Links and Notes for May 29th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• 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

When I paid $200 for 3 bags of groceries today, I …ey're having a UFC fight on the White House lawn.'

When a friend sent me this, I was reminded that I’d wanted to send them an aerial shot I’d seen of what remains of the White House after they plastered a UFC arena right in front of the White House and then there’s gigantic eyesore of the ballroom construction site right next to it but then I couldn’t find it and I realized that it doesn’t matter because we both already know how awful and stupid it all looks and how it’s just so fitting that this is where we are now, watching what we thought was just a stupid reality TV star shredding the U.S. empire to bits but also just keeping on being a real-estate developer with the decorative sensibilities of a meth addict until he draws his last breath.

I guess we gotta hit bottom before we can push off and go up for air. Hope it’s soon.

The Theatre of Punishment by Vijay Prashad (ZNetwork)

“Ben Gvir’s rhetoric reveals the depth of this political culture. He speaks of Palestinians not as a people with rights but as a demographic threat to be controlled and contained. In this worldview, solidarity itself becomes criminal. Humanitarianism is recast as terrorism. International law becomes an inconvenience. The flotilla activists were therefore dangerous not because they carried weapons but because they carried testimony. They threatened to expose the architecture of siege before a global audience.”

“Colonial systems frequently attempt to criminalise leadership because organised political consciousness poses a threat greater than spontaneous unrest. A people without leadership can be fragmented. A people without political memory can be managed.”

“To understand Ben Gvir, one must move beyond the comforting fiction that he is an aberration. He is not an interruption in Israeli political history, but is one of its logical outcomes. Ben Gvir did not emerge from nowhere. He is the product of decades of radicalisation within sections of Israeli society shaped by settler colonialism, militarisation, and ethno-nationalist ideology.”

“[…] history also reminds us that systems built upon permanent domination eventually confront crises of legitimacy. Colonial regimes often appear invincible until suddenly they do not. French Algeria seemed permanent. South African apartheid appeared deeply entrenched. Portuguese colonialism in Africa looked immovable. Repression contains contradictions, violence generates resistance, and humiliation produces solidarity.”

“The question now is whether the international system will continue to normalise such brutality, or whether global public opinion will finally recognise that what is unfolding is not merely a conflict between two equal sides, but a struggle over the basic meaning of freedom, dignity, and humanity itself.”

They will only do so if doing so becomes personally lucrative. They certainly won’t do it out of principle or human decency. They don’t care about anything but themselves.

Stop Blaming Netanyahu, Stupid… by Jamal Kanj (CounterPunch)

“The organized political opposition, in Israel’s “Jewish democracy,” offers no alternative vision to the current strategy. They differ only on tactics, not on core objectives. This is not a political system straining against its leader’s extremism, it is one that produced it. They come from the same lot of political culture shaped by victimhood narratives, conditioned by fear and hatred toward non-Jews. It is the “democratic” political system that has always, across parties and across decades, chosen the same destructive path.”

Historiker Ilan Pappe: „Israel war schon immer der Ansicht, dass es die arabische Welt beherrschen muss“ by Gwenaëlle Lenoir (NachDenkSeiten)

“Golda Meir sagte dies 1948 in Haifa, nachdem Israel die ethnische Säuberung der Stadt durchgeführt hatte. Auf die Frage eines Journalisten: „Glauben Sie nicht, dass das, was Sie hier sehen, den Pogromen gegen die Juden in Osteuropa ähnelt?“, antwortete sie: „Ja, es macht mich sehr traurig, das zu sehen, und wir werden den Palästinensern niemals verzeihen, dass sie uns dazu zwingen, ihnen das anzutun.“”

“Heute können die Palästinenser aus Gaza nirgendwohin gehen, während die Hälfte des Gazastreifens leer und vollständig von Israel kontrolliert ist. Sie haben keinerlei Schutz und sind weiterhin mit den anhaltenden israelischen Militäroperationen konfrontiert. Es gibt eine Eskalation in Bezug auf Unmenschlichkeit, Barbarei und den Willen, die Bevölkerung offen zu dezimieren – und nicht nur, sie zum Weggehen zu zwingen. Ich glaube, die aktuelle Situation ist viel besorgniserregender als während der Nakba im Jahr 1948. Denn 1948 konnten die Menschen, obwohl sie alles verloren hatten, ihr Leben wieder aufbauen – in den Flüchtlingslagern, in der Diaspora, im Westjordanland, im Gazastreifen. Heute sind sie von Auslöschung bedroht. Es ist möglich, dass Israel diesen Völkermord nicht vollenden kann, aber das Leiden ist unermesslich.”

“Glauben Sie, dass wir gerade die letzte Phase des Zionismus erleben? Ja. Aber als Historiker muss ich darauf hinweisen, dass sich die letzte Phase eines historischen Prozesses über 20 oder 30 Jahre erstrecken kann. Ich spreche nicht von einem Zeitraum von fünf oder sechs Jahren ab heute. Ich erwarte keinerlei grundlegende Veränderung innerhalb Israels, leider.”

An Anarchist Defense of the Cuban Revolution by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“While America’s now ancient embargo tightens into a downright medieval siege and the grid goes black for weeks on end from Havana to Santiago, Donald Trump is on the losing end of an epic war binge and in desperate need of a relatively cheap win. In a way his decision to lash out at Cuba takes this rampage full circle. Much of Cuba’s current predicament was precipitated by Trump’s Blitzkrieg helicopter coup against their largest trading partners in the Maduro’s Venezuela. But since that suspiciously easy victory, our own dear leader has blown multiple limbs off his own regime with his Zionist provoked clusterfuck in Iran.”

