, the guardrails go away. Jer argues that tools should enforce more protection against LLM behaviors, but the problem with that is people- like the PocketOS team- turn those protections off. And like a lot of safety mistakes, they can get away with it all the way up until the point where they can’t.”

“This is not an anti-AI post, or even a “get a load of this asshole” post. It is a “understand the damn tools you’re using” post. Be critical of them. Don’t trust them. Ever. Especially LLMs, because the worst part of an LLM is that it takes away the one thing computers used to be good at: predictable, deterministic behavior. But not just LLMs: don’t trust your cloud provider, don’t trust your infrastructure manager. Dig into them and understand how they work, and if they seem to[o] complicated to understand, th[e]n they may be too complicated to trust.”

Programming

Architecture by Autocomplete by Christian Ekrem

“Here’s roughly what an AI tends to hand you:”

function confirmOrder(orderId: string, customerEmail: string, total: number) {
  if (!customerEmail.includes("@")) throw new Error("bad email");
  if (total <= 0) throw new Error("bad total");
  // …
}

“And here’s what someone who’s actually thought about the domain writes:”

type Email = { readonly _tag: "Email"; readonly value: string };
type OrderId = { readonly _tag: "OrderId"; readonly value: string };
type PositiveAmount = {
  readonly _tag: "PositiveAmount";
  readonly value: number;
};

function confirmOrder(
  orderId: OrderId,
  customerEmail: Email,
  total: PositiveAmount,
): Confirmed<Order> {
  // …
}

“[…]

“The second version cost the developer thirty seconds and a handful of keystrokes. What did those keystrokes buy? They froze a piece of theory into a form the compiler enforces. An email is not a string. An order ID and a customer email cannot be transposed by a tired junior at 4am. A total is positive by construction, and if it isn’t, this code never runs in the first place.

“Each of those types is a fragment of the program’s theory in Naur’s sense, encoded somewhere a future maintainer (human or otherwise) cannot ignore. The first version’s theory lives in the head of whoever wrote it. In this case: nobody. The second version’s theory lives in the type signature, where my future self can still read it.”

“GitClear’s report on 153M lines of code put numbers on it. Copy-pasted lines climbed from 8.3% in 2020 to 12.3% in 2024 — and for the first time in the dataset’s history, copy/paste exceeded moved (refactored) code within a commit. Code churn (lines reverted or rewritten within two weeks of being authored) is projected to roughly double from its pre-AI baseline. CodeRabbit’s State of AI vs Human Code Generation report — a review of 470 open-source pull requests — found AI-coauthored PRs shipped with about 1.7x more issues overall and 2.74x more XSS vulnerabilities than human-only PRs.”

“A type like NonEmptyList<Confirmed<Order>> is interesting because it encodes what can’t happen. The list isn’t empty. The order isn’t tentative. The compiler will refuse to run code that violates either constraint.

“To invent a type like that, you have to model the negative space of the domain. You have to know what shouldn’t be representable, where the impossible lives, which transitions a real order can never take. None of that is anywhere in a training corpus, because training data is the record of what was written. It can’t be the record of what couldn’t have been written.

“When a senior dev reaches for a sum type or a smart constructor, that’s the theory becoming visible. The compiler now enforces it. A future reader inherits it for free, at compile time, even after the original author has forgotten what they were thinking when they wrote it.”

Programming Still Sucks. by Steven Langbroek

“You were an engineer once. You remember what a code review was for. You remember being the junior whose first PR got shredded by a senior who took the time to explain why. You didn’t wake up one morning in 2024 and decide to abolish that.

“What happened was: the runway got cut. The board meeting didn’t have the word “values” in it anywhere. The CFO had a spreadsheet. The CEO had come back from an offsite where someone had shown him a demo of an agent writing a whole feature in fourteen minutes, and he had believed it (the way people believe things when they want to believe them) and he had told the board he could cut thirty percent of engineering by Q2. Now it was your job to figure out how.”

“[…] you’d been the engineer who had to clean up after the last leader who’d been sold a simple answer. You’d watched Goodhart’s Law eat velocity metrics, story points, test coverage; every number a non-engineer had ever been handed as proof the work was going well. You knew the DORA metrics were already telling you what happens to deployment stability when you add tooling faster than you add judgment. You knew what happens to a codebase when the people who’d catch the errors get pushed out, or learn to stop catching them.

“You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who’d fix it later once things stabilized.

“Later is never.”

“There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren’t valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we’ll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember.”

