Links and Notes for July 17th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Design
• Sports
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

“Graham Platner and the machines of power.” by Patrick Lawrence (The Floutist)

“The message should not be to believe women, but to take women seriously.”

Gender should not be a factor when considering the veracity of a statement.

“Accusations of sexual assault quickly turn public opinion against a political candidate. In the absence of proof—and how seldom is this required?—any allegation is an effective political weapon. This should concern anyone who cares about representational governance, political reform, and due process under the law ignored in favor of public opinion.”

“This was a point made recently by Tonery Rose in conversation with Aaron Good on his podcast, American Exception. Rose compared Susan Collins, and Platner, too, with leaders in Iran, many of whom are of exceptionally high intellectual caliber, multilingual, prominent scholars, deeply familiar with Western cultures even while we in the West largely remain ignorant of theirs.”

“I marvel that so many people—Democrats, liberals, those who pass as progressives—are triggered by allegations of sexual abuse but not apparently by the ongoing genocide in Gaza or the carpet bombing of Iran or any number of horrific crimes committed in all of our names,”

“In the end, the demise of Platner’s campaign was not about the man himself. It was a takedown of the citizens of Maine—and all Americans who aspire for a government that responds to their needs. It was a warning and a reminder of what happens when power is challenged and the lengths to which the powerful will go to keep their power sequestered.”

“He connected so well with voters. He held 80+ town halls, screened no questions & answered them all using plain language. He wrote his own speeches. He worked his butt off. He won the primary with 72% of the vote with the highest turnout in history….”

“Faced with an electorate that fairly shouts from the mountaintops for a new national direction, the elites who run the Democratic Party have no intention of going anywhere near such a thought, or of altering any of its policies an iota. The intent, as JT so well puts it, is to crush the energy coming from the ground up, where people live—to extinguish it.”

“it is inescapable that the Democratic Party dedicates itself not to a single, solitary idea or principle or to the betterment of life in America, but solely to manipulating voters at intervals defined by election cycles to gain their support in the empty charade of the American political process.”

“Who benefits from pushing Platner off the ballot?”

• Zionists.
• Centrist corporate Democrats.
• Republicans.

“Why didn’t Democrats turn on Bill Clinton after even more credible allegations?”

• He is a centrist corporate Democrat.
• He is a closet Republican.
• He supports Zionism.

“[…] there is no way in hell that Israel determines US policy without the American Oligarchy (which are mostly non–Jews) approving it.”

“WHAT HAS BEFALLEN Graham Platner over the course of many months, now that this has reached its conclusion, has exposed a great deal about who runs America and how they go about their work. The comment thread to our piece makes this clear. This is why we choose to reply to it as we have. An increasing number of Americans do not miss the reality I just mentioned. I count this a positive outcome, revelation, if anything about this affair can be counted positive.”

“Americans have been conditioned over a long time to think, believe, accept or condemn, support or oppose whatever it is they are told to think, believe, accept, condemn, support or oppose and not think, believe, accept, etc. anything they are told they should not. I have not seen this among any other people in the course of my travels abroad. Faith and trust in forms of authority prevail when neither is warranted or wise.”

“[…] the spectacle of moralistic condemnation among those who look to a party of genocide enablers, warmongers, fiddlers, thieves—a party routinely abusive of the interests of most Americans,”

Soon It Will Be Illegal To Oppose Imperialism by Nate Bear (¡Do Not Panic!)

“It will mean journalists stop quoting the IRGC in their stories or reproducing press releases they publish. The effect, however, will be broader than this. To avoid falling foul of the law and facing prosecution, over-compliance is likely. Journalists will simply stop reporting anything said by official Iranian government figures, for fear of falling foul of the clause prohibiting information from the IRGC being shared. And the effect is likely to be felt even beyond the UK. Any journalist in the world who plans on visiting the UK will likely avoid quoting Iranian government officials for the same reason, in case they get arrested on landing in the country. In the future, there won’t even be a fig leaf of balance to mainstream articles about Iran. Every article about conflict between Iran and the west will be self-censored, and people’s understanding of events, let alone the imperial contours of the world, will erode further. Which is, of course, the point.”

“It’s the Gaza, Israel and Palestine Action playbook all over again. As soon as a group successfully imposes costs on the US and its sympathisers, as soon as public support switches from the imperial cause and its allies, to the imperial enemy, the British government cries terrorism and threatens to lock up anyone who shows support for the resistors.”

“The IRGC is the last line of defence against western hegemony and a Zionist world order which murders whoever it wants, whenever it wants, to get whatever it wants. No other group has fought so successfully against the military forces of imperialism in the last fifty years. This is their only crime. And very soon, expressing that opinion will be illegal under UK law.”

“It will remain perfectly legal, as a Brit, to join the IDF, go and kill children in Palestine, Lebanon, and wherever else the forces of Zionist expansionism desire, and then come home as if nothing has happened. And if you don’t want to do the dirty work yourself, you can wave IDF flags, praise genocide and solicit as much financial support for a military committing genocide as you like.”

“To reiterate: it will soon be British law that committing genocide is legal, but speaking supportively of any group fighting to stop genocide is illegal.”

“The west is monstrous. The loss of legitimacy is total. Free speech, such as it ever was, is dead. Liberalism, such as it ever was, is dead. It died in Gaza, in Tehran and Beirut. It died for Israel, for Netanyahu, for Trump, for Ben Gvir, and for Zionism.”

“Before them, of course, there was Hamas, and its armed wing Al Qassam, banned as an international terror group despite being entirely local to Palestine, and the only resistance to Israeli genocide.”

How the right to trial became a legal fiction by Jacob Sullum (Reason)

“[…] about 95 percent of felony convictions in the United States are based on guilty pleas. In federal courts, the percentage is even higher: about 98 percent in fiscal year 2025, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. It is not hard to understand why criminal defendants almost never opt for trials. “At the federal level,” the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers reports, “trial sentences are roughly three times higher than plea sentences for the same crime on average and sometimes as much as eight or ten times higher.””

“Although the crime he admitted involved the theft of $38,649 in a single transaction, his sentence was based on additional allegations—an example of a disturbing practice that imposes punishment for conduct that was never admitted by the defendant or proven beyond a reasonable doubt. At sentencing in the Southern District of Texas, Judge Sim Lake assumed that Hunter had stolen $488,352 in 26 transactions.”

That’s a kangaroo court. Sentencing based on things that you’ve not been accused of isn’t “weird,” it’s injustice. Hey, we’ve convicted you of three moving violations but we’re going to sentence you for six murders that we just made up, too. You’re welcome.

“In other words, “a guilty plea to a single charge enabled prosecutors to secure a punishment based on other charges they had agreed to drop or had not even brought.””

No-one actually believes this is fair. They just don’t care.

At this point, why even bother pretending to have a system? Just put the people you don’t like away for as long as you like without bothering with a justification.

“Gorsuch saw “deeper problems” with appeal waivers. “The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, this Court has held, tolerates only ‘voluntary and knowing’ guilty pleas,” he noted. A guilty plea “must be made both ‘voluntarily’ and ‘with full understanding of the consequences.’” But “how can a defendant ‘know’ and ‘fully understand’ at the time he signs a plea agreement that a court might later order punishment that defies the Constitution, a federal statute, or this Court’s precedents?””

Like, duh. Because none of this has anything to do with justice.

“If a defendant “may prospectively waive the right to appeal his sentence,” Gorsuch wrote, “one might wonder what’s to stop prosecutors from pushing their luck further yet. Might we eventually face plea agreements that include prospective waivers of the defendant’s right to complain about future unreasonable searches and seizures of his home?”

Well, we would, except what would be the point? No-one has any practical protection against unreasonable searches and seizures because nothing is considered unreasonable anymore. They just take what they want from whomever they want whenever they want and make a bullshit reason. It’s not a right that you can sign away because it’s not a right you have.

Don’t believe me? Think about how happy everyone is with license-plate readers. Rock-solid, right? In one California town, Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police (Business Insider).

“In a 1979 Law and Society article, legal historian John Langbein described an ironic tradeoff, arguing that plea bargaining, which puts defendants at a distinct disadvantage, emerged in response to the complications created by safeguards aimed at protecting defendants. “As late as the 18th century,” he noted, the jury trial was a “summary proceeding” that was almost always completed within a single day. But “the rise of adversary procedure and the law of evidence injected vast complexity into jury trial,” making it “unworkable as a routine dispositive procedure.””

So we just got rid of it! It was inconvenient for the number of people they wanted to arrest, prosecute, and sentence, so they got rid of the procedural part, the justice part, and jumped right to the throwing-the-indigent-in jail part.

“Law professor Lucian Dervan added to Alschuler’s account in a 2019 Federal Sentencing Reporter article. For most of its history, “the common law has rejected plea bargaining as impermissibly coercive and an affront to the truth-seeking mission of the criminal justice system,””

Good thing that truth-seeking isn’t the mission of the criminal-justice system in the U.S.

“In addition to the “striking political corruption” that Alschuler had noted, Dervan cited “unprecedented overcriminalization,” which accelerated during Prohibition and expanded “both the number of criminal offenses and the volume of individual prosecutions.” Because that added load “overwhelmed” the courts, Dervan wrote, “prosecutors began turning to plea bargaining to increase efficiency and clear dockets.””

Well, they had to, didn’t they? They criminalized everything, so what were they to do? Not oppress the working class?