“[…] what Cuba is going through right now isn’t a communist crisis. If that were true, then Vietnam would be in the dark with them right now rather than picking up momentum as a market socialist powerhouse. No, the source of Cuba’s economic woes is and always has been purely imperialist in nature. Cuba’s grid didn’t go dark until America took their largest trading partners in Caracas hostage, but this was only the latest blow in one of the longest shadow wars of the last century.

“Cuba has been existing beneath the weight of one of the most suffocating blockades in modern memory for over 66 years now. All part of a much larger and more violent campaign launched by the United States of America, not in the name of democracy but in the name of bringing Cuba back under our thumb where it belongs.”

“The Cuban Revolution was never given the opportunity to move beyond this first objective and, unless America ends its long, dark war against the Cuban people, I fear it never will.”

Norman Finkelstein: Palestinians Tried EVERYTHING before October 7th − A Slave's Case for Resistance by MintPress News (YouTube)

Norman Finkelstein on the Insane Racism of Israeli Society and the Plan to Erase Gaza by Current Affairs | Nathan J. Robinson (YouTube)

This is another brilliant interview with Norman.

From about 01:20:00,

“For me, the question is not what I’m committed to. I’m not committed. I’m not committed to one state. I’m committed to no states. I remain an old-fashioned ‘the international shall be the human race.’ But then, politics is essentially about one thing. It’s assessing what’s the maximum you can extract from a given situation with a given balance of forces or where balance of forces is headed.”

From about 01:45:00,

“Hamas did things that legally are indefensible on October 7th. And my view was and still is that you have to acknowledge that crimes of a significant magnitude occurred on October 7th.

“But, in my opinion, that doesn’t bind you to condemning Hamas, which I refuse to do. And I refuse to do it for a very simple reason. You know what the simple reason is? I spent the past 15 years reading the human rights reports on what was done to those people and I find it very difficult to from above scold them and lecture them about human rights.

“Just as the abolitionists in our country did not condemn Nat Turner, who committed a very bloody revolt. His order number one was quote, “Kill all white people.” But when you read the abolitionist statements, they say nothing about what Nad Turner did except to say it was horrible. They say horrible crimes occurred. Nobody. Blood curdling crimes occurred. We’re not going to deny that. Women were hacked to death. Babies were actually beheaded in that case. They said they turned to white people and they said, “We warned you. We warned you. We warned you. You treat people this way, then you reap what you have sown.”

“It was inevitable. It was going to happen. it was going to happen. You can’t do what you did to those people. Lock them up in a concentration camp where they’re born into it. They languish in it and they’re destined to die in it and not think that something like that’s not going to happen. It was just what the abolitionist said. We warned you. We warned you. We warned you that if you treat people this way, this is what’s going to happen. And that’s my view. I won’t condemn them. I will not condemn. ”

Why Didn’t You Hear About Starob*lsk? by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The 100 Days)

“Per The Washington Post, some Russian officials said the decision to pound Ukraine with nearly 700 bombs in a single night was a response to something, but the Russians “did not provide details.”

“Really? They didn’t hold an entire UN Security Council meeting to air their grievances?

“In what feels like an unrelated segue, The Post then mentions recent Russian claims that a drone attack on a dormitory killed 21 people. (If they had been 21 Americans, they would have been described as 21 teenagers studying to teach elementary school, but I guess we’ll take 21 generic “people.”) That statement is immediately followed by a carefully worded denial and a claim Ukraine instead struck “a drone command unit.””

“An official summary of the UN Security Council emergency meeting shows that representatives of China, the United States and many other nations urged Russia and Ukraine to re-dedicate to peace, and to avoid targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure. (Which is ironic since the U.S. security services are so deeply implicated in that exact targeting.)

“But other nations, including in particular the United Kingdom, France, Latvia and Denmark, all expressed skepticism about Russia’s claims about Starob*lsk and said they would need an independent investigation to verify them; while Lativa and Great Britain in particular added that this was impossible in Russia-controlled territories.

“In response, Russia immediately organized a May 25 press junket to the site. It was led by Russian Human Rights Commissioner Yana Lantratova and attended by more than 50 foreign journalists.”

Journalism & Media

Ceasefire Rages Across Middle East (Babylon Bee)

“With ongoing hostilities breaking out in Iran and Lebanon, eliciting retaliatory strikes against Israel and U.S. military targets in the region, geopolitical experts confirmed that ceasefire continued to rage across the Middle East.”

Even the Babylon Bee is—perhaps inadvertently—reporting the provocation and retaliation accurately.

Israel Could Solve Its PR Problem By Simply Ceasing To Be Evil by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Ackerman is arguing that AI chatbots are useful because instead of “honestly representing what’s in the data” they are saying whatever their owners tell them to say, which means the owners of AI companies can simply be pressured to make the chatbots say pro-Israel things. She is saying this gives “Jewish people” (her words, not mine) an opportunity for “correcting the digital world” (her words, not mine) in a way that is more efficient than “trying to control the whole world” (her words, not mine).”

“If I wanted people to stop hating my favorite country for committing war crimes and genocide, I personally would simply encourage that country to stop committing war crimes and genocide.

“I would not try to solve the problem by waging psy-ops and information warfare.

“I would not try to solve the problem by lobbying governments to ban criticism of my favorite country.

“I would not try to solve the problem by claiming that anyone who criticizes my favorite country is a Nazi.

“[…]

“I feel like doing these things would only make people hate my favorite country more. I think people would get sick of my favorite country’s supporters constantly trying to manipulate their minds and assaulting their right to free expression.”

