Links and Notes for July 3rd, 2026

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Science & Nature
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Design
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

The Founders Never Meant the US to Be a Democracy by Doug Henwood (Jacobin)

“Aside from a brief period from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, when it issued multiple decisions expanding social rights, the Supreme Court has mostly been a force for reaction, protecting the propertied. The gush of money that has taken over our political system was enabled by two decisions in particular, Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, which declared political contributions a form of speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment, and Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which held that corporate political spending could not be restricted, also on free speech grounds.”

Why Everything Is Worse And More Expensive Now by Some More News | Cody Johnston (YouTube)

At 12:00,

“The share of Americans who make more than double the median income has increased significantly in the last 50 years. And well, I guess I’m happy for those people. Way to go, richies. What it results in is a middle class that no longer feels that it can meaningfully participate in much of society because there are now enough rich people to represent a viable consumer demographic. Enough so that every company is more than happy to abandon everyone else. Why charge 30 bucks for a concert ticket when you can charge hundreds instead? They’ll pay it either way. Sorry non-wealthy Americans. They don’t need you anymore. Their consumers are doing great. Maybe come back when you accumulate enough generational wealth.”

At 25:00,

“[…] excess value is no longer easy to come by. So, it’s being stripped out of the walls […]. And I mean stripped almost literally because hedge funds and other private equity firms do what’s called asset-stripping where a struggling company is purchased not to improve it but to sell off its valuable assets to generate profits. This is essentially what happened to Sears, Red Lobster, the Chicago Tribune and Toys R Us.”

At 28:00,

“They’re actively doing something that consumers hate to solve a problem that barely exists because they think it might help improve their margins just a little bit more. Because they have to do something, right? They’ve already switched to cheaper materials, fired everyone they could, […] cracked down on theft, put fewer chips in the bag, and sent everyone 30 spam emails a day.

“And so you’re going to be seeing increasingly desperate ways for them to squeeze more profits out of you every single financial quarter. Netflix is going to keep raising its prices and cancelling any shows you like until people finally start unsubscribing. If they don’t, then there’s no reason for them to stop. And it’s just good business because this is all a natural product of the system put in place.

“The entire appeal of free market capitalism was that a bunch of companies would have to compete for our attention, which would equate to their growth. Except since there’s only like four companies competing now, they’ve realized that they don’t need to win over the consumer at all and instead are vying to see who can cut the most corners to have the thickest profit margin without falling apart completely. Then the winner gets to envelop the loser.

“Sorry, Spirit Airlines, you flew too close to the sun. Not literally, that would have been too cool. Airlines are of course the clearest example of this. Everyone has to fly sometime, so they have zero incentive to make that experience more pleasant. It’s just who can be the cheapest without literally crashing and burning. And so naturally, they are all nickel-and-dime-ing you for every piece of luggage and the ability to even pick your fucking seat because what are you going to do? Huh? Walk?”

At 35:00,

On Trump (and his ilk):

“He doesn’t care that you know that he doesn’t care.”

At 37:30,

“Making money [at a newspaper], despite what Bozos says, isn’t actually the point. It’s an attempt to craft a reality that directly benefits them and their viewpoint. Media-consolidation in general results in more right-wing perspectives and less local news. So, all this stuff we’ve been talking about, the enshittification of products and experiences, the inability of anyone who isn’t rich to meaningfully participate in leisure activities, it’s stuff you’re increasingly likely to only hear being criticized on the news if a Democrat is the president.”

At 42:00,

“Anyway, we’re talking about the rapidly diminishing lifestyle expectations of being middle-class in America and why our corporate rulers don’t plan to change things anytime soon. And this has done a number of things to the American psyche. We all recognize it, but no politician or news anchor wants to admit it. Instead, they’ll just wonder aloud why people feel the way they feel despite the stock market doing so well and never mentioned that 93% of those stocks are owned by the richest 10% of Americans. And more than a third of Americans own none at all.”

Science & Nature

Amid a flood of AI advances, astrophysicists are questioning the soul of their field by Sarah Crespi, Kevin McLean, Joshua Sokol (Science)

“Garraffo’s colleague Alyssa Goodman showed me a data-fitting problem. She wanted to understand how the spiral arms of a distant galaxy were moving. But isolating just that motion from other patterns imparted into her data by the spin and the geometry of that distant galaxy had thwarted her group for years. She asked ChatGPT, which resolved the problem in a few minutes. Now, her research group was planning to write several papers on the resulting data set, “the single best map of spiral arm kinematics ever—like, by a factor of 100.””

I smell a rat. A sponsored rat. This isn’t something that a chatbot can do, not really, and certainly not “in minutes” and single-shotted, as the article suggests. The article also suggests that the astrophysicists were so terrible at data science that a chatbot was better than them immediately? Is that even plausible? This summary skips a lot of detail. It reads like an OpenAI press release.

“It wasn’t to solve the cosmos but to grapple with it: a journey, not a destination. Graduate students aren’t supposed to be only the means of the science—doing work for senior scientists—but an end in themselves, molded into competent scientists by doing that work. In so doing, today’s students would become the latest link in an unbroken chain of practice, going all the way back to the first among us who looked up agog at a sky full of stars. “Anyone working in astrophysics,” Hogg wrote, “is someone who wants to do astrophysics, not someone who wants to learn the answers.””

This is really the point. Every answer that is obtained by shortcut fails to mold a mind to be able to find the answer itself someday. LLMs are a high-powered machine for mortgaging the future for dubious short-term gain.

“Thousands of years ago, scholarly orders from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica to China and beyond served as intermediaries between their societies and the cosmos by combining extensive bookkeeping with clever mathematical algorithms—what might now be called data science. In the second century B.C.E., Hipparchus accessed and reprocessed centuries of Babylonian records to develop theories of solar and lunar motions. At the beginning of the 1600s C.E., Johannes Kepler used Tycho Brahe’s observational data to fit mathematical laws to the motions of the planets.”

“Burns descended a narrow spiral staircase and fetched a glass negative from 1934. Photons from thousands of galaxies around the Coma Cluster had traveled 300 million light-years to Earth, where a chemical reaction in the film had trapped their energy like fossils in amber. The glass, illuminated against a white backlight, was covered in tiny markings in different colors. First a “computer” named Muriel Mussells Seyfert had labeled countless galaxies. Then others had revisited the same frame in other passes, leaving lasting traces of a layered dialog.”