““It is no exaggeration to say that, without plea bargaining, mass incarceration could not occur,” New York University law professor Rachel Elise Barkow writes in her 2025 book Justice Abandoned. “The mass numbers of cases require mass processing, and you cannot have that without plea bargaining. It is the rotten core of mass incarceration, and it exists only because the Supreme Court has allowed the government to coerce people into giving up one of the most sacred of constitutional rights.””

“In the 1941 case Walker v. Johnston, the Court held that a defendant is “deprived of a constitutional right” when he is “induced to plead guilty” by “deception or coercion of the prosecuting attorney.””

“Langbein made the same point in a 1978 University of Chicago Law Review article, likening plea bargains to confessions obtained under threat of torture in medieval Europe. “There is, of course, a difference between having your limbs crushed if you refuse to confess [and] suffering some extra years of imprisonment if you refuse to confess,” he conceded, “but the difference is of degree, not kind. Plea bargaining, like torture, is coercive.””

“Although defenders of plea bargaining sometimes liken it to “the working-out of a business contract,” the Cato Institute’s brief in Hunter noted, the result is more like “terms of surrender,” since one side wields overwhelming power: “Prosecutors alone decide the ‘price’ a defendant will pay for his acts. They have no competitors to which defendants can turn for better terms. Defendants in criminal cases are trapped in a system that insists they make a ‘deal’ when they have no bargaining power.””

“Angelos turned down a proposed plea deal that involved a 15-year sentence for one count of selling marijuana and the associated gun charge. He thought “15 years for $300 worth of marijuana as a first-time offender” was grossly disproportionate.”

Only morons and demons think otherwise.

Border cops can search your phone whenever they want, if you’re within 100 miles of the border by Elizabeth Nolan Brown (Reason)

“Coming back from a far-flung vacation? Traveling abroad on a business trip? Just happen to find yourself within 100 miles of a U.S. border? I regret to inform you that U.S. Customs and Border Control (CBP) agents can search your phone, laptop, GPS system, smartwatch, or other electronic devices for virtually no reason. No particular suspicion of criminal activity is needed. No probable cause. No warrant.”

“Under both the old policy and the new one, they can retain data if they have probable cause that it relates to contraband, crime, or immigration law enforcement. But if “there exists no probable cause to seize the information, CBP will retain no copies of the information,” the old directive said. Under the new policy, digital data can be kept if doing so may be “consistent with discovery obligations in ongoing or reasonably anticipated litigation.” Without defining any further what might trigger a “reasonable anticipation” of litigation, that gives CBP pretty broad authority to retain any and all data under the theory that doing so might be necessary as part of a future lawsuit.”

It’s just theft, coercion. Just saying it’s legal doesn’t make it constitutional.

“Under the new policy, any such ambiguity is cleared up. An officer “may perform an advanced search of an electronic device only in instances in which there is reasonable suspicion of activity in violation of the laws enforced or administered by CBP or, in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion[,] when there is a national security concern,” it says. Immigration lawyer Rosanna Berardi thinks this change of language is significant. Advanced device searches “can now happen based on a national security concern alone, without reasonable suspicion,” she recently posted.”

Which means that peptide-slurping orangutans can do whatever they like whenever they like with your stuff. Go ahead and sue; see you in ten years. The horse on this has long since left the barn. The U.S. is not even pretending to be a nation of laws anymore. I guess it’s gotten more fair now, though: this treatment used to be reserved for the lower classes and oppressed minorities. Now it’s for anyone who’s not in the elite.

“[…] for what it’s worth, authorities aren’t supposed to hang onto device passwords. “Passcodes or other means of access should only be recorded by the officer in a temporary format and should not be uploaded into CBP systems,” states the latest directive.”

It’s worth nothing.

““When he objected, he was told he had no Fourth Amendment rights at the border,” it says. “Moreover, he was told he was behaving suspiciously simply by asserting those rights and refusing to consent to the device searches,” and “his requests to contact his family and lawyer were denied during the detention.””

How The Guardian Sells Imperialism To Progressives by Nate Bear (ZNetwork)

“The Guardian scripts a story about the good guys and the bad guys, but cloaks it in a progressive sheen to hit the liberal pleasure centres of the brain to reinforce the exact same empire narratives as the right. The Guardian is more insidious than right-wing media because it gets decent people who instinctively are on the side of justice to buy into unjust worldviews which uphold empire.”

“There was no outrage at the assassination of Iranian leaders, no attempt to explain how egregious a breach of international law and norms the targeted mass killing of government officials was.”

“There were no stories subsequent to the attacks about the harm to the environment from the bombing of Iranian oil facilities which literally set Tehran’s streets on fire. (Also note the use of “shadow fleet”, a meaningless term which has become integral to buttress empire narratives. It implies illegality, but simply means that a country has been sanctioned by the US and continues to operate ships in “violation” of sanctions which have zero power under international law).”

“[…] this is the impulse that always lies beneath.

“It is the impulse that refers to illegal annexation as “gains”, or illegal Israeli invasions as the “expansion of ground campaigns.””

“A liberal democracy which does genocide and war crimes is intrinsically better than a revolutionary state which has universal healthcare and doesn’t mass murder civilians, so goes twisted empire-brained logic.”

“This Guardian story, while reporting critically on Trump’s threats to Cuba, says that even if the US did a Maduro-style kidnapping of leader Díaz-Canel, it would “leave in place the repressive communist regime.” The Guardian considers the only downside to another flagrant breach of international law is that it wouldn’t actually achieve regime change. Because they just can’t help themselves. You can be sure that when the US does finally invade, The Guardian will have a long, congratulatory piece on the end of the regime, replete with quotes from “Cuban” Americans living in Miami who’ve never set foot on the island.”

PEN America Sells out. Again. by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Fascism looms. Those who write and speak in opposition to the genocide are silenced and criminalized. Our universities have banned free speech and purged students and faculty who dare to denounce the crime of all crimes. Corporate media, including CBS and CNN […] have been cowed into silence”

“PEN America has been hollowed out. Its moral core is gone. It abandoned its mission to “defend writers, artists, and journalists and protect free expression.” It transformed itself into a propaganda machine for the oppressors, not the oppressed. It should be purged and returned to its former self or shut down.”

Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Case of Alaska Pilot Whose $95,000 Plane Was Seized Over a 6-Pack of Beer by C.J. Ciaramella (Reason)

“Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2012 when Alaska state troopers searched his plane before takeoff and discovered that a passenger was attempting to bring several cases of beer to a “dry” village where alcohol is prohibited. (Jouppi was only culpable for a single six-pack of Budweiser that troopers said was in plain sight.)

“And for the last 14 years, Jouppi has fought to stop the Alaska state government from taking his Cessna through asset forfeiture”

““Alcohol abuse in rural Alaska leads to increased crime; disorders, such as alcoholism; conditions, such as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder; and death, imposing substantial costs on public health and the administration of justice. Within this context, it is clear that the illegal importation of even a six-pack of beer causes grave societal harm,” the ruling states. “This factor strongly suggests that the forfeiture is not grossly disproportional.””

The state thinks getting an entire plane as punishment for smuggling a six-pack is proportional. No, they don’t. They like stealing shit from people and being able to smugly keep it. They’ve probably already spent the money on drugs for themselves. That country is run by thieves and liars. It’s Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome over there.

Episode 563: Requiem for a Nun by TrueAnon (Patreon)

“We hitch a ride to Heaven for a steamy sit-down with South Carolina’s latest angel, the now-perished Lindsey Graham.”

A takedown of the recently deceased Lindsey Graham. He had just turned 71 and had celebrated his birthday in a train on the way to Kiev. Man, that guy really loved Ukraine.

1053 − Graham Crackers feat. Derek Davison by Chapo Trap House (SoundCloud)

“DIVA DOWN! We pay our respects to Lindsay Graham, a man who died doing what he loved. We then tour some recent geopolitical conflicts, with the Ukraine war in a continuing stalemate despite recent drone innovations and the Iran War back in full swing. We also talk about a few fun cultural topics, such as Connor McGregor’s loss, Boosie Badazz allegedly trying to bribe Jacob Wohl, and the continuing story of Kash Patel.”

How America's Corporate Class Became Legally Unaccountable by Chris Hedges | Marie Gottschalk (YouTube)

Can AI Be Trusted To Do Anything Right? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“In the future, creating a transcript will be fast and easy because the work won’t be performed by busy fingers, but by AI chatbots. Why should the fact that the next 40 years of your client’s life depends on the accuracy of the transcript concern you? Isn’t “efficiency” and a “productive tool” more important than getting it right?

“As was noted years ago as technology sought to wiggle its way into the law, just because it makes things easier does not mean it make things better.”

“It’s not that lawyers are anti-technology, it’s that they are anti-bullshit.”

“Remaining anti-bullshit seems prudent, even if generative artificial intelligence persists on pushing lawyers down the path of incompetency.”

Labor

Crushed Between Giants by Bill Scheuerman, Sidney Plotkin (ZNetwork)

“With real wages stagnating and prices of basic goods climbing, millions of Americans borrow money just to pay for basic necessities. Workers are exploited at both ends of the economy – as producer and consumers. Low wages force them to use credit cards to make ends meet. Employers get higher profits which allows banks to reach further into workers’ pockets by charging high interest rates. So, while wages stagnated, corporate profits reached an all-time high of $4.39 trillion for the first quarter of 2026.”