Economy & Finance

S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic by Jeremy Hsu (Ars Technica)

🎉🎉🎉

“in its final decision, the S&P Dow Jones Indices stated that “no changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF.” Even after the standard yearlong wait, SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI may struggle to deliver the consistent profitability necessary to qualify for the S&P 500.”

“By contrast, the Nasdaq stock exchange changed its rules to allow SpaceX to enter the Nasdaq-100 Index within 15 trading days as opposed to the usual three months. Similarly, the FTSE Russell index provider decided to give SpaceX and other follow-on companies accelerated entry to the Russell Top 500 Index after the close of the fifth trading day following an IPO.

“The denial of accelerated S&P 500 entry for SpaceX comes just days after Morningstar analysts described SpaceX as having been “significantly overvalued” in the lead-up to its IPO. The investment research firm valued SpaceX at $780 billion—less than half of SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion IPO goal—primarily based on the strengths of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service and rocket launch business.”

It’s fucking hilarious how a company that lost $5B last year is somehow still worth $780B but that’s a big setback from the $1.75T that they’d been hoping for. It’s like someone who owes you $1000 who offers to pay $20 instead of $10. Like, it’s all just a fantasy that they’re a viable financial partner or that they even know how to count.

The NVIDIA Tax by Robert X. Cringely (I, Cringely)

“[…] in at least 40 states, utilities are allowed to bill customers in advance for grid construction that hasn’t been finished yet. So the retiree in Manassas isn’t just paying for the power the data centers use. He is pre-financing the substations being built to feed them.”

“[…] a margin like that is not a price. It’s a tax. And a tax has to be paid by someone. The whole AI economy is, at bottom, an elaborate machine for distributing that bill — and the person in Manassas is at the end of the chain, paying NVIDIA’s gross margin through his electric meter without ever seeing the invoice.”

“Nobody in this picture — not AMD, not Google, not OpenAI — is asking the prior question, which is whether the workload needed an accelerator in the first place. They are all answering “how do we pay less tax” and none of them is asking “why am I being taxed for this transaction at all.””

“The difference between a flywheel and a house of cards is whether real end-user demand is actually showing up, or whether the same dollars are just going around the table getting counted as revenue each lap. Nobody knows which one this is yet. But the systemic risk is plain: when everyone is each other’s investor, supplier, and customer, one stumble can cascade through the whole ring. If you own an index fund, you own a seat at that table. You’re paying the tax too — you just don’t get a bill.”

“[…] roughly two-thirds of AI compute today is inference, not training. And a very large share of inference is not creative generation at all — it’s retrieval. Looking something up. Checking a fact against a record. Pulling the right paragraph out of a known document. Those are jobs a CPU has done beautifully and cheaply for decades, at a few watts,, the kind of work those 4,600 idle EPYC cores could do in their sleep if anyone asked them to. We route it to a 700-watt GPU anyway, because the industry decided years ago that AI means GPU, and nobody has stopped to recheck the premise since.”

Science & Nature

Two Paradoxes of Space Navigation by minutephysics (YouTube)

Environment & Climate Change

How Dangerous Is This Super El Niño Really? by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

Medicine & Disease

Diana Yanko (The Onion)

“Diana Yanko, 61, died on Tuesday after an AI incorrectly filed her charts, another AI denied her claim, and a third AI turned off her life support.”

Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda passes 1,000 cases, as Italy reports 2 suspected cases by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on May 16, the case and death tolls have more than doubled. Within days, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the agency had revised its risk assessment upward, to “very high” at the national level for the DRC and “high” at the regional level in Africa, while holding the global risk at “low.” That the figures crossed 1,000 almost in step with the upgrade confirms what independent modeling has since established: the outbreak was already far more entrenched than official surveillance had detected.”

“Nowhere is the gap between official assessment and reality on the ground wider than in the temporary recommendations issued to States Parties by the IHR Emergency Committee, which read like a checklist for a fully functioning, well-funded health system rather than a war zone.”

“Recommending safe and dignified burials from a conference room in Geneva means little when those measures are enforced by state police against an impoverished, traumatized population subjected to decades of violence and systemic neglect.”

“They warn that a narrow, technocratic approach to preparedness is exceptionally dangerous in such conditions, where the occupation of eastern Congo by militias has fragmented authority, foreign aid cuts have decimated local partners, and public trust has dissolved.”

“The DRC’s population is remarkably young, with nearly 46 percent of its roughly 115 million people under the age of 15. This large population of youth confront a society ravaged by war and a near-total absence of formal employment.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

The Loneliness of the Competitive Quizzer by Drew Basile (The Baffler)

“The facts of our lives seem to slip away from us. Once, I’d loved facts like these. That’s why I went to Oxford, to study history. To learn and remember and keep these little things alive. But the quizzers were still learning. They were sacrificing their lives to learning, in a constant and unending task which almost no one could or would appreciate, which the market certainly wouldn’t reward. But questions would only get harder. The facts more obscure. It was all anyone could do to keep up.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Might As Well Support Hamas. They’ll Punish You Anyways by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“As Dostoevsky said, “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.””

“[…] at this point, many years into an extermination campaign, why not show some courage? Or just shut up, and show some dignity.”

“These people should just keep the Resistance’s name out they mouths, or have some real courage and speak up. Break the seal on what is an unassailable position, which more and more people feel but aren’t saying. That the people blowing up tanks and attacking military bases are the good guys, and the bad guys are the ones blowing up hospitals and schools and censoring you for complaining about it. You might as well support Hamas, because they’re going to punish you anyways.”