“Claude, in back-and-forth exchanges, claimed it could find an interesting result for the problem, then wrote up an entire impressive-looking paper. But as she read the paper, she realized it was just stating existing ideas in byzantine ways.”

Byzantine is the right word. Many of the programming solutions I’ve seen are also quite “byzantine.”

“What AI enthusiasts dismiss as now-optional “grunt work” is exactly where graduate students develop the skills and intuition to do high-level science, Minas Karamanis, a cosmology postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, argued in a March blog post. “Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work,” Karamanis wrote. Once a student crosses the hard-to-see line where the machine lets them skip thinking for themselves, “you haven’t saved time. You’ve forfeited the experience that the time was supposed to give you.””

Wonderfully put.

““I don’t see why we would rush colonizing the Galaxy or even understanding the universe, if that means a step back in the human experience,” he added. “I don’t see the point.””

Shor's Algorithm for Quantum Computing by Computerphile (YouTube)

Computerphile gets Philip Moriarty (Wikipedia) (of Sixty Symbols (YouTube) to explain how Quantum Computing works in terms of both theoretical and applied physics.

“I’m going to borrow heavily from a certain Richard Feynman and I could bury you in linear algebra. We could venture off into Hilbert space and multiple universes, etc., etc., on complex numbers, etc., etc. Instead, we’re going to work with arrows drawn on vinyl singles and LPs.”

“When we measure, we will collapse into one state or another. So what we’ll find is that we measure and we find that it’s in the the one state. What we’ll do then is we’ll end up with a larger arrow because we’ve collapsed the quantum measurement into that state. […]

“How do we get from the arrows to the probability? Well, we square the length of that arrow. That’s it.

“Why? Well, we don’t quite know. And if you really can conclusively tell us why that’s the case, you’ve got a Nobel Prize. It’s something that’s plagued, it’s called the measurement problem. It’s an aspect of the measurement problem that’s plagued quantum mechanics from the very early days for over a century now.”

Near the end, he takes out a hat that says “Hilbert space is not a place,” and says,

“The key thing here is you can do the bookkeeping whatever you like, but don’t confuse the map with the territory. Don’t confuse the model with actually what real what’s happening in terms of reality, however we define that. If you want to say if you want to couch your calculation in terms of multiple universes, that’s fine. Do that. just don’t pretend that there’s any empirical evidence for those universes existing.”

“[…] the AI industry is further devaluing the already undervalued work of cleanup and canonization. As Elliott-McCrea writes, “the social production of knowledge [is] the seed corn.””

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

The Angelic Engine by Edwin-Rainer GrebeJ (The Hinternet)

“The Ars Magna was a combinatorial logical system constructed to generate and test a potentially infinite number of propositions of a theological and natural-philosophical nature. Llull believed that all branches of knowledge are grounded in a finite number of truths determined by the Divine Attributes, and to this extent a Universal Science could be built up by systematic combination and recombination of previously derived truths grounded ultimately in theological first principles. Significantly, Llull also believed that this system of truth-derivation could be partially automated through the construction of a set of concentric rotating disks, made of parchment and connected by cords passing through small rivets. By turning these disks, with fundamental concepts such as Bonitas, Magnitudo, Potestas, and Sapientia adorning their edges, the user was able to generate novel combinations of concepts for systematic analysis.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Re-reading Sartre’s lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism by Skye C Cleary (Aeon Essays)

“‘Let us begin by saying that what we mean by “existentialism” is a doctrine that makes human life possible and also affirms that every truth and every action imply an environment and a human subjectivity,’ Sartre tells the audience. He was pushing back against the idea that objectivity is the most important way of understanding human life. Truth and action can’t be abstracted from actual people knowing and doing things.”

“If existence precedes essence, then we’re responsible for creating our essence. ‘Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself,’ Sartre explains, and this is the core of his existentialism. If existence precedes essence, then ‘man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.’ We’re also responsible for what we don’t do: ‘if I decide not to choose, that still constitutes a choice.’”

“Sartre extends the same logic to our emotions, with equally questionable results. We are free to choose our passions, and to deny this is bad faith, according to Sartre. But people with depression or trauma don’t experience their condition as chosen. For anyone whose freedom has been constrained, Sartre’s confidence about choice can come across as tone-deaf.=”

“Here, Sartre is smuggling in Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative (act only as you’d be willing for everyone to act). Stepping from ‘choosing what’s best for me’ to ‘my choice is a model for all of humanity’ has been criticised as ‘sketchy’.”

“Sartre’s test for a good choice is that it be authentic – deliberate, owned, not in bad faith. But the authentic egomaniac and the authentic saint both pass.”

“In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), Beauvoir starts from a different premise: freedom is always situated. A person born into poverty, raised under oppression or denied education faces a structurally different existential situation than the one Sartre’s lecture assumes. The choices available are narrower, the costs of choosing against the grain are higher, and the anguish of freedom can be taken over entirely by the anguish of survival.”

Sartre’s Radical Freedom is, in fact, a luxury.

Mon Amérique à moi by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“Our current world order is psychopathic, and to take the claim to sovereignty by nation-states as legitimate, to take the psycho-pimp-warlord who claims to be protecting us at his word, is to buttress this order and to remain under the terms of a murder-suicide pact that only desperate cowering creatures, not free human spirits, could ever accept.”

“[…] antinomies in their nature invite attempts at sublation. I think there could be a way of articulating a vision of American civic pride and commitment that cuts beneath any suggestion, even, of nationalism, or indeed of partisanship. It would be expressed instead in terms of communitarian belonging and of popular traditions eminently worth preserving.”

This all exists, at the local level. For family. It is nowhere to be found at a level higher than that.

“I think civic education should include popular musical traditions and folklore as central and load-bearing pillars of its curriculum. We need, that is, I think, to keep alive the idea of America much more as transgenerational epos, and much, much less as fortress.”

Zhuangzi and the case against meritocracy by Christine Abigail L Tan (Aeon Essays)

“Meritocracy implies that inequality is just and fair. Those who rise deserve to rise; those who fall behind are encouraged to try harder. We must each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.”