“A recent U.S. News and World Report survey found that 57% of all consumers now carry a balance on their credit cards and pay a monthly interest charge. According to Forbes, the average annual interest charge in July 2026 is in the Cosa Nostra neighborhood of 25.16%. Since about 29% of all credit card holders, or around 75 million people, pay interest on balances greater than $10,000, it’s easy to see why banks and corporations are prospering”

Episode 564: Sugar by TrueAnon (Patreon)

A brilliant presentation of a labor situation on the California coast today, placed in the context of the history of the company against which the workers are striking, reaching way back to the 1930s. An amazing and well-researched episode.

How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late by Chuck Mertz | Cory Doctorow (This is Hell!)

“I think AI can distract us from political debates if we get caught up in the wrong kind of debate, right? If we stipulate to the idea that AI can do your job as opposed to the idea that your boss is such a credulous doof that he can be sold an AI that can do your job and will still fire you and put the AI in your place, then we help them sell AI. And that’s a giant political distraction. If we get caught up in these absurd debates about whether teaching the word guessing program risks too many words, risks the word guessing program waking up and becoming God and turning us into paperclips, we are being distracted from real political discussions.”

This entire interview was brilliant and very much on-point. I could have transcribed the whole thing. Drop everything and listen to the interview.

Economy & Finance

Die Mär der hochsubventionierten chinesischen Autos by Urs P. Gasche (InfoSperber)

“Reine chinesische E-Autos hat die EU mit Strafzöllen belegt, auf Autos des Autokonzerns BYD satte 17 Prozent – zusätzlich zum normalen Zoll von 10 Prozent, also insgesamt 27 Prozent Zoll. China verlangt von europäischen Autos einen Zoll von 15 Prozent.”

“Bei der Frage eines unfairen Handels geht es darum, ob ein Auto, das in China hergestellt wird, stärker subventioniert wird, als ein Auto, das in Deutschland hergestellt wird. Doch ausgerechnet auf diese relevante Frage geben OECD und Kieler Institut keine Antwort. Die OECD sagt, «detaillierte Informationen auf Unternehmensebene» zu haben, aber diese «vertraulich zu behandeln». Mit anderen Worten: Niemand soll die Angaben und Berechnungen der OEDC kontrollieren können.

“Vielleicht deshalb nicht, weil ein Vergleich des chinesischen Autokonzerns BYD mit dem deutschen Autokonzern Volkswagen eindeutig zeigt: Die Autos, die BYD in China herstellt und exportiert, sind nicht einmal halb so stark subventioniert wie Autos, die VW in Deutschland produziert und exportiert.”

“Zu den marktwidrigen direkten und indirekten Subventionen gehören folgende: ”

1. Direkte Subventionen
2. Erlassene oder ermässigte Steuern
3. Kredite zu vergünstigten Zinssätzen
4. Land und Energie zu ermässigten Preisen
5. Beiträge an die Forschung
6. Staatliche Förderungen der Elektro-Mobilität
7. Abwrackprämien an Autokäufer
8. Kaufprämien für Käufer von E-Autos
9. Staatliche Autokäufe zu überhöhten Preisen
10. Subventionen und Steuervorteile für Zulieferbetriebe

“Beim fairen Wettbewerb kommt es darauf an, ob ein chinesisches oder ein deutsches Auto stärker subventioniert wird. Diese Autos stehen den Konsumenten zur Wahl. Ob ein Konzern im Vergleich zu seinem Umsatz mehr Subventionen erhält – wie das die OECD misst – ist wenig relevant. Denn am Umsatz gemessen kommt ein wenig produktiver Konzern mit aufgeblasenem Umsatz besser weg als ein schlanker Konzern mit hoher Produktivität. Das kann nicht im Sinne des Wettbewerbs sein.”

“Doch die unterschiedliche Inflation spielt eine wesentliche Rolle. Im Zeitraum von 2021 bis 2025 erreichte die kumulierte Inflation in Deutschland 21 Prozent, während sie in China bei bescheidenen 4 Prozent blieb. Die hohe Inflation in Deutschland hat den Schuldner VW begünstigt, weil sich die Kreditschulden des VW-Konzerns – je nach Refinanzierungszeiten und Zinsen – real deutlich reduziert haben, während BYD die Schulden im fast gleichen realen Wert wie bei der Aufnahme zurückzahlen und verzinsen muss.”

No Path Forward, No Way Back, Imperial Decline Edition by Rob Urie (CounterPunch)

“While you and I know that AI isn’t going to cause 50% – 60% of the jobs in the US to disappear, what astonishes is that this is considered an acceptable outcome by Donald Trump and the US Congress.”

“Most governments begin worry about political instability when unemployment rises to 10%. That Trump and Congress heard the 50% – 60% unemployment projection and still thought AI a brilliant idea is testament to an absence of political accountability. There is something deeply broken in US politics.”

“[…] surprise, the class war is real. Illustrated is that capital’s share of national income (GDP) has been rising for five decades as labor’s share has been falling. Oligarchs own the capital stock. Labor owns labor. When payments to capital rise, oligarchs benefit. When payments to labor fall, labor loses. As the graph illustrates, labor has been losing in the US for fifty years.”

“The political effect of this should in theory be analogous to handing someone an empty gun, telling them that it is loaded, and then forcing them to shoot their spouse. The spouse will live because the gun is empty. But the relationship will have ended the second that the trigger is pulled. Trust will have been permanently broken. With the predicted job destroying impact of AI, Donald Trump and the US Congress pulled the trigger. They are fine with the nation disappearing in a puff of smoke as long as their stock portfolios keep rising.”

“No government would withstand 50% employment without massive social upheaval. This implies that the current US leadership has no stake in the US beyond what can be extracted through looting.”

“The math has it that at 50% unemployment, a 200% increase in productivity would be needed to avoid an economic decline from AI. Last year, with AI in the mix, this value was 3%. This is not going to happen.”

“They imagine that the stock market would rise in the midst of 50% unemployment. What they should be imagining is every major city in the US being burnt to the ground by newly immiserated citizens. As the saying goes, three days without food and no government will stand.”

“Because the US was far away, lies between two oceans, and joined the war late, its industrial infrastructure was in better condition after the war ended than before it. To confuse this with grace, intelligence or hard work is a category error.”

“By the 1980s, the choice for the US was between manufacturing and asset stripping. The leadership at the time (Reagan) chose asset stripping (finance capitalism). With crypto grifts now having reached their natural limit, the US rediscovered war as a business plan— but without the manufacturing base needed to turn military production back into a business.”

“In neoclassical theory, a powerful and intrusive state is needed to prevent concentrated wealth from closing the door on new competitors. Neoliberalism thus holds the paradoxical view that 1) economic power doesn’t exist but that 2) the purpose of the state is to support the interests of the economically powerful. The result is that economic ‘freedom’ now means the freedom to loot (e.g. crypto grifts) without legal consequences.”

“Bartering a coal mine for goods and services is complicated and cumbersome. But selling shares in the coal mine to the public and then cashing in through stock options is easy, quick and rewarded with tax incentives (discounted capital gains tax rate). The richest 1% owns half of the stock market and the richest 10% owns about 90%. The stock market is central to continuing oligarch control.”

“To be clear, the issue isn’t envy over fat wallets. It is concern over the aggregating impact of the mis-allocation of social resources. If the greed-heads want a sixth yacht, who would care except for the social power that their wealth gives them to force their self-serving decisions onto the rest of us.”

“In the 1990s, outsourcing was claimed to be the product of nature (wage competition) when it was in fact the result of specific policies promoted by specific interests. American industrialists imagined that they could rid the US of organized labor by ridding it of jobs that pay. Now, with crypto grifts being what it is that Americans ‘do,’ the solution from above is political repression.”

“It doesn’t help that the CEOs of the two main competitors in the thinking machine space, OpenAI and Anthropic, are philosophically ignorant fabulists who don’t appear to understand how the products that they are selling actually work.”

“An analogy is to build a bridge 90% of the way without having a clear understanding of how the remaining 10% will be built. Continental philosophers explained a century ago both how and why building the final 10% (inanimate to animate) of the bridge is impossible. American AI companies built 90% of the bridge with no way to get to the other side.”

“As Will Rogers put it, once the bubble bursts, people stop worrying about the return on their money to focus on the return of their money.”

“The math has it that valuing the hedonic adjustment at 100% of the increased functionality while users only use 15% of it overstates the increase in the productivity of capital on its own terms. When applied to AI, assuming that the full theoretical change in the value of capital is 100% of the hedonic adjustment, and therefore allocating 100% of productivity gains to AI, is to overstate the change in productivity from AI (15%) and to understate the change in productivity of labor (85%) in the production process. This same point applies to all technology shocks. The game is rigged for capital.”

“Looking forward, expect and prepare for an AI related financial calamity within the next year or two. This will be the result of AI financing, not AI per se. The catalyst could be the economic consequences of the re-shutting of the Strait of Hormuz. Or it could be the implosion of AI financing in the presence of shrinking promises about what AI can do. Either way, the US has been placed very, very far out on the limb of a dying tree. Trump the destroyer is the product of the American turn toward internal predation.”

“What are the solutions? The re-localization of agriculture. Rationalizing the consumer economy to match social and environmental constraints. A Federal guarantee that all who are willing to work be provided jobs that pay doing the work that the US needs to be done. Public schools from pre-K – PhD that educate the public in the broad attributes of human civilization. A healthcare system that raises life expectancy instead of lowering it And a Department of Peace with the authority and purpose of ending US military adventurism abroad. Murder is the business of the mafia. It’s time to get the gangsters out of government.”

Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement Sets a Bad Precedent by Tosin Akintola (Reason)

“Anthropic’s decision to settle the case might hurt the company’s pocketbook for now. Still, it likely avoids a court battle with even wider-reaching implications, since many AI companies use pirated data to train their models. Indeed, AI leaders such as Meta, Perplexity AI, Google, OpenAI, and Nvidia are facing lawsuits over similar copyright infringement claims. Anthropic is also being sued by Concord Music Group, which alleges that the company used copyrighted lyrics to train its Frontier AI model, Claude.

“Time will tell how these disputes shake out, but courts placing restrictions on fair use of publicly available data will likely make AI models worse. Instead of settling potential copyright claims, AI companies will likely turn to a growing market for repositories of licensed copyrighted works.

“Of course, this will also make production of the models more expensive, a cost that will inevitably be passed on to consumers.”

It’s always such a shame when people let what they want override their supposed convictions. This is a writer for Reason, so they probably have a libertarian bent. But their fealty to property rights ends at individual authors exercising them; they cover only the property rights of corporations. As Libertarians, they also see their way clear to wanting to give as much regulatory leeway as possible to the “pirate” companies who are providing products that they want to have, at prices that they like. Any justice that gets in the way of providing the product at a cheaper price is considered bad, rather than the cost of doing business.

Questions raised over continuation of AI boom by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Earlier this month, Samsung shares plunged by as much as 10 percent in a single day. But the share slide did not come on the back of bad results. Rather, it came after the company had reported a third straight quarter of record profits. Its forecast for the second quarter operating profit was $58.4 billion, up 19-fold from the figure a year ago and exceeding the profit for all of 2025.”

“Samsung shares have fallen by a third since their June high, SK Hynix has dropped 40 percent and shares of the US-based chipmaking firm Micron have dropped more than 30 percent.”

Holy shit! That’s a lot of lost trust. What’s going on? I thought that they had a lock on the market? Or is it that the market is about the disappear?

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

“To be abundantly clear, the vast majority of the AI data center compute revenue is contingent on the continued ability of two unprofitable, unsustainable AI companies’ to raise tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This is not an overstatement, this is not hyperbole, it is the quite literal situation we’re stuck in.

“There Is Over 15 Times More Data Center Capacity Being Built Than Actual Data Center Demand, Which Is Already Inflated By OpenAI and Anthropic

“Putting aside whether data centers are profitable or not (they aren’t), if the demand does not exist at this remarkable scale, the vast majority of AI data centers and their associated SPVs will collapse.”

Premium: The Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2) by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“Yet with AI, Oracle broke its long-standing trend of letting someone else figure out the innovation, choosing instead to build its own cloud infrastructure, spending more in capex in its last fiscal year ($55.6 billion) than it did in the previous nine years combined ($50.4 billion), tripling its debt from $56.91 billion in FY2017 to $167.4 billion in FY2026, a year that ended with its free cashflow sitting at negative $23.69 billion.

“For comparison, Oracle has had positive free cashflow every single year since 2001, including the Great Financial Crisis and COVID.

“Oracle has doomed itself with its commitment to the AI bubble. It has committed to building 7.1GW of data center capacity for one company — OpenAI — as part of a $300 billion, five-year-long contract that requires it to build an impossible amount of capacity in an impossible period of time for a client that could never afford the $70 billion or more in annual costs to make any of it worth it.

“Today I am going to talk trash on what I consider to be one of the single-worst companies in the tech industry that’s survived only through financial engineering and never, ever overextending itself.

“With revenue plateauing and customers in revolt, Oracle’s future already looked murky, but with the power of AI — and $95 billion in FY2027 capex — it’s becoming increasingly clear that this may be Larry Ellison’s last dance with Silicon Valley.”

Private Credit’s State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers by Andrew Granato, Pranjal Drall (SSRN)

“Private equity (PE) firms have acquired large life insurers and loaded their balance sheets with private credit assets that are opaque and difficult for regulators to value. […]

“Unlike ordinary firms, life insurers do not pass through bankruptcy when they fail. Instead, when a life insurer becomes insolvent, state-based guaranty funds protect insurance policyholders by “assessing” surviving insurers to cover the shortfall. In most states, such outlays are fully creditable against state premium taxes over time, transforming an ostensibly industry-funded system into a public backstop. The result is a system that socializes losses more sharply than banking’s federal deposit insurance […]”

“After acquiring an insurer, the PE firm earns profits in two ways: a spread between what the insurer promises policyholders and what its investments earn, and management-related fees on those investments. Guaranty funds and their accompanying regulatory regime implicitly subsidize this model in three ways. First, opacity in private credit permits insurers to appear better capitalized than their true risk exposure warrants. Second, weak incentives for policyholder monitoring permit PE to siphon gains through control of fees while shifting losses onto insurer balance sheets. Third, because guaranty-fund assessments are based on premium volume rather than risk contribution, conservatively-managed insurers (and, ultimately, taxpayers) finance the more aggressive strategies of their PE-owned competitors.”

Science & Nature

Starting to understand epsilon-zero by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse)

“Understanding when we can model a complicated system in terms of a simpler one, and how to do that, is one of the main concerns of mathematics. Set theory is just about the simplest system there is, so mathematics spends a lot of time trying to interpret various complicated systems in terms of set theory.”

“Another thing we need from numbers is a successor operation: each number should be followed by another, different one, and it should be possible to calculate which one. This has been recognized since the 19th century as the most important organizing principle that the natural numbers have. It’s is one of the few foundational things that almost every mathematician not only accepts but is happy with.”

Comment on “Might be the most effective form these days because everything is so expensive” by centralmind (Reddit)[3]

“Not to be overly pedantic about unimportant stuff, but technically “immaculate conception” refers to Mary’s birth, not Jesus’. It’s the belief that Mary was conceived without free of original sin.

“You’re thinking of parthenogenesis (aka “virgin birth”), which happens in a bunch of animals but is impossible in humans.

“Was my correction necessary? Not really, no. I just like to share trivia.

“Edit: I’d like to add that the church was extremely misleading in naming it that. Not everyone gets to be raised by college educated Catholics, and it’s very easy to assume that “immaculate conception” refers to what Mary is most famous for. But no, it refers to a fairly obscure piece of doctrine that most Christians don’t even know about. And of course, it has been subject of heated theological debate.”

I, for one, very much appreciated this unexpected bit of pedantry.

Environment & Climate Change

Vampire Planet: What the Story of China’s and Australia’s Solar Success Gets Wrong by Joshua Frank (CounterPunch)

“Australia remains the world’s largest coal exporter, shipping 70% of its coal to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India. It’s also the third-largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter, with 80% of its LNG shipped to Asian markets. Its solar boom doesn’t offset its massive contributions to climate change.”

“When we talk about ending our use of fossil fuels, as Australia appears to be doing, at least on the surface, we are forced to reckon with the hard truth: Australia’s vast resources continue to power global capitalism, at the expense of the environment. Its rooftop solar surge may be helping, but not by much. The country remains a major consumer of fossil fuels. Its coal power emissions are the highest in the “developed world.”

“Australia is ranked 13th globally in per capita emissions.

“It’s the 14th-largest emitter overall and the 2nd-largest, only behind Russia, in fossil fuel exports.

“So when we cheer on Australia’s growth in solar (as Bill McKibben did on Ezra Klein’s podcast last week), let’s get serious. There’s a hell of a lot of work to be done, and solar alone ain’t gonna fix the underlying problem. As long as economies and markets keep expanding, energy use will too, and it will remain dominated by fossil fuels.

“It’s much the same story in China, where large solar installations (unlike the small-scale, rooftop installations in Australia) appear to be keeping pace with the country’s growing energy usage. It’s been hailed as the most rapid solar expansion in history, but signs indicate it’s now slowing. Like Australia, China’s gleaming solar push masks a darker reality: the country is still burning record amounts of fossil fuels.”

“As far as the climate is concerned, China is not moving quickly in the right direction and will remain the world’s top emitter of fossil fuel pollution for the foreseeable future. The next-biggest climate polluter, the US, accounts for 11% of total emissions, and India for 8%.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Yes, David Ellison’s Merger is Bad, But a Netflix Takeover of Warner Bros Isn’t Much Better by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“Even the argument for Paramount, which I take no pleasure in making, rests on this: a Paramount-Warner combination at least builds a plausible number two streamer that can push back against Netflix, whereas a Netflix-Warner combination just crowns the king, probably for good. A lot of the people most frightened of consolidation have thus been rooting for the one deal that most cleanly fit the phrase “tends to create a monopoly.” Their instincts about Ellison are correct. Their instincts about Netflix’s relative influence as a potential monopoly force are simply not justifiable.”

“Netflix killed the old way of doing business. What worked for decades for movies was a release in movie theaters with about a 50/50 split with the theater owners, an exclusive window for theatrical that could last a year, and then release on physical media like VHS or DVD, a high-margin business that paid royalties and turned a lot of flops into hits. In television, you had your original network run of a show, where networks and affiliates split advertising spots and earnings, and then if a show was successful enough it was sold into syndication, where local television stations, cable channels, and foreign broadcasters rebroadcast old shows and took in advertising dollars. All of this was very profitable and it worked for creatives as well as corporations,”

“Netflix pays a rich fee upfront, takes full ownership of the thing you made, and buys out the back end… which means little or nothing in the way of residuals, and little or nothing in the way of profit participation. No sharing in the upside of a show or movie that becomes a classic; you get your check, they get the asset and everything it ever earns, forever.”

“A studio used to be a machine for converting creative labor into durable assets with shared upside; now the sharing part is almost gone. Netflix changed Hollywood into a machine for producing disposable, work-for-hire content that Netflix owns outright and discards at will.”