Live From Tibet: Lee Camp Plays Basketball With The Monks & Debates The Nuns by Lee Camp (YouTube)

A female Tibetan monk first says,

“I’ve watched these kinds of debates during your presidential elections but I find them quite strange. You dig up each other’s past mistakes and bring them up during the debate. I don’t understand the point of that, or how it helps society. But that’s not how we debate here. We don’t attack each others’ flaws and shortcomings. Our debates focus on compassion and wisdom. We debate for the sake of development and improvement. The goal is to make society better, people wiser, and more compassionate. The intention behind your debates is different from ours.”

To the question of “why did you choose to become a nun?” she responded,

“It’s a long story. I used to study dance and I performed in places like Shanghai and Beijing. Later, I started learning yoga. I chose to become a nun at first because I was very ignorant and I had many questions. So, I wanted to see the world through the lens of Buddhist cause and effect. In the eyes of many Westerners, Xizang [Tibet] might seem underdeveloped. But, today, you say the Jokhang Temple, and you walked through Barkhor Street. You saw the deep devotion of the people. Maybe, from that, you can sense that their prostrations aren’t some blind superstitions, but a way of seeking inner peace and self-reflection. ”

On Neutrality, Morality, and Courage by Denise Plattner (Neutrality Studies)

“the sanctions against Russia that were decreed by an international body were adopted by the European Union. Yet the European Union is not being attacked by Russia and does not have the task of sanctioning violations of the Charter of the United Nations. To consider that it is thereby making up for the inaction of UN bodies is hazardous. In law, a competence not exercised by one body does not authorize another entity to exercise it in its place. Otherwise, we could consider as legal the public-order activities of a private militia on the grounds that the police are not doing their job.”

“The ethic of conviction consists in condemning and then punishing the guilty party; the ethic of responsibility seeks rather to restore a situation consistent with the law. However, the proponent of the ethic of conviction will point out that the belligerent who acted unjustly “must not win the war” and that only its defeat restores the law. In reality, recourse to armed force is never simply “a bolt from the blue.” It follows growing hostility between two countries, which the international community has failed to appease, and which has probably seen repeated violations of a duty that exists before the prohibition of war, namely the duty to maintain friendly relations with other States.”

“A neutral State that works actively to ensure that diplomacy replaces the language of arms unquestionably acts more morally than those who inflame tensions, then sanction the aggressor, and then indefinitely oppose the return of a peace that they continue to regard as unjust for as long as their demands are not met.”

Voila.

“[…] we have seen that the violation of the prohibition on the use of armed force is the outcome of a process during which hostile manifestations have taken place over a certain period, most often many years, with varying degrees of responsibility among the different actors involved. It therefore marks the general failure of the obligation to preserve peace incumbent on the international community as a whole, as well as, when war is prolonged, the failure of the obligation to bring it to an end as quickly as possible.”

Force your enemy to start or prolong a fight, then insist that everyone side with you against the evil you caused.

“Neutrality does not necessarily protect against aggression by another State. Neutral States, such as Belgium until the First World War, have been attacked. But it at least protects inhabitants from a war that would be triggered by their own leaders. And it signals to the world its attachment to peace and its determination to remain peaceful.”

My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon by Will Oremus (The Atlantic)

“He understands that some teachers and parents might have qualms with education software that mimics the addictive mechanics of mobile games. Blooket is designed not to supplant lectures or project-based learning, he argued, but rather to replace flash cards and worksheets as a way of reviewing facts that students have already absorbed.”

“Jodi Carreon, a mother based in San Marcos, California, told me that her younger child was in second grade when he began coming home begging her to pay for Prodigy’s premium service so he could get more rewards. Then she started getting notes from teachers that her son was getting distracted playing Prodigy in class. “I’m like, ‘You literally handed them this,’” she said.”

“[…] the status quo of ed tech is bleak. Screen time has become a default rather than an intentional choice for harried teachers and distracted students. That day I first encountered my son playing Prodigy, I noticed something odd after several minutes of watching him. He was learning how to divide fractions in math class, but the screen kept flashing addition problems. “Oops,” he said when I pointed that out. “I must have clicked the wrong lesson.””

“AI Ethics” Is a Dead End by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“This is ultimately, of course, a laundering scheme, and one that only makes sense in this interim period of waning but still measurable academic authority, whereby a few people with Ph.D.s are convinced to sign off on what the tech companies were obviously, in endless pursuit of profit, going to do anyway.”

“Even if philosophy of AI is a young field, at least in its current guise (in its longue-durée metamorphoses we can see it as beginning at least as far back as Hellenistic gnosticism), we are fortunate to have millennia of sustained reflection on animal ethics to help us work through very similar problems in relation to a similar class of non-human yet relevantly human-like entities.”

“And here what we consistently see is that while a very small number of people concern themselves with the relatively impressive ability of pigs to navigate mazes or manipulate joysticks with their snouts, and are prepared to argue that because suids outperform canines at such tasks we are therefore being “inconsistent” when we eat pigs but not dogs, for the most part human beings simply do not think this way, and never will. We eat pigs because they are the animals that yield pork. We abstain from eating dogs because their meat is inedible — as attested among other things by the fact that there is no name for it analogous to “pork”.”

“The dogs are on our side. They get their moral status from their social position, and there was definitely never a moment when we decided to give them that position as a result of some series of capacity-measuring tests.”

“A set of social practices so deep as generally to be taken for granted, on Diamond’s account, determines what kinds of entity are able to show up at all on the radar of moral concern. One such practice is naming, which traditionally has functioned as a ritual acknowledgment of group membership through attachment to an onomastic label that is perpetually recycled across the generations. In the Christian tradition, this has meant anchoring the social being of a newborn to the name of a saint. The name doesn’t mark you out as an irreducible individual so much as an iteration of one of the small number of socially acknowledged clusterings of moral relevance. You can’t wantonly abuse some Peter or Maria, but it’s not their neurophysiological complexity that’s protecting them — it’s their affiliation to a saint. The diminutive names reserved for dogs, slaves, and other social marginals and subalterns have an obvious logic to them, in light of this: these are beings of some moral status, but not full moral status.”