“Confucians believe that individuals are responsible for what they become. Through sustained efforts such as learning, ritual practice and disciplined self-regulation, people actively shape their character. Individuals therefore stand in a morally significant relation to their outcomes. One’s social position is responsive to agency, despite one’s circumstances.”

“A concept that helps us make sense of this, and that lies at the very heart of Confucian thought, is worthiness (xian, 賢). Xian captures the difference between those who have cultivated themselves and those who have not. This is a difference in ethical standing, as some individuals have developed compassion, righteous judgment and moral restraint more than others. Indeed, some have developed these virtues to a degree that enables them to bear responsibility for collective life. Moral inequality therefore inevitably exists, even though moral capacity is something that is originally equally shared.”

“Confucianism holds that economic and political inequality are justified when they mirror moral inequality.”

Cute. What could possibly go wrong? The U.S. is Confucian, then.

“Authority, influence and material security should fall to those whose cultivated dispositions allow them to wield power in moral and righteous ways.”

Where morality is defined by those who wield power.

“In the story, Zhuangzi is offered a high office, but he declines. When envoys from the king arrive to recruit him, Zhuangzi points to a sacred turtle shell kept in the royal temple and asks whether the turtle would rather be honoured after death or be alive, dragging its tail through the mud. The envoys reply that the turtle would rather be alive than honoured. ‘Then go away,’ Zhuangzi says. ‘I too will drag my tail in the mud.’ It is better to remain alive and unranked than to be elevated within a system that exploits vitality as though it’s currency for abstract prestige.”

“Zhuangzi sees a far more fragile and contingent reality. His target is not simply unfairness within the system, but the very idea that moral worth can serve as a stable foundation for hierarchy.”

“He goes on to mock the idea that virtue gives anyone a special claim to rule or to judge others. He accuses Confucius and the rulers he serves of doing on a grand scale what he does at a smaller scale: taking from others. The only difference is that, in Confucius’s case, he does so in the name of lofty ideals.

“He treats these ideals as a kind of theft: a way of capturing the world through names, standards and rankings, then using that capture to legitimise authority. Zhuangzi’s literary goal was thus to make the bandit and the sage into mirror images. The difference is merely in technique and social structure rather than an ontological given. Zhi and Confucius are both thieves: one of goods, the other of names.”

“[…] in this system, sacrifice does not function as a response to injustice (even when individual actors understand themselves that way), but as a way of accumulating moral standing. What is being purchased with one’s sacrifice is not the possibility of a better world, but a higher place for yourself or your own family.

“For this to work, virtue has to be something that can be measured and ranked. Only then can lives be sorted according to those who deserve more and those who deserve less. The Confucian meritocratic ideal therefore rests on the assumption that values have a stable and reliable measure. Zhuangzi did not think this was true.”

“In reality, moral distinctions arise within concrete situations. What looks like an act of compassion toward one person can simultaneously harm others; what counts as righteousness in one context can become cruelty in another. ‘From where I see it,’ Zhuangzi writes, ‘all the sproutings of human kindness and responsible conduct, and all the trails of right and wrong, are hopelessly tangled and confused. How could I know how to distinguish and demonstrate any conclusions about them?’”

“In 1983, a man from Alabama named Alvin Kennard stole $50.75 from a bakery. He was given a life sentence and released in 2019. Meanwhile, the culprits of the 2008 financial crisis destroyed an estimated $50 trillion in global wealth and drove nearly 10 million American families from their homes. Only one mid-level banker went to prison (for 30 months) for mismarking securities. This is how power tips the scales of accountability. In Zhuangzi’s terms, the great thief is simply the thief with enough power that his taking sets the rules for everyone else.

“Now, as in Zhuangzi’s time, luck, circumstance and privilege do far more to determine who ends up in power than moral cultivation ever could. In the Zhuangzi, Confucius also offers to rehabilitate the Robber’s reputation and frame him as a conqueror rather than a menace to society. The point is that, for Zhuangzi, once someone has prevailed, their position is often retroactively framed as deserved. Their dominance becomes evidence of their virtue, and their victory becomes proof of their worth.”

“The point is that power works not only by commanding bodies but by determining what counts as valuable, and presenting it as natural or inevitable when in reality it is shaped by contingent social arrangements and power relations.”

“Once we have poured years of work into becoming better, questioning the framework that evaluates us becomes costly. To doubt that effort pays off is to risk admitting that much of what we have invested may never yield returns. It is far easier to believe that we will be the exception than to confront the possibility that the system itself depends on many people never succeeding.”

“For meritocracy to function and for inequality to appear deserved, people must be imagined as the authors of their own success and failure. However, the very capacities that make agency possible (such as education, health, time, stability, personal networks) are unevenly distributed before any cultivation can even begin. These conditions shape what effort and excellence look like, which means that ‘virtue’ can only ever be defined by those who have already succeeded.”

“In the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, we are introduced to the mythical philosopher Liezi, who is able to ride the wind. He glides effortlessly through the air, appearing to move with complete freedom. Yet Zhuangzi points out that Liezi still depends on something: the wind. His motion, however graceful, remains conditional. The image offers a parable of human achievement. What looks like self-propelled success is always carried by social, material and historical currents that have no individual author. The meritocratic subject mistakes a favourable wind for personal flight.”

“Where individuals of the meritocratic framework understand themselves as one who accumulates achievement through effort and thereby earns reward, the Daoist sage relinquishes ownership of action altogether. They do not see success as something authored by the self, nor failure as something that properly belongs to it. What happens happens through the convergence of conditions. Agency is instead responsiveness rather than imposition.”

“Effort arises through upbringing, pedagogy, institutional pathways, emotional and material support, health, luck and the ordinary labour of others that makes any striving possible. ‘Merit’ is in large part a social product.”

“A society can say ‘those who rise deserve to rise’ only after it has imagined a self that authors itself in isolation and then owns the result as personal property. Yet for Zhuangzi, selves are porous, responsive and entangled, moving with the grain of their situations rather than standing above them. In a world of ziran, no one is a self-made success. And if no one is self-made, then inequality has no foundation.”

“Institutional support and care, as well as the removal of structural disadvantages, would be primary concerns. Ultimately, abandoning our modern obsession with desert would pave the way for a more dynamic understanding of human beings, one that recognises we are nodes in a vast network of conditions that co-produce who we are and what we do. We would be rid of the cruel fantasy that a person’s place in the world is a reliable valuation of their worth as a human being.”