“Multiple people involved in the Netflix creative process have reported that screenwriters have been ordered by executives to “have this character announce what they’re doing” so that a viewer with the show “on in the background” can follow along. The reasoning is very 21st century and very dark: if the viewer’s real screen is the phone, the show on the wall can’t be so demanding that it makes them switch it off. This is a company that has studied inattention and then optimized for it. Netflix does not particularly want your eyes on its #content. They just want your subscription and your ambient tolerance. They’ve engineered their product accordingly.”

“The reason Netflix can pass for the good guy in this fight is not that Netflix is good. It’s that Netflix has spent a decade lowering everyone’s expectations so thoroughly, so successfully, that the company that broke Hollywood’s economics and turned its craft into wallpaper can now, in a pinch, be mistaken for a friend of the artist.”

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Borges: South America's Titan by Hoover Institution Library & Archives (YouTube)

This kind of stuff used to be aired on U.S.-American television in 1977, in prime-time. A man of abhorrent political opinions but of indisputable letters—William F. Buckley—delicately interviewing one with no interest of politics but possessed of one of the most brilliant literary minds to have ever graced the planet—Jorge Luis Borges—about languages and literature. They discuss Spanish, English, Italian, German, Greek, Latin and the transitions between them, of how some things can be expressed in one language but not the other, of which language is more appropriate for poetry versus prose.

At one point, Borges says that in Spanish, you cannot really say something like “he loomed over”, whereas in English there are many examples, like “to laugh off”, “to dream away”, “to live down something”, “to live up to something”. Buckley interjects that perhaps “asomo” would be a translation of “to loom” but Borges disagrees that it’s not quite the same thing. This shows that Buckley was quite fluent in Spanish—something to which not a single right-wing intellectual today would either aspire or admit—because asomar does indeed mean “put out, stick out, lean out”. The official translation of “loom” is alzarse imponente sobre or erigirse imponente sobre.

At the very end, there is another opportunity to see that Buckley knows Spanish quite well,

Buckley: Cervantes thought of himself as a poet didn’t he, primarily?
Borges: As a poet he was nowhere.
Buckley: So that was simply a mistake in judgment?
Borges: But what I mean to say is, he was a poet when he was writing prose, not when he was attempting verse.
Buckley: Yes, yes.
Borges: It is said that the one good verse he’s written in Spanish was La gracia que no quiso darme el cielo – I mean being a poet, no? That’s the one line of good verse he ever wrote.
Buckley: Do you want to translate that?
Borges: “The gift that heaven did not give me.”
Buckley: Could not give me.
Borges: Yes, “could not” – que no quiso – no, “would not”, “did not care to.”

They discussed a dozen writers, including Marquez, Neruda, Arthur Machen, Longfellow, Nabokov, Shopenhauer, Joyce, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Dante, Twain, Patrick White[4] etc. Notably missing are any female authors, of course. It’s so easy not to notice that these two giants could purport to discuss literature at such a depth, all the while ignoring the literary output of half of humanity.

Despite his initial profession of begin non-political, Borges does end up saying that he despises nationalism, discussing Argentina’s system, as well as the nationalisms of South America. He wonders why he loves Buenos Aires so much, why he writes about it so much, when he could be writing things that are unbound by place.

Both men show their intellectual blind spots: Borges clinging to his notion of being non-political, even though there is no other way to have opinions about the world, and Buckley’s knee-jerk anti-communism, discussing how it leads to intellectual dearth, “how do you account for the aridity of the entire Soviet experience of the last 50 years?” There’s the breathtaking arrogance based on profound ignorance for which the man was well-known.

Buckley: Thank you very much, Mr. Borges.
Borges: No, I have to thank you for your extraordinary patience.
Buckley: You can have my patience anytime you want.
Borges: Thank you, sir.
Buckley: And thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
Borges: Thank you, sir.

My God, the politeness; the respect; the joy at having had an erudite discussion. Magical. Sometimes, when I look at my “watch later” list and I see something like this video—a one-hour, black-and-white interview between two old white guys from 60 years ago—I, too, wonder whether I should even bother. But, man, I am so often rewarded for “bothering” to watch these things.

There is so much gold in “them thar hills” that involves a hard trek and a bunch of digging. You’re not going to find it right on your doorstep. You’ve got to get out there, roll up your sleeves, get dirty, be uncomfortable, be challenged, do the work, and, finally, be rewarded with the thrill of learning, of connection, and, perhaps, of epiphany. The effort is almost always worth it.

Red House (Live San Diego Sports Arena, May 25, 1969) by Jimi Hendrix (YouTube)

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Substack Cloaca by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“History gives us reason to predict that those who don’t like this transformation will protest for a while, and eventually either get in line or get sidelined. It’s an old story. Just read Zola’s Au bonheur des dames (1883) (about which, incidentally, Agnes and I had a nice discussion a few years ago), a fictionalized version of the story of Aristide Boucicaut and the foundation of Le Bon Marché, the first department store in the world, and of the impact that had on the Paris artisans still taking five years each to sculpt the figure of an elephant’s head into a single umbrella handle with a pocket knife. The world changes — it’s tough, and it’s exhilarating.”

THE CARTESIAN COGITO AS THE SUBJECT OF AI by Slavoj Žižek (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

“But after Sarah gets a son, Abraham sends Hagar with Ishmail to the desert, where the two are supposed to die of thirst. God then directly intervenes and saves both of them. Although Abraham and Ishmail are mentioned dozens of times in the Quran, Hagar is unmentioned, erased from the official history. As such, however, she continues to haunt Islam, her traces surviving in rituals, like the obligation of the pilgrims to Mecca to run six times between the two hills Safa and Marwah, a kind of neurotic repetition/reenactment of Hagar’s desperate search for water for her son in the desert. Muslims thus perceive themselves as the descendants of an illegitimate offspring: their founding person is an orphan (and the same holds for Muhammad himself).”

“Legalists advocated a new order of the total power of a centralized state which brutally enforced its notion of a just legal system – is it not almost certain that AI will impose itself as an even stronger power whose very functioning will transcend our understanding?”

“At this point of moral singularity, humans would find themselves facing a paradox: we would directly or indirectly be at the mercy of a system whose ethical judgements we cannot assess, yet whose power we cannot resist. In this case, superintelligence would not guarantee super-morality, but it might instead produce total moral opacity.””

Yeah, but that’s what nature does. Nature already feels like that.

HOW CAN CAPITALISM DEAL WITH A HEAT WAVE? by Slavoj Žižek (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

“[…] the fateful and potentially catastrophic consequences of capitalist market logic when it regulates how we react to a heat wave. Capitalist logic, at its most basic, is characterized by the primacy of exchange value over use value: the goal of capitalist circulation is not to create more use value but to increase exchange value.”

““Public wealth,” he wrote, “may be accurately defined to consist of all that man desires, as useful or delightful to him.” Such goods have use value and thus constitute wealth. But private riches, as opposed to wealth, require something additional (i.e., an added limitation), consisting “of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.” Scarcity, in other words, is a necessary requirement for something to have value in exchange and to augment private riches. But this is not the case for public wealth, which encompasses all value in use, and thus includes not only what is scarce but also what is abundant.”

“if one could monopolize water that had previously been freely available by placing a fee on wells, the measured riches of the nation would be increased at the expense of the growing thirst of the population.”

“There are three main forms of such expropriation: robbery of natural resources and destruction of the environment; expropriation of and domination over other races (direct slavery or more refined racism); and women’s work (reproduction and household). These forms are not part of value‑relations: a slave or a woman doing household chores doesn’t get a wage and is not exploited in the same way a salaried worker is.”

“[…] the Third World poor who suffer ecological expropriation and economic poverty even if they are not exploited in the classic capitalist sense. Their environment is destroyed through the robbing of its natural resources for foreign markets,”

“[…] the rich are rich also because of their interaction with the poor (exploiting their resources, using their cheap labour force, etc.), so that the rich are rich also because the poor are poor.”

“Already the phrase we often use to designate what we have to do – “adapt ourselves to a life with higher temperature” – is too narrow and misleading: heat waves are not an objective process to which we have to adapt, they are (partially, at least) the outcome of how our use of natural resources has affected the stability of our environment.”

You get what you pay for by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Making art, making culture, has always involved some sort of dark deal with the infernal machinery of capital, but the rise of big tech and venture capital in the early 2010s changed the terms of the deal. Culture stopped being something the consumer paid for and cultural industries became kindling for digital furnaces that only wanted to monetize our data anyways. An entire generation of young creatives were paid to dump terabytes of posts and videos in a black hole, trying to entertain users long enough to be surveilled and train AI. And not only do they have nothing to show for it professionally, they have nothing to show for it creatively, as well.”

A philosopher’s argument against the cult of achievement | Zena Hitz: Full Interview by Big Think | Zena Hitz (YouTube)

I wanted to like this more because her ideas are OK. It seems more like how she’s come to learn that the self-elected elite are maybe no better than others, especially in the ability to think.

“People think being a graduate student and not getting a job is the worst thing that could happen to you.”

Which people think that? The vast majority of the world population that can easily imagine far worse things happening to them.

How do you spend three years washing dishes in a monastery and still say things like the statement above or even “anyone can wash dishes,” which is patently not true?

Think about the intended audience of those statements. It certainly isn’t the taxi driver living a life of the mind. That person is going to feel like the person who said them is quite out of touch.

“Inner life is something that’s available to anyone.”

Very good. However, the fruits of the world are only available to those who “achieve.”