“Young women in Mongol-Turkic pastoral societies can sometimes be married off to clay figurines — for example when too many young human males have been killed off in their high-risk life of cattle-rustling. These “husbands” typically don’t do their share of domestic labor, to say the least, or much of anything else either, and one imagines they’re not very good in bed (then again, perhaps one does not imagine enough). But you can be sure they have “moral status” in the sense that it would be a grave social transgression to throw one to the ground and watch it shatter. These faithful little men are playing a social role, and that’s a kind of work too.”

“The truth is your wedding ring is not really of much day-to-day utility, but that doesn’t mean you can throw it into the Trevi Fountain “for good luck”.”

“[…] whether you are an atheist or the most devout of worshippers, I don’t think I need to do much work at all to elicit your intuitions. Crucifixes can be desecrated in a way that bowling balls cannot be.”

“Does anyone imagine that it could have triggered another “Danish cartoon” controversy for that fellow to record himself —doing what exactly?— closing the browser with the text of the Qur’an in it? Even if he had smashed the computer itself I doubt anyone would interpret that gesture as a destruction of the holy book in particular.”

“[…] will in fact be enough to say more bluntly, with Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google AI researcher and friend of The Hinternet: “We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them.””

🤔

Technology & Engineering

What Is Disrupting GPS Over Europe? by Veritasium (YouTube)

The first half shows you what a goddamned miracle it is that geolocation even works at all.

The second half blames Russia for disrupting European GPS signals.

How should we think about Starship? by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars For The Rest of Us)

“I have a similar struggle evaluating Starship that I do with AI. The core technology is undeniably real and transformative, but it comes welded to a preposterous vision of the future. In the case of Starship, that means hundreds of launches a day, vast orbiting data centers, and kilometer-length mass drivers on the Moon built to sub-micron tolerance. And the whole thing depends on the emergence of an orbital economy that, for several decades now, has resisted boosters’ efforts to will it into being.”

“Today Super Heavy is a piece of pure electric-guitars-and-screaming-eagles space awesomeness, from the gorgeous purple exhaust plume full of shock diamonds, to the grace with which it descends on a single swiveling column of flame until the rocket comes to rest on the chopsticks that catch it.”

“Keeping this hunk of spacecraft intact and controllable during re-entry requires large control surfaces and a capable heat shield. But for these elements to be re-usable, they have to be sturdy, and ‘sturdy’ in an aerospace context usually means so heavy that it eats through all your available payload.”

“SpaceX is in a race to see whether it can improve performance in the Raptor engines faster than the upper stage of Starship gains weight. The real test for the program will be the first capture and re-flight of an upper stage, because the economics of launch cost are sensitive to just how many times that upper stage can fly.”

“How often will Starship launch? Getting a credible answer is hard because the SpaceX IPO hinges on preposterous numbers that the company can’t disavow yet.”

“Finally, there is the launch cadence SpaceX actually targets in their S-1, a million metric tons a year to Earth orbit. That frankly preposterous figure implies 25-30 Starship launches a day, with the exact number contingent on how much payload the final version of the rocket can carry. This would be the flight rate of a small regional American airport like Chattanooga or Sioux Falls, except that instead of turbojets SpaceX would be launching skyscrapers full of liquid oxygen and methane from a constellation of launch pads, each one handling multiple launches, catches, and re-stackings in every 24 hour period.”

“Overnight the company would become one of the country’s biggest consumers of methane, electric power, and liquid oxygen. And since a failure rate of ½00 at this cadence would have Starships falling out of the sky every week, the rocket would have to improve in reliability by at least two orders of magnitude.”

“In other words, SpaceX’s IPO promise implies a Starship program that looks like airline travel in the early thirties, dozens of flights a day with an accident rate of a few flights per hundred thousand, or about a thousand times more reliable than any modern rocket.”

“Now that SpaceX is an AI company, refueling has become something of an awkward side quest. SpaceX can launch as many Starlink and AI satellites it wants on Starship without having to touch refueling with a barge pole. But it is still on the hook to develop the technology for its NASA contract, since the lunar lander version of Starship can’t get to the Moon without it.”

“Propellants in zero g exist as a three-dimensional jumble of liquid mingled with gas. Moving them between rockets requires either developing special wicking techniques for use in zero g, or accelerating the docked rockets enough that the propellants inside settle to the bottom of the tank.”

“Fortunately for SpaceX, NASA’s timeline for landing on the Moon is even less realistic than these development milestones. But it does set up an interesting dynamic of who will blink first, and who will bear official blame for the inevitable delay of the first Artemis landing into the 2030’s.”

“But it’s hard to read SpaceX’s S-1 filing and estimate the chances of a Starship landing on Mars as anything higher than zero. The company’s core business is no longer space flight, but data center rentals and B2B enterprise sales in low Earth orbit. Not a penny of the company’s claimed total addressable market of $26 trillion(!!) comes from sending space nerds to Mars.”

“Today, the story is confusing. SpaceX is suddenly an AI company with a small sideline in rockets, claiming a $2 trillion valuation on mostly vibes. Starship is no longer a rocket for colonizing Mars, but has turned into what the Space Shuttle was trying to be early in its design—a cheap, reusable two-stage space truck.”

“Either way, though, what an impressive piece of hardware! If SpaceX hadn’t built it, people would call it impossible, and that’s the highest form of praise for the engineers who have beavered away on this rocket for so many years now.”