The Demoralization of The White-Collar Worker (No One's Happy)

“Since 1979, American worker productivity has increased approximately 90 percent. Hourly compensation for typical workers has grown 33 percent. The other 57 points of productivity growth went to executive compensation, to shareholder returns, to private equity, to corporate profits.”

“I have watched management lay off engineers with ten or more years of tenure so that they can hire someone younger at 50 percent of the cost. The replacements are cheaper but they are also less capable. Not because younger workers are inherently less skilled, but because institutional knowledge takes years to build.”

“A household earning $75,000 can afford 21 percent of current listings, down from 49 percent in 2019. Those fortunate enough to inherit family wealth or possess dual high incomes are indeed in a much more comfortable position when it comes to housing.”

“The system has produced an environment in which medical professionals openly view insurance companies as an obstacle to practicing medicine. Which puts the patient in the precarious position of managing both parties, not too dissimilar from updating your contentious divorced parents about one another’s lives.

“The average family health insurance premium in 2025 is $26,993 per year — comparable to a new car, billed annually. Add an average deductible of $1,886 — up from $1,644 in 2020 — and a worker can spend $10,000 to $15,000 out of pocket before insurance meaningfully engages. It’s been quietly converted to disaster insurance, as more often than not the self-pay option at the hospital is cheaper than insurance.”

“[…] one in five reported a coverage denial in the past year. Of those denied through prior authorization, 41 percent said the denial delayed their care and 28 percent said their condition worsened as a result. Among those whose claims were denied, 43 percent went into medical debt.

“Half of all denials that are appealed get overturned. This means the system issues denials it knows are incorrect, because most people do not appeal. The denial is not a medical judgment. It is a bet — that the patient will give up, accept the no, manage on medication, or quietly go into debt. The system profits from friction.”

“The median retirement savings for all American families aged 32 to 61 is $5,000. Five thousand dollars. This should be alarming to all. For families aged 56 to 61, approaching retirement, the median is $21,000. Forty-four percent of Americans aged 60 to 64 have nothing saved at all. The average is pulled dramatically higher by a small number of wealthy households.”

“Any worker born in 1985 or later has never been offered a pension at a private company.”

“[…] modern two-income families earn 75 percent more money than their single-income counterparts from a generation ago, yet possess 25 percent less discretionary income. The second income did not make families richer. It was absorbed like traffic expanding to fill a wider highway, captured by housing. Childcare, which didn’t exist as a cost when one parent stayed home, became a non-negotiable expense. A second car, work clothing, commuting costs, convenience food: the costs of having two earners consumed what the second earner brought in. Which stimulates the economy, but fundamentally changes the family in what I would consider a non-positive manner.”

“[…] a 2026 LendingTree study found that a two-child household would need to earn $402,708 per year for its childcare to clear that affordability bar. The average household income for families with two children is $145,656.”

Average is way below, but almost certainly not as shocking as a quintile analysis would be.

“Total U.S. student loan debt stands at $1.87 trillion across 42.8 million borrowers, and 42 percent of them are still paying their loans off twenty years later — for a worker who graduated at 22, payments stretching into their early 40s, overlapping precisely with the years they are trying to buy a house, save for retirement, and afford childcare. Student loans are the price of admission to the white-collar workforce […]”

“Families spend less on clothing, food, and appliances than a generation ago, adjusted for inflation. The increase is entirely in fixed, non-discretionary costs: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. The basics simply cost too much relative to what we earn. Dual-income households went from roughly 44 percent in 1967 to 60 percent by 2020. The question is not whether both parents should work. The question is why the system requires it and delivers less for it.”

“Workers are not choosing to disengage. They are responding rationally to a system that takes more and gives less. The more accurate frame is that the employer quietly quit the worker — by freezing wages, eliminating career ladders, shifting healthcare costs, buying back stock instead of investing in people — and then asked why morale is low.”

“I have had to threaten to resign in order to receive a cost-of-living adjustment. A raise to keep pace with inflation. Each time, the company found the money within days of the threat. Like with stock buy-backs, the money was always there. The willingness to offer it was not.”

“The worker learns that loyalty is not reciprocated and that their compensation is determined not by their value but by their willingness to leave.”

“Fifty-two percent of workers worry about future AI use in the workplace. This is not technophobia. It is rational threat assessment by workers who recognize that AI adoption, as currently implemented, transfers productivity gains to shareholders while threatening the workers who generate them.”

“The 401(k) that was supposed to replace the pension is loaded with the same tech stocks whose valuations depend on AI delivering the productivity gains that will eliminate the jobs that fund the 401(k). The worker’s retirement depends on the success of the technology that may make them unemployable.”

“The complex judgment, creative problem-solving, and strategic thinking that define knowledge work are precisely the cognitive functions most impaired by disengagement. Organizations that squeeze workers hardest on compensation and benefits are degrading the very cognitive capacity they are paying for. They are saving on labor costs and losing on labor quality, but quality losses in knowledge work are slow and difficult to attribute.”

“Total healthcare spending in the United States — from all sources including employers, government programs, and individuals — amounts to $14,885 per person per year, the highest of any country in the world. Among the 38 wealthy nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average is $5,967 per person. American administrative costs alone exceed $1,000 per person — approximately five times more than comparable nations. Despite spending more than twice as much, the U.S. has lower life expectancy (78.4 years versus 81 to 83 in Western Europe), higher infant mortality (5.6 per 1,000 versus 2 to 3), and higher maternal mortality (18.6 per 100,000 versus low single digits).”

“Every comparable nation decided that healthcare, childcare, retirement, and time off are public goods. The United States decided they are profit centers. The demoralization of the American worker is not a labor problem. It is a policy choice with a clear alternative that those in control have examined and declined.”

Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50% by Nate Anderson (Ars Technica)

“Serrano decided that his spring 2026 section of the quite difficult ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams for both the midterm and the final. Suddenly, the course received an influx of students. El País has the story:

“The course… typically attracts few students, but very good ones. [Serrano] has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100.

“This was indeed extraordinary, because as Serrano told Inside Higher Ed, “Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because… take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time.””

It’s like he made a trap and all of those students ran into it. Not only did they cheat to pass the course, they signed up for the course because they knew that they could cheat to get a good grade to pad their GPA.