“I hope that that starts to break down some of the pedestals and the fantasies and our false ideas of what an intellectual is helps us to see it in our own lives. You can’t leave to specialists, you’re your basic humanity. If I’m right that intellectual life, thinking, reflecting, asking fundamental questions about yourself and your relation to the world, I think those are really just part of what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, what it means to be a member of a community.

“And we can’t pretend that somehow only smart people get to do that or only rich people get to do that or only the winners get to do that. And I want to say it should be for everyone. Another way I want to say I don’t need to argue for that because it’s already taking place all the time, we just don’t pay attention to it. There’s in fact a wealth of intellectual activity that’s going on all around us in very ordinary places.

“And it has, because of its littleness, its humbleness and authenticity for us. It can help us recover something, those of us who are like myself, winners who have relatively high social status, who are professional intellectuals, academics, what have you, can help remind us of what the point is of what we’re doing. The point of what we’re doing is not to add lines to the CV. It’s not to get a slightly more high-prestige job so that we can slightly diminish our teaching. It’s to cultivate and practice ourselves this human activity, this thing that makes us who we are.”

These are the kind of people who can spend an entire hour talking about how the purpose of being human is to live a life of the mind without mentioning a single thing that prevents people from doing so.

FUCKING LIBERALS ARE THE WORST.

They can only preach to the choir. They cannot figure out that the thing they’re saying is impossibly out of the reach for so many people precisely because of the “winners” whose lifestyles are built on a hill of skulls.

Instead, she pleads with her cohort to enjoy their privilege by living a life of the mind rather than chasing CVs.

I’m sure she doesn’t intend it like this. It just comes out that way after having passed through the narrow worldview imposed on her by her … life. She thinks she’s gotten past it but, just because her worldview is wider than it was, and probably much wider than those to whom she addresses this video, which is an advertisement for her book, it doesn’t mean it’s wide.

A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory for Why the World Feels So Weird by Plain English with Derek Thompson (YouTube)

As a follow-up for my “listening to videos of U.S.-American liberal philosophers talking to each other”, I tried this one. Again, while I like the principle being discussed, it’s another thing, like the one in the video above, where it’s like liberals discovering that the world they live in is kind of stupid, and that they contribute to it.

Like, they come up with this broad philosophical context to describe how it’s not a great idea to talk to the whole world as if you were chatting with your best friends.

In the prior video, it was “the world we live in seems to have divorced achievement from actual value.” In this one, it’s “directing your message outward for likes from strangers is perhaps not a great basis for societal interaction.”

They come up with the theory that negativity arises from the ease with which it can be applied to a larger context. They don’t seem to mention the commercial incentives driving the algorithm that prefers negativity over positivity. It’s kind of odd how their discussion of online discourse so thoroughly avoids discussing politics or economics, both of which have a tremendous influence, much more so than people’s innate preferences once they are in a unicontext.

And here, too, the default language slips sometimes, as when Callard proposes an example of a hypothetical Iranian poem being published to the world,

“It’s in a language that few of us speak.”

Well, there are certainly several-dozen million Farsi speakers just in Iran alone. What she meant was, that the important population, the part of the human population that would be capable of appreciating a poem, does not speak Farsi. That is, those with leisure don’t speak Farsi. They speak the language of Empire: English.

This is another video that will end without having tied any of the discussion to how the world is being run. Instead, they will just remark that using Twitter is probably not a great way to advance yourself intellectually and that, for those interested in personal growth, they should be aware of it, all without bending their prodigious minds to the problem of figuring out how we can keep the elite from predating on the poor with societal toxins like Twitter. You know, like, maybe getting the poor enough fiscal autonomy that they aren’t beholden to participation on such platforms in order to make ends meet?

Even within her own liberal world, she describes identity categories that don’t change, like “[she’s] never going to not be a woman,” which I imagine would be quite triggering to some of her students. I understand what she meant but I wonder how she managed to develop that as an example, given the circles within which she presumably moves.

Things get more interesting when she talks about organizations—universities, restaurants, etc.—that experience context collapse. These organizations weren’t doing anything wrong before but they are suddenly scrambling to satisfy requirements imposed by an enlarged context. But this is kind of basic economics, as well, no?

The Last Interview with Hannah Arendt (1973 English & French) by Philosophy Overdose (YouTube)

“Hannah Arendt discusses various things in an interview with Roger Errera over several days in October 1973 for French TV (ORTF), which was then broadcast in 1974. ”

“Critical thinking is dangerous but not thinking is even more dangerous.”

What training my chaotic dog taught me about power, control – and human beings by William Davies (The Guardian)

“Getting to this point requires grasping an additional key difference between dogs and humans: the absence of a moral psyche also means an inability to generalise from one situation to another. Dogs can become controllable and predictable in one context, and then behave entirely differently in another. And while it is possible to control the environment in your kitchen, you can never be sure what novelty might suddenly appear in the park. The Steve Mann answer to this problem is simple: don’t put your dog in situations that you can’t control or which have provoked bad behaviours in the past. This ultimately is how most dog owners cope, not training their dog to behave well in every situation, but striving to avoid those situations when they know they won’t.”

Their dogs train them. And then they try to train all of their friends and family to kowtow to their dog’s wishes, as well.

The Guardian continues to be a window into the Western “liberal” viewpoint that is just gobsmacking in its elitism. “I was walking my crazy dog without a leash and this guy got mad at me when it wouldn’t leave his dog alone. Am I the asshole?” Yes. Clearly.

Technology & Engineering

More Bounce to the Ounce! by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars For The Rest of Us)

“The full propulsion cycle looks like this: A small (0.1-3 kiloton) nuclear bomb detonates about a hundred meters behind the pusher plate. The explosion vaporizes a disk of propellant (this can be anything from ice to metal to the crew’s own stored waste) and flings it at the plate at a velocity of many thousands of kilometers per second. The plasma cloud hits the pusher plate, accelerating it with the force of a cannon shot. The intense heat of the collision ablates away a thin layer of oil on the pusher plate, protecting the main body of the plate from damage. Giant airbags and shock absorbers turn the impulsive acceleration on the pusher plate into a longer pulse gentle enough (2-4 g) to be endurable by a human crew, and transmit it to the spacecraft. A spritzer spritzes the plate with a fresh layer of oil. The compressed shock absorbers rebound and return the pusher plate to its original position just as another bomb reaches the detonation point.”

“You can think of the process like accelerating a golf cart by hitting it with a sledgehammer.”

“A round trip to Mars and back might involve 2,000 nuclear detonations, but the pusher plate will have spent a total of less than one second in contact with superhot plasma. The same technique that lets you carry a hot potato comfortably by tossing it hand to hand gets you to the outer planets.”

“Another interesting failure mode is a fizzle—a scenario where the chemical explosives in the nuclear bomb go off, but fail to detonate the nuclear pit. Remarkably, this is far more dangerous to Orion than an atomic blast. The pusher plate is designed to absorb the impact from a uniform cloud of hypervelocity plasma, not sharp chunks of shrapnel. So a lot of design work has to concentrate on making sure the pusher plate isn’t dinged up too badly by flying debris from a conventional explosion.”

“You are basically building an accurate, low-velocity machine gun for nuclear shells.”

“Unless you start nuking Florida from ground level (and I’m not saying ‘no’), you need dozens of traditional rockets to lift this affront to God and Nature into orbit. Even then, its fission products will get caught in the Earth’s magnetic field and eventually spiral their way back home.”

“Only three components on a nuclear pulse rocket need to be built to a high engineering tolerance: the shock absorbers, the bomb dispenser, and the bombs themselves. Everything else can be riveted together out of whatever material is handy.”

How hard is it to build orbital data centers, actually? by Eric Berger (Ars Technica)

“[…] this data center megaconstellation would represent at least a 20-fold increase in its launch capacity. SpaceX currently has one Starship launch pad at its Starbase facility in Texas, and within a couple of years, it should have a total of four launch towers at sites in Texas and Florida. Those launch pads are optimized for equatorial orbits, so SpaceX may need launch sites for missions to Sun-synchronous orbits.”

“One problem with drawing conclusions about cooling—as with massive solar panels and the economics of launch—is that we don’t really have any benchmarks for truly massive orbital constellations. We lack real-world examples to show whether cooling data centers at scale is practical with current technology. It’s physically possible, but does it scale? As Scott Manley notes in a recent video, cooling is the most significant issue that would-be space data center operators must solve.”

“Latency—both satellite-to-satellite and ground-to-space—is an issue for orbital data centers, but how much of an issue depends on how carefully one can adapt one’s computing problems to the medium. It’s a speed bump that might mean certain kinds of workloads aren’t a good fit, but it’s not a showstopper that sinks the entire idea of orbital data centers.”

“There are no real fundamental barriers to building data centers in space—just some very serious technical problems to solve. You need unprecedented heavy lift: reusable and rapid launch. You need the ability to manufacture the largest satellites humans have ever built and to build 100 times more of them than humans ever have for a single constellation. You have to hope that radiation’s impacts on chips are manageable and that radiational cooling scales. You also need a few trillion bucks.”

The Day WhatsApp Goes Dark (マリウス)

“The Meta owned and operated messenger has roughly 3.3 billion monthly active users as of early 2026, which is about 40% of every human alive, and somewhere north of 60% of every human with a smart phone.”

“The platform processes more than 100 billion messages per day, out of which around 7 billion are voice messages. On top of that, users place around 5.5 billion voice calls and 2.4 billion video calls per month, which boils down to more than 2 billion minutes of voice and video traffic every 24 hours.”