“The dry mass of the Space Shuttle orbiter was 78 metric tons; its payload capacity was 27.5 tons.”

LLMs & AI

The Lying Machine by Robert X. Cringely (I. Cringely)

“I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a Salesforce benchmark called HERB, which found that the best AI retrieval systems answer real enterprise questions correctly only about a third of the time — and, the part that matters here, that the bottleneck isn’t the model’s intelligence but whether it can find the right document. When it can’t find the answer, it doesn’t stop. It invents one. Nearly half of that benchmark was deliberately built from questions that have no answer at all, just to see whether the machine would admit it didn’t know. Mostly, it wouldn’t.”

Citing Charity Majors by Simon Willison

“[…] this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles.”

This time is different. The cult I’ve joined is the real cult.

If you’ve done the reading, then you’ll eventually see that this is, as are all socioeconomic problems, a class issue. The rich are plundering the poor, again.

“[…] you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build.”

Those who can, will cash those checks because they will never have to pay it back. They don’t understand how precious the saving are, because they didn’t pay into them in the first place. It’s all just free resources, just like all the other free, public resources they’ve plundered in the past. They claim that they’re infinite too fool others into letting them take them, but they know that there’s really only enough for their own short-term gains, and they don’t care.

“[…] on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out”

These are the people who will pay for this plundering, as usual. Support. And customers.

Cashing checks against the future is the natural mode of the form of capitalism I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying my whole life. It occurs whenever someone sells you something that doesn’t do what it says on the tin, when they get you to pay more for their services than they are actually worth., when they get you to pay for the risks they’re making you assume.

The sales job of AI is that the upsides massively outweigh the downsides. This is not obviously true, as even many proponents will admit. Those who think it’s true just mean that they personally won’t suffer the ill effects of any of the downsides.

Or, hey, maybe I’m not a Marxist, but a fascist, as Anti-AI nostalgia and the cult of the past by Sean Goedecke argues.

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs by Simon Willison

“The rideshare giant is limiting all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool, an Uber spokesperson said in response to a Bloomberg News inquiry. That means spending on one tool doesn’t have a bearing on the budget for another.”

That’s $18,000 per year, for those weak in arithmetic. Per tool.

The author approves, writing,

“A $1,500 monthly limit per tool strikes me as a rational policy response ”

Of course that strikes you, as a tech blogger, as a rational policy response because you, as a tech blogger are not running a struggling company. An extra $18-54K per year seems reasonable to you, the tech blogger, because obviously all of these LLM coding harnesses are worth that.

Should companies spend that money on the developer? Not so much. A course or education for a $2-$5K per year? Not so much.

Because labor costs are the devil, whereas technology costs are the savior.

I take it back. This isn’t a cult. It’s a straight-up MLM.

Actually, MLMs are cults.

I just don’t know how much brain damage you need to have to just casually add $18K per developer per tool to the budget and think that this is something that is sustainable for 99% of companies. You know, those companies that don’t spend $330,000 median compensation package for software developers in the USA, as Uber does.

Most companies’ eyes would pop wide open at the increased productivity boost that just giving that $18K to the developer would engender.

But, no. They are much more comfortable sending that money to big Daddy in Silicon Valley because of course that makes more sense.

Almost no-one is asking about ROI anymore. No-one is even measuring anything. They’re just FOMOing their way to success.

Knowing What You Don’t Know by Robert X. Cringely

“The thing standing between AI and the enterprise was never speed and was never price. It is trust. And trust is not a mood; it is a property. It requires the machine to know the boundary of its own knowledge and to tell you, out loud, when you have walked past it.

“Twenty-four hundred years ago the smartest man in Athens built a whole philosophy on four words: I know that I know nothing. Socrates’ entire edge was that he knew the edge — he could feel where his competence ran out. That, not raw recall, is what we actually mean when we call someone an expert. The junior analyst answers every question. The senior one says, “I’d have to check.” We trust the second one more, and we are right to.”

“The moment a buyer can choose between an AI that fabricates and one that flags its own ignorance, there is no contest — and no price war that changes the outcome. Honesty does not get absorbed by demand. It gets demanded.”

Sam Altman is starting to panic by Mo Bitar (YouTube)

“This algorithm, the LLM auto-regressive thing, for every single word it generates, it has to reread the entire conversation from the start for every word. It’s just structurally inefficient at the deepest level.

“And what this thing actually is, and look, I’m done pretending that this is a clever little analogy. I’m being literal. It’s a slot machine. You pull the lever. Sometimes it gives you a little dopamine tingle. Oh, look. It wrote code that works. And you’re hooked. But 80% of the time you’re like listening to confident nonsense that sounds like a stoner explaining quantum physics. But hey, that 20%? Beautiful.

“And see, that’s the trap. That’s the mechanism. It’s you late at night going, “Should I just write this myself?” And going, “No.”

“Pull the lever one more time, king. The big win’s coming. Just like last time and the time before that, intermittent rewards, the most addictive design ever discovered, dropped into your enterprise engineering team with a leaderboard bolted on top.”

Criticizing the everything machine by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“[…] before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?”

Teaching LLMs to one-shot complex backends at scale, report #1 by Nathan Marz (Red Planet Labs)

“We’re currently testing with Opus 4.6. We tried 4.7, but its responses include only summaries of the model’s reasoning rather than the raw thinking blocks. That’s a real problem for skill development, as seeing the model’s thought process is critical to determine how to get it to stop going down wrong paths.”

I don’t really believe that there is any reason to believe that thinking and reasoning blocks are any more “realistic” than the incoherent responses that they purport to explain. It’s like asking a toddler why they did something.