When he announced that the final would be in-person,

“Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

“Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.”

““We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society.

““We cannot choose to become idiots.””

Hold my beer, says humanity.

AI Surveillance and Social Progress (Bruce Schneier)

“Surveillance, personalization, uncertainty and authority are all key mechanisms to increase the scale and impact of chilling effects. They cause people to self-censor their words and actions, to become more conformist and compliant and thus easier to manage and control. And the effects are additive: the more mechanisms employed, and the more powerful the form, the greater the chill.”

“AI brings an analytical ability to spy on the contents of our communications, and to answer sophisticated questions about our whereabouts and activities: actions that previously required human analysts are now automated.”

But they don’t even talk about how this information doesn’t even have to accurate. It won’t matter! You can just make up whatever you want because people will have been instilled with the belief that the tools and their outputs are infallible. This article is one brick in that wall. LLMs have given organizations plausible deniability as long as everyone ignores that they still often deliver inaccurate results.

“Consider the relatively recent societal normalization of same-sex relationships and the recreational use of marijuana. Over the decades, those ideas slowly progressed from being both immoral and illegal, to moral but still illegal, and finally to both moral and legal. But in order for any of that to happen, there had to be a counterculture that was able to experiment and eventually demonstrate to the world that morality could change over time. To the extent that AI surveillance chills this sort of experimentation in public or in private, social progress becomes impossible.”

“There are no real historical precursors to this; these technologies are too new.”

What the hell are you talking about? Cambodia? East Germany? Anywhere in the occupied territories of Palestine?

Even in Europe today, you can already be made a non-person, an unbanked person for things you’ve written or said. The state willing to curtal its citizens’ rights to survive is already here. It’s tools are getting better. If we let them.

Caste system in India (Wikipedia)

I realized that I knew the Brahmin caste (priests) and the Dalit caste (untouchable). I’d even read of the Adivasis[3], who are outside of the caste system. but I didn’t know the other three castes.

“Beginning in ancient India, the caste system was originally centered around varna, with Brahmins (priests) and, to a lesser extent, Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors) serving as the elite classes, followed by Vaishyas (traders and merchants) and finally Shudras (labourers). Outside of this system are the oppressed, marginalised, and persecuted Dalits (also known as “Untouchables”) and Adivasis (tribals).”

Technology & Engineering

2026.06.30: Understanding lattice risks by D. J. Bernstein (cr.yp.to)

“[…] attacks exploiting bugs, such as the bugs highlighted in my new paper on ML-DSA, don’t qualify as cryptanalysis.

“For scientists writing different types of papers, it’s useful to have words to describe those differences. But users need cryptographic software to be secure. Security compromises often come from mathematical attacks against specs but often come from software problems not visible in the specs.”

“I’ve been pointing out risks of failures in PQ specs and in PQ software, and I’ve been connecting these risks to my recommendations of ECC+PQ. Look, for example, at how I described NISTPQC as “the largest regression ever in the quality of cryptographic software” and said this “will not be easy to fix”, and at how I wrote that “bugs in post-quantum software” warrant “a blanket rule of always upgrading from ECC to PQ+ECC, not discarding the ECC layer”.”

“There’s a basic lack of credibility if a proponent claims, e.g., that there will be “exceedingly few bugs”, while dodging basic questions about how many “exceedingly few” is, what the justification is supposed to be for that number, and why that number is supposed to be low enough to justify throwing away a broadly deployed low-cost mitigation.”

“I have a paper that exploits a simpler tightness gap in another lattice-based cryptosystem, FrodoKEM. For example, the paper shows that if you send 240 ciphertexts to a frodokem640 public key then one of the ciphertexts will be decrypted by a large-scale attack that’s feasible today. This is beyond an academic demo, but it does disprove an official FrodoKEM security claim. That version of FrodoKEM was then officially renamed “ephemeral FrodoKEM” (which I think means we’re supposed to forget this version ever existed) and was officially replaced with a revised “FrodoKEM”.”

“The 2010 paper proposed dimension-256 lattices as supposedly taking “about 2150 operations” to break. The reason FrodoKEM moved to much larger dimensions is that there were a bunch of attack papers chopping more and more bits out of lattice security levels. It’s not that one paper suddenly did a bunch of damage: each paper chopped out far fewer bits, but the cumulative damage from many papers meant that, no, dimension-256 is nowhere near 2150 security.”

“When is the cliff going to stop crumbling? Are the lattice dimensions used for ML-KEM and FrodoKEM today going to sound as ignorant in 15 years as dimension 256 from the 2010 paper? And what happens if attackers find the improvements before the public does? How can it can make any sense to narrow the risk analysis of lattice-based cryptosystems in a way that excludes every improvement in generic lattice attacks?”

“It’s content-free to come up with a statement saying “there are no known attacks meeting the following criteria: …” if those criteria are chosen to exclude every attack that is known. This becomes actively misleading if it’s accompanied by not even citing those attacks.”

“[…] if your answer to every attack is to come up with an ad-hoc excuse for ignoring the attack then you aren’t evaluating risks.”

“A “reduction” from problem P to problem Q means a way to use a solution to problem Q to solve problem P. In particular, a “worst-case-to-average-case” reduction means a way to use a solver for random examples of problem Q as a way to solve an arbitrary example of problem P, with no P inputs being immune.”

“What I find truly horrifying about the paragraph that I’ve been commenting on in this blog post is the procedural context. The paragraph wasn’t part of a collaborative community process of analyzing risks. The paragraph instead showed up as a last-moment talking point during a limited-time vote on a controversial proposal for IETF to standardize solo ML-KEM in TLS, a weakened form of the widely deployed ECC+ML-KEM in TLS. There’s just one week left in the voting period.”

“One good reason to oppose is recognizing that solo PQ creates unnecessary dangers compared to ECC+PQ. But another good reason to oppose is simply to say that, procedurally, disagreements have to be resolved.[, not ignored]”

Why Jet Engines Aren’t “Made In China” by Aakash Japi (Substack)

“Second-generation alloys added rhenium for creep resistance, a metal so rare its annual world production is fifty tons. Third-generation alloys doubled the rhenium content, which improved temperature capability but created brittleness under load, so the most recent iteration adds ruthenium, an ever rarer metal only produced as part of South African platinum mining.”