“Brazil has about 148 million users, and the app is installed on roughly 99% of the country’s smartphones. And 93% of those users open the app daily.”

“In a great many countries, WhatsApp is not simply a service on the internet, it actually is the internet for most practical purposes.”

“It is likely that three things start happening in parallel. First, mass migration to apps like Telegram, Signal, and to a lesser extent Messages (iMessage), Viber, and Line. Signal’s servers, which are run on a fraction of WhatsApp’s infrastructure, are not designed for an inrush of hundreds of millions of new accounts and start to degrade in some regions. Telegram, which has spent a decade preparing for exactly this scenario, holds up better but still struggles with its own issues. Ultimately none of the alternatives are suitable for the people who had built their workflows on WhatsApp.”

“The second thing that happens is commercial collapse, which is the biggest 12-hour story, but still largely invisible from Western media. In Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Mexico, and probably 50 other countries, the small businesses that route everything from orders and prices, and photos of goods, to delivery confirmations, and payments, through WhatsApp have lost their primary revenue channel.”

“In Brazil, by the end of day one, the financial press is comparing the situation to a partial shutdown of the national payments system. Pix transfers still work, as those run over the central bank’s infrastructure and not WhatsApp’s, but the merchant-customer communication layer that drives Pix transactions for millions of small operators is offline. The same is true in Argentina, where the inflation-driven culture of constant price renegotiation between vendors and customers happens, in practice, almost entirely on WhatsApp.”

“Schools also begin to feel it, because in many countries, including India, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, and much of the Middle East, parent-teacher communication runs over WhatsApp groups. Two days in, schools that have not made the switch to other channels are operating partially blind, and parents are not getting closure notifications,”

Switzerland depends on WhatsApp for school communications, too.

“Several governments, including Brazil, India, and the EU as a bloc, have announced formal investigations or task forces into how to prevent this from happening again. As usual, however, none of them will produce anything actionable within years.”

“[…] the painful realisation that a free product is not the same thing as a public good.”

“The point is that we have built a planet-spanning piece of communication infrastructure whose ownership, governance, and continuity are concentrated in a single American corporation, that is led by people with questionable values and beliefs, which all in all is a state of affairs that has no historical precedent.”

Except for China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and other sanctioned states.

“WhatsApp, on the other hand, is a single proprietary protocol, with a single operator, optimised increasingly for the commercial interests of that operator, and treated by the rest of the world (governments, hospitals, schools, small businesses, families separated by borders) as a public utility.”

How AI May Impact CMS Architecture (No One's Happy)

“A CMS is one runtime server doing five jobs at once: it stores content, governs who can change it, renders it into pages, runs dynamic behavior around the content, and gives authors an interface to create it. For the rest of this article I’ll just refer to these as “CMS”.”

“Now as far as the jobs of a CMS, there is the source of truth — where the canonical content lives — and then the editing interface. They were fused for one reason: a database isn’t human-editable, so every platform had to bolt an interface onto its storage. Which means the whole system rests on a single assumption: the editor is a person.”

“[…] at build time, an indexer can crawl the rendered site and write an inverted index as static files that deploy with everything else. In the browser, a small library fetches only the index chunks relevant to the query and scores results locally. Pagefind — built for exactly this — keeps a search on a ten-thousand-page site to a few tens of kilobytes transferred. [] Because the index regenerates with every deploy, search is never stale relative to the site — a property database-backed search doesn’t automatically have.”

Episode 558: Zone Time by TrueAnon (Patreon)

“We’re joined by Natasha Dow Schüll to talk about GAMBLING, MONEY, The Machine Zone, the Ludic Loop, and MORE.

“Check out her book Addiction by Design”

This was an excellent and fascinating discussion about the state of society in the U.S., with a focus on addiction, gambling, marketing, and tech monopolies.

What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all by Stephen Follows

1. We now live in a world where a movie statistics website is worth hacking because prediction markets empower anyone to turn almost any data into money.
2. Hacking websites is now something anyone can do with a cheap AI subscription.
3. The web, as we have it, is incredibly fragile in the face of large-scale swarms of agentic AI bots.

Oh, I forgot to mention the utter trash that is unregulated prediction markets.

“Getting access to a thirty-year-old website with 160,000 legacy files is exactly the kind of known-flaw surface that AI tools have made cheap to probe. The expertise barrier that once protected small sites from all but the most determined attackers has largely evaporated.”

The environment encourages people to break everything for personal profit, and there is no mechanism for punishment. The entire burden is put on the web-site owner. This will push even more people to standardized platforms and solutions.

“[…] the team is having to reconsider what a public website even means in 2026. Bruce’s analysis is that The Numbers used to serve two audiences (human beings and search engines) and now serves roughly six: humans, search engines, LLM training runs, prompt-based AI traffic, agentic AI, and prediction market punters. Each has different needs and a different traffic profile. As he puts it:

“We’ve gone from a world where running a web site meant focusing on three things (content, ads, and SEO) to about eight to ten different factors that go into every design decision.”

“Google crawls about five pages for every visitor it sends you. OpenAI crawls over 1,000. Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor it refers.”

These are criminal enterprises wasting precious resources and wasting everyone’s time with their bullshit brute-source, overcapitalized “technology”.

“AI tools are some of the most powerful and destructive things humans have ever created. And they are being effectively tested by the public in real time in the real world. When the Manhattan Project was trying to work out the power of their atomic tech, they did not do so by sending everyone the specs each morning and seeing which houses blew up.

“The world we have built thus far is so incredibly ill-prepared for the power and scale of the AI models we all have access to.”

It’s not the models. It’s not the power of the technology. It’s the unhinged lack of decency paired with a ridiculous amount of capital of the companies that are running these machines. We are more unregulated than ever. This is a confluence of so many stupid features of our society.

Hey, look, those companies are ruining everything! Somebody should stop them!

Too bad. Unfortunately, they’re the most powerful companies and they are now in charge of how our society functions. What they say, goes.

“Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.”

The powers-that-be don’t care! Nothing matters to them but personal profit! And they are far too shallow to see any holisticity in anything, to see any connection between their plundering and marauding and the degradation of everything else.

Too bad, poors. Maybe you should have paid attention in school, like my grandfather did, when he accumulated generational wealth by plundering indigenous peoples.

LLMs & AI

Automation Without Understanding by Jun–Yong Park (Arxiv)

“Mathematical capacity is not a stockpile of theorems. It is a community of people transformed, by years of rigorous training, into minds able to see abstract structure inside complexity, detect errors that formal systems miss, and reason with unusual precision. No one learns to think as a mathematician by reading a book. One learns it by spending years confronting theoretical frameworks initially beyond one’s reach, under the supervision of people who learned the same way, inside institutions that believe such training is worth sustaining.”

“A country cannot conjure a mathematical workforce on demand any more than it can conjure an officer corps or a cadre of nuclear engineers on demand. The training takes years. The intellectual tradition takes generations.”

No-one cares. Number go up. Ignorance is richly rewarded. Revenge of the jocks.

“These are precisely the habits required to audit a model, expose a hidden assumption, distinguish a robust result from an artifact of the data, and recognize when a formal system is being asked a question it was not built to answer.”

“A famous speaker and a first-year graduate student are answerable to the same demands: define the terms, justify the inference, make the argument clear. That culture cannot be recreated by buying more chips or allocating more capital.”

A pity, because “buying more chips or allocating more capital” is all they’re willing to give, if even that. They have no patience for an even slightly delayed path to personal profit.

“[…] predict the next token in a sequence.”

I’ve wondered this before: how does it write French? How does it know to write de when la maison would follow rather than d’ for d’edifice or du for du musee? If it’s predicting just the next token, then how would it ever get that right?

“[…] systems trained at sufficient scale, then refined through post-training and extended inference, display forms of abstraction, planning, and multistep problem-solving that their creators do not fully understand.”

I don’t think that’s true. It’s unpredictable, yes, non-deterministic. But the harness is well-understood. Just because it looks like black magic to you…doesn’t mean that no-one understands it. I think there’s a lot less to this emergent behavior that all of these hucksters would like you to believe.

“There is not yet a systematic mathematical theory of how large artificial neural networks form internal concepts, why certain capabilities appear abruptly, or how to predict which forms of reasoning will emerge at a given scale.”

They don’t. They don’t form internal concepts. They induce hallucination in its users. Not much has changed since Eliza, which was incredibly simple, but which its early users were desperate to keep playing with.

“Decoding the network was possible only because the researchers could recognize Fourier structure when they saw it. The machine’s inner workings became legible only to humans who had the mathematics to read them.”

The morons in charge will argue that comprehensibility for humans is superfluous. Can you blame them? They themselves know nothing about how anything works, and they are wildly successful by society’s standards. Why would they place any value on comprehension or understanding? They are incentivized not to, as doing so wastes time and money, leaving profit on the table.

“When mathematicians encounter an unfamiliar object, they do not ask only whether it performs well. They ask what kind of object it is: What are its invariants? Its symmetries? Its limiting behaviors? Which examples are canonical, and which apparent phenomena are artifacts of a particular presentation? Nothing like that framework yet exists for the internal representation spaces of frontier AI systems.”

“The public intellectual infrastructure capable of understanding these systems has not kept pace with the private infrastructure capable of building them. Societies are coming to rely on systems whose capabilities are advancing faster than the science that explains them.”

That’s a decent point but the author seems to have bought into the hype about how ethereally powerful LLMs are.

“[…] mathematics belongs at the center of the coalition, because the task is not only to make the systems more powerful. It is to develop the conceptual frameworks by which their structure can be understood, their claims audited, and their limits known.”