So, Where Does Next-Token Prediction Leave Us? (POP RDI; RET;)

“God forbid anyone find an ounce of joy or contentment in their craft − it is now squarely gone. You are now a node. Your only job is to maximize for throughput. You take an input, produce an output with your AI. You are to keep pushing a stream of work at rates you cannot reliably review or verify. Even if you wanted to do it, there will be people that won’t and for the corporation, you are now an under-performer. You can task another agent to do it though, at an additional charge.”

When to the industrialization of your work. Look, we all know it doesn’t work the way they pretend to think, and then say, it will. It just doesn’t. None of this is serious. None of this is how you build quality products. This is how you run a cult and a scam. This is how you mortgage the future at a frightening rate to extract short-term value right now.

“The labs and corporations will have agents babysit other agents bruteforcing solutions and discoveries. You cannot do the same because you do not have the unlimited compute or specialized models. It is the same pattern as the structural hurdles that prevent an average person becoming a billionaire.”

“Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted. They do not have to deal with pesky programmers anymore. They do not need to ask a programmer to change colour, sizing or the style of a breadcrumb on a webpage anymore. No more protests about how it is bad UX or the code complexity is not justifiable enough for some useless flashy feature. The AI does not complain, the AI does not unionize and it does not protest. It will listen to you. It will say something you said in passing was truly impressive and that it has not seen many people think that way.”

“In many ways, the AI rush is the poster child of capitalism. This would never have happened any other way. World leaders were lied to, persuaded and coerced into thinking if we are not ahead in the AI race, it is literally doom and gloom. The labs made it a national security issue to cut oversight on datacenter buildouts.”

“[…] where does next token prediction leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.”

Programming

The Eternal Sloptember by George Hotz

“I really tried for the last 6 months. I wrote some parts of tinygrad with agents. I reversed a USB <-> PCIe chip with agents. But each time I suspected I could have done it better and faster manually. The agent frontloads all the progress, then gives you a slot machine lever to pull to hope it gets the polish done. It never quite gets there.”

“A trait you find in all high performing people is the ability to error correct, and they have mostly been good at seeing when slop is slop. It takes a bit to explore/exploit and tune the outer loops around when to use them, when to trust them, how to use them, etc…but I haven’t seen anyone of them move to a model where they don’t carefully read and understand each line, except in some confined domains.

“Contrast this with a large organization. Much slower feedback loops, much less alignment. The bottom performers won’t have that self check. They are the ones producing 10x output with the agents. What do you think is happening to the average output of that organization? What is happening to the average output of the world?

“Agents will end up producing more code, more apps, and more features than ever before. It is a golden era for buckets and buckets of slop, and a dark age for gems of quality.

“I hear that Apple is pushing AI on all their engineers. When people think in the abstract, they think AI will do all this stuff, but let’s focus on a concrete example. Do you think macOS will get better or worse in the next 2 years?”

“The real story of this era will be who manages to avoid harming themselves in their AI psychosis.”

Improving C# Memory Safety by Richard Lander (.NET Blog)

“Migration of the runtime libraries is already underway: the reduce-unsafe label tracks the running list of PRs removing unsafe code from the libraries, including swaps like #127394 (replacing MemoryMarshal.Read/Write with BitConverter equivalents) and #127485 (removing unsafe code from IBinaryInteger.TryReadBigEndian). This migration is also a sign that industrial code can be moved to safe patterns. Your unsafe code probably can, too.”

“We want everyone to move to the new model. We also expect fewer projects to enable <AllowUnsafeBlocks> over time. That’s what we’re doing with our own code.”

“New property on, <AllowUnsafeBlocks> off (default). The safest configuration. The project participates in the new model and allows no unsafe code. You know your code isn’t calling Marshal.ReadByte or any other unsafe member.”

“We want everyone to move to the new model. We also expect fewer projects to enable <AllowUnsafeBlocks> over time. That’s what we’re doing with our own code. To help with the move, we plan to ship a dotnet format fixer that performs a best-effort migration on projects that haven’t yet flipped the new property on: wrapping unsafe call sites in unsafe { } blocks, moving the unsafe modifier off types onto their members, and similar mechanical rewrites. The fixer can’t infer safety obligations or write <safety> blocks; that work stays with the developer. It’s a starting point that gets the code compiling under the new rules, not a finished migration.”

“No code review can match the efficiency of a compile error. Memory-safety auditing collapses from inspecting every diff to checking one project property.”

“Documentation names the obligations. Guards discharge them. This pattern matters most at the unsafe boundary, where a developer attests that unsafe code has been brought into alignment with compiler-provided safety.”

“A program that panics to avoid undefined behavior is far more reliable than one that lets it happen.”

“The checks compose. Each one is only sufficient because the preceding ones have already ruled out classes of inputs. Change any link in that chain (switch to an unsigned index type, or change what the runtime guarantees about Length), and the safety reasoning has to be re-derived. The ThrowIf* methods are the C# analog of Rust panic helpers like slice_error_fail; both crash the program at the boundary rather than let UB happen, and both are factored into separate functions to keep cold paths out of hot code.”

“The entire proposition is that unsafe code is marked and easy to audit. That’s the basis of safety in all of these languages.”

“Readonly fields satisfy much of the same need. It helps to think of unsafe readonly as the contract plus a built-in guard: unsafe names the invariant, and readonly is the safety guard that prevents post-construction writes from violating it. Drop the readonly and the contract remains; it just has to be discharged the harder way, by reviewing every write site. The ArrayWrapper<T> example above is readonly unsafe for exactly this reason. Rust is converging on the same shape via the unsafe-fields design axioms: the marker stays, but the operations it gates (writes, reinitialization) are exactly the ones immutability already prevents.”