“The biggest complication here is yield. During the single-crystal casting process, dozens of variables need to be maintained within very small tolerances. Any disturbances during the process, any imperfections in the base material, any trace dissolved gases during nucleation, and you have micro-grains that cause the blade to fail certification. Established manufacturers still only reach 50-70% yield; a new entrant would be in the low tens for years.”

“[…] turbine blades, as complex as they are, form just one component of a jet engine. A complete engine has over 40,000 parts, each of which operates under similarly extreme conditions that stretch the boundaries of conventional fabrication, and consequently, has its own exotic material composition and manufacturing process, optimized through decades of continuous engineering effort.”

“China’s first fifth-generation fighter, the Chengdu J-20B, relied on a thirty-year old Russian AL-31 for a full decade until its domestic WS-15 program, which was started in the 1990s, was deemed ready for production. Even then, it’s projected to be far behind the Pratt & Whitney F135, the F-35’s engine, in durability, reliability, and efficiency. Its other fighter uses an outdated, 20-year-old Chinese engine.”

The F35 is reliable? Or just its engine?

“Iteration speed is very slow because reliability is very difficult to know a priori: it requires extensive testing and real-world monitoring. And jet engines do not have any lower-tier market with underserved demand: there’s a small set of customers with very strict requirements and a mature set of incumbents to supply them.”

“[…] an industry that combines extreme cost sensitivity with an extensive regulatory burden. These are nearly impossible conditions for new entrants to succeed in. Is it any surprise, then, that China’s CJ-1000A has faced interminable delays? The program was started in 2009 and initially projected to reach production by 2015. Instead, prototypes only launched in 2017, in-flight testing (as a redundant engine on a four-engine freighter) began in 2023, and domestic certification isn’t projected until at least 2027. 2030 is the earliest it will be attached to the C919, China’s domestic airliner, which currently relies on CFM’s LEAP-1C. FAA or EASA certification is not on the horizon at all, meaning the engine is likely to remain a domestic backstop for the foreseeable future.”

“Chinese military statements do need to be caveated. The F-35’s many operational issues are public because of a Western engineering culture that prioritizes shared learning. China has no equivalent. It has nothing like our annual Pentagon reports. F-35 crashes make worldwide news, but Chinese military aviation accidents are not reported. Maintenance issues remain classified. Given how little public operational data exists on the WS-15, it’s quite hard to believe that its performance matches its optimistic claims.”

I guess it’s probably accurate that China doesn’t publish information about its failures but “Pentagon and the war industry are open and honest” is also not true.

“No country that has ambitions to become a global power can depend on someone else for the propulsion of its fighter jets, the most important tool in the modern military.”

So many things wrong with that sentence. China is a global economic power; that the U.S. is dead-set on remaining a global power based on military might forces China to also pursue military might. This author is projecting how deeply ingrained his belligerence is. Fighter jets are no longer the most important tool in a modern military; they are an important tool for an offensive military. Drones and missiles have proven much more useful for defense.

“China constantly cites an episode in 2025, where export controls haphazardly applied by the Trump administration blocked the export of GE LEAP engines for the C919 for two months—and it is clear why this would induce fear in the CCP.”

Constantly…for at most a year now. The author’s anti-China prejudice is showing.

“These ongoing costs alone will exceed the LEAP’s purchase price. And the commercial market here is limited. Because FAA and EASA certification is not on the horizon, China is limited to domestic sales, which isn’t enough for the program to provide a financial return. Altogether, this is why most others have not bothered entering the market. Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Italy—all wealthy countries with large manufacturing sectors—have decided it’s better to buy engines and focus elsewhere.”

And those countries are all U.S. cucks, just like India. The author keeps rounding down the value of not depending on the U.S. to zero, which is silly.

“That China continues to push forward is a limitation of a system that hyper-focuses on legible targets and deliberately ignores market feedback.”

How is that job at the Heritage Foundation, dear author? Or are you at Cato? Reason? The author has decided the unit economics don’t work, and that dependence on the west is a non-concern. There is no reason to do anything if it costs too much. I’m sure the author hasn’t made the same analysis of the U.S. financial or prescription-drug-procurement system. The author will laser-like focus on China’s subsidization of a program that is otherwise not immediately profitable, while ignoring all of the cases in which purportedly far more capitalist systems do the same, but for the goal of enriching its wealthy elite, rather than breaking a dependency on a country that has declared war on it. This is silly.

LLMs & AI

Why AI Doesn’t Think, Cannot Reason, Isn’t Intelligent and Will Never Achieve Consciousness by Rob Urie (CounterPunch)

“if a series of steps are conceived, planned and launched by humans on equipment that was created by humans, at what point does their dimension shift from inanimate to animate? Or more simply, at what point does a bundle of algorithms housed on a computer think or reason or possess intelligence or consciousness? In fact, the claim that any of these describe AI is a category error. Is a rock rolling down a hill imagined to be rolling itself down the hill rather than being moved by unseen physical forces (e.g. gravity). So, claims that AI can reason emerge from either ignorance or misunderstanding of basic physical processes.”

“The question is political as well in that the answer determines how income is distributed in the West. If ‘capital’ in the form of an automated factory produces the output, do the proceeds then belong to capital, meaning to the capitalist? Without workers first creating the automated factories, there would be no automation process. The political answer was to end the claims of workers to this product through wages. However, while workers receive one-time payments (wages) for their effort, the capitalist receives the profits from this labor for as long as they last.”

“Recent public discussion has puzzled over how AI can solve math problems if it doesn’t think? Consider the concept from physics of ‘work.’ What those considering the matter are imagining is lone mathematicians sitting in rooms and thinking through the solutions to math puzzles. But with unlimited computing power, optimization programs can use brute force computing to work through every conceivable iteration of a problem in seconds. What AI users aren’t seeing is the skyscraper’s worth of infrastructure behind the scenes producing a result.

“Doesn’t this vast computing power illustrate the value of AI? No. It gets to the nature of technology. One explanation of technology is that it provides a benefit. Another is that it simply changes that way that humans do things. On the one hand, we can drive long distances quickly in cars versus walking. On the other, many of us now spend three hours per day sitting in traffic in cars. So, are cars a benefit? In some ways yes, in some ways no. What they aren’t is an unequivocal benefit, meaning that the jury is still out.”