“The more immediate problem is already here: institutions are beginning to delegate judgment to systems whose reasoning they cannot fully examine. A model may advise on military logistics, financial risk, scientific research, cybersecurity, or critical infrastructure. It may be right often enough to become indispensable. Indispensability without intelligibility is a dangerous bargain. When such a system produces a recommendation with serious consequences, “the model said so” cannot be the end of the discussion. Someone must be able to ask what was optimized, what evidence was omitted, which failure modes remain plausible, and whether the system answered the question it was actually asked.”

“[…] stop demanding that every mathematical project justify itself through immediate application. Some of the mathematics that becomes indispensable twenty years from now will look obscure today; that is not evidence of irrelevance, it is how foundational knowledge has always worked. The point is not to convert every pure mathematician into an AI engineer. It is to preserve the ecosystem from which new concepts, unexpected methods, rigorous critiques, and independent standards of proof emerge. The Erdős proof itself ran through class field towers: machinery a century in the making, built by people who could not have named its eventual application.”

Those who hold the pursestrings not only don’t know how knowledge is acquired, they think they already know everything they need to. Throw money at it and micromanage the outcome to death.

“[…] when AI systems are asked to perform consequential reasoning, they should be required to expose their decision-critical claims in a formal, machine-checkable form, not merely as persuasive natural-language explanations.”

“My father used to tell me: “When you cannot tell what is the right thing to do, do the most difficult thing well. That is the right thing to do.””

“The choice facing the United States is not between human thought and machine intelligence. It is between automation with understanding and automation without it. A country that chooses the second path does not become more advanced. It becomes more dependent, more fragile, and less capable of directing its own future.”

But think of the short-term profit to be had by a handful of elite ghouls who will reap the benefits of decades of investment without for investing something to sustain the system that graced them. Why bother? Just squeeze a one-time win out of it and move, leaving the dried-out husk for someone else to clean up.

The AI Debate Bores Me by John R. MacArthur (Harper's Magazine)

“How pretentious! How banal! What a marketing ploy! AI may well be terrible for one’s health, but it is also magnificent, even violent, and capable of creating incredible pornography. You simply must buy some right away!

“I am not saying we should ignore the cacophony surrounding AI. Major corporations must be strictly regulated to curb their less “benevolent” sides. The ongoing theft from writers, publishers, photographers, filmmakers, and musicians by OpenAI is immense, and I encourage everyone to look into the copyright lawsuits filed by the Authors Guild and the New York Times against the so-called shapeshifter Sam Altman and his band of pirates, bots, and humans.”

“Who would choose to use software built on plagiarism and theft to perform tasks—even trivial ones—and present them as their own? Where is the joy in that? Where is the pride?”

Where indeed.

Programming

Collection Initializers & Properties as an Alternative to Fluent Modifiers (GitHub)

I found this discussion quite interesting because it’s something that I spent quite a bit of time on in the past, when building the fluent, model-construction APIs for Quino.

The proposal starts with the current fluent API, which looks like this:

VStack(0,
    Text("todos").FontSize(36)
        .Set(t => t.FontWeight = FontWeights.Light)
        .Foreground(AccentText)
        .HAlign(HorizontalAlignment.Center)
        .Margin(0, 16, 0, 8),

    HStack(8,
        TextField(state.NewItemText, v => dispatch(new SetNewItemText(v)))
            .Set(tb => tb.PlaceholderText = "What needs to be done?")
            .HAlign(HorizontalAlignment.Stretch),
        Button(addCmd)
    ).Padding(16, 8, 16, 8)
     .Background(CardBackground) …);

The first proposal extends the stacks to implement IEnumerable and looks like,

new VStack {
    Spacing = 0,
    Background = SolidBackground,
    MaxWidth = 600,
    HAlign = HorizontalAlignment.Center,

    // Header
    new Text("todos") {
        FontSize = 36,
        Weight = FontWeights.Light,
        Foreground = AccentText,
        HAlign = HorizontalAlignment.Center,
        Margin = Thick(0, 16, 0, 8),
    },

    // Input bar
    new HStack {
        Spacing = 8,
        Padding = Thick(16, 8, 16, 8),
        Background = CardBackground,

        new TextField {
            Value = state.NewItemText,
            OnChanged = v => dispatch(new SetNewItemText(v)),
            Placeholder = "What needs to be done?",
            HAlign = HorizontalAlignment.Stretch,
        },
        new Button(addCmd),
    }, …

Instead of implementing IEnumerable, the stacks could also declare a property called Children,

new VStack {
    Spacing = 0,
    Background = SolidBackground,
    MaxWidth = 600,
    HAlign = HorizontalAlignment.Center,
    Children = [
        // Header
        new Text("todos") {
            FontSize = 36,
            Weight = FontWeights.Light,
            Foreground = AccentText,
            HAlign = HorizontalAlignment.Center,
            Margin = Thick(0, 16, 0, 8),
        },

        // Input bar
        new HStack {
            Spacing = 8,
            Padding = Thick(16, 8, 16, 8),
            Background = CardBackground,
            Children = [
                new TextField {
                    Value = state.NewItemText,
                    OnChanged = v => dispatch(new SetNewItemText(v)),
                    Placeholder = "What needs to be done?",
                    HAlign = HorizontalAlignment.Stretch,
                },
                new Button(addCmd),
            ],
        }, …

Another approach uses the original factory methods but also with much more heavily,

VStack(0,
    Text("todos") with {
        FontSize = 36,
        Weight = FontWeights.Light,
        Foreground = AccentText,
        HAlign = HorizontalAlignment.Center,
        Margin = Thick(0, 16, 0, 8),
    },

    HStack(8,
        TextField(state.NewItemText, v => dispatch(new SetNewItemText(v)))
            with { Placeholder = "What needs to be done?", HAlign = HorizontalAlignment.Stretch },
        Button(addCmd)
    ) with { Padding = Thick(16, 8, 16, 8), Background = CardBackground }, …

The design document is quite long and considers other alternatives and minor tweaks.

Prefer unitless numbers for line-height values (MDN)

“[…] it is better to use <number> values instead of <length> values”

The way the algorithm works is to calculate percentage line-heights on the container on which the line-height is set. If a nested container has a smaller font but doesn’t set the line-height, then it ends up using the line-height from the parent container, which was calculated from a larger font. This is inevitably too large. If the line-height is specified without a unit—e.g., 1.5—then the algorithm recalculates the line-height for each font-change.

If you prefer a video,

Wait, line-height works like that?! by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

Design

Apple iPhone Air by Marius (マリウス)

“The kindest thing I can say about Liquid Glass is that, despite it being the Ferrari Luce of UIs, the engineering underneath it is impressive. The amount of real-time blur, refraction, and material simulation Apple is pulling off on the A19 Pro at 120Hz is an impressive graphics feat that the Android system can only dream about. Having said that, however, I don’t think that any of that engineering would be truly necessary if somebody at Apple had asked the question “does this design language actually make the device easier to use?” before shipping it on a billion devices.”

“On the Air, all of this just works. Apps launch instantly, attestation succeeds, and the device does not get anywhere near as hot as the average Pixel phone doing any of it. After four years of fighting with Google’s hardware and Android’s gradual decay, I am, embarrassingly, enjoying the boring reliability of iOS.”

“Metal and Core Image are better-integrated graphics and imaging stacks than what Android exposes to third-party developers. ”

Sports

Weekly Review by Megan Evershed (Harper's Magazine)

“In the West Bank, a 17-year-old Palestinian soccer player died after being shot by Israeli settlers last week, bringing the total number of people associated with Palestine’s footballing organization who have been killed by Israelis since October 2023 to 568. The Israeli prime minister declared his support for the Argentine national soccer team, citing his close relationship with the country’s right-wing president, ahead of the FIFA World Cup final, during which the South American country failed to make a single shot for one hundred and sixteen minutes, committed the greatest number of fouls in any World Cup match since the team’s final match in 2022, and was ultimately defeated by Spain.”

Fun

POV: Euro Maxxing by Kai Lentit (YouTube)

Video Games

I Made My Absurdly Tall Factory Also Uncomfortably Wide − Satisfactory by Let's Game it Out | Josh (YouTube)

This is just more madness by Josh but it is incredible how amenable the Satisfactory rendering engine is for the huge amount of factory elements that he places, all in ways that are clearly wildly different than what was originally intended. THe engine just deals with everything with aplomb. No frame-rate collapses, just buttery smooth the whole time.

RIP bargain bin: The price impact of Sony’s disc-free PlayStation plan by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)

“In some cases, games that were six to eight years old (i.e., Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey) were still being offered digitally at their original launch price of $59.99, even while used discs were available at GameStop for just $9.99.”

If you want to play a game in the future, you’ll have to pay the only price you can get: from the monopolist who owns all the titles. There will be no secondary market.

“While a cheap disc can be purchased pretty much whenever you want, getting a deal on the PlayStation Store means being vigilant enough to monitor the few days a year where the best price is being offered. For the bestsellers we looked at, those discount prices on downloads were only offered between 13 and 33 percent of the time. In some cases, an eager digital buyer would have to wait multiple months for a weekslong sale period to pop up if they wanted to take advantage of the generous digital discounts.

“Remember, too, that buying a game on disc means you can resell it again when you’re done, getting back a percentage of the purchase price in the process. This kind of de facto discount won’t be an option in PlayStation’s disc-less future.”

There will be no second-hand market because you don’t own anything.

I hadn’t considered that aspect of it at all.