“We envision a future where C# is among a set of languages chosen and noted for their type- and memory-safety enforcement. With this model change, C#, Rust, and Swift have a more common safety vocabulary and workflow. We imagine teams adopting a complete supply-chain view of their dependencies, whether C# all the way down or C# at the app layer over Rust at the system layer. Our own team has moved large blocks of C++ to C# over the years for exactly this reason: safe C# doesn’t carry a memory-safety review burden.”

Our docs are shit and we’re bad at teaching by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

“The complexity of this quickly becomes unreasonable, and learning how to do something when you don’t already know how requires you to track down a whole lot of information from a whole slew of often very bad sources.”

“The average quality of documentation available for most tech is abysmal. It’s often incomplete, poorly-organised (which is to say that it’s organised in ways that don’t correspond to how it’s likely to be used), leaves out vital information or is just plain unreadable. Even much of the documentation that makes sense in hindsight is often more or less incomprehensible in foresight until you see an example, and step-by-step examples are often absent from the official docs.”

“If you look at a good course or a textbook, for example, a large part of the text is made up of not just theoretical facts and blather, but of examples. And it’s not just one example: we start with a simple example to build a baseline of understanding, we have people do an exercise or two to confirm that they understand the example and can reproduce it themselves, and then we build on it with a more complex example. It’s an iterative process, and coming up with good examples and exercises is a skill in itself.”

“Whatever else it might be, in reality the practical goal of documentation is to teach someone new to technology enough about the system that they can contribute to developing it without adding technical debt: it is first and foremost a teaching document.”

“If we as software engineers are bad at teaching, then, we are definitionally bad at our jobs. And so the bulk of software engineering workers at the moment are bad engineers, with the people who could be the really good engineers being pushed to the margins or out of the field entirely. This explains much about our industry.”

“[…] when there’s a clear need for people to learn but almost everyone who could teach ranges from “kinda bad at teaching” to “absolutely awful” and the official ways we offer to learn it are incomprehensible, basically unsearchable and incomplete, the space is wide open for grifters and snake oil salesmen to move in.”

“We need to write better documentation that people can actually learn from, which means prioritising people in industry who can teach well, and we need to reduce the number of technologies that go into a simple project to the point where the amount of documentation that you need to know to be able to work on a project effectively is something manageable.”

Design

Don’t Roll Your Own … by Susam Pal

“[…] when it comes to developing user interface features for serious websites that people need to use to get their work done, I wish the software development community were more conservative in deciding what fancy feature goes into a website and what is left out.”

“No. I do not want to learn your calendar widget. I just want to use the date picker in my favourite browser, which is quite sane. Saner than your custom implementation. If you need to have a calendar widget to support browsers with inadequate native date-picker support, perhaps that support can be added alongside the native date picker rather than as a replacement for it.”

For another example, stop making your own dialogs. Dialogs should be movable, so that you can move the window out of the way when you’re trying to see some text behind to e.g., choose an appropriate filename.

“[…] while you are at it, don’t keep changing your website layout and interface every few months! I may adapt to the new design, but my ageing relatives cannot. For them, every time you change the user interface, it amounts to learning a whole new tool. If every website keeps doing this every few months, they have to spend a significant amount of time relearning familiar things for no functional benefit. Please just let them enjoy their retirement. Imagine how you would feel if a Linux distribution decided to redesign all its core commands and their command-line options every few months. Or imagine how you would feel if the buttons of your washing machine were rearranged every morning.”

Sports

The Nazi World Cup by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The entire (re: all) Iranian team has been denied stays in ‘America’ and has to ‘commute’ from Mexico. Their physical safety is not assured. Switzerland striker Breel Embolo has had his visa withdrawn, hours before he was due to travel. South Africa’s entire team had to delay travel until their visa issues were resolved. Moroccan Zakaria El Ouahdi was unable to join the team until his visa was finally approved.”

“Other World Cups have not been like this. For Russia (2018), your spectator card (obtained via a ticket) was your visa. Qatar had visa-on-arrival for 95 countries, and fans got a Hayya card that gave them free public transportation. In ‘America’ they’re charging $150 to get to the stadium (which you cannot walk to because dangerous) and you’re not even allowed to bring water bottles, you have to pay for that also. That isn’t even getting into accommodation and travel between cities and all the other price gouging. It is wild how vile this World Cup is.”

“This is in many ways worse than the 1936 Nazi Olympics where Blacks and Jews that Hitler obviously hated were able to compete and overt displays of racism were toned down in front of visitors. The Nazis suppressed Jews and Roma within the German team, but did not ban visas for athletes from other countries, like America is doing. Nor were they, at the time, actively invading or besieging other countries. The ‘Americans’ are, of course, worse than the Nazis because the Nazis at least fizzled out after 12 years. ‘America’ has been at this for centuries.”

Fun

Trump Diverts All Science Funding Into Locating The Smurfs (The Onion)

““These are very bad tiny blue people, and we gotta kill these Smurfs immediately—I don’t care how many vaccine trials I have to cancel,” said Trump, signaling an end to all ongoing cancer research in order to “harness the magic” that the Smurfs control. “We are working closely with Gargamel, who will be given full access to any weaponry or troops he may need in his quest, and I promise you we won’t need any studies into reversing Alzheimer’s once we have the very beautiful lady Smurf in our grasp, which will be very soon.”

I honestly can’t even tell anymore.

Or there’s this one:

FCC To Investigate TV Shows Where The Mom Has Job (The Onion)

“It is a violation of broadcast codes for these women to be shown outside the home at all, unless it is at a grocery store or a church. Moving forward, every mother who appears on camera must be holding a child in every single frame or we will revoke the licenses of the offending stations.”