“The ability to run a billion permutations in a microsecond makes AI a very powerful tool. But how much better is a world in which AI can run a billion permutations in a microsecond than the same world without it? The question requires a social answer, And the social answer must emerge from clear and complete understanding of the social costs of AI. It isn’t good enough to point to the math problems solved to justify the social investment in AI. The question is: what else could be accomplished with those same resources (opportunity costs)?”

“Take the term ‘Christianity,’ There are 45,000 Christian denominations as of a recent survey. What does this mean in the current context? An operational definition of Christianity as those who believe in Christ eliminates 45,000 enthusiastic differences of opinion amongst Christians regarding what ‘believing in Christ’ means. In political terms, it flattens 45,000 differences of opinion out of existence to claim a unity that arguably does not reflect reality.

“Again, this isn’t a quibble. Whoever controls the meaning of language controls the language. In an example from Zen Economics, economists use something called Household Income as a measure of economic wellbeing. While this makes intuitive sense, in practice ‘household’ must be defined, ‘income’ must be defined, and the terms must be recombined into Household Income. The semantic problem? With upwards of dozens of competing definitions, people using the exact phrasing ‘Household Income’ tend to be speaking about materially different concepts.

“When a user runs an AI query on Household Income, AI references the meaning that has been created by humans and placed into a semantic cache (storage area). But because AI is replacing internet search functions, prior definitions of commonly understood words are being systematically replaced with stripped down (operationalized) definitions by AI. This stripping down creates the sense of a consensus view on every topic that is incorrect. Linguistic diversity is being eliminated from the discourse. Each of these differences represents a worldview.”

“Anyone still imagining that AI thinks, reasons, has intelligence or consciousness should spend time with the model logic and explain exactly where in this process algorithmic instructions become an independent thought process? Just because some haven’t done the work to understand it doesn’t make it magic. And if you imagine that it is magic, where else is similar magic found in industrial equipment? Self-driving cars don’t drive themselves. They are dumb machines that follow algorithmic instructions. To test this theory, disconnect them from the algorithms.”

The difference between “today’s task” and “accretive work” by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“AI’s pitch to bosses is that they can fire most of their workers in order to terrorize the remainder into tolerating a working life wherein they are made to mark the AI’s homework, at superhuman speed, and to assume the blame when it goes wrong.”

“[…] is vibe code a way of empowering people to have the personal, vernacular tools that they design and adapt as they see fit? Or is it a way to shovel technological asbestos into the walls at scale, filling up our high-tech society with ghastly, lethal technical debt we’ll be digging our way out of for generations?

“Again: the paradox falls away once you realize that personal software you write for yourself is fundamentally different from “production code” that other people have to use, maintain and improve.”

“Elliott-McCrea posits that making code that is “socially constructed in a way that leaves the team prepared to operate on it, iterate it, and improve it” is the difference between “I got it working” and “something the future can build on.”

“He’s not claiming that “I got it working” is worthless. There’s plenty of space for “disposable and single use software.” Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be “bad code” but doing today’s task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn’t “accretive.”

“Canonization is accretive. To canonize code is to make it “legible to systems of humans and non-humans operating on it.” Free/open source software is the backbone of the canon: “decades of…intelligible, build-on-able work, sitting in public repos.””

“[…] the AI industry is further devaluing the already undervalued work of cleanup and canonization. As Elliott-McCrea writes, “the social production of knowledge [is] the seed corn.””

See also Canonization and the Overhang by Kellan Elliott-McCrea

“Features of a codebase that resist change, the code that sucks the will to live are measures of an absence of effective canonization. (though often, especially in the traditional human powered software systems they were also evidence of bad canonization)”

“If we continue to value only the work of theorem proving (coding) and not the work of canonizing (and also training the next generation of practitioners) then the Overhang will grow increasingly poor as a search space. We see this already in how reviewing is more fatiguing and also unrewarded. No one gets status for doing cleanup.”

Design

The irregular features of the Torre Marenostrum building in Barcelona at night

Programming

The best code is the one you shift+delete by Oren Eini (Ayende)

“In the past, I would have to trawl through the log and hope that something would pop up. These days, we can try handing the whole thing to the model and let it figure it out. If the log file wasn’t that big, it might even work. At dozens of MB, it doesn’t work (and it is quite expensive to try). I went the other way. I told the model: “Write me a script that looks at the structure of this log (I gave it the first ten rows). I want the script to extract and aggregate the parts I care about, and render the result in a nice table to make it easier to understand.” I had the view in under a minute, then I could explore the log and iterate.”

“Here’s the part that matters: I never read the code the model wrote. The moment the investigation was done, I threw all of it away. It’s throwaway code whose entire purpose was to help me see, and once I had seen enough, I discarded it. Without the model to write this code, I could have written it myself, but it is enough of a chore that it probably wouldn’t make sense. Doing that manually would have taken roughly the same amount of time.”

“I tell it the overall direction, it goes somewhere, and then I decide if I like the result. I find it genuinely easier to react to something than to produce it from a blank page — having a first draft to push against is faster than writing it all myself. Nevertheless, this is my code. I went over every single line, and I know exactly what’s in there.

“That last part takes real discipline, and it’s worth being honest about why. When you’re in the zone chasing a change (try something out, revert, try something else, etc.), it is very easy to surface a few hours later staring at two thousand lines of changes you never actually wrote. You went through a dozen iterations, and somewhere in there the code stopped being something you authored and became something that merely happened. Guarding against that is really important, because otherwise that isn’t your code.

“How do I make sure it’s still mine? I lean on tests, of course — regression tests to prove I didn’t break the old behavior, and new tests built alongside the change to pin down the new behavior. That’s the baseline for anything long-lived.”

“But the fact that I can get good scaffolding from the model for cheap changes a lot of the usual considerations. Because scaffolding is literally disposable code, I don’t have to worry about the usual code quality concerns. The log analyzer would probably take two or three hours to write (without the pretty graphics, which were helpful for easily identifying what was going on). The comparison harness would be multiple weeks of effort and would probably be a non-interactive ASCII table.”

The gauge broke (intrepidkarthi)

“[…] the people most confident the tool was speeding them up were the ones it was measurably slowing down.”