“She’s not the safest person in the industry. She’s the shape of what you cannot touch. She is every piece of institutional knowledge your transformation just deleted, walking around in a fifty-five-year-old body. She came up through the apprenticeship you abolished: Ben, 1998, the USB stick. She is the pipeline. When she dies, the thing that produces people like her is already gone. You killed it three years ago. You will not be able to hire her replacement, because you broke the machine that makes her.”

“AI didn’t take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask.”

Appearing Productive in The Workplace (No One's Happy)

“I have a colleague, a careful and intelligent person in a role that is not engineering, who spent two months earlier this year building a system that should have been designed by someone with formal training in data architecture. He used the tools well, by the standards by which use of the tools is currently measured. He produced a great deal of code, a great deal of documentation, a great deal of what looked, to anyone who did not know what to look for, like progress. He could not, when asked, explain how any of it actually worked. The work was wrong from the first day. The schemas, and more importantly the objectives, were wrong in a way that would have been obvious to anyone with two years in the field.”

“The tool did not make him a worse colleague. It made him able to impersonate, for months, a discipline he had never trained in, and the impersonation was good enough that the institutional incentives all bent toward letting him continue. Perhaps it’s a failure of management, but I have been finding management to be so eager to embrace AI that they’re willing to accept the risk.”

“[…] you have overconfident, novices able to improve their individual productivity in an area of expertise they are unable to review for correctness. What could go wrong?”

“The skills of producing work and judging it were deliberately distinct, but accomplishing the work itself used to teach the judgment. The first skill now belongs, in large part, to the machines. The second still belongs to us, though fewer are bothering to acquire or utilize it.

“The architectural critique that used to come from someone who was taught, or who had built and broken three of these before now comes from a model with no embodied memory of building or breaking anything. The slowness was not a tax on the real work; the slowness was the real work. It was how the work got good, and how the people producing the work got good, and how the firm whose name was on the work could promise the client that what they were buying was a particular kind of thing rather than a generic one.

“The current generation of agentic systems is built around the premise that the human is the bottleneck — that the loop runs faster and cleaner without the awkward delay of someone reading what is about to happen and deciding whether it should.”

“Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive. The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about. Each individual decision to elongate seems rational, and each is independently rewarded — readers are more confident in longer AI-generated explanations whether or not the explanations are correct [5]. The collective effect is that the signal in any given workplace is harder to find than it was before any of this began.”

“The pipeline of future experts is thinning from both ends. The work that used to teach judgment is now done by the tool, and the entry-level roles where the teaching happened are being cut on the theory that the tool can do the work. What this is causing, in many offices including mine, is a great deal of motion and very little of what motion used to create.”

“[…] the same dynamic playing out inside organizations: time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed.”

“What discipline looks like, in this environment, is almost embarrassingly old-fashioned and may seem obvious to most of you until you try to avoid it. Use the tool where you can verify precisely what it produces. Never ask a model for confirmation; the tool agrees with everyone, and an agreement that costs the agreer [sic] nothing is worth nothing.

“Generative AI does well on tasks where feedback is fast, where being approximately right is good enough, where the human remains the final arbiter. Drafting a memo, generating examples, summarizing material the reader could verify if they cared to. The University of Illinois Generative AI guidance and the PLOS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules paper on AI in research, among the more careful documents now circulating, list much of this explicitly: brainstorming, copyediting, reformulating one’s own ideas, pattern detection in data one already understands.

“In every recommended use, the human supplies the judgment and the tool supplies the throughput. This is a stronger position than human-in-the-loop. The tool sits outside the work, contributing where invited and silent otherwise, which is the opposite of what most agentic systems are now being built to do.

“For firms, the competitive advantage of a firm whose work can be trusted has not disappeared; it has, if anything, appreciated, because so many of the firm’s competitors are quietly converting themselves into content-generation pipelines and counting on the client not to notice.”

“The firms still doing the work properly will be in a position to charge for it. The firms that have hollowed themselves out will discover that what they hollowed out was the thing the client was paying for.”

“In many of the rooms I now find myself in, expertise has been asked to look the other way: to deliver faster, produce more, integrate the tools more deeply, get out of the way of the colleagues who are “getting things done”. The artifacts are accumulating; the work [value] is not.”

“If you take one thing away, take away that people are impressionable creatures.”

Programming Sucks by Peter Welch in 2014 (Still Drinking)

Man, not much of this article has changed. It’s actually gotten more true with the advent of slop and enshittification.

“Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.”

“Here are the secret rules of the internet: five minutes after you open a web browser for the first time, a kid in Russia has your social security number. Did you sign up for something? A computer at the NSA now automatically tracks your physical location for the rest of your life. Sent an email? Your email address just went up on a billboard in Nigeria.

“These things aren’t true because we don’t care and don’t try to stop them, they’re true because everything is broken because there’s no good code and everybody’s just trying to keep it running. That’s your job if you work with the internet: hoping the last thing you wrote is good enough to survive for a few hours so you can eat dinner and catch a nap.”

Design

Handy CSS layout patterns, and fun ways to elevate them by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

Kevin shows how to make very sophisticated, responsive layouts—“fluid, intrinsic, and responsive design patterns”—for which a lot of people would reach for JavaScript but for which CSS has long since acquired powerful and concise syntax that does it all with no trade-offs: it’s declarative syntax that the browser applies as efficiently as possible, using built-in logic.

00:00 − Introduction
00:20 − overscroll scroller
05:05 − auto-grid and preventing overflow with it
09:30 − adaptive layouts with container queries
13:09 − CSS Demystified
13:53 − bonus: scooped corners
15:08 − bonus: overscroll animation with scroll-driven animation

Sports

What Ethiopian running says about the limits of human ability by Michael Crawley (Aeon Essays)

“In 2025, athletes from Ethiopia and the nearby East African nations of Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Tanzania filled 69 and 74 of the top-100 spots in the World Athletics marathon rankings for men and women, respectively. This is an extraordinary level of dominance, with few parallels in global sport. In these countries, distance running expertise is seen as something that is intuitive, learnt from others, honed through experience, and deeply dependent upon a group training dynamic. Increasingly, though, this approach goes against the grain of cutting-edge sports science, which advocates the monitoring of an ever-increasing number of physiological variables and individualised, precisely engineered training.”

“More and more athletes are relying on this biomarker [glucose], along with heart rate – a more established but sometimes less reliable marker of physiological strain – to guide the precise speeds and intensities at which they perform their individual training. It’s not uncommon for elite distance runners to pause every few reps in a session to take a blood sample to calibrate their paces, speeding up or slowing down for the next few reps, even by just a few seconds, depending on what the test reveals.”

“Such control and precision are exactly at odds with the Ethiopian valuation and management of their energy. A tailored, individualised management of physical energy is necessarily non-social, while in Ethiopia, the important properties of energy are that it is understood to be a limited substance that must be carefully monitored and protected. It is understood to be a ‘transbodily’ substance – that is, it can flow between people, as well as between people and their environments.”

“While many have assumed that East African athletes’ success comes ‘naturally’, or is derived almost automatically from the advantages of genetics or altitude – there is a huge amount of expertise about endurance running in Ethiopia. It is not ‘old school’ at all, but more refined, built upon decades of cumulative knowledge. It just can look a little different to Western sports science: less about lab testing and utilising data, and more about creating a balance in training between different kinds of environmental conditions and learning to share energy with others.”

Fun

Capitol Tour Guide Keeps Pointing Out Hidden Spots With Uninterrupted Sight Lines (The Onion)

Taking Advantage Of Other People Was The Best Financial Decision I Ever Made by Trent Ralston (The Onion)

“[…] the most important thing I learned didn’t come from any expert. It was a lesson I had to teach myself—that the key to financial success lies in taking advantage of others.”

“Many of us fall into the habit of treating those around us—friends, family, coworkers—with respect. Unfortunately, this all-too-common practice can be devastating to our financial wellness. The good news is that our prospects improve dramatically as soon as we learn to see other people as nothing but tools for our personal gain.”

“Did you know you can borrow money from somebody and just never pay it back? The benefits of this approach are seemingly endless. Back when I was married, I used to take out loans from my father-in-law all the time, and I never dreamed of repaying him. I mean, what was he going to do about it? Sue his own daughter’s family?”

“I know some of you out there are thinking this all sounds too good to be true. You ask: How can this be? How can taking advantage of everyone you meet possibly be the secret to long-term financial security? I’ll answer your question with a question: How the fuck do you think billionaires do it?”

not doing stupid things saves us all from dying by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

“i changed one (1) breaker in one (1) breaker box with the help of my father, who is a retired electrical engineer, and when I commented that he was maybe being overly cautious with a breaker box whose master breaker was off, he said “first, never trust anything is off. and second, all the people who mess with electricity who weren’t overly cautious are dead now””