“Faros AI, looking across more than 10,000 developers, found pull requests merged up 98%, pull request size up over 150%, and review time up 91%, for roughly no net change in delivery. 31% of pull requests merged with no review at all. DORA’s research found higher AI adoption associated with a measurable drop in delivery stability, and the damage persisted into this year. GitClear, reading 200 million changed lines, found copy-pasted code rising, code churn rising, and refactoring collapsing to under 10% of changes, with 2024 the first year on record that developers pasted more code than they reorganized. The pattern across every one of these is identical. More generated, more merged, more churned. Same amount delivered, shakier when it lands.”

“The volume exploded at the one stage we did not re-staff, and the dashboards we trust cannot see the cost because the cost lands downstream, in incidents and churn and reviewer burnout, on a different page from the velocity chart everyone is cheering.”

“Measure what reaches production and stays standing, re-staff the stage where the work actually piles up, and treat any productivity claim that lives in a feeling as unproven until the stopwatch agrees.”

The cost of a free feature by Oren Eini (Ayende)

“When you get something for free from a dependency, you are not just accepting a feature. You are accepting an obligation. The behavior becomes observable, the observable becomes relied upon, and the relied-upon becomes a promise you have to keep, possibly long after the dependency that gave it to you is gone.

“The real price of a dependency is the behavior that you need to carry forward down the line, because it became part of your contract and your users rely on it. And that requires very careful consideration.

“I want to be careful here, because the lesson is not “don’t take free things” or “don’t depend on Lucene.” Building on Lucene was the right call, and exposing the count was the right call. I’d probably make both decisions again (although I would weaken the promise about the accuracy of the count).”

Sports

Wer sich über Infantino echauffiert, darf auch zu Merz nicht schweigen by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Es gibt im Leben und im Fußball Geschichten, die sind so skurril, dass man sie zunächst für einen nicht mal originellen Witz hält. Dazu gehört die gestrige Pressemeldung, dass ausgerechnet der nunmehr 90-jährige Ex-FIFA-Boss Sepp Blatter sich öffentlichkeitswirksam Sorgen um die Integrität der FIFA unter seinem Nachfolger Gianni Infantino macht. Wer Blatter nicht kennt – das ist der Mann, der von der FIFA-Ethikkommission – allein dieser Begriff ist ja bereits ein Oxymoron – wegen seiner dubiosen Geschäfte zu sechs Jahren Sperre für alle mit dem Fußball verbundenen Tätigkeiten verurteilt wurde. Das ist ungefähr so, als würde sich die CSU über die Vetternwirtschaft der AfD aufregen.”

“Die FIFA ist so korrupt, wie Wasser nass ist. Und Gianni Infantinos Unterwürfigkeit gegenüber Donald Trump ist ja ebenfalls kein Geheimnis. Dass Trump nun seinen Buddy „Johnny“ angerufen und eine Aufhebung der Sperre des US-Stürmers Folarin Balogun gefordert hat, sollte daher eigentlich niemanden so wirklich überraschen. Trump macht Trump-Sachen und Infantino macht Infantino-Sachen. Das kann und muss man kritisieren. Nun so zu tun, als falle man vor Überraschung aus allen Wolken, ist jedoch bestenfalls naiv und schlimmstenfalls verlogen.”

“Kritisch geht es beim Fußball wie in der Politik ja nur zu, wenn es Gratismut zu verteilen gibt. Und was ist leichter und dankbarer, als sich über Gianni Infantinos Unterwürfigkeit gegenüber Donald Trump zu mokieren? Doch wo waren unsere ach so kritischen Medien eigentlich, als Friedrich Merz im Weißen Haus eine Schleimspur, breiter als der Strafraum im Fußballstadion, hinterließ? Ach ja, das war ja in den Worten des SPIEGEL „Krisendiplomatie“. Ist Friedrich Merz im Grunde nicht auch nur ein etwas größerer Infantino mit etwas mehr Haaren auf dem Kopf?”

“Es gibt jedoch einen großen Unterschied zwischen Infantino und seinen Ebenbildern aus der deutschen und europäischen Politik. Wenn Infantino den Bückling gegenüber Trump macht, geht es um so banale Dinge wie einen albernen „FIFA-Friedenspreis“ oder Rote Karten im Fußball. Bei den Kotaus von Merz, Rutte und von der Leyen geht es um Billionen, unsere Zukunft und, wenn es hart auf hart kommt, um Krieg oder Frieden. Das sollte man nicht gleichsetzen.”

Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs by David Epstein (YouTube)

The Hydration-Break World Cup by Jonathan Wilson (The Paris Review)

“[…] in this tournament of miracles and wonders, the minnows have been shocking the sharks—no team more so than Cape Verde’s, who quickly became the darling, first by tying with Spain and then by giving Argentina a major scare in a game of astonishing sublimity before succumbing in overtime. Along the way, the team’s forty-year-old goalkeeper, Vozinha (which means “little grandma”), became a media sensation. So did the recruitment story of Roberto “Pico” Lopes, the team’s center back, who usually plays for Ireland’s Shamrock Rovers. Born in Dublin to a Cape Verdean father, the defender was invited for international duty by way of a LinkedIn message he didn’t respond to because it was in Portuguese and he thought it was spam. Eventually he received a notification in English and replied. This may be the most interesting thing that has ever happened on LinkedIn.”

Fun

America: Birth Of A Nation by The Onion (YouTube)

Yak Hopes They Never Stop Making Grass (The Onion)

“At press time, witnesses overheard Cunningham let out a quiet “hell yeah” after discovering he had a big patch of grass left over from lunch.”

Video Games

Kernel Anti-Cheat Is an Overreach (No One's Happy)

“The access is broad, the owners’ incentives point toward using it, and there is no way for you to verify what it does. I have to assume that they are collecting data on systems they have access to unless they specifically say they are not. That is why I’ve come to read kernel anti-cheat as another channel for monitoring consumers — one that happens to sit at the most privileged layer of your computer, owned by state funds and advertising businesses, running on hardware you paid for.

“So I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater than run un-auditable ring-0 software on the same machine I use for anything private. People spend thousands of dollars on gaming hardware and expect it to be multi-use. Yet if you are going to play these games, I feel it’s 100% necessary to isolate them: dual-boot a second Windows install used only for gaming — or better, a separate machine — with nothing personal on it. Which is incredibly wasteful, and downright audacious from these gaming companies.”